6 ms·

It's important to make a distinction medically between pushing as many as people as possible towards the high-age end of that curve on one hand and scaling the

by Udo 15y ago

It's important to make a distinction medically between pushing as many as people as possible towards the high-age end of that curve on one hand and scaling the entire X axis on the other. The first one is what we're currently doing with modern medicine, and it boils down to debugging the most common causes of premature death. The second one is completely separate from this and way harder to tackle because it involves messing with the parameters of life in a profound way. The main problem here is that the human body, like all higher life forms on this planet, is designed to be a disposable object from the ground up. We now know that human biochemistry is the result of an evolutionary process which when faced with a problem consistently comes up with the worst possible solution that is still workable. It's 3 billion years worth of crufty spaghetti code, literally. Contrary to disease, aging isn't one factor going "wrong". It's a million little modules coming to the inevitable end of their cheaply designed life. Of course, we'll tackle this eventually - we have to if we ever want to move on from this weird intermediary half-state between nature and intellect - but it's going to be slow, slow progress. Intuitively, I'd say we might have some very limited success in scaling up that X axis within the next 20 years, but it'll be a long time before we actually solve this issue. Which is sad, because I wanted to be around for much longer and now I most likely won't get to do that. Then again, the subject of life extension meets with so much hostility it's actually easy to argue that we as a culture are not ready for this yet.

