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Peter Thiel once said something along the lines that nobody is against aging research, because in practice what you’re solving for are problems everybody wants

Peter Thiel once said something along the lines that nobody is against aging research, because in practice what you’re solving for are problems everybody wants cures for, like Alzheimer’s, cancer, Parkinson’s, etc. I often think about that quote because aging is such an intractably hard problem, we’ve sort of collectively rationalized it as something “good”. You see it in many religious traditions. In the zeitgeist. That somehow death gives life meaning. Makes it good. But I’ve never found anybody who thinks cancer is a good thing. Nobody sane at least. I’ve thought for a while now that every philosophy problem is in some sense, just a health problem waiting to be solved. Occasionally I think about the Bible too and the way Christ (regardless of your religious beliefs) upended this tradition of rationalizing death as good. There’s a line in the Bible that’s the shortest verse in the English version: “Jesus wept.” And he was weeping for Lazarus, a man who died (who he could bring back to life effortlessly); in some sense a true condemnation of death as evil. Something even a god would weep over. I think about the future often too; the way immortality will finally be achieved. There’s so many complications when it comes to aging, and so much we don’t know about the human body, I wonder whether humans will be involved at all; whether machines will silently develop cures while our bodies lie in a metal tomb, explaining to us what happened afterwards in terms we can understand. I think it’ll happen someday. But I don’t know if it’ll be a year or 100 years from now. I certainly hope it’s soon. Some days I feel like I’m at the edge of an eternal history.

