I think even at technological peak we would not be able to do what you are describing. I think people are very off at how capable max technology will really be.

It’s not an either / or problem. If we could live forever we could also likely opt not to.

Death is out of our control, so no it's not a problem. We should however address our strained relationship with death in general. That is a problem worth solving.

> If you have a starting hypothesis (e.g. an increase in the money supply will cause inflation), you can very much go back and look at historical data to find support for your hypothesis.

You can express "increase in money supply" and "inflation" as "just a bunch of variable labels". So the two scenarios you sketch are identical in every sense apart from the first having named variables and the second having anonymous variables. Which gives the appearance that you are attributing causality on the basis of some pre-exisiting theory about "money supply" and "inflation". Which runs the risk of creating a circular definition. In essentials, you are ignoring the insights of Hume and the response of Kant regarding the insights of Hume.

I am happy to agree that if we have two columns of numbers

  1     1
  2     4
  3     9
  :      :
 99    9,801

we could agree that the relationship between the first column and the second is that the second is the square of the first. That establishes that there is a mathematical relationship but that mathematical relationship does not guarantee any kind of causality. Although, if you take the position of Tegmark - the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis - the existence of a mathematical relationship guarantees reality but not necessarily causality. Which leaves you in the same situation: data sets, labelled or not, do not reveal causality. For that you need a theory of knowledge that gives warrant to the knowledge that x=9 therefore y=81 is a causal relationship and simply labelling the numbers with "money supply equals nine therefore inflation equals eighty one" does not establish that.

Which largely points to there being no "causal knobs" inside data sets. There may be something about a data set that has some kind of "establishes causality" about it, but it is not simply doing mathematical manipulations or matching variable labelling. There is something rhetorical going on that you really are not making clear.

>Momento Mori Motherfucker

I'll admit, I laughed.

I’ve directed my wife to euthanize me in the case of increasing dementia. It can get to a point where you’re incapable of even making an informed decision about it.

I watched my grandmother become un-personed over the course of a decade, and there’s no way I’d ever put myself or anyone else through such a heartbreaking hell.

Death has a song called “The Philosopher”

But we can make a car Last forever , always replacing an engine, drivetrain etc. same cant be said for humans because we arent keeping humans alive 200+ years. its not a problem we can solve. But again Death in itself is not a problem. Its part of Life, we need Death.

Only because we are more ignorant of how to fix the body than we are the car.

Which is the problem to solve.

They can certainly be compared.

For the later point, it can be argued that we are already past the point where those in charge get to be in charge for too long.

Jefferson suggested a new constitution every 19 years, for example.

Is dying at 40 the same as dying at 80 though? We rightly view young death i.e. less continuous existence for the person in question as a "wrong" as it takes away the potential for experience.

Then consider death at 20000 years. Is that conceptually the same as dying at 20? Or would we find that over such lengths of time human experience becomes fundamentally different with people, for example, reaching terminal ennui and seeking out death as either an end or an adventure?

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> But then you can't conclude with a moral judgment.

Correct.

> Presumably solving moral dilemmas involves being able to make correct moral judgments wrt the dilemma in question, right?

Perhaps certain conditions can be set and then things will resolve on their own. Each agent in the system has onboard cognition, and agents are affected by their environment, their knowledge/belief, and the knowledge/belief of other agents in the system. Normalizing beliefs (ideally: a net decrease in delusion, but perhaps not even necessarily) could change things for the better (or the worse, to be fair).

> But you're needing to make an inference, yes? In order to come to a conclusion as to the correct answer or correct course of action wrt a given moral problem or dilemma?

I'm thinking speculatively, kind of like "I wonder if we did X within this system, what might happen?" Not a risk free undertaking, but that rarely stops humans.

> You definitely don't need to be making an explicit or verbal argument, but if you're engaging in a line of reasoning or making an inference to a conclusion, then the same old and you need to assume a particular moral framework (or at least certain moral/normative premises).

To the degree that this is in fact necessary, that would simply be part of the description as I see it - if something is necessarily true, simply disclose it.

A car imo is honestly repairable and easier to troubleshoot than a human though? Unless we have the technology to bring someone back like a car.

Cant compare them.

>Right, don't do that either. Pure descriptive, zero prescriptive.

But then you can't conclude with a moral judgment. Presumably solving moral dilemmas involves being able to make correct moral judgments wrt the dilemma in question, right?

>And if you aren't making an argument?

But you're needing to make an inference, yes? In order to come to a conclusion as to the correct answer or correct course of action wrt a given moral problem or dilemma? You definitely don't need to be making an explicit or verbal argument, but if you're engaging in a line of reasoning or making an inference to a conclusion, then the same old and you need to assume a particular moral framework (or at least certain moral/normative premises).

> If you don't assume any value judgment or normative statements, you cannot conclude with any value judgments or normative statements; any argument that did the latter without doing the former would necessarily be deductively invalid.

Right, don't do that either. Pure descriptive, zero prescriptive.

> And it has nothing to do with the manner of your presentation, "steel-mannered" or otherwise you still run afoul of Hume's law if you attempt to conclude an argument with normative or morally evaluative language if you did not include any among your premises.

And if you aren't making an argument?

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Neuroscience stuff, mostly

If you don't assume any value judgment or normative statements, you cannot conclude with any value judgments or normative statements; any argument that did the latter without doing the former would necessarily be deductively invalid.

And it has nothing to do with the manner of your presentation, "steel-mannered" or otherwise you still run afoul of Hume's law if you attempt to conclude an argument with normative or morally evaluative language if you did not include any among your premises.

Would you take the same approach with, say, your car?

"The solution to the check engine light is to find peace with the check engine light?"

I want the movie to end, but I'd sure like to be able to appreciate it after the fact. I'd like to leave the theater, talk about the movie with my friends, get some distance to incorporate it into my understanding, hell, I might even want to see another movie.

I don't want the theater to collapse with me in it as soon as the credits are done rolling.

Well, I would think voluntary death wouldn't be a problem.

Like any other machine, you fix it because you want it to keep running.

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What if the solution is to stop seeing it as a problem, though?