iwwr 15y ago
On the other hand, the subject of life extension meets with so much hostility it's actually easy to argue that we as a culture are not ready for this yet. Only from the Malthusians.
- sixtofour 15y ago
  What do we do with people who live to extreme age, but do not operate at the speed of the current economy? How do we keep them occupied? How do they make a living? How do we use what they can contribute? Are we as a culture, today or on the next two generations, ready to deal with those issues?
  - iwwr 15y ago
    How do we There is no 'we', people act individually. If people will have enough savings, they will retire earlier, if they don't they keep working. The increase in life expectancy would be doubled with an increase in health and fitness at these older ages. So people can and would keep working. The alternative interpretation is more insidious: "we should not allow people to live longer because it will bankrupt the pension system". Well, if the pension system is one casualty of longer, healthier and more productive lives then so be it.
    - sixtofour 15y ago
      "There is no 'we', people act individually." There are many 'we's," people act together and individually. Some of the ways we act together are strictly voluntary, others are coerced (tax supported activity) and we either agree and go along or disagree and go along. Some people don't go along at all in rare cases.
w1ntermute 15y ago
I'd say there's little value in trying to fix what's broken to the core. Research should focus on ways to extract one's consciousness from the body and place it in an artificially designed shell (a Ghost in the Shell, one might say).
- broot 15y ago
  But W1ntermute, wont William Gibson be mad that you're cheating on Neuromancer with Ghost in the Shell?
- wazoox 15y ago
  I'd argue that the common view that our mind is somehow independent from our body is probably wrong, and a judeo-christian falsity. Our mind is a real-time, continuous creation of our brain AND our whole body. I don't think that a brain in a vat could be anything but either a vegetable or a psychopath; and that the "ghost in the shell" (or the mind dump neuromancer-style) is anything more than a pleasant, impossible fiction, similar with faster-than-light travel.
  - w1ntermute 15y ago
    If you can create a medium compatible with the human brain, it may be possible to hold our consciousnesses in it.
  - joshuacc 15y ago
    I realize these aren't direct responses, but here are a couple of interesting historical points. 1. Mind/body dualism also arose in pagan Greece (Plato being the clearest example). 2. When most people think of dualism today, they are thinking of Cartesian dualism where the mind and body have a very tenuous connection indeed. But that is a relatively recent idea. Within the Christian tradition, something like Hylemorphic dualism[1], which maintains a very tight connection between mind and body, long predated it. (Probably due in part to belief in the Resurrection of the Body.) [1] http://www.reading.ac.uk/AcaDepts/ld/Philos/dso/papers/Hylemorphic%20Dualism.pdf http://www.reading.ac.uk/AcaDepts/ld/Philos/dso/papers/Hylem...
  - 15y ago
ez77 15y ago
if we ever want to move on from this weird intermediary half-state between nature and intellect I don't know if I follow correctly. Do you feel that solving the life extension puzzle is tantamount to intellectual nirvana? I'd say there is still plenty more to talk about (say [1] and [2], for example), and arguably deeper from a strictly intellectual viewpoint. In fact, I'd say that the fact that I happen to be mortal or not does not tackle any of classical intellectual conundrums. Then again, the subject of life extension meets with so much hostility it's actually easy to argue that we as a culture are not ready for this yet. I'm not sure about life extension, but effectively ending retirement would be met with hostility! But then again, we're getting both things (end of retirement/pensions and the resulting unrest) without indefinite life extension. [1] http://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl http://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl [2] http://www.claymath.org/millennium/ http://www.claymath.org/millennium/
- JohnLBevan 15y ago
  With regards to the retirement problem, that's only an issue because people are still thinking like mortals. Were we immortal I'd expect gap years to replace retirement. Many people would choose to live their lives in cycles, retraining every 50 years for a new job / change of scene, getting to a proficient level, then taking a break for a few years until ready (or out of funds) to retrain & start anew. Once they'd done a few cycles people would likely begin to specialise, picking up stuff they'd touched on in the past & taking it to the next level / mixing it with their other skills. The issues then arising are the capacity of the mind (mind rather than human brain since who knows what form it will have taken by this point). I've assumed that with immortality we maintain physical (if still relevant) and mental fitness, as without those, extending life becomes torturous and pointless, causing people not only to not enjoy their lives, but also to become long suffering burdens on their families, just for the sake of a larger number of sun circuits.
  - ez77 15y ago
    It would make sense to first colonize outer space or, more controversially, sharply control births (or eliminate them altogether), as we would simply run out of space. You need prosperity and an abundance of resources for your cyclic program to work.
api 15y ago
We now know that human biochemistry is the result of an evolutionary process which when faced with a problem consistently comes up with the worst possible solution that is still workable. It's 3 billion years worth of crufty spaghetti code, literally. As someone educated in theoretical biology and learning theory, I object to this kind of characterization of the evolutionary process. There is no evidence for a superior magical learning algorithm that would have done better-- see the no free lunch theorem. This characterization also lacks respect for the difficulty of many-dimensional optimization problems on non-fixed fitness landscapes, which is what evolution has to deal with. (Mathematically, the problem tackled by natural evolution is effectively infinite-dimensional. By comparison, the problems tackled by human engineers are toy problems.) It would be more accurate to say that evolution, when faced with a problem, finds a working solution. There is no way to know how close or how far that working solution is from a theoretical optimum, since the theoretical optimum is non-computable. (If it were straightforwardly computable, evolution would find a gradient to ascend and discover it rapidly.) "Life doesn't work perfectly. It just works." That being said, it is likely that our mortality represents a hard compromise between the survival value of longevity, adaptations to prevent cancer (many of which have aging side effects, like telomeres), and the species-scale (or selfish-gene-scale) survival value of getting oldsters out of the way to make room for the next generation. The fact that humans can live substantially longer than is merely necessary to reproduce is due to the fact that we're a K-selected species rather than an R-selected species. (Cicadas, for example, are an R-selected species. Dolphins, Elephants, and Humans are K-selected.)
- valisystem 15y ago
  I have no authority on the subject, but, the fact that we cannot prove nor properly evaluate solutions that emerge from evolution does not change the fact that the first solution that fits is the one that will be kept. Intuitive reasoning that not work on such a subject, but still, I have hard time to accept that it is the best. The only proper qualifier, as you state, is that it is the existing one. The same way I am not comfortable with using dynamic verbs when describing evolution. Evolution does not find a solution. It's just that a solution that fits emerges. After producing many dysfunctional living individuals. It's still the only way life can evolve by itself, and I wouldn't dare to say if it is a laborious or great way to sustain ifself.
zargon 15y ago
It's important to make a distinction medically between pushing as many as people as possible towards the high-age end of that curve on one hand and scaling the entire X axis on the other. This is a great synopsis of the situation. There is little research going into actually extending the human lifespan. It's fascinating to hear people like Aubrey de Grey describe some of that research (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_de_Grey http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_de_Grey).
rweba 15y ago
Here is one problem with life extension that I haven't seen mentioned - can we just assume that people who grew up in vastly different time periods will just be be able to coexist comfortably? To give an obvious contemporary example - gay marriage is a lot more controversial among older American voters than younger voters. Now multiply that times a thousand - what if people who grew up in the time of Christ were still a significant part of the voting population? We can't just assume they'll all become hip techno-libertarian atheists/extropians just because they managed to live long enough. My guess is that they'd have a strong attachment to the values and way of life they grew up with - thus creating potentially bitter conflicts among the different cohorts which might make contemporary domestic politics seem downright friendly. So while its cool to imagine living indefinitely - it seems to be in many ways healthier for society to have a continuous "purge", to constantly start fresh with new minds that have less baggage from the past. Also on a personal note - if society in 2,000 years is radically transformed into something I find really bewildering and bizarre - do I really want to be around for that? Of course I would gamely try and adapt, but it might be better for everyone to just leave that future world for people who grew up with it and who find it natural. Still, I am not any kind of Luddite - if life extension and mind uploading etc. is perfected I won't oppose it - I'll just have a lot of misgivings as will a lot of other people. Joe Haldeman's "Forever War" has some good exploration of the nature of "Future Shock": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forever_War http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forever_War Actually, now that I think about it, if this whole scenario actually happens the best thing might be to maintain separate societies for people born in different time periods, which can communicate and interact but which operate relatively independently.(e.g. Being gay might be illegal in the 1000 CE society but being straight could be illegal in the 3000 CE area!) That might be the only way to keep some relative peace.