jacquesm 5y ago
> But I don’t know if it’ll be a year or 100 years from now. You might want to add another zero there.
Terry_Roll 5y ago
It cant be solved yet as there isnt enough resources to go round for everyone. https://www.overshootday.org/how-many-earths-or-countries-do-we-need/ https://www.overshootday.org/how-many-earths-or-countries-do... https://www.overshootday.org/content/uploads/2022/01/How_many_Earths_2022_EN_sm.jpg https://www.overshootday.org/content/uploads/2022/01/How_man...
- ben_w 5y ago
  Resource use is a separate axis to longevity. The right industry (we already have the tech) and a hundred billion can live sustainably on what is currently desert. Remove all the tech and the sustainable population of the entire planet is mere tens of millions. World population is also a separate axis. If lifespan is unchanged, population goes up or down depending on rate of new children. Rich and resource-hungry westerners have the lowest reproductive rate. If we get a perfect fountain of youth, we can’t forecast how society will or won’t change. More kids, or fewer? Likewise resources per person, will we stay in the rat race forever, or shift to working as little as possible as soon as the mortgage on the third mansion has been paid off? Also, “no ageing” doesn’t mean “immortality”, because current rates imply there’s a 50% chance of dying from accidents or malice in roughly any thousand year period. Though again, no way to predict how that might change with eternal youth.
- moonchrome 5y ago
  This kind of nonsense reasoning had people predicting civilization end within 15 or 30 - back in the 70s... Resources aren't a fixed notion, crude oil was worthless and toxic before we learned how to refine it and suddenly it's a critical resource. Natural ecosystems are considered vital today, but if we were to come up with artificial biospheres we would be looking back at the days people got infected by malaria and tick born disease living in uncontrolled environments like we look at people who live(d) in cities without sewage systems. Anything can be a resource, and be worthless or harmful, depending on the context. Claiming that resource problems can't be solved is a logical fallacy - resources are anything you use to solve a problem.
  - galangalalgol 5y ago
    I agree to an extent, but the matter involved on this planet is finite, the added entropy it can handle is finite. Our power consumption is growing exponentially and that has to stop at some point or we will just cook. We will find new resources like clean fusion energy, but that won't let us sink more heat. We worried about food back in the 70s but then we got better at agriculture, except it isn't sustainable what we do to boost the yields, the soil is getting used up. We can do better, but there are simply limits, and with no deaths we will find them much sooner. We will have to expand off earth, which is another seemingly impossible problem, or stop our growth, which isn't technologically difficult, but apparently socially impossible.
black_13 5y ago
jdrc 5y ago
> intractably hard problem Is it intractably hard? We already know how to 'rejuvenate' cells for a decade. The field did not receive a lot of attention however, partly because of misguided ethics concerns. COVID changed that attitude
- andrepd 5y ago
  Source? I don't understand what you're referring to.
  - jdrc 5y ago
    https://www.varsity.co.uk/science/23088 https://www.varsity.co.uk/science/23088
    - notreallyserio 5y ago
      What are the misguided ethics concerns?
      - jdrc 5y ago
        Look at some of the comments in this post
      - krageon 5y ago
        "Life is supposed to be finite". I would term it as death cultism, but I'm sure other people have friendlier ways to explain the stance.
bsedlm 5y ago
you'd say I'm rationalizing it, but I do not believe that death is a problem to be solved As I take it, that line of thought (that death is just a problem to be solved and that immortality is something to strive for) leads to solving death just before going on to "solve" childhood. Why do we have to be born ignorant of the world and must "waste" some 20 years learning about it (possibly more) before we can go on to be socially productive persons? another 'challenge' for medical science to "fix"... no, no. I repeat myself, death is not a problem, immortality is nonesense. To percieve death as opposed to life is a consequence (IMO) of thinking with words and only with words; i.e. within language (and logic) these two seem opposite, but there're are ways to think beyond just the logical-linguistic.
- WhitneyLand 5y ago
  Ok, how about if all efforts are aimed only at eliminating sickness and suffering? If somehow that were possible for all ages would you be for that? Then, since death is not a problem we could just “schedule” it for some reasonable date in the future to retain all the philosophical benefits it brings? You first?
  - bsedlm 5y ago
    thing is, I've begun to consider old age as a graceful easing out of life, as if without old age ceasing to be alive can only be violent affair (violent like an explosion or a high-speed crash)
    - molpeio 5y ago
    - therealcamino 5y ago
      Old age can be many things, and is often far from graceful. I wouldn't romanticize it.
    - jamiek88 5y ago
      Old age is horrific torture and I hate it. How I used to be strong and fast and smart and now I’m a withered husk of a man. Death is to be conquered like all other obstacles fuck this surrender.
JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
A really great comment that brightened my day and made me think. Thank you.
hericium 5y ago
I like how aging is explained in "Lifespan: Why we age and why we don't have to"[1]: cells are analog holders of information and just like analog tapes, each copy holds data of slightly lesser quality. After a number of copies, cells become less performant in their job and eventually some lose enough information that new copies cannot function properly enough to survive and/or not mutate. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifespan:_Why_We_Age_%E2%80%93_and_Why_We_Don%27t_Have_To#Critical_reception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifespan:_Why_We_Age_%E2%80%93...
- anthony88 5y ago
  But if you look further at David Sinclair's videos on YouTube, the aging problem is not the lost of information but mostly the lost of capability to read/interpret the information. The cell then doesn't operate as it should. He's working now on ways to "polishing the CD" so information can be read as in young cells.
- andai 5y ago
  Then why aren't children affected, each generation becoming more damaged than the last? Are reproductive cells special in some regard? If so, can we make normal cells more like that? (I know about older parents having a higher risk of giving their kid Down's and autism but that only happens for a small percentage and the rest of the kids are fine.)
  - specialist 5y ago
    Perhaps the (biological) choices are growth and decline. No steady state (stable equilibrium) is feasible. Just a stupid guess; I have no basis for this notion.
  - hericium 5y ago
