My strange journey into transhumanism
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I mean I'm 34 and I get ever more paranoid, suspicious and corrupt as I age. I can't image what 3400 years would do to my head.
Summary: "Immortality" isn't just anti-aging. Mental health and intellectual extensibility are just as important to immortality as oncology.
My utopian vision doesn't involve millenia-old people everywhere. It involves a smaller world population that succeeds in leaving ever smaller footprints on the planet and living in harmony with other creatures.
Which aspect do you feel is manifesting?
What the years (59) have taught me is other people very RARELY care enough about anyone else to persecute them.
My desire for physical things has lessened significantly, since unless you have an extreme amount of money, more things just complicate life more. As for self importance, I want to contribute to making life better for mankind, but I don't think a lot of being recognized for it.
Suspicious is just being wise as long as it doesn't rule your life.
Corruption is a choice you make in order to have more physical things or feel more important.
I feel every year makes me wiser and increases my desire to help mankind.
Maybe we need to have a test at 100 years, and cull the self important, corrupt individuals.
I personally would love 3400 years! All the things I could learn, all that I could contribute.
Edit: I MIGHT even learn spelling and grammer!
The Holocaust. Pogroms. Pol Pot. China's Cultural Revolution. Wars without number (often for racial or ethnic reasons). Genocides. The Inquisition. Witch-hunts. Lynchings. Jim Crow laws. Slavery. McCarthyism. Homophobia. Hate crime. Anti-immigrant xenophobic policies. The racist War on Drugs.
The list goes on and on. I see persecution everywhere, and many, many people all too eager to take part.
Point being, life apparently doesn't care much about situational and human derived ethics. And that's what got us here. So what gets us there may not be according to values of our culture and time.
I see the opposite picture when these discussions pop up: everybody tries to find a downside in increased lifespan, be it personal or social. It looks like a pretty obvious defense of status-quo to me.
What is really-really sad and what really bothers me is that this attitude is so prevalent in the modern West, when the West is the only society on planet Earth that has knowledge and resources to make some version of life extension happen. Other parts of the world are de-facto firmly in the survival mode.
Fairness
Only rich people will get it. (no tech has ever done this.)
Better to give money to the poor than science. (family,city,state,nation, has proven local investment beats foreign.)
Bad for society
Dead people make more room for new, other people. (consider going first.)
Run out or resources (live people discover/extract/renew better than dead or nonexistant)
Overpopulation (colonize the seas, solar system, or have a war.)
Stop having kids
Worse wars (nukes are more dangerous than having your first 220 year old person in 2136)
Dictators never die (they die all the time and rarely of age)
Bad for individual
You'll get bored. (your memory isn't that good, or your boredom isn't age related)
You'll have to watch your loved ones die. (so you prefer they watch you?)
You'll live forever in a terrible state. (longevity requires robustness.)
Against gods will (not if he disallows suicide, then it is required.)
Man up, save your family, save yourself.
P.S. Curing aging isn't immortality. You die at 600 on average by accident, and if the parade of imaginary horribles comes true, even earlier.
I am not so optimisitic about what life extension and other technologies that transhumanists get excited about would mean for humanity. I am reminded of Douglas Adams:
"Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all
barriers to communication between different races and cultures,
has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the
history of creation."In that context many of these arguments seem moot. Even the idea that "More people make more progress faster" becomes speculative as "people" would no longer be constrained by genetics to specific distributions of neurons.
People tend to think that [current year] is super late and advanced in the history of the world, and seem to infer from that impression that things that haven't been solved yet are unlikely to be solved. The germ theory of disease is about 150 years old; practical uses for electricity are just over 100; powered flight is just over 100; not using horses as primary transportation is the same; etc. Now is early in the possible history of discovery. There remain hundreds of thousands of important things we don't understand, or even know about, yet.
Besides which, we are talking about a hypothetical future in which we have solved aging; to suppose that future would exist without comparably revolutionary advances in intimately connected biological problems like cancer and dementia is odd.
If you believe we're doggedly and linearly solving Problems Humanity Faces one at a time, and that techno-utopia is around the corner, I think that's mistaken. We continue to remain blind to unforeseen consequences, and it is unclear to me that we'll figure them all out before we wipe ourselves off of the face of the earth.
My second argument was that our current moment in time is not likely to be near the end of the possible tech tree, that large advances in technical knowledge and ability are very likely still in front of us, and that therefore it doesn't make sense to argue that if by now we haven't already solved [x,y] then we probably never will.
Your argument seems to be that we don't fully understand the unintended consequences of our inventions, and that there's a distinct possibility that some of those unintended consequences may cause us to go extinct before we get smart enough to stop making those kinds of errors.
I agree with that argument. I don't see any conflict between your point and my point - just between your point and some claim I didn't make about techno-utopia being just around the corner.
