To Live Forever?
There is a great comic by Zach Weinersmith (writer of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal)[[166]](#_ftn166) on this topic (shared with his permission).
Humans have been bred to fear both death and change because those who accept change and impermanence with abandon are far less likely to survive and produce viable offspring.
Your culture will therefore need to take an intentional stance against elements of permanence if you do not want adherents to cling to it blindly. Before taking your stance, we encourage you to think through what it really means—and whether it promotes worthwhile outcomes.
In the Ship of Theseus thought experiment, we are told the story of a man named Theseus who, piece by piece, replaces every part of his ship throughout his journey. Is the ship that ends the journey still the same “ship” as the vessel that originally embarked? What if, behind Theseus, another man were to collect the cast-off pieces and use them to build another ship? Is this other ship also Theseus’ ship?
Suppose instead of talking about a ship, we are discussing a consciousness and a brain that forgot old memories and replaced them with new ones while also replacing the physical, organic matter in its cells bit by bit. What if a mad scientist captured all those forgotten memories in a brain made of the first brain’s discarded particles? Which entity would be the “true” continuation of the previous state of consciousness?
If you took one percent of a person’s brain and replaced it with computer chips, would they still be themselves? What about 50 percent? When does a person stop existing? To us the answer is obvious: With every adjustment in who a person is, they become something partially—but not wholly—new. In part, a person stops existing with the first percentage point of replacement, but in part, a person doesn’t stop existing until the last percent of their original brain is gone. Given that we transmit much more than 1 percent of who we are to our kids, we are fractionally the same entity as them. In addition, given that humans are constantly improving and changing themselves, we are constantly killing ourselves—either by gaining new information, changing our minds, experiencing hormonal shifts, or sloughing off old cells and generating new ones.
From our perspective, the question posed in the Ship of Theseus is fundamentally flawed. The concept of separation (in which the molecules that make up the ship are meaningfully a new thing from the surrounding water molecules) and continued identity (that the ship is meaningfully the same thing between moments) are mental shortcuts the human brain uses to more easily categorize the world but not reflective of a deeper reality. The same can be said for our own consciousness, which more or less has no value if it does not undergo a constant cycle of creative destruction. (Consciousness in and of itself isn’t valuable; it is valuable because it helps us learn and solve problems by taking in new information, weighing it, and forming new views.)
Our cultural framework sees a fear of death as equivalent to a desire to take Theseus’s ship and carefully dip every board in preservatives to maintain it for thousands of years. Meanwhile, we gauge a ship’s value by its ability on the water and at war. This view inspires new ship designs and constant innovation because our intergenerational identities’ purpose as custodians of ships—the identities we experience within a single lifetime—is to make them better on water and at war. As older ships fail to compete with newer models, they are retired, forgotten, and allowed to rot. Thousands of years later, our cultivar’s Ship of Theseus looks like a fleet of advanced battle cruisers and submarines—whereas it still resembles an ancient Greek trireme within those cultivars that develop life-extension technologies out of fear of death.
Given our belief that, as we grow and change, our identities change, we see every moment of self-improvement as an incremental death. Resisting the process of creative self-destruction intrinsically leads to stagnation. A pool of stagnant water can breed dangerous parasites.
Mental homogenization is just as potentially damaging as mental stagnation. Like viruses, some of the ideas to which we are exposed are self-replicating. If our mental “immune systems” are insufficiently robust, viral ideas can infect us and prevent us from seriously engaging with new concepts (to protect themselves) while pushing us to spread those virulent ideas to other people. When this kind of homogenization happens to a person, we call them a “husk” because when someone halts the process of creative destruction—refusing to explore, weigh, and sometimes accept new ideas—they stop being meaningfully human (in our House’s view, at least).
Our culture also resists instinctual attachment to biological identity, instead contextualizing our children collectively as more “us” than we are. Consider that each biological kid you have is 50 percent you. As soon as you have more than three kids, there is more of your biological identity (1.5X) in them than in you.
Better still, because most have the freedom to choose reproductive partners they admire, having kids yields an opportunity to augment individual biological identities by mixing them with those of people we respect and admire—people whose unique DNA will improve our own. Once equipped with this improved mix, children can also be raised in ever-more-ideal circumstances than their parents, granting still more advantages to the new-and-improved biological identities produced.
As an added benefit, children are not burdened by their parents’ biases and prejudices; they get to choose to discard the parts of their parents’ worldview that, with their clearer views, they can recognize as sub-optimal. This essentially diversifies an individual biological identity’s “investment portfolio” by allowing iterations of them to take wildly different (and perhaps better) approaches to life.
Our House’s cultural beliefs around identity produce a view of life and the individual as a bubbling cauldron of creative destruction at its best—and a stagnant, homogeneous cesspool at its worst. The destruction of identity is not an unwanted byproduct of progress but the core value of identity in the first place.
While this mindset encourages a high birth rate at the intergenerational level and a low fear of death, it is hard to say how aggressive our distant descendants will be when it comes to genetically and mechanically modifying their own kids. Even we have some trepidation about how far we can improve our species before we hit ethical issues, like classes of a family being genetically specialized for specific jobs, which brings in questions of consent.
We are excited to see what you come up with for your own House’s cultivar and even more excited to see, through the eyes of our distant descendants, which cultivar “wins.” How will your culture frame permanence? Will you advocate for some constants while encouraging continuous change in other domains? What are the likely downstream effects of the way you frame permanence?