Death is the only guarantee in life and in fact is necessary for human ecology. I too am deeply saddened by this loss, but am supremely grateful that a man like John McCarthy was able to contribute to the humanity's knowledge. May his work be the foundation in many more advances in human understanding, and may his void be filled by someone who respects this journey.
While I'm pretty confident in humanity's current understanding of physics, I'm not that confident to say that given a million (more like several billion) years and Jupiter brains, we won't figure out a way out of whatever the fate (if there is one) of the universe is. The more important aspect however is how can I actually get to the point of living a million+ years? When I'm there I can argue over some supposed necessity or long-term inevitability of death; right now it doesn't have to be that way.
We're not Drosophila, we're people with minds capable of exploring and understanding a world that goes beyond biological evolution. We don't have to use death to iterate, we do it using general intelligence (it outperforms evolution by a factor of a bazillion). Also, not all organisms use preprogrammed death as a mechanism to iterate, ask an amoeba sometime.
All this talk about the inevitability of death and how that's supposdly a good thing is basically just pseudo-religious reasoning in defense of a status quo that is rapidly crumbling away.
Right, but if there is actually any selection for aging and death in organisms (maybe there is, I'm not sure), it's not useful anymore. There's a lot of evidence that there's no longer genetic selection acting on the human population, and it's therefore no longer true that our children should be genetically superior.
>There's a lot of evidence that there's no longer genetic selection acting on the human population
Sure there is. The fitness function is just different from what you or I consider 'optimal' or 'superior'. We're still becoming more resistent to disease, even if the future may have more in common with trailer park people than urban elites.
And the way of thinking isn't constant. It changes over time. A 15 year old you, a 25 year old you and a 50 year old you are all different people. A 500 year old you will most probably be a different person.
There are people who resist change and disapprove of all viewpoints other their own, but I doubt it's an age thing. I see a lot of young people opposing gay marriages for instance.
We think differently as we age. Have you spent any amount of time arguing with old people? You can't teach an old dog new tricks, etc.
Ideas tend to propagate in generations - it's often necessary for the old guard to die off before a new idea will be accepted, whether this is in art, or science, or politics or whatever.
As new people crop up that aren't reputationally invested in a certain idea it allows more ideas to be considered seriously, etc.
I know a guy who did a bunch of market research for a senior care product. They found technology use, on average, dips in the 60s and then starts increasing again in the seventies.
RIP, John.