20250307 - 长寿与不朽：科技、死亡与生活的意义 - The Cost of Trying to Live Forever¶

分类: Clippings
创建: 2025-03-07
标签: 长寿, 不朽, 科技, 死亡, 生活意义, 爱, 连接, AI, 布莱恩·约翰逊, 雷·库兹韦尔

The Cost of Trying to Live Forever¶

摘要 (Summary)¶

这篇文章讨论了长寿和不朽的追求，聚焦于科技企业家布莱恩·约翰逊和他的Netflix纪录片《别死：想要永生的男人》。文章指出，延长生命的努力在全球范围内日益普遍，包括使用AI破解长寿密码和城市争相成为长寿中心。雷·库兹韦尔通过他的书《奇点临近》和《奇点更近》讨论了技术赋能的不朽。然而，文章强调，大多数长寿运动实际上是关于延长生命和减缓衰老的影响，而不是真正的不朽。文章还探讨了死亡在生活中的重要性，引用了哲学家、宗教领袖和名人的观点，强调接受死亡可以帮助我们更好地生活。最后，文章指出，爱和连接是生命的真正意义，而不仅仅是物质和经验的追求。

要点 (Key Facts)¶

布莱恩·约翰逊是《别死：想要永生的男人》纪录片的主题，他致力于延长生命。
长寿已成为全球消费趋势，企业家使用AI破解长寿密码，城市竞相成为长寿中心。
雷·库兹韦尔在他的书《奇点临近》和《奇点更近》中讨论了技术赋能的不朽。
大多数长寿运动关注的是延长生命和减缓衰老，而不是真正的不朽。
死亡在生活中具有重要意义，接受死亡可以帮助我们更好地生活。
爱和连接是生命的真正意义，而不仅仅是物质和经验的追求。
没有科学证据表明我们将成为第一代不死的Generation。

正文 (Content)¶

Ray Kurzweil has been talking about tech-enabled immortality for decades, including in his 2005 book The Singularity Is Near and again in his 2024 book The Singularity Is Nearer. For Kurzweil, the singularity will come when humans merge with AI to become “immortal software-based humans” living in the cloud.
雷·库兹韦尔几十年来一直在谈论技术赋能的不朽，包括在他的 2005 年著作《奇点临近》和 2024 年著作《奇点更近》中。对于库兹韦尔来说，奇点将在人类与 AI 融合成为“基于软件的不朽人类”并生活在云端时到来。

Most of the longevity movement is not really about immortality but rather about extending life and limiting the damaging effects of aging. Of course, we all want longevity, and doing what we can to extend how long we live is great—as long as we don’t allow that to distract us from focusing on how to live. The danger of Johnson’s obsessive approach is spending so much time trying to extend your life that you never quite get around to living it.
大多数长寿运动并不是真的关于永生，而是关于延长生命和限制衰老的破坏性影响。当然，我们都想要长寿，尽我们所能延长寿命是好的——只要我们不让这分散我们对如何生活的关注。约翰逊的痴迷方法的危险在于，花费太多时间试图延长生命，以至于你永远无法真正开始生活。

Indeed, keeping death close—even while pushing it as far into the future as we can—has many lessons to teach us about life. Because as one headline from The Onion puts it: “World Death Rate Holding Steady at 100%.” This punchline, that no one escapes death, can of course be confirmed by multiple scientific studies.
确实，将死亡保持在近处——即使我们尽可能地将其推向未来——可以教给我们许多关于生活的教训。因为正如《洋葱报》的一条标题所说：“全球死亡率稳定在 100%。”这个笑点，即没有人能逃脱死亡，当然可以由多项科学研究证实。

We are not anywhere close to conquering death. In fact, a study from the University of Illinois in Chicago last year showed that though the average lifespan has gone up, the pace of improvement is slowing and the maximum lifespan hasn’t changed as much. “We’ve now proven that modern medicine is yielding incrementally smaller improvements in longevity even though medical advances are occurring at breakneck speed,” the study’s lead author Professor Jay Olshansky says. “There’s plenty of room for improvement: for reducing risk factors, working to eliminate disparities and encouraging people to adopt healthier lifestyles—all of which can enable people to live longer and healthier.” But room for improvement in living longer is very different from delusions about eliminating death.
我们离征服死亡还远得很。事实上，去年芝加哥伊利诺伊大学的一项研究显示，尽管平均寿命有所增加，但改善的速度正在放缓，最大寿命并没有发生太大变化。该研究的首席作者杰伊·奥尔尚斯基教授说：“我们现在已经证明，现代医学在延长寿命方面的改进越来越小，尽管医学进步的速度非常快。”“有很多改进的空间：减少风险因素，努力消除差异，鼓励人们采取更健康的生活方式——所有这些都可以使人们活得更长更健康。”但延长寿命的改进空间与消除死亡的幻想完全不同。

