2011-02-24, 02:22 PM
What do you mean by saying immortality is exclusive to non-religious faith? If there is something that can make people immortal it wouldn't be something that distinguishes religion, as that's simply a person's choice. It's like saying immortality is just for those who don't like chocolate.
Otherwise, if you mean religions and the concept of immortality would conflict in interests. Well, that depends on which religion you are talking about. Catholiscism doesn't have one mandament "Thou shall not become immortal" don't see exactly why it would be conflicting (though I'm not catholic anymore so yeah).
Regarding the possibility of immortality: don't really see that as the main aspect of the article anyway but, "should we have immortality?" is a weird question in itself. Do we deserve immortality? I don't think immortality is the way to go for us, with how the population has been alarmingly growing. Also the renewal of the way of thinking is important, old people with old ideas should leave and let fresh ones come in.
As for the article, the premise that computers are getting faster and that their speed is increasing faster each time: my quantum chemistry course has thaught me that computers are only evolving at the speed they are because companies decided to follow someone's prediction that computing power (transistor density) would multiply by 10 every X years, just a market decision. Moreover, he also showed that such development is insustainable, we would need to completely change the way transistors work to keep up with the rate because once they get too small we leave the domain of classical physics upon which all computers are based now and we'd enter on the quantic domain. At this point transistors would no longer work because of some quantic phenomena.
Finally, to match the abilities of our brain we would need to go WAY farther than just making faster computers. First step would be to actually understand the brain and according to my sister who's studying medicine the brain is the part of the body we know the least. We understand pretty much nothing of the brain (or else there would be no psychologists and we would be doing brain surgery to cure alzeimer).
Otherwise, if you mean religions and the concept of immortality would conflict in interests. Well, that depends on which religion you are talking about. Catholiscism doesn't have one mandament "Thou shall not become immortal" don't see exactly why it would be conflicting (though I'm not catholic anymore so yeah).
Regarding the possibility of immortality: don't really see that as the main aspect of the article anyway but, "should we have immortality?" is a weird question in itself. Do we deserve immortality? I don't think immortality is the way to go for us, with how the population has been alarmingly growing. Also the renewal of the way of thinking is important, old people with old ideas should leave and let fresh ones come in.
As for the article, the premise that computers are getting faster and that their speed is increasing faster each time: my quantum chemistry course has thaught me that computers are only evolving at the speed they are because companies decided to follow someone's prediction that computing power (transistor density) would multiply by 10 every X years, just a market decision. Moreover, he also showed that such development is insustainable, we would need to completely change the way transistors work to keep up with the rate because once they get too small we leave the domain of classical physics upon which all computers are based now and we'd enter on the quantic domain. At this point transistors would no longer work because of some quantic phenomena.
Finally, to match the abilities of our brain we would need to go WAY farther than just making faster computers. First step would be to actually understand the brain and according to my sister who's studying medicine the brain is the part of the body we know the least. We understand pretty much nothing of the brain (or else there would be no psychologists and we would be doing brain surgery to cure alzeimer).