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Comment by philipkglass | Hacker News Reader

Some of these "benefits" of death are just ridiculous. If you don't like a long life you can always end it. It's not like anyone is going to invent mythology-grade immortality and then chain you to a rock to be tormented by an eagle tearing at your liver.

I don't expect that anti-aging research is going to significantly extend my own lifespan or healthspan. Biology is really complicated. But that doesn't justify sugar-coating age related morbidity and mortality. They are really bad. The only thing worse than death is great pain. Old age deals out both: pain and death. It torments and finally kills you. People trying to defeat death may be delusional about their prospects for success, but they are at least trying to do the best thing humans have tried to do in generations.

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There's a difference between you wanting to die personally and death being good for society as a whole. Death keeps old things from taking up the resources that new things need to live. When our cells don't die, that's called cancer. It's great for the cells involved -- until it kills the person they're a part of.

> When our cells don't die, that's called cancer.

No. No, when cells multiply uncontrollably, that's called cancer.

So, right now, in fact it's unchecked population growth that's much more akin to a cancer, than any hypothetical immortality.

As for unnecessary (or less important) things taking up resources; how many people do you know who have had their appendix and gallbladder taken out?

the appendix and gallbladder are non-vital organs but they still perform useful functions.

unchecked population growth is indeed a problem, what impact do you suppose it will have on the population when people keep living longer and longer, and a few of them are essentially undying?

in your comment, are you meaning to speak metaphorically or am I reading into it too much. the symbolic reading of your words suggests that certain people might have the status of a gallbladder. did you mean to imply that?

The organs remark was bonus snark, but yes: we will have to address unchecked population growth sooner or later, because lifespans will – should – continue to rise as well anyway, thanks to advances in medicine and hygiene, unless something goes terribly wrong in some area.

Luckily this problem has been solved in high brow science fiction: http://futurama.wikia.com/wiki/Near_Death_Star

In all seriousness I find that to be an unconvincing argument; isn't it better to have that choice rather than let it be made for us? Where would we be if Newton and Einstein were still alive? The only argument for aging I've ever liked is that culture just can't really advance without it- old people (on the whole! many older people are fantastic and very progressive) eventually seem to stop catching up to the rest of society. But still, it seems like insufficient reason to let brilliant people die.

As an example, wasn't Einstein a strong opponent to some of the weirder conclusions that would later be drawn by Quantum Physics? Even the brilliant people get stuck at some point (as you alluded to), and fresh perspectives are needed to make progress.

In addition, you don't get to pick who lives on and who doesn't. Think of all the people you would find to be very culturally backwards that would still be alive and hold a lot of power.

Getting to choose to live longer = good. I'm not trying to argue against that. I'm just trying to point out the benefits that natural death provides to society, because these benefits are something I personally plan to think carefully about as the choice to live longer and longer becomes an option.

> Think of all the people you would find to be very culturally backwards

Is the assumption that each generation is better than the last?

Hopefully if the previous generation paid it forward.

And as long we are talking about scientists, Feynman said this in his speech:

"The ideas I wish to describe are old ideas. There is practically nothing that I am going to say tonight that could not easily have been said by philosophers of the seventeenth century. Why repeat all this? Because there are new generations born every day. Because there are great ideas developed in the history of man, and these ideas do not last unless they are passed purposely and clearly from generation to generation."

> Where would we be if Newton and Einstein were still alive?

Or you could also point on the other end of the spectrum ? What if Attila or Stalin were still alive? Would that be a good thing for humanity ?

Putting it negatively, the myth of eternal return states that a life which disappears once and for all, which does not return, is like a shadow, without weight, dead in advance, and whether it was horrible, beautiful, or sublime, its horror, sublimity, and beauty mean nothing.

[....]

If the French Revolution were to recur eternally, French historians would be less proud of Robespierre. But because they deal with something that will not return, the bloody years of the Revolution have turned into mere words, theories, and discussions, have become lighter than feathers, frightening no one. There is an infinity of difference between a Robespierre who occurs only once in history and a Robespierre who eternally returns, chopping off French heads.

[....]

For how can we condemn something that is ephemeral, in transit? In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.

- Kundera, from the first chapter of The Unbearable Lightness of Being; mistakes mine, typed hastily from my dead-tree copy for want of a quickly DuckDuckGoable digital one.

(yes, it goes on to wrestle with many of the objections/concerns you should already have about the small snippet above)

You inspired me to pick up that book again for this week. Thanks!

"Where would we be if Newton and Einstein were still alive?"

Einstein and Newton contributed a lot but they were part of a historical trend, not genetic hail marys who ushered mankind from one epoch to the next.

"...it seems like insufficient reason to let brilliant people die."

This is - look, you can't argue that someone has the right to live based on their life achievements. This is like the ultimate perversion of the 'american drem' delusion - just achieve great thing and you can live forever.

Unfortunately Johnny never did crack the Navier-Stokes equation so instead of given the Immortality Treatment he became fertilizer in the end

Newton and Einstein were absolutely brilliant beyond their time, and would definitely have continued to make great contributions. Overall people have gotten smarter over the generations, but the geniuses of the past would still be geniuses today. In mathematics alone there are dozens of examples of people who were proving things that we still haven't replicated. Just by looking through their notes we have found solutions to problems we hadn't been able to solve yet.