    Human race is not destroying its DNA at current pace for long. Deterioration may be more pronounced in a few generations. And as to why the child is not formed from bad copies of worn-off cells of a mature parent - it's been some time since I read the book but I think that there was some reset mentioned when a whole new person is formed inside another organism. Fetal stem cells are known to have superior properties.
thelittleone 5y ago
"I wonder whether humans will be involved at all; whether machines will silently develop cures while our bodies lie in a metal tomb, explaining to us what happened afterwards in terms we can understand." Could this already be?
FollowingTheDao 5y ago
Dualism will lead to only a very basic understanding of existence. Death, nor cancer, are good or bad. Jesus might have had the whole thing wrong after all. Of maybe humanity, as its so often does, misinterpreted His teaching. Before we knew about cancer, and yes there was a time we did not know what cancer was, was canned good or bad? Did we even see natural death as bad? So where did these constructs come from? And now I guess you are saying immortality is good? Good for who? Overpopulation is already an issue, imagine if no one died!! You cannot create a good thing without also creating a bad thing. That is just the way it is.
- CryptoPunk 5y ago
  Overpopulation can be solved while increasing the human population, by eliminating people's environmental footprint. This is a much better way of solving the issue of overpopulation than consciously avoiding solving the problem of aging. A larger population, that sees an acceleration in the rate of per capita human capital accumulation, as a consequence of aging being solved, could also be a huge boon for other lifeforms, as it could mean artificial habitats being created outside of Earth where these lifeforms could flourish. It is entirely possible for human civilization to one day create continent sized O'Neill cylinder covered with forests originating from Earth.
  - FollowingTheDao 5y ago
    > Overpopulation can be solved while increasing the human population, by eliminating people's environmental footprint. Ha! I have heard of people trying to control the world but I have never seen it accomplished. Yes, there are many impossible possibilities that can only be created with fascism.
  - tehjoker 5y ago
    Why not just conserve nature instead of putting it in a museum? "Solutions" like that make me feel doomed.
    - CryptoPunk 5y ago
resoluteteeth 5y ago
> Peter Thiel once said something along the lines that nobody is against aging research, because in practice what you’re solving for are problems everybody wants cures for, like Alzheimer’s, cancer, Parkinson’s, etc. > I often think about that quote because aging is such an intractably hard problem, we’ve sort of collectively rationalized it as something “good”. You see it in many religious traditions. In the zeitgeist. That somehow death gives life meaning. Makes it good. > But I’ve never found anybody who thinks cancer is a good thing. Nobody sane at least. This seems to be suggesting that people (have convinced themselves that they) dislike aging research because they have convinced themself that aging is good, which... I just don't think is true? I think most people would like to not get old, but they are just skeptical about this research. In other words, aging research doesn't have a bad reputation because people are morally opposed to aging research, it has a bad reputation because it's just pretty dismal as science. A lot of aging research makes assumptions (such as the "programmed aging" theory) that are widely believed to be false by mainstream scientists, simply because that's the only scenario in which it is actually feasible to "solve" aging at our current level of technology. As Peter Thiel said in that quote, most people want to solve diseases like Alzheimer's and cancer. The problem with a lot of aging research is that we haven't solved these diseases, and it seems like we simply can't solve them yet because we don't understand enough about how the human body works. We can't even prevent hair from turning gray or (in a satisfactory way) balding. The idea that we can seriously slow or stop aging overall at a point in time where we can't even solve these individual diseases frankly seems pretty unlikely.
- ericmcer 5y ago
  People don't want to get old, sick and die, but they also recognize that removing death across our entire species would have scary implications.
  - adamisom 5y ago
    Yes. I expect some variation of “society needs death” to be 100x more common than more careful considerations of whether aging research has questionable models
  - 5y ago
rozab 5y ago
Nick Bostrom, 2005, 'The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant', Journal of Medical Ethics, Vol. 31, No. 5 https://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html https://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html
- TheRealNGenius 5y ago
  That's the same philosopher who thinks we live in a simulation. They're about as credible as their profession is respected. I'm fairly certain I'd disagree with him in the piece of writing he next pens as well.
  - rozab 5y ago
    No, he believes that one of these three things is true: 1. "The fraction of human-level civilizations that reach a posthuman stage (that is, one capable of running high-fidelity ancestor simulations) is very close to zero", or 2. "The fraction of posthuman civilizations that are interested in running simulations of their evolutionary history, or variations thereof, is very close to zero", or 3. "The fraction of all people with our kind of experiences that are living in a simulation is very close to one." Do you disagree?
    - TheRealNGenius 5y ago
      Yes. He has no basis for that belief. The three points you've raised in clarification on his behalf are neither mutually exclusive nor exhaustive over the entirety of the probability space. He is pulling "very close to" out of thin air, in complete disregard for rigorous evidence borne of the scientific method.
    - TheRealNGenius 5y ago
      Furthermore, reality itself is the "simulation". It takes the entire universe at one time t1 as input, transforms it according to the functions known as the fundamental forces, to produce the entire universe at time t2 as output, where t1 and t2 are one discrete time step apart. Restricting the "simulation" on a subset of the input is bound to introduce errors.
chobeat 5y ago
That's a deep mischaracterization of positions against aging research. People are against because in the way it's conducted and given the existing social order, it will reinforce inequalities and make the world a worst place. If you are more privileged you will live longer and have more chances to concentrate money and power for yourself or your family and away from less privileged people. This is even more the case in a world on the verge of ecological and social collapse where the age expectancy is lowering.
- orangecat 5y ago