by Udo 15y ago

iwwr 15y ago

On the other hand, the subject of life extension meets with so much hostility it's actually easy to argue that we as a culture are not ready for this yet. Only from the Malthusians.

sixtofour 15y ago
What do we do with people who live to extreme age, but do not operate at the speed of the current economy? How do we keep them occupied? How do they make a living? How do we use what they can contribute? Are we as a culture, today or on the next two generations, ready to deal with those issues?
- iwwr 15y ago
  How do we There is no 'we', people act individually. If people will have enough savings, they will retire earlier, if they don't they keep working. The increase in life expectancy would be doubled with an increase in health and fitness at these older ages. So people can and would keep working. The alternative interpretation is more insidious: "we should not allow people to live longer because it will bankrupt the pension system". Well, if the pension system is one casualty of longer, healthier and more productive lives then so be it.
  - sixtofour 15y ago
    "There is no 'we', people act individually." There are many 'we's," people act together and individually. Some of the ways we act together are strictly voluntary, others are coerced (tax supported activity) and we either agree and go along or disagree and go along. Some people don't go along at all in rare cases.

w1ntermute 15y ago

I'd say there's little value in trying to fix what's broken to the core. Research should focus on ways to extract one's consciousness from the body and place it in an artificially designed shell (a Ghost in the Shell, one might say).

broot 15y ago
But W1ntermute, wont William Gibson be mad that you're cheating on Neuromancer with Ghost in the Shell?
wazoox 15y ago
I'd argue that the common view that our mind is somehow independent from our body is probably wrong, and a judeo-christian falsity. Our mind is a real-time, continuous creation of our brain AND our whole body. I don't think that a brain in a vat could be anything but either a vegetable or a psychopath; and that the "ghost in the shell" (or the mind dump neuromancer-style) is anything more than a pleasant, impossible fiction, similar with faster-than-light travel.
- w1ntermute 15y ago
  If you can create a medium compatible with the human brain, it may be possible to hold our consciousnesses in it.
- joshuacc 15y ago
  I realize these aren't direct responses, but here are a couple of interesting historical points. 1. Mind/body dualism also arose in pagan Greece (Plato being the clearest example). 2. When most people think of dualism today, they are thinking of Cartesian dualism where the mind and body have a very tenuous connection indeed. But that is a relatively recent idea. Within the Christian tradition, something like Hylemorphic dualism[1], which maintains a very tight connection between mind and body, long predated it. (Probably due in part to belief in the Resurrection of the Body.) [1] http://www.reading.ac.uk/AcaDepts/ld/Philos/dso/papers/Hylemorphic%20Dualism.pdf http://www.reading.ac.uk/AcaDepts/ld/Philos/dso/papers/Hylem...
- 15y ago

ez77 15y ago

if we ever want to move on from this weird intermediary half-state between nature and intellect I don't know if I follow correctly. Do you feel that solving the life extension puzzle is tantamount to intellectual nirvana? I'd say there is still plenty more to talk about (say [1] and [2], for example), and arguably deeper from a strictly intellectual viewpoint. In fact, I'd say that the fact that I happen to be mortal or not does not tackle any of classical intellectual conundrums. Then again, the subject of life extension meets with so much hostility it's actually easy to argue that we as a culture are not ready for this yet. I'm not sure about life extension, but effectively ending retirement would be met with hostility! But then again, we're getting both things (end of retirement/pensions and the resulting unrest) without indefinite life extension. [1] http://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl http://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl [2] http://www.claymath.org/millennium/ http://www.claymath.org/millennium/