>This is - look, you can't argue that someone has the right to live based on their life achievements. This is like the ultimate perversion of the 'american drem' delusion - just achieve great thing and you can live forever.

I'm very anti-libertarian and totally against the idea that the ends justify the means wrt achievement. However geniuses do exist, and their productivity is very often cut short by death or age. As a race we would have been able to gain immensely if a few hundred people had lived a decade or two longer.

I most certainly don't deny that geniouses are critical for moving forward. What I was after, is that there never is just one - the one we remember is the one who publishes first - and it's sometimes hard to tell who they are from an institutional perspective.

> old people ... eventually seem to stop catching up to the rest of society

If (happy to be proven wrong here) we can assume that this trend has to do with an age-related decrease in brain functionality, maybe this could be mitigated anyway.

> Where would we be if Newton and Einstein were still alive?

If Newton were alive, would Einstein's theories ever have seen the light of day?

Where would we be if Vlad the Impaler or Nero or Genghis Khan were still alive?

It's not like we'll run out of brilliant people. There are always new ones being born. I think it's much better to have the opportunity for new brilliant people to rise with a different point of view from having been raised in a different environment in a different time.

this is a deeply pernicious argument, in my opinion. who gets to be the judge of when a person is "brilliant" enough to grant immortality to? what if a "brilliant" person decides they don't want to perform their brilliance for you anymore? Would you permit immortal Newton to take up painting or golfing at the expense of time he could be spending on his brilliant mathematics?

If you are under 40 I don't think the prospect of a fair amount of additional healthy years as a result of this research is a particularly delusional one. Actual immortality seems unlikely to me, however.

I feel anyone born post 1980 has a shot at slowed-aging, maybe even reversed for post 2000's. No data, just a hunch on the pace I've seen from the biotech sector.

As someone disconnected from that industry, I don't know of the major breakthroughs since 2000. Do you have have a "biotech advancements in the last 15 year executive summary"?

Well for one thing, around 2000 we completed our first human genome sequencing effort of Craig Venter's genome at a cost of $3 billion over 10 years. Today we can sequence an entire human genome for about $1000 in a few days, and we've sequenced thousands of genomes including all kinds of cells and organisms that affect human health. We're generating craploads of very valuable data just waiting to be explored.

We can now take data from a computer and synthesise DNA for a cell from basically nothing, load that DNA into a 'blank' cell and start it up, making it grow and replicate - almost like making life!

We can use CRISPR/Cas9 to accurately cut and paste active DNA anywhere we want with high precision.

All these tools are ready, we just have to work out how to use them

Data doesn't equal breakthrough. For example : better climate models doesn't help us to fight climate change; centuries of football scores doesn't help us to win bets :-)

Really?

I meant data doesn't always equal huge breakthrough. For example, theorems, neural networks, quantum physics, etc. existed long before data were available. Data helps, supercharges them, but that doesn't count as "breakthrough" for me (so, I have a very ambitious notion of breakthrough)

If we don't learn a crap load from DNA in the next 20 years, I'll be very surprised.

DNA technology is hardly used medically, even though it is becoming cheap and relatively old.

CRISPR/Cas9 is more precise than technologies before, but still not perfect: http://www.nature.com/news/enzyme-tweak-boosts-precision-of-...

... yet ;)

These things have a way of being impossible until they are not. It used to be impossible to communicate with someone a great distance away, then we invented the telegraph. It used to be impossible to see someone at a great distance, then our seemingly-unrelated breakthroughs in network technology brought us easy consumer video chat.

Wikipedia has a list:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_medicine_and_medic...

Dammit, I'm 41. Oh well, death it is.

He actually does have a point. It's pretty difficult to actually reverse aging once it has started, as everything kind of feeds back into itself. There are a few exceptions- Alzheimer's may be reversible, but things like heart damage, immune weakness or DNA degradation may not be. The way it looks right now it may be easier to stop aging from starting than to stop the damage from occuring. Once it starts happening, even if aging stops the damage will still accrue.

From a computational POV DNA damage should be trivial to repair. You have so many redundant copies in your body. Of course building a fault-free copy, creating stemcells from that and coaxing those into fixing any defects without causing cancer is still scifi, but not the physics-violating kind.

" It's pretty difficult to actually reverse aging once it has started"

As far as I know, there are two paradigms about ageing: There is a biological clock inside us or it's only entropy acting (damage accumulation).

Both would start in the moment of conception. So, what it means "once it has started"?

> things like heart damage

Could be reversed with a heart transplant?

Today is my 40th birthday. sad face.emoji

Happy Birthday :)

> I don't think the prospect of a fair amount of additional healthy years

Based on what data ? Read newspapers back in the 80s, we were going to solve every disease by the year 2010 or so. But for the most part medicine has not evolved by huge leaps. Sure, we have made some important drug discoveries, but by far and large we are notoriously bad at predicting what we can achieve in a set span of time.