  Wealthier societies and individuals always get the first shot at new technologies, so this is a general argument against any improvement until we've established global communism. Cancer treatments and Covid vaccines have not made the world worse despite being unevenly distributed. It's a particularly bad argument here because mitigating the harmful effects of aging would result in massive reductions in medical expenses. Governments and insurance companies would be highly incentivized to get them to as many people as possible.
  - chobeat 5y ago
    No, it's not an argument against improvement, it's an argument against inequalities. Fighting inequalities is fundamental to unleash the potential of medical technologies. Potential that cannot be reached under the current economic model that is hindering research, progress and wellbeing. The argument about medical expenses doesn't make any sense: it's more profitable to have sick people living longer and increare their medical expenses. The failure of the American healthcare system is proof that a market economy is not fit for healthcare.
    - kiba 5y ago
      The argument about medical expenses doesn't make any sense: it's more profitable to have sick people living longer and increare their medical expenses. The failure of the American healthcare system is proof that a market economy is not fit for healthcare. Profitable for who, exactly? Companies, individuals, the state, or whole society? For that matter, which companies are we talking about?
allisdust 5y ago
Lets say as a thought exercise that: it is proved beyond doubt that there is nothing after death. And all life human beings included are just self perpetuating complex biological loops no different than a toy with electricity. Lets also assume immortality is found by some kind of fixing of this biological machine and so defeating death. Is such an existence worth living? You would be no different than a straw on wind with all its movements explained by physical laws.
- progman32 5y ago
  I already live my life under this understanding. Regardless, I wish to continue experiencing the world for as long as is possible. Could it be that an idea of self-worth tied to a metaphysical immortal soul stems from an attempt towards acceptance of death? What happens if that death is removed from the equation?
  - allisdust 5y ago
    I would say yes. All religions, metaphysics and paranormal explanations seem to have come from trying to explain death and an yearning for continuation of life. Wishing to continue to experience the world is good but lets say if every activity we do, every desire we have, every thought, inhibition, fear, perception can be debugged external and be shown to be deterministic. That would effectively make us code and probably able to run on machines/simulation. In which case, the whole thing at least for me would seem really to be pointless existence. I mean if all our thoughts, desires, perceptions are just code being run by some giant cpu, then well I'm not going to look forward for the execution of more such instructions (:
- gcanyon 5y ago
  You should read Exhalation by Ted Chiang mild spoiler, but it is almost exactly what you're talking about, and a beautiful piece of writing.
  - allisdust 5y ago
    Thanks. Adding it to my collection!
WhompingWindows 5y ago
There's a lot happening here, what a wide ranging post! Thanks for stimulating the mind. I'd separate aging research from attempting to solve Alzheimers, PD, cancer, and other maladies. Cancer is ever-present, sorry to say but most people who read this have some small amount of latent cancer growing slowly. Maybe we will harness the immune system and new powerful drugs and techniques to remove cancer more and more effectively, until it becomes like infectious disease: a threat to all, but usually treat-able. For aging research, however, we're in a different realm. Assuming someone didn't die from any common malady or old-age related ones, let's say they live to 105. What's likely to kill them then? Well, it could still be cancer, but it could also be solve-able issues like falling and breaking a hip (we could invent machines to prevent or lessen damage from falls). It could be cardiac events, strokes, things where the cardiovascular system has been through so many "duty cycles" that the parts reach their expiration date. And this expiration date is where I think we'll struggle most. We need to make our hardware last much, much longer if we're to achieve immortality as biological-only entities. The valves of our heart, the vessels of our brain and heart, the operation of the lungs, the sensory organs, the kidneys and bowels: these parts need a lot of extra "lubrication" and "TLC" over our lifetimes if we're to get past the "Age Limit" which is probably around 120 years old. I'd hesitate to put too much stock into aging research at present. It's in its infancy, and until it ages to maturity, it's going to be an over-hyped area for rich people to dabble in, but I doubt 99% of people living now will ever reach escape-velocity and reach immortality.
dinkleberg 5y ago
What I don't understand is how anyone can believe that there is any future where we can defeat death. If we could increase human longevity to the point of living for a thousand, a million, a billion years, death is still sitting there at the end of the road, waiting for you. Whether you live for a year or a million, our fates are sealed. There are different theories about the end of the universe such as a heat death or a big collapse. We'll never know with certainty what that end state will be, but that is not something we can escape. (Also, the time frame of these types of cosmic events is incomprehensible to the human mind) We can and should try to cure all diseases and ailments to ensure everyone has the chance to live as long and healthy as possible. But death is inevitable.
- D-Coder 5y ago
  No one is talking about immortality. The point is life elongation (in good health).
  - dinkleberg 5y ago
    Plenty of people seem to be talking about immortality and wanting to never die. On this thread and whenever a similar thread comes up. Slowing or stopping the aging process is the goal.
rsync 5y ago
"But I’ve never found anybody who thinks cancer is a good thing. Nobody sane at least." Interesting that you bring up cancer ... Cancer occurs when individual cells decide to act in their own self interest and no longer act for the collection of cells that is your body. They ignore cell signaling mechanisms and resist the culling actions of apoptosis, etc. I agree that cancer is not a good thing. I wonder if individual humans acting to preserve their own selves will be a cancer upon humanity.
- JPLeRouzic 5y ago
  > Cancer occurs when individual cells decide to act in their own self interest and no longer act for the collection of cells that is your body. They ignore cell signaling mechanisms Please could you point to a good reference as tumor microenvironment seems to play an important role? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tumor_microenvironment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tumor_microenvironment Thanks!
joaogui1 5y ago
There is much more rationalising about death being good in Christianity (with the notion of a heaven for the believers) than in Judaism (no set beliefs on the after life) or even many pagan religions of that time (Greek life after death is often depressing for non-heroes)

