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For sure. It's as foolish to me as somebody thinking they can keep a classic car going forever if they just use a better motor oil. In the early days of the au

For sure. It's as foolish to me as somebody thinking they can keep a classic car going forever if they just use a better motor oil. In the early days of the automobile, Ford sent people around to junkyards to look at their cars. They were looking for two things. One was obvious; they were looking for things that consistently failed too soon, so they could make them better. The other was to look for things that had a lot of life left in them, so they could make them cheaper. The net result: a car that was great when new, did pretty well for a while, and then had thing after thing going wrong with it, such that it was just time to get a new one. Evolution is, like Ford, an unsentimental optimizer. I believe bodies are basically the same deal as cars. That's certainly how people talk about getting old; everything starts to wear out at around the same time. Doctors are happy to fight individual problems, but even in the best hospitals, doctors will get to the point where somebody has too many problems, is too medically fragile, for them to treat anything. And from the perspective of one's genes, that's fine. Like people buy new cars, genes build shiny new bodies so they can continue roving the world. With an infinite supply of new bodies available, why would they make any individual one such that it could last forever? Much better to build cheap and replace every so often. The frequency of "so often" changes for the circumstance, but the pattern doesn't.

gumby 3y ago
> Evolution is, like Ford, an unsentimental optimizer. I certainly won't argue with this position, but note that evolution is a peephole optimizer, rather than trying newton's method, much less trying to optimize with a goal in mind. It does seem most people draw the wrong conclusion from the ape-to-man drawing (e.g. https://www.kindpng.com/picc/m/408-4084640_evolution-ape-to-man-theory-of-evolution-illustrated.png https://www.kindpng.com/picc/m/408-4084640_evolution-ape-to-... ) It's a random walk: each set of die rolls is continually tested on local (i.e. contemporary) conditions. You may have superior lifespan but live where people commonly die in floods. Only broad signals (e.g. ambient temperatures ranging between -10 and 40 C) really determine widespread attributes. So what? Well 300 My of human evolution has included feedback loops uncommon and later unknown to other animals: speech, writing, and the social structures they afforded; hygene and other medical intervention; etc, and they do feed back into evolution even at the slow rate at which humans reproduce. Now we can (poorly) do genetic intervention, it's quite possible to subject humans to more rapid evolutionary pressure (most of it likely driven by fashion), with an attempt to move to goal-directed rather than peephole optimization.
- wpietri 3y ago
  I agree with what you said, but I don't see how it relates to the question of whether the sort of silver bullets the forever-young crowd want actually exist.
  - gumby 3y ago
    I was mainly expanding on your optimizer point. But the last point gets to the longevity issue: now part of the selective pressure can be genetic intervention and highly directed social pressures which could drive changes for longevity in ways that natural selection previously could not.
midoridensha 3y ago
There's nothing foolish about it at all, it's just not simple. You can keep a classic car going forever if you keep replacing parts when they wear out. Of course, you eventually end up with the Classic Car of Theseus, but so what? Humans are already like this: your cells have all died out and been replaced over the course of ~7 years. I don't see why the same won't be true of humans eventually: it'll require constant maintenance of course, and maybe artificial parts or implants, but there are other organisms out there that are biologically immortal, so it's certainly not impossible.
- wpietri 3y ago
  It's deeply disappointing to me when somebody here responds to one part of a sentence. I get that sometimes people get excited and don't read a whole comment. But I think making it all the way through a sentence is a reasonable minimum bar.
  - midoridensha 3y ago
    It's deeply disappointing to me when somebody here can't seem to understand the point of my post. I DID read your whole sentence. What exactly are you not understanding? I even acknowledged that keeping a classic car is not as simple as a different motor oil, and eventually ends up with a car that isn't even the original car. Did you somehow miss all that?
    - wpietri 3y ago
      I was agreeing with zug_zug's point: "The idea that the human body has the formula for immortality 99% right an it just 'forgot to make enough of protein X which has no downsides seems hopelessly naive [...]" That was specifically what I was calling foolish. That is what my metaphor was referring to. You leapt into say, "There's nothing foolish about it at all", suggesting that the ”anti-ageing by chemical cocktails” approach was in fact reasonable. You from there went on to make a different car analogy, one I also think hopelessly naive. But if even you don't support the magic chemicals option, then again, it looks like you didn't really read what you were replying to, just in a different way.
sheepscreek 3y ago
You can keep a car going forever. Just replace what is not working well. Will it still be classic? Probably not but it’ll work just fine. There is still the Ship of Theseus argument - if we replace everything in your body, is that still you? I’d argue yes - as long as the memory is intact and the brian is alive - producing and consuming signals throughout. I guess - a test could be, can you be “awake” through any procedure done to your body? (if we had advanced ways to block all associated pain with the surgery) Perhaps there’s no need for that as long as the brain can be kept alive in a state like being in a nap.
- wpietri 3y ago
  > You can keep a car going forever. Sure, but not by just replacing the motor oil. Which was my point. You also can't replace "everything in your body" without replacing the brain. Which, given that the prevalence of dementia increases every year somebody lives, and given the general well-known cognitive effects of ageing, is a key problem here. And that also ignores that we can't swap body parts like we can swap car parts, even if we had infinite spare parts.

