I do not get why you do not get the appeal. Do you want to die?
If anti aging proponents spent as much time trying to reproduce and making sure their offspring were fit to continue their bloodline with good education it seems to me a good outcome. That is why the education of my children is important: the imprint of intellect self after I imprinted my bodily self in their genes.
One could argue, but “hey ptsneves your children are not you thus you will unavoidably going to be eliminated from existence”. And I say, “it is ok and part of physical existence. I accept it.“
Evolution found it worthwhile to have sexual reproduction, meaning clones are a bad fit for eco system disturbances.
Evolution also found it fit to restart the cycle from scratch even if it meant an individual would lose experience or ecosystem optimality. This is to protect again local optimae , which is a great path to extinction.
The extent of these 2 premises is such that the apex predator on earth reproduces sexually and has a limited life span. Maybe that is survival bias but I think there are good causation ideas behind them.
With the above if I really want to be immortal and have my legacy preserved robustly I should use the current system: reproduction with a good emphasis on descendant upbringing and according to my experience. Again, even if I am great in my current eco system I do not presume this experience will work with eco system disturbances, so I accept evolutionary bargains and have children with a partner I believe will fulfil my bodily destiny the most resilient way possible.
I even wanted to start a religion where propagation of one’s self through dedication to offspring and community is central. I am tired of a society ruled by geriatric concerns[1]. (I say this as mostly a joke of course, I have more than enough work raising my children much less dabbling in other peoples lives)
Ps: none of what I wrote invalidates improvements on longevity. It is just that we already have a basic system for propagation in time.
[1] I know extremely young demographics make for crappy countries and quality of life.
Some people may indeed prefer to die, some people may be religious or whatever, but most people doing the criticism just give extremely low prior probability to not dying due to some technological/medical advance (during their lifetimes at least), so they consider obsessing with something that is virtually impossible for the hope that it will happen a waste of time, of the finite life they have.
Then it boils down just to whether one is curious about it, or is curious about any other X subject.
The best you'll get is extended life, and that's never going to be enough - there's always going to be someone trying to push that limit out a little further. IMO, what matters more, and what some folks here have brought up, is more healthy years. I think wanting to be fitter and healthier in old age is pretty uncontroversial, but the problem is that it gets rolled up with immortality, because getting to say "We conquered death" would be way sexier than saying "We extended good living by a decade or two (and that's being optimistic)".
Immortality has been, and always will be, a fantasy. Better that those resources go to something more productive, like healthcare.
Sure, that's entropy, but that's only necessarily true at the level of the whole system, energy inputs can and do reduce local entropy.
> The best you'll get is extended life
Sounds good, let's start there. 'True' immortality may or may not be a pipe dream, but it doesn't matter if it is. Almost nobody is talking about living absolutely forever, but looking at ways in which greater longevity can be achieved. I'd bite your hand off for another couple of decades on top of whatever my current 'allocation' might be, I don't give a crap if we've "conquered death" or not, but if we can find ways to give the average person more time, that seems like a win.
> Better that those resources go to something more productive, like healthcare.
How is this not healthcare?
There seems to be this backlash against any talk of life extension, that other things matter more, that it's somehow frivolous, or just morally wrong to seek to live longer. It feels to me entirely arbitrary as we already use all sorts of interventions to help people live longer, and to be healthier for more of that time. This is good and wise and virtuous. But some folks seem to have this weird switch in their heads when extending life gets mentioned, that suddenly they're uncomfortable and the whole thing is not to be discussed by preference.
And I wonder if it's because they don't want to admit to themselves or others that they are terrified, but have rationalised away their fear as "meant to be, can't be changed". Such talk of extension makes them uncomfortable.
Anti-aging science is basically the most audacious preventative program out there. It is not really about "immortality" (even if this level of success were to be reached, one can always kill themselves, no biology will give you immunity to fast flying bullets), but an attempt to prevent or at least delay onset of a host of chronic diseases that are synonymous with aging.