jacquesm 5y ago

> But I don’t know if it’ll be a year or 100 years from now. You might want to add another zero there.

Terry_Roll 5y ago

It cant be solved yet as there isnt enough resources to go round for everyone. https://www.overshootday.org/how-many-earths-or-countries-do-we-need/ https://www.overshootday.org/how-many-earths-or-countries-do... https://www.overshootday.org/content/uploads/2022/01/How_many_Earths_2022_EN_sm.jpg https://www.overshootday.org/content/uploads/2022/01/How_man...

ben_w 5y ago
Resource use is a separate axis to longevity. The right industry (we already have the tech) and a hundred billion can live sustainably on what is currently desert. Remove all the tech and the sustainable population of the entire planet is mere tens of millions. World population is also a separate axis. If lifespan is unchanged, population goes up or down depending on rate of new children. Rich and resource-hungry westerners have the lowest reproductive rate. If we get a perfect fountain of youth, we can’t forecast how society will or won’t change. More kids, or fewer? Likewise resources per person, will we stay in the rat race forever, or shift to working as little as possible as soon as the mortgage on the third mansion has been paid off? Also, “no ageing” doesn’t mean “immortality”, because current rates imply there’s a 50% chance of dying from accidents or malice in roughly any thousand year period. Though again, no way to predict how that might change with eternal youth.
moonchrome 5y ago
This kind of nonsense reasoning had people predicting civilization end within 15 or 30 - back in the 70s... Resources aren't a fixed notion, crude oil was worthless and toxic before we learned how to refine it and suddenly it's a critical resource. Natural ecosystems are considered vital today, but if we were to come up with artificial biospheres we would be looking back at the days people got infected by malaria and tick born disease living in uncontrolled environments like we look at people who live(d) in cities without sewage systems. Anything can be a resource, and be worthless or harmful, depending on the context. Claiming that resource problems can't be solved is a logical fallacy - resources are anything you use to solve a problem.
- galangalalgol 5y ago
  I agree to an extent, but the matter involved on this planet is finite, the added entropy it can handle is finite. Our power consumption is growing exponentially and that has to stop at some point or we will just cook. We will find new resources like clean fusion energy, but that won't let us sink more heat. We worried about food back in the 70s but then we got better at agriculture, except it isn't sustainable what we do to boost the yields, the soil is getting used up. We can do better, but there are simply limits, and with no deaths we will find them much sooner. We will have to expand off earth, which is another seemingly impossible problem, or stop our growth, which isn't technologically difficult, but apparently socially impossible.

black_13 5y ago

jdrc 5y ago

> intractably hard problem Is it intractably hard? We already know how to 'rejuvenate' cells for a decade. The field did not receive a lot of attention however, partly because of misguided ethics concerns. COVID changed that attitude

andrepd 5y ago
Source? I don't understand what you're referring to.
- jdrc 5y ago
  https://www.varsity.co.uk/science/23088 https://www.varsity.co.uk/science/23088
  - notreallyserio 5y ago
    What are the misguided ethics concerns?
    - jdrc 5y ago
      Look at some of the comments in this post
    - krageon 5y ago
      "Life is supposed to be finite". I would term it as death cultism, but I'm sure other people have friendlier ways to explain the stance.

bsedlm 5y ago

you'd say I'm rationalizing it, but I do not believe that death is a problem to be solved As I take it, that line of thought (that death is just a problem to be solved and that immortality is something to strive for) leads to solving death just before going on to "solve" childhood. Why do we have to be born ignorant of the world and must "waste" some 20 years learning about it (possibly more) before we can go on to be socially productive persons? another 'challenge' for medical science to "fix"... no, no. I repeat myself, death is not a problem, immortality is nonesense. To percieve death as opposed to life is a consequence (IMO) of thinking with words and only with words; i.e. within language (and logic) these two seem opposite, but there're are ways to think beyond just the logical-linguistic.

