We May Not Have to Age So Fast
wsj.com
wsj.com
As topics become more sophisticated, the time to competency and insight increases.
Someone for instance, truly committed to studying the entire corpus of thoughts on political economy, from the Frankfurt school, Chicago school, Stockholm school, Austrian school, Keynsianism, Marxian, Monetarism, New Classical, Public Choice, Georgism, Bachuninism... Each of those are hard and complicated. A sincere dedicated study of all of them would likely take decades.
If you had 300 years then not only could you do that, but you could also make meaningful contributions to the field.
Imagine public policy by people who were able to dedicate 100 years to its study.
50 or 100 year studies which currently have to be chaperoned across multiple generations of researchers could be done by a single team.
The accumulated wisdom that manifests itself in the written word would be far more potent with centuries of accumulations. In a way, genius is a measure of speed and time, the quickness of ones assimilation of the topic. With enough time, the plane of genius might be accessible to nearly all.
Other, much longer efforts would be engaged with more frequently. For instance, The art of computer programming, started 51 years ago, would be one amongst a much larger number of works of similar breadth, if taking a century to complete something was feasible for all.
The differences this would manifest would be likely as stark as if someone from the 18th century descended upon a modern urban metropolis.
No doubt some events in your life might stick around in your mind for a long time, but by your 100th, 300th, whatever year would 50% of it just be a hazy memory?
Or maybe this technology could give you super memory, I mean even currently some people are born with the ability to remember tons of information, but often at the expense of other brain facilities.
"I have this daddy issue, probably, but I don't really remember my dad..."
> A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it
Aka science advances one funeral at a time
There needs to be the luxury of time and the space to fail, two things we don't have.
The technology of longevity won't fix this problem of culture, sure. But it would make such a fix a lot more meaningful
But once we have those, won't they be considered not luxurious, instead, standard?
And won't the argument still be that we lack the luxury we need?
I think we should improve the handover instead of pretending there will be no handover.
I mean seriously, emacs lisp looks so much more sane than vimscript, I've been telling myself to switch for 10 years now...
I don't know, maybe we could put a hard limit on academic positions of 50 years or so. We could figure something out. I like that solution more than, effectively - kill them, and everyone else!
I hope my post didn't imply I thought killing people was a solution...
Basically are we just keeping old people alive longer or are people growing old slower.
140 year old Albert Einstein might have written an actual letter to 161 year old Max Planck because that's what they both knew and had known for more than a century, so why change things? Many of the technological and societal changes have come up because of old people dying, including the smart ones.
There are 30-year-old "old" people who don't want to learn anything they don't already know. And there are 80-year-old "young" people who gladly learn an interesting new tech.
People who give up are doomed, regardless of age or other living conditions.
If you could live to 300, competition would eventually make it that you have to spend 150 years "building a life" (but hey, you still get 150 years of a good life).
Would the world be a better place, if Vanderbilt, Pullman, or Stalin were still alive? What would be the benefit to the world of, say, a Putin still in control a hundred years hence?
Death is an equaliser and a recycler.
“For the first 30 years of your life, you make your habits. For the last 30 years of your life, your habits make you.”
I'm not sure that making that last phase ten times longer is a good investment.
Tangentially, is that actually 'a Hindu saying' - all I can find are other people quoting Jobs and claiming the same - or is it just something a guru said that Jobs happened to like and remember?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategies_for_Engineered_Negl...
If we stopped ageing, how long would we live? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19937047
Oh, come to think of it, that could be a concern in some countries. Maybe in say, China, if your social score is not high enough, it might be illegal for you to extend your life.
The oldest wooden houses are only one thousand years old. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirkjub%C3%B8argar%C3%B0ur The human body is way more delicate and less likely to survive.
Even with extreme motivation, no human will see the death of our Sun, let alone the heat death of the universe.
Unless you mean that a copy of your brain would not longer be 'you'. In that case I just disagree. We don't know the level of fidelity required, but it seems extremely likely to me that if my brain were copied to a sufficient level of precision, whatever that level might be, the copy would continue my subjective experience.
it may, but it wouldn't be "you". "You"'d experience death, and something else will exist independent of "you", but with most of the same features and memories.
I also think that copying your conscious state from one body to another creates a new person in any case. Everybody except you (including the copy) may consider the new person to be exactly the same as you, but you will now be dead.
Somewhat tongue in cheek, but the point remains. What leads you to believe this? As another reply touches on, there's a straightforward way to verify whether that is the case (for oneself, and not an external observer): Given a perfect clone, uploaded copy, etc, are you as aware of the clone's experience as you are of your own?
If the answer is no, why would that change if the original ceases to exist?
If the answer is yes, the first thing I'd want to know is _how_ exactly the information (of awareness) is possibly synchronized between hosts (presumably in realtime, at that!).
Same with kids - they are basically our clones with genes mixed from both parents. They go on their own path and experiences. Although it it supremely rewarding to see them succeed in life, they are not "me", they are "they".
My clones living forever ain't any more rewarding/fulfilling than seeing my kids spread my genes and... live "forever". And we already have that.
Absolutely. I think this is a presupposition of the entire scenario.
Practically speaking, the only thing that is in question is whether the original's subjective experience extends to the clone. If it doesn't, the clone is useful for those who aren't the original, as a means of backup for important individuals. But, such a clone isn't a viable way to pursue immortality (for the original), as you'd still die if you are cloned in such a fashion; 'your' experience would end as the clone succeeds you, much like the case of having children.
I'm reminded of the case of blindsight here, can something be called immortality if it is the equivalent through another body?