"but the problem is that it gets rolled up with immortality"
Then don't contribute to that problem by insinuating that anti-aging is something different from healthcare. It is not, it is literally about extending healthspan, at least at this point. Rejuvenation means making people live longer by improving their metabolism etc.; how it is not healthcare in the best sense of the word (protecting health instead of treating already extant diseases)?
"Everything dies, or breaks down, or decays."
And yet you can keep your room tidy for long decades even if the entropy of the universe as such increases.
We have a lot of self-repair mechanisms, that is why we live longer than our relatives like dogs and mice. "The universe" does not dictate to us whether to get cancer or not; some species (like whales) seem to be very resistant to cancer and it is absolutely thinkable that we could acquire this ability too, if we happen to learn enough about metabolism. Etc. etc.
Human death at 80 isn't a result of laws of physics, any more than murine death at 2,5. It is a case of biological dysregulation that can possibly be fixed or at least improved, much like we improved other things about ourselves. Few of the HN crowd would proclaim wearing glasses to fix your vision to be unnatural. What we are looking for in anti-aging are "glasses for the body".
> "Yes, and so do you," said Harry. "I want to live one more day. Tomorrow I will still want to live one more day. Therefore I want to live forever, proof by induction on the positive integers. If you don't want to die, it means you want to live forever. If you don't want to live forever, it means you want to die. You've got to do one or the other... I'm not getting through here, am I."
It would be interesting to see how society will change when we can make ourselves permanently healthy. Maybe people who want to die will start taking extreme risks like sky-diving or Russian roulette but the above quote stands imo. If you don't want to live any more sounds to me like you have a psychological problem. I don't mean that 80 year olds, that have a dozen physical problems and struggle to do anything and therefore want to die because life is unbearable, have a psychological problem but if you're young, healthy and still find no pleasure in living then maybe you should see a therapist. Maybe the psychological part of living forever needs to be solved too
I broadly agree with lifespan and healthspan extension on the grounds that one should get to choose the time and manner of their passing, but that quote is just ridiculous and Yudkowsky should have known better.
Maybe we'd be nicer to each other if we lived that long, because we know our empire might be on top now, but likely not through our lifetime.
But wealth inequality would probably be even worse, because by the time one generation dies, they've already bought up every piece of land in the world.
death is inevitable. by artificially extending your lifespan, you're not becoming immortal. you're taking an event that typically comes as a natural part of life and is out of your control and forcing yourself to choose when it happens. you will have to choose at what point your agony is so unbearable that you no longer want to live.
people who are unlucky already have to live that hell in modern times. i don't think people chasing this fever dream have experienced the joy of seeing it play out.
A normal person can just decide they're 200 and not really enjoying much anymore and have that be the end of it.
I've been depressed a couple of times in my life and saw no point in going further or living but I've talked myself out of it by simply saying, hey, if I do this relatively small thing and then do this thing that gives me pleasure then that's better than literal death. I find it hard to believe a person has experienced everything there is to experience in 200 or even 1000 years. Our set of experiences is what it is because of the short time that we have but it doesn't mean it can't evolve to accommodate a lifespan of 10x or 100x.
parts of the human body also evolve and strengthen over time, unfortunately evolution also made them decay after some point, that's what we're trying to fix.
> you're taking an event that typically comes as a natural part of life and is out of your control..
this whole paragraph could apply to any physical problem. You were born with XYZ health problem? just accept your fate, it's natural. You got bit by a dog? Natural, just accept your fate. You got an infection? why even bother taking antibiotics, you're just forcing yourself to live longer
And most of that life is spent in healthy youth and middle age, not in continual decline. Today we expect to become elderly in our 70s or 80s, and then die. The Greeks became elderly in their 60s or even earlier. Is it so hard to believe that in another 100 years people could be living to their 90s or 100s before age catches up with them?
If people decide to end themselves that is suicide, and if someone else decides it then that is murder. All these are morally and ethically much more complicated than just dying agentlessly.
Most people don't want to die. I want to learn more, and indulge curiosity for another day. I want to laugh and love and see my family forever longer - I don't think I'd ever wish to leave my loved ones, and I will unsurprisingly mourn their loss. I assume I'm not particularly special in any of this...