WhitneyLand 5y ago
Ok, how about if all efforts are aimed only at eliminating sickness and suffering? If somehow that were possible for all ages would you be for that? Then, since death is not a problem we could just “schedule” it for some reasonable date in the future to retain all the philosophical benefits it brings? You first?
- bsedlm 5y ago
  thing is, I've begun to consider old age as a graceful easing out of life, as if without old age ceasing to be alive can only be violent affair (violent like an explosion or a high-speed crash)
  - molpeio 5y ago
  - therealcamino 5y ago
    Old age can be many things, and is often far from graceful. I wouldn't romanticize it.
  - jamiek88 5y ago
    Old age is horrific torture and I hate it. How I used to be strong and fast and smart and now I’m a withered husk of a man. Death is to be conquered like all other obstacles fuck this surrender.

JohnJamesRambo 5y ago

A really great comment that brightened my day and made me think. Thank you.

hericium 5y ago

I like how aging is explained in "Lifespan: Why we age and why we don't have to"[1]: cells are analog holders of information and just like analog tapes, each copy holds data of slightly lesser quality. After a number of copies, cells become less performant in their job and eventually some lose enough information that new copies cannot function properly enough to survive and/or not mutate. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifespan:_Why_We_Age_%E2%80%93_and_Why_We_Don%27t_Have_To#Critical_reception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifespan:_Why_We_Age_%E2%80%93...

anthony88 5y ago
But if you look further at David Sinclair's videos on YouTube, the aging problem is not the lost of information but mostly the lost of capability to read/interpret the information. The cell then doesn't operate as it should. He's working now on ways to "polishing the CD" so information can be read as in young cells.
andai 5y ago
Then why aren't children affected, each generation becoming more damaged than the last? Are reproductive cells special in some regard? If so, can we make normal cells more like that? (I know about older parents having a higher risk of giving their kid Down's and autism but that only happens for a small percentage and the rest of the kids are fine.)
- specialist 5y ago
  Perhaps the (biological) choices are growth and decline. No steady state (stable equilibrium) is feasible. Just a stupid guess; I have no basis for this notion.
- hericium 5y ago
  Human race is not destroying its DNA at current pace for long. Deterioration may be more pronounced in a few generations. And as to why the child is not formed from bad copies of worn-off cells of a mature parent - it's been some time since I read the book but I think that there was some reset mentioned when a whole new person is formed inside another organism. Fetal stem cells are known to have superior properties.

thelittleone 5y ago

"I wonder whether humans will be involved at all; whether machines will silently develop cures while our bodies lie in a metal tomb, explaining to us what happened afterwards in terms we can understand." Could this already be?

FollowingTheDao 5y ago

Dualism will lead to only a very basic understanding of existence. Death, nor cancer, are good or bad. Jesus might have had the whole thing wrong after all. Of maybe humanity, as its so often does, misinterpreted His teaching. Before we knew about cancer, and yes there was a time we did not know what cancer was, was canned good or bad? Did we even see natural death as bad? So where did these constructs come from? And now I guess you are saying immortality is good? Good for who? Overpopulation is already an issue, imagine if no one died!! You cannot create a good thing without also creating a bad thing. That is just the way it is.

CryptoPunk 5y ago
Overpopulation can be solved while increasing the human population, by eliminating people's environmental footprint. This is a much better way of solving the issue of overpopulation than consciously avoiding solving the problem of aging. A larger population, that sees an acceleration in the rate of per capita human capital accumulation, as a consequence of aging being solved, could also be a huge boon for other lifeforms, as it could mean artificial habitats being created outside of Earth where these lifeforms could flourish. It is entirely possible for human civilization to one day create continent sized O'Neill cylinder covered with forests originating from Earth.
- FollowingTheDao 5y ago
  > Overpopulation can be solved while increasing the human population, by eliminating people's environmental footprint. Ha! I have heard of people trying to control the world but I have never seen it accomplished. Yes, there are many impossible possibilities that can only be created with fascism.
- tehjoker 5y ago
  Why not just conserve nature instead of putting it in a museum? "Solutions" like that make me feel doomed.
  - CryptoPunk 5y ago