For William Mair, professor of molecular metabolism at Harvard Chan School of Public Health, talk about immortality or radical life extension has a clear opportunity cost. “I worry that in a world where people have limited attention spans, the people who speak with confidence and say they have already cured aging will get the microphone,” he says. “We all age and we all know someone who is suffering from an age-related condition.”
对于哈佛陈公共卫生学院分子代谢学教授威廉·梅尔来说，谈论永生或激进的延长寿命有着明显的机会成本。“我担心在一个人们注意力有限的世界里，那些自信地宣称自己已经治愈衰老的人会得到话筒，”他说。“我们都在变老，我们都认识一些患有与年龄相关的疾病的人。”

Death can help us focus our attention on living our best life, because there’s nothing that can teach us more about how to live life than death. Death is the most universal experience, yet we will do anything and everything we can to curtain it off, to avoid dealing with the only plot twist that we know for sure will be in our story’s last act. Here lies the crux of the error Johnson, Kurzweil, and their followers are making: by seeing human beings solely as material beings, they have confused an immortal soul with an immortal body. As the philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin put it, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” Or, as the poet Hermann Hesse wrote, “You will be neurotic and a foe to life—so says your soul—if you neglect me.”
死亡可以帮助我们专注于过最好的生活，因为没有什么比死亡更能教我们如何生活。死亡是最普遍的经历，然而我们会做任何事情来遮蔽它，避免面对我们唯一确定的故事最后一幕的剧情转折。这就是约翰逊、库兹韦尔及其追随者所犯错误的关键所在：他们仅将人类视为物质存在，将不朽的灵魂与不朽的身体混淆了。正如哲学家皮埃尔·泰亚尔·德·夏尔丹所说：“我们不是拥有灵性体验的人类。我们是拥有人类体验的灵性存在。”或者，正如诗人赫尔曼·黑塞所写：“如果你忽视我，你将变得神经质并成为生活的敌人——你的灵魂如是说。”

==We neglect our souls by losing ourselves in endless busyness and never-ending to-do lists while never getting around to the big unspoken item that will eventually get its checkmark. We spend our days accumulating, acquiring, achieving. We relentlessly document our lives on social media to forever memorialize moments we never fully experience.==
==我们通过陷入无休止的忙碌和永无止境的待办事项清单而忽视了我们的灵魂，而从未真正去处理那个最终会得到勾选的重大未言明项目。我们的日子都在积累、获取、实现中度过。我们在社交媒体上无情地记录我们的生活，以永远纪念那些我们从未完全体验的时刻。==

As Joanna Ebenstein writes in Memento Mori, in a world that prides itself on being able to control all aspects of life, death is the “ultimate insult.” There’s a reason why death has been a central part of spiritual traditions and philosophy throughout history. “The one aim of those who practice philosophy in the proper manner,” Socrates says in Plato’s Phaedo, “is to practice for dying and death.”
正如乔安娜·埃本斯坦在《纪念死亡》中所写，在一个自诩能够控制生活各个方面的世界里，死亡是“终极侮辱”。死亡之所以一直是历史上精神传统和哲学的核心部分是有原因的。苏格拉底在柏拉图的《斐多篇》中说：“那些以正确方式实践哲学的人的唯一目标，就是为死亡和死做准备。”

In ancient Rome, MM—short for “Memento Mori” which means “remember death”—was carved on statues and trees. The phrase is said to go back to a tradition in Roman victory parades in which a slave would hold a crown over the head of the triumphant general or emperor while whispering “remember you will die,” lest the victor lose his sense of perspective.
在古罗马，MM——“Memento Mori”的缩写，意思是“记住死亡”——被雕刻在雕像和树木上。据说这句话可以追溯到罗马胜利游行中的一个传统，在游行中，一个奴隶会将王冠举在胜利的将军或皇帝的头上，同时低声说“记住你将死去”，以免胜利者失去理智。

For the Stoics, accepting death and keeping it close was important to organize and give meaning to daily life. As Seneca put it, “It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.” In Buddhism, the transient nature of life in which “all compounded things are impermanent” is a central teaching. The “maranasati” is a Buddhist meditation that specifically focuses on the awareness of death, reminding us that beginnings and endings are natural and that death is inevitable, which can awaken our appreciation for living.
对于斯多葛派来说，接受死亡并将其视为亲近的事物对于组织和赋予日常生活意义非常重要。正如塞内卡所说：“人不应害怕死亡，而应害怕从未开始生活。”在佛教中，生命的无常性，即“一切有为法皆无常”，是一个中心教义。“maranasati”是佛教的一种冥想，专门关注对死亡的觉知，提醒我们开始和结束都是自然的，死亡是不可避免的，这可以唤醒我们对生活的欣赏。

For the French Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne, not thinking about death was “brutish stupidity” and overcoming our fear of death is the way to liberate ourselves. “To begin depriving death of its greatest advantage over us…let us deprive death of its strangeness, let us frequent it, let us get used to it,” he wrote. “To practice death is to practice freedom.” For the existentialist German philosopher Martin Heidegger, "death opens up the question of being.” In essence, facing our mortality allows us to explore the biggest mystery: what it means to be alive.
对于法国文艺复兴时期的哲学家米歇尔·德·蒙田来说，不去思考死亡是“愚蠢的野蛮”，克服对死亡的恐惧是解放自己的方式。“为了开始剥夺死亡对我们的最大优势……让我们剥夺死亡的陌生感，让我们经常接触它，让我们习惯它，”他写道。“练习死亡就是练习自由。”对于存在主义德国哲学家马丁·海德格尔来说，“死亡开启了存在的疑问。”本质上，面对我们的 смертность让我们探索最大的谜团：活着意味着什么。