JohnLBevan 15y ago
With regards to the retirement problem, that's only an issue because people are still thinking like mortals. Were we immortal I'd expect gap years to replace retirement. Many people would choose to live their lives in cycles, retraining every 50 years for a new job / change of scene, getting to a proficient level, then taking a break for a few years until ready (or out of funds) to retrain & start anew. Once they'd done a few cycles people would likely begin to specialise, picking up stuff they'd touched on in the past & taking it to the next level / mixing it with their other skills. The issues then arising are the capacity of the mind (mind rather than human brain since who knows what form it will have taken by this point). I've assumed that with immortality we maintain physical (if still relevant) and mental fitness, as without those, extending life becomes torturous and pointless, causing people not only to not enjoy their lives, but also to become long suffering burdens on their families, just for the sake of a larger number of sun circuits.
- ez77 15y ago
  It would make sense to first colonize outer space or, more controversially, sharply control births (or eliminate them altogether), as we would simply run out of space. You need prosperity and an abundance of resources for your cyclic program to work.

api 15y ago

We now know that human biochemistry is the result of an evolutionary process which when faced with a problem consistently comes up with the worst possible solution that is still workable. It's 3 billion years worth of crufty spaghetti code, literally. As someone educated in theoretical biology and learning theory, I object to this kind of characterization of the evolutionary process. There is no evidence for a superior magical learning algorithm that would have done better-- see the no free lunch theorem. This characterization also lacks respect for the difficulty of many-dimensional optimization problems on non-fixed fitness landscapes, which is what evolution has to deal with. (Mathematically, the problem tackled by natural evolution is effectively infinite-dimensional. By comparison, the problems tackled by human engineers are toy problems.) It would be more accurate to say that evolution, when faced with a problem, finds a working solution. There is no way to know how close or how far that working solution is from a theoretical optimum, since the theoretical optimum is non-computable. (If it were straightforwardly computable, evolution would find a gradient to ascend and discover it rapidly.) "Life doesn't work perfectly. It just works." That being said, it is likely that our mortality represents a hard compromise between the survival value of longevity, adaptations to prevent cancer (many of which have aging side effects, like telomeres), and the species-scale (or selfish-gene-scale) survival value of getting oldsters out of the way to make room for the next generation. The fact that humans can live substantially longer than is merely necessary to reproduce is due to the fact that we're a K-selected species rather than an R-selected species. (Cicadas, for example, are an R-selected species. Dolphins, Elephants, and Humans are K-selected.)

valisystem 15y ago
I have no authority on the subject, but, the fact that we cannot prove nor properly evaluate solutions that emerge from evolution does not change the fact that the first solution that fits is the one that will be kept. Intuitive reasoning that not work on such a subject, but still, I have hard time to accept that it is the best. The only proper qualifier, as you state, is that it is the existing one. The same way I am not comfortable with using dynamic verbs when describing evolution. Evolution does not find a solution. It's just that a solution that fits emerges. After producing many dysfunctional living individuals. It's still the only way life can evolve by itself, and I wouldn't dare to say if it is a laborious or great way to sustain ifself.

zargon 15y ago

It's important to make a distinction medically between pushing as many as people as possible towards the high-age end of that curve on one hand and scaling the entire X axis on the other. This is a great synopsis of the situation. There is little research going into actually extending the human lifespan. It's fascinating to hear people like Aubrey de Grey describe some of that research (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_de_Grey http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_de_Grey).

rweba 15y ago

Here is one problem with life extension that I haven't seen mentioned - can we just assume that people who grew up in vastly different time periods will just be be able to coexist comfortably? To give an obvious contemporary example - gay marriage is a lot more controversial among older American voters than younger voters. Now multiply that times a thousand - what if people who grew up in the time of Christ were still a significant part of the voting population? We can't just assume they'll all become hip techno-libertarian atheists/extropians just because they managed to live long enough. My guess is that they'd have a strong attachment to the values and way of life they grew up with - thus creating potentially bitter conflicts among the different cohorts which might make contemporary domestic politics seem downright friendly. So while its cool to imagine living indefinitely - it seems to be in many ways healthier for society to have a continuous "purge", to constantly start fresh with new minds that have less baggage from the past. Also on a personal note - if society in 2,000 years is radically transformed into something I find really bewildering and bizarre - do I really want to be around for that? Of course I would gamely try and adapt, but it might be better for everyone to just leave that future world for people who grew up with it and who find it natural. Still, I am not any kind of Luddite - if life extension and mind uploading etc. is perfected I won't oppose it - I'll just have a lot of misgivings as will a lot of other people. Joe Haldeman's "Forever War" has some good exploration of the nature of "Future Shock": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forever_War http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forever_War Actually, now that I think about it, if this whole scenario actually happens the best thing might be to maintain separate societies for people born in different time periods, which can communicate and interact but which operate relatively independently.(e.g. Being gay might be illegal in the 1000 CE society but being straight could be illegal in the 3000 CE area!) That might be the only way to keep some relative peace.