Sixty Years Old - is my future short and messy, or long and glorious?
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As a cynic, I say it's just a complete fear of not existing that's the draw to living forever. But if you can experience something new only once, it seems very greedy to keep this little body going while using up some kid-to-be's spot.
Personally, I've tallied up a number of things I want to do in my life, and after having done 2 big ones (well, one finished and one still in progress with a moving goalpost), I've realized just how long it takes to accomplish big goals. Even my incomplete list far exceeds 200 years already. I'll take the life extension, thanks.
So, no, I don't think this is just "a personal hangup" of yours...
Religion dodges the issue by presenting goals that cannot be reached, which I think is a fair compromise for most people.
If you've watched 114000 years of Netflix by the time you're 83, color me impressed.
And you'd have to drink 2 liters of soda/beer a day for 1711 years for that many (olympic sized) pools.
I love this Mark Twain quote: "I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it."
The common objections don't change this. "Uploading your brain" is an unsolved philosophical conundrum that may or may not continue the existence of "you".
The universe eventually dies, too. 10 billion years is not immortality. Escaping to a newer younger universe is a pure speculation.
Everyone will die.
No, I think the whole problem can be bypassed, check my answer above.
"Lengths" like, err, making a thought experiment like the above in a HN thread? I've went further than that just to get a bag of Pringles.
And it's not like it's a "simple evolutionary incentive" anymore. That might hold true for a lizard or a deer, but a human has more complex rational to want to live. It might be evolutionary still, but it's far from "simple" when you can think about it.
But no, I don't agree with you that humans' desire to live is any more real or special than a lizard's, or a tree's, or a rock's desire not to break apart for that matter. It's a natural extension of physical laws combined with the circumstances of our evolution as a system--in this case linked directly to our basest subconscious instincts. To say that your desire to live is fundamentally stronger or more complicated than that of a deer reeks of geocentrism of the ancient world to me.
You say "more real or special" here, though, whereas you said "simpler" in your previous comment.
You get back to the same argument at the end though: "To say that your desire to live is fundamentally stronger or more complicated than that of a deer reeks of geocentrism of the ancient world to me."
It might not be more "real or special" or "stronger" (I never argued that it was anyway), but it SURE is more complicated.
And to deny that reeks of obsessive reductionism to me. The desire to live as expressed and felt by some billion (trillion?) neurons of a human, is more complex than the desire to live as expressed by the primitive brain of a lizard, or even a "rock's desire not to break apart" (!). I don't even think we can call the latter "desire".
We can feel everything a deer can feel about the desire to live (horror, survival instinct, etc --we're animals after all), but ON TOP OF THIS we can write poems, sing songs, make movies and have deep conversations about it. Including massive institutions on the matter, such as religion.
I'd call that more complex --calling it anything else would be delusional.
In the naive way of making a copy of it, yes.
But consider this: with some future procedure, each neuron of your brain is replaced by a mechanical one, one at the time. You maintain your consciousness at all times.
In the end of the process, you now have a fully mechanical brain.
No philosophical conundrum this way, right?
>The universe eventually dies, too. 10 billion years is not immortality.
Yeah, I don't care, 100-200 million years sound enough for me until I get bored.
I wouldn't be so sure: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus
Plus, this problem is solved in practice for us humans anyway: all of our cells are regenerated and replaced by new ones every few years, yet we consider ourselves to be the same persons.
I'm not making any particular claim that our identity as minds hinges on these three types of cells (though such a case for the brain cells seems, prima facie, like a possible good direction), but if you are going to make claims about what our identity as minds does not hinge on, you should take more care to get the facts straight.
ref1: http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/content/latest-questi... ref2: http://www.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/aprilholladay/2007-03...
how old do i need to be before holding a funeral for my past self?
what about special ceremonies for people coming out of medical sedation or comas or just waking up in the morning? a "fractional welcome to the universe party" seems in order, as the person is not really the same one that used to exist.
if upload tech like batista describes is ever created, we will probably give the resulting person the same common sense benefit of the doubt we give to people in the above cases.