Of course, these questions have not just been asked by late philosophers. “For the past 33 years,” said Apple co-founder Steve Jobs in 2005. I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?’ And whenever the answer has been ‘No’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.”
当然，这些问题不仅仅是晚期哲学家提出的。苹果联合创始人史蒂夫·乔布斯在 2005 年说：“在过去的 33 年里，我每天早上都会照镜子，问自己：‘如果今天是我生命的最后一天，我还会想做今天要做的事情吗？’当连续多天答案都是‘不’时，我就知道我需要改变一些事情。记住我很快就会死去，这是我所遇到过的帮助我做出人生重大选择的最重要工具。”

When we don’t allow death into our lives, we lose the clarity, perspective, and wisdom that only death can bring. That’s why psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross called death the key to the door of life: “It is the denial of death that is partially responsible for people living empty, purposeless lives; for when you live as if you’ll live forever, it becomes too easy to postpone the things you know that you must do.”
当我们不让死亡进入我们的生活时，我们失去了只有死亡才能带来的清晰、视角和智慧。这就是为什么精神病学家伊丽莎白·库布勒-罗斯称死亡为生命之门的钥匙：“正是对死亡的否认部分地导致人们过着空虚、无目的的生活；因为当你像永远活着一样生活时，你就很容易推迟那些你知道必须做的事情。”

One of the biggest problems with believing that we’re just material beings and putting all our existential eggs in that basket is that it can diminish our appreciation of the joy, mystery, poetry and love that make life—however much we have of it—worth living.
相信我们只是物质存在并将我们所有的生存希望都放在这个篮子里，最大的问题之一是它可能会减少我们对使生活——无论我们拥有多少——值得过的喜悦、神秘、诗意和爱的欣赏。

In his book AI Superpowers, AI pioneer Kai-Fu Lee writes about how he once lived his life according to the same operating principles as the technology he was building. “I came to view my own life as a kind of an optimization algorithm with clear goals: maximize personal influence and minimize anything that doesn’t contribute to that goal,” he writes. After being diagnosed with stage IV lymphoma, Lee went on an inner journey to reexamine his life. One person whose wisdom he sought out was a Buddhist priest, Master Hsing Yun, who told him: “Kai-Fu, humans aren’t meant to think this way. This constant calculating, this quantification of everything, it eats away at what’s really inside of us, and what exists between us. It suffocates the one thing that gives us true life: love.”
在他的书《AI 超级大国》中，人工智能先驱李开复写道，他曾经按照自己所构建的技术的相同操作原则来生活。“我开始将自己的生活视为一种具有明确目标的优化算法：最大化个人影响力，并最小化任何不利于这一目标的事物，”他写道。在被诊断出第四期淋巴瘤后，李开复开始了一段内在旅程，重新审视自己的生活。他寻求智慧的一位人物是佛教僧侣星云大师，后者告诉他：“开复，人类不应该这样思考。这种不断的计算，一切的量化，它侵蚀了我们内心的真正东西，以及我们之间的存在。它扼杀了赋予我们真正生命的一件事：爱。”

That’s the true singularity. Love is what gives life meaning and makes it worth living. No matter what we believe about God or the afterlife, we have a fundamental need to connect — with ourselves, with others, and with something larger than ourselves. And love is both the pathway to that connection and the payoff. When we see life purely in material and empirical terms, we lose access to other dimensions of life—the parts beyond reason and rationality. And what an arid and limited existence that is.
那才是真正的奇点。爱是赋予生命意义并使其值得活下去的东西。无论我们对上帝或来世有什么看法，我们都有与自己、与他人以及与比我们自己更大的东西连接的基本需求。而爱既是通往这种连接的途径，也是回报。当我们纯粹从物质和经验的角度看待生活时，我们就失去了接触生活其他维度的机会——那些超越理性和逻辑的部分。那是一种多么干枯和有限的存在啊。

So yes, let’s do what we can to lead a long life. But accepting that our life on earth will come to an end will make us more alive to it. In a post on X, Bryan Johnson wrote that “The coolest question in existence right now is exploring if we are the first generation to not die.”
所以，是的，让我们尽力过上长寿的生活。但接受我们在这个地球上的生命终将结束这一事实，会让我们更加珍惜生命。在 X 上的一篇文章中，布莱恩·约翰逊写道：“现在存在的最酷的问题是探索我们是否是第一代不会死亡的人。”

It might be a cool question, but we know the answer: there’s zero scientific evidence that we’re going to be the first generation to not die. But what about a cooler question: how can we live a good life? For that, death is the ultimate bio hack.
这可能是一个有趣的问题，但我们知道答案：没有科学证据表明我们将成为第一代不死的 Generation。但还有一个更有趣的问题：我们如何过上美好的生活？对此，死亡是终极的生物黑客。