> The "game of life" is really about statistical inference and people aren't that good at it -- the success of Las Vegas proves it.
Las Vegas is run by human beings. Having members of your species be worse at a task than other members of your species doesn't prove that your species as a whole is not good at the task.
Now...
> Has Christianity infected people with a desire for personal immortality? Are people inured to flushing billions and billions down the drain on biomedical research?
Why wouldn't one want personal immortality? To be fair, religious groups are those least likely to support personal immortality of many sorts (e.g. brain uploading) because of questions such as "what happens to the soul", and "isn't this meddling in our creators work?".
Rather, I'd think that anyone who believes that this life is all that exists would want to prolong it indefinitely. It's better to be than not to be.
Certainly: quality of life. Immortality may be a miserable, horrible existence. Most of the things we derive happiness from in life are an integral part of our normal life-death cycle of events, disrupting that cycle may not be very pleasant long-term unless we can supplant those innate desires with something equally fulfilling. We don't really know, it's never happened.
Most of your desires and goals are related to the scarcity of time. In a broad sense, having children for example is a rewarding experience for people, we have an innate desire to reproduce and rear children (talk to any childless post-30 woman who didn't explicitly choose that situation, you'll see it's innate), but it's also something we probably wouldn't continue to do should death be removed from humanity, there'd be no need. But in a smaller sense, even something like enjoying a nice meal with friends would be called into question. Your enjoyment of food only exist because we've got a biologically programmed taste for foods that assists in our survival, and social interaction in an infinite time scale even gets weird, everyone would eventually know everyone and know everything there is to know, unique life experiences would become commonality, etc.
there's a lot of assumptions in that particular view of immortality. It assumes that it would also mean infinite memory, a loss of senses and certain capabilities, and that we cannot modify ourselves to create new urges. All of these are possible and plausible, but for example in the simulated AI situation only the loss of senses is likely to be true (as well as perhaps the inability to modify ourselves, depending on the approach)
Las Vegas is run by human beings. Having members of your species be worse at a task than other members of your species doesn't prove that your species as a whole is not good at the task.
Now...
> Has Christianity infected people with a desire for personal immortality? Are people inured to flushing billions and billions down the drain on biomedical research?
Why wouldn't one want personal immortality? To be fair, religious groups are those least likely to support personal immortality of many sorts (e.g. brain uploading) because of questions such as "what happens to the soul", and "isn't this meddling in our creators work?".
Rather, I'd think that anyone who believes that this life is all that exists would want to prolong it indefinitely. It's better to be than not to be.
Do you have an argument against that?