If you created multiple copies, they would all be equally 'me', although obviously yes, as they then went on to live different lives, they would become different people from each other, just as there are many different paths my life could take looking into the future now.
How does that compare to creating an exact replica of you today (assuming that ever becomes possible, which personally I doubt)? At the moment of replication, which of the two is really "you" (can anyone, including you, tell?), and how will that identity develop into the future as the two have divergent experiences? If one of them is destroyed, is the remaining one automatically "you" from then on?
>If you have an identical twin, is your twin "as much you" as you are yourself?
No in pretty much all meaningful senses; there was never a point where you and your identical twin had the same memories.
>At the moment of replication, which of the two is really "you" (can anyone, including you, tell?), and how will that identity develop into the future as the two have divergent experiences?
This is where the concept of personal identity itself gets tricky. I would say that in a way both of them are you. As far as my subjective experience is concerned, what makes me "me" is primarily my memories, and both instances would share that at that point in time.
This also means that, as two instances exist with diverging experiences, their "identities" diverge as well.
An outside observer might view the original and the copy differently, but personally I view subjective experience as the most important factor here.
There are known trees whose ages easily exceed a thousand years: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_trees#Individ...
I think this is generally where our species is heading..., we are going to continue to further blend ourselves with technology.
Humans are extremely flexible, and it really seems like some people don’t have naturally severe depressive episodes even with strong external tendencies. Beyond that, I can say that depression is often combated, in some of the less extreme cases, by recognizing it incoming and developing tools to keep yourself from spiraling.
I’ve dealt with depression, and have had plenty of external things start a spiral. After many years of dealing with it, I have learned how to prevent it from getting overwhelming. I really don’t see the end of an indefinitely life occurring via suicide, assuming you’re not in isolation or alienated, or some crazy circumstance.
That seems like a big assumption over centuries.
The thing is, if you really lived for hundreds of years, society would be radically different. Imagine... You can't get promoted because no one above you ever retires. You can't get an entry level job, because everyone has 200+ years experience!
People struggle to work the grind until they are 65 already. But you can't retire, because your death is so far away. You need to keep grinding another 500+ years...
That kind of world would likely have a lot of systemic issues with depression.
As the saying goes "graveyards are full of indispensable men", and "science advances one funeral at a time". This could mean a total lack of evolution in science, technology, philosophy, and so on.
While not ideal, stagnation at least brings stability of sorts.
This is a societal issue that has nothing to do with a longer lifespan. The thought that you need to keep doing what you do for ten years is already plenty depressing, yet people make it to 65 just fine.
I'm very happy you can feel this way, but yes, on a long enough time scale, depression will get all of us.
We currently cant keep our minds from becoming dependent on an external source of what it can naturally generate.
> The team predicts that even in a bone at an ideal preservation temperature of −5 ºC, effectively every bond would be destroyed after a maximum of 6.8 million years. The DNA would cease to be readable much earlier — perhaps after roughly 1.5 million years, when the remaining strands would be too short to give meaningful information.
https://www.nature.com/news/dna-has-a-521-year-half-life-1.1...
[0]: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/does-body-replace-itself-s...
However if some bases in the DNA molecule get chemically degraded then error correction mechanisms should kick in and (mostly) correct them.
Edit, spelling
This article talks about a potential way to increase lifespan and quality of life by a very modest amount, by a process that if it is feasible at all for humans (which it likely won't be), will only be available in the somewhat distant future. Digitizing yourself is several orders of magnitude removed from that, both technologically and in terms of what it would mean for the individual.
> you're still limited by the ultimate end of the universe.
There is a huge chasm between the prospect of an increased your lifespan and the notion that existence should never end, even if that increase in life expectancy would happen to be extreme from our current point of view. Just because literally eternal life is not in congruence with physics (or most practical definitions of intelligence for that matter) doesn't mean the idea of living far longer than currently possible is invalid. I would even say these two have very little in common.
> (which seems to be the fantasy of many posters here)
It's an aspirational fantasy that I share. I recognize the fact that this will not become feasible in my lifetime, but I do not think it's a fantasy in the sense that it is unattainable if we work towards that goal. Given the choice, I would do it in a heartbeat. It's possible that we as a civilization will just opt to not pursue the matter further, the same as with any other scientific or technological goal.
Imagine telling a pair of newlyweds, "oh, may you have long life, good fortune, and good health, but also some day the sun will burn to cinders and everything will decay into fundamental particles as entropy overtakes all." The latter is only even relevant to the former as a way of showing that you think inhuman universal things are somehow more important than human things.
Anyway, evolution is a very confused concept in modern society. None of the old factors apply any more.
It's still a moot point however. There is no meaningful human evolution anymore in terms of adaptation to anything in nature. Human biological fitness these days, outside hunter gather societies I suppose, is about beauty or intelligence and not a whole lot else.
And famine is no longer possible? Being small enough to survive on limited food is no longer of any use? (Or alternatively, being big enough to take other people's food...)
And a deadly pandemic is now impossible? So a good immune system doesn't give you any advantage? And an innate tendency to behaviours that reduce the chance of infection won't help you?
And the big one... Do all the beautiful and intelligent people now have the same number of children? Or do some have none, and some have ten, for reasons that may well be genetically influenced?
But your last is interesting - and touches on something I was going to type but didn't. Yeah, evolution might be happening there, and not in a good way. There's evidence that smart couples have less children, because they're busy with careers. There's evidence that religious people have more children than non-religious. So yeah, to the extent that evolution is still in play in modern society - we're probably going backwards.