I think the sudden onset of immortality (especially concentrated on the wealthy) will be catastrophic for society. Imagine Bezos or a Kardashian or someone politically motivated like Murdoch/Soros but immortal? Imagine them being able to spend (and grow) generations of wealth... for generation?
For the rest of us, the cost of an opportunity to be immortal will be massive because of course it can be. People today save for retirement, but one day they may save for immortality - or perhaps take out insane loans to fund it. Imagine real estate prices when banks can offer 100y mortgages to a class of rich immortal workers? Imagine trying to advance in your career when someone can get a senior job and work for hundreds of years, especially if they need to fund their 100y mortgage or their immortality procedure - Millennials already complain that boomers won't retire and open up the higher-rung jobs.
Immortality would upend society, and likely exacerbate social tensions, but it could also be a great reset in social expectations. Maybe it'd encourage everyone to take a long-term view of their actions. eg. Climate change would impact everyone, so no one would be "too old to care".
That's what anti-aging is.
Every single one of my ancestors for the last 3.5 billion years has died. It is part of existence.
50, 60, 100 more years? Great! Then I can pile on knee, hip, back, and wrist regeneration surgeries. Then extensive therapy to keep my brain from degrading. Also new teeth and corneas. Oh and the heart is going to need a lot of work if it starts beating for twice as long as it was designed to. Plus constant maintenance for the skin as it soaks up an entire second lifetime's worth of UV.
Just a never-ending cycle of expensive, likely painful, time-consuming all-consuming patches on the body to delay the inevitable.
Just kill me already.
Maybe eventually they'll find a path to immortality.
That would be even worse. I imagine the joy would drain out of sunsets if you've seen a billion of them, with them being as noteworthy as every time your eye blinks.
So you can imagine that rather than see another sunset, you'd die?
You can imagine a state of being where you become so jaded, so incurious, that nothing can pique your interest any more, that interpersonal relationships would be better off terminated with biological death than continued, that learning, travel, discovery all lose their meaning and value?
Honestly, as with many of these comments, I feel it says more about your present life than those who would like to live longer or indefinitely.
And I certainly know people in their 70s who are not ready to settle down and be fitted for a coffin yet, even if their bodies are starting to seriously disagree. I don't imagine they would turn down the chance of a few more decades of relative fitness.
>Just a never-ending cycle of expensive, likely painful, time-consuming all-consuming patches on the body to delay the inevitable.
So I take it you never visit a doctor or dentist? After all, going to the doctor to get that mole checked for cancer, or getting your teeth drilled to prevent an infection that kills you is unnatural.
Even if you don't consider yourself important to the world, surely you are important to yourself. At least I as an atheist consider my limited time alive here— conscious and healthy— to be infinitely valuable to me personally as it's really all that I have. And I think if your life isn't valuable to you in the same way, there's something wrong. Hence, extending it is a worthwhile goal.
Longevity research is difficult and it's not as if a breakthrough improving our lifetime by an order of magnitude is around the corner. So, I see little risk in ambitious research that'll probably only yield humble results anyway, at least until we're reaching 200 years old.
I agree with this completely, so long as it doesn’t actually cause problems for younger people born into the world. At the moment it’s arguably a good thing that we die and let new generations have their shot at things. I’m only 37 and already excited to see what people in their teens manage to accomplish before I die. By the time the they’re full swing and doing cool stuff, I’ll probably be looking for my keys for a car I haven’t owned for 20 years in a bingo hall. No one will need more of me.
Fundamentally though I believe our time is rarely spent as well as it could be, and fixing that might be best to come first. Should I live longer if I don’t cherish it? Should I want more days when I’ve admittedly wasted many? Perhaps the best thing I could do is learn to use the time I have to its fullest.
And of course, I go to great lengths to protect my health and lifespan — I want to live as long as I reasonably can, and I want to be able to enjoy it. I don’t think for a second that I should prolong that to any degree which begins to hinder the opportunities and possibilities of younger people, though. Maybe that sounds crazy. I just don’t think I matter more than another person, just like me, wanting all the same opportunities in their own life. I guess I don’t believe old people should be in the way of young people fully living their lives.
