Nicq MacDonald wrote:
>Schopenhaur pointed out that taking one's own life is the ultimate act of
>will- essentially the ultimate subversive act. Life extension really
>doesn't change much of anything except duration- every entity will still
>perish at some time.
I'm not so sure about this. I'm in the process of reading Richard Dawkins'
_The Selfish Gene_ (which I highly recommend, by the way), and it has
caused me to wonder about the possible existence of a deviant "suicide"
gene...one which has latent tendencies unless faced with a certain amount
of pressure or some other kind of stigma. This would explain the
relatively high (I have no figures handy) occurence of suicides within a
family.
So the point to this is that if and when veritable life extension (i.e.:
immortality) becomes more readily available, the tendency to commit suicide
will not necessarily rise on a per person basis.
There are a variety of reasons for suicide, but they all seem to stem from
pressure based situations. However, it could be argued that what is a
pressure situation to one person could be handled rather easily by another.
If this is true, then I don't foresee the "all will perish" scenario being
statistically plausible.
_____________________________________________________________
E. Shaun Russell Operations Officer, Extropy Institute
e_shaun@extropy.org http://www.extropy.org
-------------------------------------------------------------
"Yesterday we created the present; today, we're inventing our
future. Kineticize your potential."
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