However the following about fasting once a week is interesting:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/9091794/Fasting...
http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/07/there-is-no-such-...
"The point I want to make with all of this is that longevity science, work that will lead to biotechnologies capable of human rejuvenation, is no different. It is a process of incremental advances, requiring a large research community for any sort of reliable progress, and in which the nature of forthcoming discoveries are telegraphed by the nature of the work today. If you think that scientific breakthroughs are the way in which the world works, then you might be sitting there expecting significant advances in engineered human longevity to arrive no matter what the state of the present research community. Because some people are working on it, right? And it's just a few scientists and a eureka moment, right? Sadly not. One of the biggest challenges facing us today is that there is no large rejuvenation research community, and if we want to see real progress, that community must come into being - large enough and vigorous enough to match the stem cell research community pace for pace."
The seed of the rejuvenation research community of tomorrow is the SENS Foundation and its allies, advisors, and supporters in the life science community. Much of their work today is not just in producing research progress, but laying the groundwork for the next twenty years of work: the people who build the applied technologies of mitochondrial repair, biomedical remediation of amyloid and AGEs, rejuvenation of the lysosome, and so forth, are in college today. That is why programs like the SENS Foundation Academic Initiative are so important:
http://sens.org/academic-initiative
Check out their student research projects:
It's interesting, thorough, and optimistic. I also recommend donating money to SENS, as this cause is dramatically underfunded relative to its realistic potential to save and enhance human life for everyone. http://sens.org/
http://sens.org/files/pdf/SENS_Foundation_Annual_Report_2011...
"We are delighted that SENS Foundation was able to make expenditures of $1,518,000 in 2011. This was an increase of over $400,000 from 2010, overwhelmingly in support of direct research and conference projects. ... We greatly appreciate the support of the many individuals who contributed to our mission. We would like to thank Peter Thiel, Jason Hope, the Methuselah Foundation, and all of our contributors and volunteers for their on-going generosity. We expect a significant increase in both revenues and expenses for 2012, as we begin to see distributions from a de Grey family trust, under a grant from SENSF-UK. This support will be in addition to the contributions we receive from other sources."
http://sens.org/files/pdf/2011_Research_Report.pdf
"The elasticity of the artery wall, the flexibility of the lens of the eye, and the high tensile strength of the ligaments are examples of tissues that rely on maintaining their proper structure. But chemical reactions with other molecules in the extracellular space occasionally result in a chemical bond (a so-called crosslink) between two nearby proteins that were previously free-moving, impairing their ability to slide across or along each other and thereby impairing function. It is the goal of this project to identify chemicals that can react with these crosslinks and break them without reacting with anything that we don't want to break.
"In 2011, we established a Center of Excellence for GlycoSENS and other rejuvenation research at Cambridge University and hired postdoctoral student Rhian Grainger to design and perform experiments to develop reagents that can detect proteins bearing glucosepane crosslinks, facilitating further studies on its structure, abundance, and cleavage by small molecules. We also established a collaboration with researchers at Yale University, who will lend their expertise in generating advanced glycation end-products and lead efforts in developing agents which may be able to cleave glucosepane."
Diet and exercise can probably affect it a few percentage points either way but for all the advice, tips and tricks, people who do absolutely nothing special but have good genetic heritage will easily outlive you with better quality of life.
http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2010/10/historical-inheri...
But whether or not your reach early old age and what shape you are in when you get there is largely determined by lifestyle rather than genes for the vast majority of people. Basically don't get fat, and keep exercising, and that's the 80/20:
http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/08/can-you-optimize-...
The second quickest (and the first step towards AI) is to create computer vision algorithms, specifically human level object recognition. These will dramatically increase the wealth in the world (seeing robots that can do all manual labor tasks) so that conducting biomedical experiments becomes dramatically cheaper.
Therefore, anyone really serious about curing diseases should be devoting most of their time to objection recognition technology.