Secret Principles of Immortality, Edition 2

There is a context I have described in the first article, a function of 100% adaptation, 50% medicine, 25% athleticism, or 12.5% wisdom. The upshot of this is the following:

It behooves us to ask questions about our environment. The Ostensible Law is that, relatively speaking, any major individual concept, once concrete in the environment, is a potential factor for youth, death, or longevity. Youth is a neutral principle, in the context of wisdom. Simply having it temporally, for a nanosecond, does not guarantee that it is a property of the body. Such a thing could be a coincidence. A temporary bargain with no long-term usefulness. Merely temporary usefulness is what we are avoiding. It is the bane of every form except adaptation. And in adaptation, there is 100% commitment. It is not usually tenable. Adaptation is the entropy of immortality. Because we have already accepted that there is a standard. The fundamental precept of immortality is literally that ‘there is a standard’. Any effort at achieving long life is usually seen as secondary to this (I need not recite age-old evidence of the necessity for common welfare, the social good, or the golden rule. These rules, while instructive, are not always central to the commitment to long life: for they may be over-commitments. They may be false projects).

Returning to the Ostensible Law, I will illuminate a number of related factors which may influence immortality in unexpected ways. These are positions which come from an aesthetic, materialistic, rhetorical, or consumerist view of life.

First, I will address a context familiar to me: Games. In a computer game, or on a television there is an image of a receding box, a box which captures some complete or incomplete aspect of reality. We can imagine that we are ‘inside the bubble’ and it captivates everything, it has the flavor of success or failure. We can also imagine that we are outside the ‘bubble’ and this interface-reality has only a contingent effect upon our existence. The question is, what does this interface mean? What if we could preserve the image on the screen, and that life was adequate to compensate for a very short, but highly stimulated life ‘outside of the box’? Or what if the television was highly transient, and our life outside of the screen was immortal? We might want better images, or a different process of meaning, or we might want to abandon the television altogether for a simpler life. But what if that simple life was not guaranteed? What if the television offered prospects of reward, even for an immortal? Clearly there are metaphysical questions raised, but solely as a function of the existence of a partition, and reproduction, like a reflection in a pond. This could be incidental, no? It could be ultimately meaningless. But consider hypothetically that the computer game offers a prospect of immortal life, just as might many forms of compromise which have a material advantage. We might ask, “How is the game realized? Who has the imagination to know?”

Secondly, what if choices in our daily life affected how real we are? I find that there are many factors which make us live shorter lives, or care more or less, or gain weight, etc. So I consider it a relative truth that we can become more or less real, and furthermore, when life in general involves choices or problems or solutions, even relatively so, then we recognize that these choices, problems, and solutions involve our reality. It virtually follows from appreciating that there could be a value system. Or, even more broadly, a perceptual framework. It is as though to deny relative truth we need to be a relativist. But what I am saying is that reality—of any specific composition—is a function of the definable properties of our highly conditional lives. Without conditioning we might take the view that relative longevity is merely an arbitrary decision. But with conditioning, we have a dependence on conditioning to define health, wisdom, adaptivity, and also in short the duration of our lives. But, returning to my earliest statement on this subject, defining reality is actually a radical concept. By defining reality, we can also define immortality. That is, when immortality is available to 100% commitment, or 50%, or 25%, or 12.5%. Fascinating.

Thirdly, in any context of arguments we must traditionally accept that we are victors or defeated. Only the relativist believes that there is a subjective position in which the words are interchangeable. A relativist in such a position has no choice but to believe that immortality also is an arbitrary concept. In arguing in such a way, he or she is prone to reductivism or exaggeration, which defend that some participle of life is still immortal, or advising someone to observe that it is the larger questions that have more significance than some material answer. But this ignores the key issue: immortality only exists by definable criteria. Even if these criteria are relative, they need not be subjective. A die-hard subjectivist, according to a dramatization of those earlier views, would discover that she had made a principled mistake only later in life. Ironically, death was not subjective, just as most people could have told her. Really, in real terms, she didn’t uphold a standard. She didn’t believe the language in front of her face. So, in defending immortality with arguments, there is a necessity to not be a subjectivist. But do we need to avoid relativism? What if every advantage depends on measurements which would seem insignificant in any ultimate meaningful context of God, greatness, or even (that truly great idea) a life-worth-living? In my view relativity, not relativism, is actually a necessary agent of the conditioning for an objective mind. In the context of understanding, it is a necessary pre-condition for understanding what it means to have an immortal advantage. What can be attained in long life need not be immortally valuable to the value system under which it is created. For such a value system is necessarily infinite. There is a necessary reductivism of values and exaggeration of principles which is befitting the necessarily relative and sliding-scale view of temporal reality. Even if nothing except temporal reality exists, there is room for immortal values. These are real concepts.

Fourthly, in the consumer view of reality, we must learn to be immortal consumers, once we accept the axiom that consumerism is relative enough to be functional—such as by adopting flexible definitions. These are not flexible definitions of personal, individual, or optimal social standards (whether they have been written down, or whether the best standard remains intangible) but are instead merely flexible definitions of consumerism. Remember, there are two additional caveats, that consumerism is functional, and that that functionality implies immortality. So what does it mean to be an immortal consumer? There are at least three components: [1] Infinite consideration, [2] Appropriateness or strategy, [3] A capacity to function as a consumer indefinitely, that is, for the duration of the longest possible life. What are the implications of this ‘immortal’ consumerism? In my view, as I have already considered, there is nothing inherently wrong with such a system. Clearly the values that emerge are roughly analogous to those properties of consumerism: variety or psychological reliability, implying complexity and perfection,

So what is the summation of this body of knowledge concerning four types of analysis on the subject of the secret precepts of immortality? I will abbreviate the discoveries as the following:

(1) Appreciation of context, including balanced principles about the nature of the false and the real;

(2) The principle adopted for immortal life scales to the level of commitment: with 100% commitment we would best be adaptive, with 50% commitment we would seek medicine, with 25% commitment we would be an athlete, and with 12.5% commitment we would have to possess immortal knowledge;

(3) The argument for immortality is not subjective, because death is not subjective. However, the argument is relative because the values and systems for achieving immortality must accept both reductivism and exaggeration, but under a pragmatic rule.

(4) The immortal consumer favors variety with spice, a function of complexity and perfection.

Nathan Coppedge is a philosophical writer who encourages everyone to live a long, healthy life. Additional of his writings about immortality can be found in his 1-Page-Classics (2012), and the forthcoming book, The Dimensional Philosopher’s Toolkit (2013).

Nathan’s book-covers and artwork is visible at http://www.nathancoppedge.com

Nathan also writes about perpetual motion machines, made popular at his website.