resoluteteeth 5y ago

> Peter Thiel once said something along the lines that nobody is against aging research, because in practice what you’re solving for are problems everybody wants cures for, like Alzheimer’s, cancer, Parkinson’s, etc. > I often think about that quote because aging is such an intractably hard problem, we’ve sort of collectively rationalized it as something “good”. You see it in many religious traditions. In the zeitgeist. That somehow death gives life meaning. Makes it good. > But I’ve never found anybody who thinks cancer is a good thing. Nobody sane at least. This seems to be suggesting that people (have convinced themselves that they) dislike aging research because they have convinced themself that aging is good, which... I just don't think is true? I think most people would like to not get old, but they are just skeptical about this research. In other words, aging research doesn't have a bad reputation because people are morally opposed to aging research, it has a bad reputation because it's just pretty dismal as science. A lot of aging research makes assumptions (such as the "programmed aging" theory) that are widely believed to be false by mainstream scientists, simply because that's the only scenario in which it is actually feasible to "solve" aging at our current level of technology. As Peter Thiel said in that quote, most people want to solve diseases like Alzheimer's and cancer. The problem with a lot of aging research is that we haven't solved these diseases, and it seems like we simply can't solve them yet because we don't understand enough about how the human body works. We can't even prevent hair from turning gray or (in a satisfactory way) balding. The idea that we can seriously slow or stop aging overall at a point in time where we can't even solve these individual diseases frankly seems pretty unlikely.

ericmcer 5y ago
People don't want to get old, sick and die, but they also recognize that removing death across our entire species would have scary implications.
- adamisom 5y ago
  Yes. I expect some variation of “society needs death” to be 100x more common than more careful considerations of whether aging research has questionable models
- 5y ago

rozab 5y ago

Nick Bostrom, 2005, 'The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant', Journal of Medical Ethics, Vol. 31, No. 5 https://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html https://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html

TheRealNGenius 5y ago
That's the same philosopher who thinks we live in a simulation. They're about as credible as their profession is respected. I'm fairly certain I'd disagree with him in the piece of writing he next pens as well.
- rozab 5y ago
  No, he believes that one of these three things is true: 1. "The fraction of human-level civilizations that reach a posthuman stage (that is, one capable of running high-fidelity ancestor simulations) is very close to zero", or 2. "The fraction of posthuman civilizations that are interested in running simulations of their evolutionary history, or variations thereof, is very close to zero", or 3. "The fraction of all people with our kind of experiences that are living in a simulation is very close to one." Do you disagree?
  - TheRealNGenius 5y ago
    Yes. He has no basis for that belief. The three points you've raised in clarification on his behalf are neither mutually exclusive nor exhaustive over the entirety of the probability space. He is pulling "very close to" out of thin air, in complete disregard for rigorous evidence borne of the scientific method.
  - TheRealNGenius 5y ago
    Furthermore, reality itself is the "simulation". It takes the entire universe at one time t1 as input, transforms it according to the functions known as the fundamental forces, to produce the entire universe at time t2 as output, where t1 and t2 are one discrete time step apart. Restricting the "simulation" on a subset of the input is bound to introduce errors.

chobeat 5y ago

That's a deep mischaracterization of positions against aging research. People are against because in the way it's conducted and given the existing social order, it will reinforce inequalities and make the world a worst place. If you are more privileged you will live longer and have more chances to concentrate money and power for yourself or your family and away from less privileged people. This is even more the case in a world on the verge of ecological and social collapse where the age expectancy is lowering.

orangecat 5y ago
Wealthier societies and individuals always get the first shot at new technologies, so this is a general argument against any improvement until we've established global communism. Cancer treatments and Covid vaccines have not made the world worse despite being unevenly distributed. It's a particularly bad argument here because mitigating the harmful effects of aging would result in massive reductions in medical expenses. Governments and insurance companies would be highly incentivized to get them to as many people as possible.
- chobeat 5y ago
  No, it's not an argument against improvement, it's an argument against inequalities. Fighting inequalities is fundamental to unleash the potential of medical technologies. Potential that cannot be reached under the current economic model that is hindering research, progress and wellbeing. The argument about medical expenses doesn't make any sense: it's more profitable to have sick people living longer and increare their medical expenses. The failure of the American healthcare system is proof that a market economy is not fit for healthcare.
  - kiba 5y ago
    The argument about medical expenses doesn't make any sense: it's more profitable to have sick people living longer and increare their medical expenses. The failure of the American healthcare system is proof that a market economy is not fit for healthcare. Profitable for who, exactly? Companies, individuals, the state, or whole society? For that matter, which companies are we talking about?

