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Comment by run2arun | Hacker News Reader

This is not a serious article. There are many topics they could have discussed in depth but the biggest miss for me is that they did not talk about human psychology. Human brains are not evolved to handle a million years of noise and notifications. There would be an incalculable amount of damage to a person's personality from all the ups and downs and vagaries of life.

So many of our physiological systems and the way our consciousness works will have to change unrecognizably that the being that exists after these transformations can no longer be called human. If a thing thinks, it will be finite and want to be.

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>Human brains are not evolved to handle a million years of noise and notifications.

Are you sure? I mean it could be argued we're not evolved to handle 50 years of noise and notifications given that we do not keep all that data but forget quite a bit of it. But then the response is that we handle it by forgetting it - what's the proof that the mechanisms that allow us to handle 50 years by forgetting will cease to work with significantly more data?

Right, I think human brain forgets most of the things anyways, so I don't see why it'd not continue forgetting old memories over time!

Well I can make a hypothesis that the human brain will not be able to easily forget centuries worth of memories given the thing that after a certain age people often report having clearer memories of longer ago events than newer ones and that these memories will come back to them periodically, will over time the long term memories be filled up?

my personal feeling would be no, you will keep getting that memory of the person you liked in high school when you're 600 but your probably won't remember anything particularly clearly past 20 years before and the stuff from your 70s-80s will be totally gone.

I do believe that.. to the point that I believe that we're following an emotional program and I'm quite worried that extending your biology without understanding of this side of your psyche will only lead to higher pile of people at the bottom of a bridge.

I'm open to suggestion and discussion but the 20-30 shift in experience may probably be a necessary part of the parenting cycle. And I quite regret the simple and deep joy of kids. Now (as I mentioned often here) I'm not in the best moods but so far no doctor or researcher addressed how to restore this happiness to agreeable levels.

To your first point, is it shown that people who live the longest follow this emotional program, in a way that is actually detrimental to their psyche? I am not talking about people experiencing various diseased states such as dementia and other chronic illness.

Restoring in your life the same levels or type of happiness that you see in kids seems unrealistic. Not only that, there tends to be a bias towards nostalgia and how good we had it when we were younger. As I have gotten older, I have only felt a continuous trend towards more happiness in general though. I was a confused, anxious child. I feel better on every level - but that has come with a lot of work on making sure I am eating nutritiously, moving regularly (outside and in the sun), sleeping well, and leaning in towards work that I feel fulfilled doing. It also comes with fostering social relationships and cultivating a good social circle. That's what worked for me.

There is a path for everyone, and there are some generalities we can make on what that looks like, but in the end it is going to be unique to the individual due to their specific circumstances and genetics.

Sure, maybe not totally childlike.

But there's a blend of excitement and joy in simple things that I find really lacking in adult life.

I'm also rewiring most my life and habits (somehow centering on simple usual and lively activities) but .. so far not good enough.

To be back to the original point, living longer will exhibit issues, and we'll have to work on that. I just find it sad that it's never mentionned.

Think of it as a process, with no real end in sight. Unlikely you will all of a sudden wake up one day with that blend of excitement and joy you see in children. But it possible to move closer to experiencing that more consistently by rewiring your life and habits like you said. Hope your journey brings what you are looking for.

I think most people realize that living longer will bring a whole host of issues that are hard to put into perspective today. But I also think that for most people, there is a bias against living longer because they think it will be filled of boredom and impaired mental and physical functioning, which I don't think will necessarily be the case.

Reminded me of this:

"In the strict sense, it is not true that one's character is unchangeable; rather, this popular tenet means only that during a man's short lifetime the motives affecting him cannot normally cut deeply enough to destroy the imprinted writing of many millennia. If a man eighty thousand years old were conceivable, his character would in fact be absolutely variable, so that out of him little by little an abundance of different individuals would develop. The brevity of human life misleads us to many an erroneous assertion about the qualities of man."

- Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

> If a man eighty thousand years old were conceivable, his character would in fact be absolutely variable, so that out of him little by little an abundance of different individuals would develop.

Perhaps it would, perhaps it would not.

For what this strange anecdote is worth, Alzheimer’s had not robbed my mother of her personality even when it was robbing her of object permanence, the concept of things having a left hand side, numbers over four, and speech.

> Human brains are not evolved to handle a million years of noise and notifications. There would be an incalculable amount of damage to a person's personality from all the ups and downs and vagaries of life.

Source?

> If a thing thinks, it will be finite and want to be.

I disagree.

This isn’t a serious comment if you’re presuming to speak on behalf of every “thinking thing”.

Memory is seemingly virtual but in reality all memory takes up physical space, so eventually you'll hit limitations.

I don't know about the whole "damage" part but from a logical perspective you have a limited amount of space in your head and therefore limited memory.

If a thing thinks, by induction it will be finite. I don't know if it will "want" to be.