Some kind of "techno-utopia" does seem like a possible future, but not necessarily a probable one. I don't know if we'll make it there. We're not reasonable enough, maybe. And one of the ways in which we're unreasonable is that we tend to read into our opponents' arguments things they didn't say and impute to them beliefs we don't have evidence that they hold. That isn't helpful, and on the large scale it's distinctly harmful - it's a major part of the political polarization and divisiveness that is dragging down our collective ability to cooperate and come to reasonable compromises.
People regularly perform backups of their mind. In the case of death or injury or illness, a new body is grown and their backup is restored into a new body.
It also presents interesting solutions to currency/wealth and what happens when life gets boring when you can live forever.
People regularly perform backups of their mind. In the
case of death or injury or illness, a new body is grown
and their backup is restored into a new body.
and their backup is restored into a new body.
What a relief, to know that something that looks like you, can keep listening to your favorite bands, wearing your clothes, eating the same favorite foods, and having the same opinions about the world after you die.
Me? If I had a brain back-up, and they could grow a copy of my body in a vat... Why, I'd just run around fighting lions with my bare hands, and wrestling hungry sharks in the ocean. Who cares if I get completely eaten and digested?
The new copy can pick up where I left off, and just beat up whichever animal ate me!
One of Kurzweil's projects is he wants to resurrect his dad because he misses him. Making copies kind of makes more sense if they interact with others rather than a brain in a vat type scenario.
Renewal would be more or less dead.
If life extension reverses / resets aging at the cellular level and you have the endocrine system of a 20 year old , it is likely that one could retain a youthful mindset. I think people overestimate the significance of experience and underestimate how your body's chemicals regulate your mood.
Maybe that is because of the time pressure?
I guess we will be doing the same just on a different scale, e.g. most of us will be chasing money, power and status
I think mortality is fundamentally wired into the thought processes of earth bound organisms. Part of that is how one perceives even smaller units of time like a minute, second, hour..
Almost like a partial reset or wipe of ourselves ?
Build the future you wish to see. Biotech, the life you save may be your own.
If you like nanobots, try your hand at the white blood cell, it's pretty great at what it does. You'll get farther hacking it, than trying to build your own nanobot version. Same for trees. Pick up where nature left off. Nature's already done a pretty great job of it over the very long time it's had. Imagine the difficulty of building an artificial tree, compared to efficiently planting more.
WBCs are grown and raised in a stochastic, vastly imperfect process. It might be indeed easier to build an equivalent from ground up, similar to how AI algorithms do not quite copy the neuron. Some are inspired by it, but not a copy.
If everyone expected results immediately we would be nowhere now. Typically "normal science" works incrementally with occasional flashes of insight and paradigm changes.
https://www.exratione.com/2017/04/blind-upon-the-eve-of-apot...
But really, transhumanism is common sense. You see a problem and you fix it. That inevitably leads to the end of suffering, which requires medical control of aging, complete control of the biosphere, comprehensive neurotechnology, and so forth. The only open question is how long it all takes to run through the development pipeline.
If longevity-assurance technologies existed, everyone would use them as a matter of course, just like people go to the doctor when they are sick, take vitamins, and go for flu shots. We're in a strange part of history at the moment, transitioning from a state of abject technological poverty, unable to affect our environment, to a state of technological wealth in which all of these items - aging, intelligence, the human condition - are becoming malleable. All of the mental and philosophical architecture put in place to enable people not to go mad in the face of death and limitations will come crumbling down, but not without a fight.
Humans are nothing if not conservative at root, and all change is fought. Not an advantage in an age of vastly beneficial change, but it is what it is until the human mind changes.
There has been some debate about what true goals of the alchemists were, and whether they were using religious language merely as a veil of indirection and as protection against the religious intolerance of their time. Some believe that the alchemists had religious motives, others that they were really after worldly wealth achieved through chemical means, others that they were after a psychological transformation.
The entire narrative woven by this story is certainly fascinating, but I am not persuaded by the thesis that Christians deserve all the credit for the religious strains in the transhumanist and singulitarian movements. Similar aspirations are certainly reflected in these movements, but these aspirations are shared by many religions all over the world.
Even if we limit the focus to just America, where the computer revolution could be argued to have been born, there are many religious influences outside of Christianity, such as the attraction to and adoption of Eastern religions by at least much of the American intelligencia in the 50's, 60's, and 70's around the dawn of this very computer revolution. Eastern religions have their own stories of transcendence and of humans essentially becoming gods.
I am also reminded of Eric Voegelin[1], who thought many modern movements, from Communism to Fascism, were actually gnostic in nature, and sought to transcend humanity through knowledge. Some have characterized gnostics as a "Christian sect", but in fact they may have had influences from various religions and may have predated Christianity.
It's nice to dream, but it's in the realm of visiting other star systems at this point.
"Immortality" will eventually be possible in the form of biotech, given enough time with uninterrupted technological and medical progress. But before that happens we're going to be torn apart, either by our own humanity (nuclear war, politics/religion, pollution, overfishing, antibiotic resistance, etc) or nature (new ice age, giant meteor, etc).
We can't even agree on why the seas are rising, much less decide to do anything about it. And these people think we're going to evolve? Not if we drown in ignorance first.