gumby 3y ago

> Evolution is, like Ford, an unsentimental optimizer. I certainly won't argue with this position, but note that evolution is a peephole optimizer, rather than trying newton's method, much less trying to optimize with a goal in mind. It does seem most people draw the wrong conclusion from the ape-to-man drawing (e.g. https://www.kindpng.com/picc/m/408-4084640_evolution-ape-to-man-theory-of-evolution-illustrated.png https://www.kindpng.com/picc/m/408-4084640_evolution-ape-to-... ) It's a random walk: each set of die rolls is continually tested on local (i.e. contemporary) conditions. You may have superior lifespan but live where people commonly die in floods. Only broad signals (e.g. ambient temperatures ranging between -10 and 40 C) really determine widespread attributes. So what? Well 300 My of human evolution has included feedback loops uncommon and later unknown to other animals: speech, writing, and the social structures they afforded; hygene and other medical intervention; etc, and they do feed back into evolution even at the slow rate at which humans reproduce. Now we can (poorly) do genetic intervention, it's quite possible to subject humans to more rapid evolutionary pressure (most of it likely driven by fashion), with an attempt to move to goal-directed rather than peephole optimization.

wpietri 3y ago
I agree with what you said, but I don't see how it relates to the question of whether the sort of silver bullets the forever-young crowd want actually exist.
- gumby 3y ago
  I was mainly expanding on your optimizer point. But the last point gets to the longevity issue: now part of the selective pressure can be genetic intervention and highly directed social pressures which could drive changes for longevity in ways that natural selection previously could not.

midoridensha 3y ago

There's nothing foolish about it at all, it's just not simple. You can keep a classic car going forever if you keep replacing parts when they wear out. Of course, you eventually end up with the Classic Car of Theseus, but so what? Humans are already like this: your cells have all died out and been replaced over the course of ~7 years. I don't see why the same won't be true of humans eventually: it'll require constant maintenance of course, and maybe artificial parts or implants, but there are other organisms out there that are biologically immortal, so it's certainly not impossible.

wpietri 3y ago
It's deeply disappointing to me when somebody here responds to one part of a sentence. I get that sometimes people get excited and don't read a whole comment. But I think making it all the way through a sentence is a reasonable minimum bar.
- midoridensha 3y ago
  It's deeply disappointing to me when somebody here can't seem to understand the point of my post. I DID read your whole sentence. What exactly are you not understanding? I even acknowledged that keeping a classic car is not as simple as a different motor oil, and eventually ends up with a car that isn't even the original car. Did you somehow miss all that?
  - wpietri 3y ago
    I was agreeing with zug_zug's point: "The idea that the human body has the formula for immortality 99% right an it just 'forgot to make enough of protein X which has no downsides seems hopelessly naive [...]" That was specifically what I was calling foolish. That is what my metaphor was referring to. You leapt into say, "There's nothing foolish about it at all", suggesting that the ”anti-ageing by chemical cocktails” approach was in fact reasonable. You from there went on to make a different car analogy, one I also think hopelessly naive. But if even you don't support the magic chemicals option, then again, it looks like you didn't really read what you were replying to, just in a different way.

sheepscreek 3y ago

You can keep a car going forever. Just replace what is not working well. Will it still be classic? Probably not but it’ll work just fine. There is still the Ship of Theseus argument - if we replace everything in your body, is that still you? I’d argue yes - as long as the memory is intact and the brian is alive - producing and consuming signals throughout. I guess - a test could be, can you be “awake” through any procedure done to your body? (if we had advanced ways to block all associated pain with the surgery) Perhaps there’s no need for that as long as the brain can be kept alive in a state like being in a nap.

wpietri 3y ago
> You can keep a car going forever. Sure, but not by just replacing the motor oil. Which was my point. You also can't replace "everything in your body" without replacing the brain. Which, given that the prevalence of dementia increases every year somebody lives, and given the general well-known cognitive effects of ageing, is a key problem here. And that also ignores that we can't swap body parts like we can swap car parts, even if we had infinite spare parts.