> Old age deals out both: pain and death

Not all the time. If you die in your sleep, it's either painless or you have no time to realize what's occurring. Not everyone dies from a 2 years fight with cancer.

philipkglass probaby refers to pain inflicted as a side-effect of aging (joint pains etc.) not the immediate precursors to death.

Aging is not really the cause of joint pains - the simple act of living is what causes a lot of these pains. The repeated use and abuse of joints which have non-regenerating components is what causes joint pain. There are also several diseases which accumulate damage over time.

These would need to be addressed independently of prolonging life. That there is no real mention of them when talking about prolonging life makes me shake my head - living at 200 with destroyed joints and a mind which is failing due to Dementia or alzheimers doesn't sound like much fun to me.

> That there is no real mention of them when talking about prolonging life makes me shake my head - living at 200 with destroyed joints and a mind which is failing due to Dementia or alzheimers doesn't sound like much fun to me.

Indeed, cartilages and joints get damaged because of prolonged usage, and not just aging. If we were to live much longer, we would have to also tackle how to make such factors less a problem to maintain an active lifestyle beyond age 100.

>It's not like anyone is going to invent mythology-grade immortality and then chain you to a rock to be tormented by an eagle tearing at your liver.

You upload a brain into a computer and you might have exactly this.

I never got the brain upload style of immortality. I desire myself to live eternally, not a simulacrum or copy. What you're describing is a fancy way of creating, and then torturing, an AI.

Obligatory https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFe9wiDfb0E

The Ship of Theseus would like to be so certain.

At what point are you not you?

Bionic organs? limbs? New bones, artificial blood? Neuro-prosthetic interfaces or implants? "Biologically integrated coprocessors"?

I'm Genuinely curious where you choose to draw the line since it's not often discussed from a personal standpoint it's usually just the philosophical arguments that get discussed in what I've read.

I am my experience of the world, so to speak.

Creating an exact copy of me wouldn't make me experience the world from two different perspectives at the same time. It would just create a new human being that, allegedly, would be a "copy" of me (or so people would say).

To me, it would just be another person walking around. There wouldn't be any essential difference between this person and an adult child of mine.

But today's you has diverged from yesterday's you just as much as tomorrow's copy would have diverged from today's original. At the moment of copying - assuming a sufficiently high fidelity - they would be practically identical. The differentiation would only happen over time.

So if you kill the original - maybe because the procedure is destructive or because it's a consciousness-saving emergency measure - the "copy" would have a pretty good claim to be a continuation of you.

But why is "your experience of the world" tied to your current physical body? I think that the brain is just a machine that creates the illusion of a consciousness. If you turn the machine off, copy the all the data into new hardware, and turn it back on, it will start back where it left off, and the "you" inside won't know the difference. You might not even notice it happened

Agreed. Responding to the replies, regarding the fidelity of a copy: Yes, the copy would have a great claim to being you. Assuming the physiology of the copy is also (nearly) identical (behavior and personality is not a pure function of the brain), the world at large would also identify it as you.

But I'm not interested in legacy style immortality. I don't care at all if a separate version of me continues to exist – I want to be continuous with the physical substrate I now occupy. In other words, we are all Ship's of Theseus, and that's fine, but a perfect replica of the Ship breaks my internal narrative of continuity.

To distinguish: If a form of "immortality" supports the possibility of another copy of me existing simultaneously with the current incarnation, then it is not the immortality I'd desire.

Responding to the parent, I would much prefer slowly replacing my neural hardware with circuitry to wholesale scanning and instantiation in another substrate.

Summarize: Identity is (partially) a function of substrate. Change the substrate in a discontinuous fashion, and identity itself becomes discontinuous. I call that discontinuity (one form of) "Death".

That begs the question of what are "you". I personally believe that I am just the data contained in my brain, and it can be copied and transferred around, but where ever it ends up would still be me.

I occasionally wonder if the "me" that goes to sleep is really the same "me" that wakes up or whether it is another instance of me restored from a backup.

There's a lot of recent psychology research that suggests you're very wrong and that your body and physical experience is fundamental to our existence as beings.

That's trivially invalidated by observing that there are people without various limbs and/or other body parts that are nevertheless happily alive and considered to exist as beings.

The physical body - and the physical environment we live in - are just variables that can be gradually altered. Even if the brain is optimized towards a particular environment, it doesn't mean it won't handle a different one.

It is not trivial, nor invalidated.

They do exists as beings, yes, but different beings than the ones who possessed (or would have possessed) those limbs.

The question is not one of necessary conditions for "being-hood", it is one of identity via continuity.

Identity via continuity sounds like the Ship of Theseus problem[0], and it doesn't seem like any kind of a roadblock for anything.

As for being a different being, I personally wouldn't mind. I'm not the same being I was yesterday, or last year, anyway. For instance, over the past few years, I have many parts of my teeth removed and replaced with artificial components. I do not feel worse because of that.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

Would you mind sharing some links? And maybe explaining your thoughts further? Are you saying that you can't have a consciousness without a physical body?

I'm a bit slammed, but the book The World Beyond Your Head by Matthew Crawford summarises a lot. Not necessarily can't have consciousness, but the research he cites argues that we are more than just a brain.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Sc...

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