allisdust 5y ago

Lets say as a thought exercise that: it is proved beyond doubt that there is nothing after death. And all life human beings included are just self perpetuating complex biological loops no different than a toy with electricity. Lets also assume immortality is found by some kind of fixing of this biological machine and so defeating death. Is such an existence worth living? You would be no different than a straw on wind with all its movements explained by physical laws.

progman32 5y ago
I already live my life under this understanding. Regardless, I wish to continue experiencing the world for as long as is possible. Could it be that an idea of self-worth tied to a metaphysical immortal soul stems from an attempt towards acceptance of death? What happens if that death is removed from the equation?
- allisdust 5y ago
  I would say yes. All religions, metaphysics and paranormal explanations seem to have come from trying to explain death and an yearning for continuation of life. Wishing to continue to experience the world is good but lets say if every activity we do, every desire we have, every thought, inhibition, fear, perception can be debugged external and be shown to be deterministic. That would effectively make us code and probably able to run on machines/simulation. In which case, the whole thing at least for me would seem really to be pointless existence. I mean if all our thoughts, desires, perceptions are just code being run by some giant cpu, then well I'm not going to look forward for the execution of more such instructions (:
gcanyon 5y ago
You should read Exhalation by Ted Chiang mild spoiler, but it is almost exactly what you're talking about, and a beautiful piece of writing.
- allisdust 5y ago
  Thanks. Adding it to my collection!

WhompingWindows 5y ago

There's a lot happening here, what a wide ranging post! Thanks for stimulating the mind. I'd separate aging research from attempting to solve Alzheimers, PD, cancer, and other maladies. Cancer is ever-present, sorry to say but most people who read this have some small amount of latent cancer growing slowly. Maybe we will harness the immune system and new powerful drugs and techniques to remove cancer more and more effectively, until it becomes like infectious disease: a threat to all, but usually treat-able. For aging research, however, we're in a different realm. Assuming someone didn't die from any common malady or old-age related ones, let's say they live to 105. What's likely to kill them then? Well, it could still be cancer, but it could also be solve-able issues like falling and breaking a hip (we could invent machines to prevent or lessen damage from falls). It could be cardiac events, strokes, things where the cardiovascular system has been through so many "duty cycles" that the parts reach their expiration date. And this expiration date is where I think we'll struggle most. We need to make our hardware last much, much longer if we're to achieve immortality as biological-only entities. The valves of our heart, the vessels of our brain and heart, the operation of the lungs, the sensory organs, the kidneys and bowels: these parts need a lot of extra "lubrication" and "TLC" over our lifetimes if we're to get past the "Age Limit" which is probably around 120 years old. I'd hesitate to put too much stock into aging research at present. It's in its infancy, and until it ages to maturity, it's going to be an over-hyped area for rich people to dabble in, but I doubt 99% of people living now will ever reach escape-velocity and reach immortality.

dinkleberg 5y ago

What I don't understand is how anyone can believe that there is any future where we can defeat death. If we could increase human longevity to the point of living for a thousand, a million, a billion years, death is still sitting there at the end of the road, waiting for you. Whether you live for a year or a million, our fates are sealed. There are different theories about the end of the universe such as a heat death or a big collapse. We'll never know with certainty what that end state will be, but that is not something we can escape. (Also, the time frame of these types of cosmic events is incomprehensible to the human mind) We can and should try to cure all diseases and ailments to ensure everyone has the chance to live as long and healthy as possible. But death is inevitable.

D-Coder 5y ago
No one is talking about immortality. The point is life elongation (in good health).
- dinkleberg 5y ago
  Plenty of people seem to be talking about immortality and wanting to never die. On this thread and whenever a similar thread comes up. Slowing or stopping the aging process is the goal.

rsync 5y ago

"But I’ve never found anybody who thinks cancer is a good thing. Nobody sane at least." Interesting that you bring up cancer ... Cancer occurs when individual cells decide to act in their own self interest and no longer act for the collection of cells that is your body. They ignore cell signaling mechanisms and resist the culling actions of apoptosis, etc. I agree that cancer is not a good thing. I wonder if individual humans acting to preserve their own selves will be a cancer upon humanity.

JPLeRouzic 5y ago
> Cancer occurs when individual cells decide to act in their own self interest and no longer act for the collection of cells that is your body. They ignore cell signaling mechanisms Please could you point to a good reference as tumor microenvironment seems to play an important role? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tumor_microenvironment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tumor_microenvironment Thanks!

joaogui1 5y ago

There is much more rationalising about death being good in Christianity (with the notion of a heaven for the believers) than in Judaism (no set beliefs on the after life) or even many pagan religions of that time (Greek life after death is often depressing for non-heroes)