I'm skeptical. Old memories do fade quite a bit. Anything unimportant is somehow compressed... distilled to its essence... perhaps the equivalent of garbage collection. There is a window of time, say 25 years, and beyond that point things get pretty hazy. At least, that's how it feels to me. I have childhood memories that are so distant and fragmented, they barely exist anymore.

There's no need to be skeptical. We live in a physical world where all information must be represented by a physical entity.

By induction there will be limits no matter what. You cannot have an infinite amount of memory in your head. You cannot have an infinite amount of anything anywhere.

However abstract something is, the symbolic nature of an abstraction must utilize at least one atom. For example, let's say we have a big number... <the number nine> that we want to abstract. We can choose to have that number be represented by a single symbol "9" rather than nine actual things. This is the true nature of what abstraction is, using smaller symbols to represent bigger things aka compression. But for that symbol to even exist it must be written down or memorized somewhere. This takes up physical space. Even your computer hard drive must use physical magnets flipped to different polarities to represent memory.

The biggest possible abstraction of a real world phenomena in terms of magnitude is to represent the entire universe with a single atom. In the end atoms take up space and even the biggest possible abstraction of the entire universe must take up the space of at least one atom. Your memories are no different... they are just symbols representing aspects of your life experience. Likely your memories take up much more space than a single atom and if your memories take up space and you have a finite amount of space in your skull, then by logic your memory is finite... this categorically true by logic.

Whether the finite memory problem is solved by garbage collection or whether it's not solved at all and people simply go insane is undetermined.

What is known for sure is that your memory is finite.

It's not literally "infinite", you are right. And compression is probably the wrong term. Parts of my early memories are gone: literally gone, no where to be found. It feels like exponential decay the further you go back. Certainly it doesn't decay to nothing, but maybe it's close enough on a very long time scale. I don't know... how do others perceive their distant memories?

Compression is the correct term.

Using symbols to represent bigger concepts is a form of compression. The representation/memory of an animal in your mind is done using symbols rather than an actual animal.

This isn't speculation. A animal exists in reality as construction of millions of biological cells each in turn made up of billions of atoms. Depending on how big the animal is it could be more atoms that make up your brain. Therefore, for the animal to exist in your mind as a memory there Must be a form of information compression. You cannot fully hold an actualization of an animal in your mind because it is too big to exist in your mind. Your brain holds symbols of the animal.

What happens with a jpeg is the exact same concept as what happens in your memory. A jpeg is a symbolic representation of the actual picture. It is a form of lossy compression because details from the original picture are lost.

In some cases, yes, it is compression. What I was referring to was not, really. It's complete absence of detailed memory.

In all cases memory exists as compression. If the memory is completely absent then we're talking about something that doesn't exist, there's no point.

Or it may not be completely absent, just consciously. Who knows. Nobody knows exactly how our memory works. It's fun to think about though.

Except we have a mathematical theory of information, and memory being information we know that it must exists within the bounds of that theory. Hence, memory is compression.

As I've tried to explain 3 or 4 times, this is not what I'm talking about. Do you understand the difference between data being "deleted" and data being "compressed"? I give up.

Why do you assume it's me who doesn't understand. It's you who doesn't get it.

There is no difference between losing information during lossy compression and deleting information during lossy compression. Lossy compression means that data is literally lost aka deleted.

You can compress an entire memory into a single bit or into nothing. Lossy compression is a gradient where maximum space saving involves total deletion. Medium space spacing involves partial deletion and no space saving aka lossless compression involves no deletion.

Let me put it this way. A JPEG is lossy compression, there is literally deleted information when you compress a picture into a JPEG that cannot be retrieved. Do you understand this concept about the pictures you see on the internet? If you decrease the size when saving a jpeg in photoshop you actually lower the image quality to the point where you can lose a ton of information (aka deletion).

A png is an example of compression without loss. Same with zip, tar or rar file. The original file can completely be rebuilt from a a non lossy compressed file BUT NOT a JPG because a jpeg is a lossy compression. Get it?

Please thank me for teaching you. Or don't reply because you're too mad at being wrong and not appreciative of the fact that I didn't "give up" on a you.

Meh, I don't think you or anyone can seriously make that claim.

I think the mind/human psychology would adjust like we do now. As we progress in life, we are shaped by our experiences, but most of what we experience become distant memories or are completely forgotten. When I look back on my early life, even things that were deeply impactful to me, the memories are almost like they almost happened to another person. IF we lived to be hundred of thousands of years old, I think we would just experience this to a more severe degree.

No, not serious. But it's a fun thought experiment. And since it was written by an astronomer, it's no surprise the perspective is more about how we would deal with changes outside ourselves rather than within. Frankly, I wouldn't want to mire the story with too much navel gazing before touching on the elephants in the room: overpopulation, boredom, identity, and the need to develop a near-infinite perspective on being responsible for our actions.

Humans are very adaptable. Society would no doubt look very different, but I also have no doubt that if it were physically possible to live a million years that our psyches would adapt.

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