As long as that’s not happening, sign me up. Until then I’d like to learn to use my time more wisely. On the Shortness of Life totally transformed how I think about longevity and lifespan extension in general. It seems to pale in importance compared to the practice of living better to begin with.
Depends on how depressed a person is I guess. ;)
The last time I wrote this opinion, I was met with everything from 'just kill yourself' to 'quit trying to control my life.'
Funny bunch here.
And telling other people when they should die is sorta messed up. Ignore these anti-aging medications, should people be cut off other medicines at a certain point? What's the difference?
> And telling other people when they should die is sorta messed up
I'm not telling other people when to die! I'm thinking more of a societal contract. Which in fairness, seem less and less these days.
Like, if I go to the back of a queue, and see you going to the front, and request you go to the back... I'm not trying to control your life. I'm just asking you to acknowledge and respect that we live in a society.
The arguenent of "I don't want to need help going to the bathroom/eating?" Or "I don't want to have effectively a two minute memory?" They're pretty solid arguments to me.
>I'm not telling other people when to die!
No, you want society to agree with you when people should die. This societal contract already does not exist. Maybe it'd be nice if it did, but you'd still need to answer the question of "should I stop this person from taking medicine because it's time for them to die?"
The entire medical (and dental) profession is all about keeping you from dying when you're "supposed to". You're supposed to die in your teenage years of a tooth infection, or in your 30s or 40s of cancer, or any random age of an injury.
People in rich countries live much longer (and healthier) than people in poor countries because of access to modern medicine.
So apparently you think people shouldn't have access to any medical services?
I feel miserable just trying to imagine why a person would think this way. I'm grateful I don't have this kind of psychology.
The rest of us will support the relevant research, and use the results to remain young or to be young again, possibly lasting for millennia.
(Dying from the point of view of being about to sustain human life)
Unless of course we have magically conquered space travel too.
If everyone sticks around, they can help solve the problem. If people don't die, maybe they'll be forced to care for the planet instead of spoiling it for the next group.
Because if better appreciation just means you're on the right side of an argument that very rarely comes up, then your life quality is the same.
It's definitely not about taking solace in winning some inane argument. I won't be celebrating my death, nor yours, as some kind of win.
Aging has long been characterized. We understand in which ways degradation happens, and no new ways have been found for several decades. There aren't that many; They can be tackled, one by one.
We have an assortment of tools today that weren't available a mere 20 years ago, and it is our moral imperative to do this research.
There's more people suffering from aging and the conditions it does cause than any other health issue. All of us will eventually degrade, suffer and perish if nothing is done about it.
Improving the quality of life of our aging population by supplementing the shortcomings of metabolism (and thus un-doing aging) is the target.
Longevity would be a byproduct of this.
> Time is the great equalizer
Yes, totally, we all get to live exactly the same amount of time, so it's perfectly fair. Also that fixed term life deal is the perfect amount of time by definition, so we should never, ever try to change it.
A challenge to your assumption that there is an implied system and that said system is somehow fair in its current state. It's nonsense.
My main argument is against the wealthy buying time that others cannot. This is why I'm not against say, penicillin and such.
If you feel that is a bad argument, please explain why. If you feel it's fair, then I think we may agree. I'm not against humanity living longer, I'm against some select few doing so.
"I should get to live longer and everyone else can rot" would be a particular sort of evil.
However what I don't agree with is going from there to "unless everyone can have it, noone can". An awful lot of medicine is not (yet) available to everyone in the world, and while I think it should be, and we should work towards every last human being having access to free, socialised healthcare of the highest quality, you won't find me calling for denying cancer treatments to those in wealthy nations because other nations can't foot the bill.
We have gotten so used to being generally blind to essentially slave labor to support our lifestyles. Is it fair if we double our lifespan while those stuck in poverty making our products don't, or perhaps don't even want to?
Significant longevity treatment is likely to be highly disruptive to our society in many ways, but I don't think that we should either fall for the fallacy that we can accurately predict those ways, nor succumb to the idea that we won't or can't adapt positively.