Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

(Apologies for the rambling comment, this is just a thought I’ve had and this link reminded me of it.)

One interesting way of thinking about the last few hundred years, specifically the growth of individualism, is that it’s a shift of focus from larger social organisms (the family, the village, the nation, etc.) to the individual person’s organism. Which is an obvious description of individualism, of course, but it has sorts of downwind effects that maybe aren’t as immediately apparent.

This occurred to me when I was reading about some life extension organizations trying to make individuals’ lives longer. It’s not about being remembered or honored by society, or about continuing a legacy via a family/business/institution/etc. but about extending your personal experience longer.

If we went back to a different civilization like the Romans, the dynamic was very different. There was much less focus on extending the individual life experience and more focus on being honorably remembered by Roman society. A desirable afterlife was one in which you were honored by society, not one in which your personal experience continued forever.

What is really interesting though is how these two dynamics (individuals vs. groups) will play out in the future, evolutionarily. I can’t imagine that individualism’s limits are endless; at some point group dynamics would become more competitive, I think. And yet at the same time a lot of resources are going into the extension of individual lifespans.

To put this all another way: imagine two opposite societal structures. One is comprised of individuals that live extremely long, focus on their personal experience, and assume they will be largely forgotten after death - partially because of the unpredictability of the future. The other is comprised of people that live shorter lives, are focused more on the social group (and have more kids), and are remembered after their deaths for their contributions to that group. They buy in to this vision because the future is more predictable.

It seems like the last few hundred years in the West has been a shift from group 2 to group 1, but it remains to be seen if that will continue.

We can the example from other species. When trying to explain why bees die when they sting you, i.e. why they evolved such a suicidal mechanism, it doesn't make sense on the individual level. But on the group level, if we consider them disposable parts of a larger super-organism which has evolved by multi-level selection, it does.¹

I think that scarcity vs. abundance plays a role into this as well. If we consider an other species, the slime mold Dictyostelium discoideum, it lives its life as a single celled amoeba when given plenty of food. But when food becomes scarce, something amazing happens. All the individual amoebae send out a signal to aggregate into a multicellular slug (pseudoplasmodium). This slug then moves to an ideal location, collecting more amoebae along the way. It then morphs into a fruiting body that can release spores.² ³

[1] Why do bees die when they sting you? — https://www.subanima.org/bees/

[2] What is a biological individual? — https://www.subanima.org/individuals-1/

[3] Starvation turns slime moulds into multicellular organisms — https://www.mpg.de/16476527/0222-immu-sulfur-the-consequence...

Maybe an increasing fixation on individualism is a sort of psychological rebellion against feeling like a disposable part of society. Wanting to feel like more than a worker drone making a billionaire even richer. If you can’t afford a family, having a legacy might feel unattainable.

I definitely agree on the defiance bit being one of few remaining moral comforts left.

Also interesting to think how other levels (billionaires,middle managers) are incentivized/disincentivized to express their individualism. Seems like a U shaped curve.

If you have not read it, yet, I highly recommend it: The Deep History of Ourselves by Joseph LeDoux.

I think that your entire thought process can be hypothesized all the way back to the first cellular colonies. Individualist needed the sustainable colony to get the chance to grow and thrive. The Colony needed Individualists to innovate and diversify, because with a growing population, new needs and wants are born from evolution, subconsciousness, experience and choice and the freaking environment changes so new sources need to be processed according to possibility and taste.

The fun part is that the preserving part of the colony needs the kind of remembering and honor you are talking about to maintain the ground on which individualists can grow. At the same time individualists need to be strong enough to dessert the colony and establish a new one. And if they do, their only way to survive is to build a culture of remembering and honor that enables the growth of new individualists.

Sometimes I find myself playing with the thought that Empires only fall if their conserving body fails to serve the diverse range of needs, desires & kinks of it's population, the breeding ground of and by individualists & for everybody. It's as if too many good men die in wars and the politicians and administrators back home just don't have what it takes to be grow strong enough people because they themselves can only survive and thrive in submissive, pseudo-dominant hierarchies that don't cherish innovation & individualism and tend to be predatory & oppressive, fostering cultures that are build on shame, guilt, fear and manipulation because these things are efficient enforcers of conformity, cooptation, and create adjustable competition, which is exactly what makes colonies weak and poisons the ground, air and food of both, the social body and the individualists.

Consumer Culture might have been maximized as a hack around this, I believe, not necessarily as a conspiracy of men who tried to standardize the way of money, but of the social body itself, in order to create a clandestine womb for individualists, because mothers noticed what the fuck and how the head aligned their offspring after too many fathers died in wars & too many natural leaders withdrew from top level positions and went into the crafts and engineering because so that the mafia guys wouldn't gang up on them & their offspring. Too much corruption, even when they were only just tiny clumps of cells! ... and now we have "the age of consciousness" vs/or/and/not/nand "mass information flow"

I haven’t, I will check this out. Thanks!

I think Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self was probably on my mind subconsciously when I wrote the comment. It’s also a great book about the formation of individualism.

Edit: replying to your long edit, absolutely, it seems like a factor that is relevant in every biological system: which “level” of identity acquires more resources or is otherwise more impactful in controlling the organism’s decision making.

Ah, that's a good way to store these concepts in memory: an organisms levels of identity acquiring resources and/or being "otherwise more impactful".

Your post reminded me of “Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.” from G. M. Hopf

You can be sure that the unselflimiting nature of individualism will eventually, or maybe soon, come up against the finite resources of the earth.

The political impasse in the West is between those who prefer to call evil the lack of self-limitation, and those who prefer to call evil other-limitation.

(Stoics were about self-limitation. to stay ontopic. What would they say about life-extension?)

The following is written by a cranky guy, but unfortunately I could find on hand no better summary of the core idea.

https://www.commentary.org/articles/gary-morson/aleksandr-so...

> What would they say about life-extension?

equanimity. if it can be had for a reasonable cost, and one is able to live a virtuous life, then one should seek it. it's like a starving soldier who upon finding abandoned food decides to eat it so that he can continue to serve his country (or his community, his friends, etc). if the cost of life extension is unvirtuous acts, like ecological vandalism, desperate seeking of wealth to pay for it, etc, then he would turn his back and say no, I have more than enough already.

What's your utility function for life extension like, at t=0^{+}, t=T^{-}, t=T^{+}, and t=T+(time interval till the unvirtuous access life extension tech)

(It doesn't matter, but I'd like to know :)

I'm afraid I don't really understand the question... I'm not familiar with this notation.

I'm ready to elaborate, but I'm talking about something like this. (I certainly hope not to sound like a lesswrong nut, which I certainly did this time)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-utility_function#:~:text=....

I don't want to pretend to sound like I fully understand what's going on here, but I do think this is approximately the right framework to think about how individual agents decide to cooperate or not on life-extension tech.

It's like a much more complicated prisoners dilemma- even with basic assumptions like "every agent thinks themselves virtuous and the other unvirtuous and refuses to communicate", it's already interesting to think about the shape.

On the topic, it's also interesting to think of reproduction as a very primitive life extension tech.

> to think about how individual agents decide to cooperate or not on life-extension tech

I think the sort of people that can afford it in the early years will be the sort that amass ungodly amounts of wealth and the sort that would be difficult to defend as virtuous in the Stoic sense.

I personally am not a Stoic, I've been suicidal since I was 12 and the only reason I'm still here is that my survival instinct has kicked in every time so far. Indefinite life extension sounds like hell tbh. I'll serve my time as long as my body refuses to die, but I do not engage in any specific effort at life extension.

PS: I vaguely get the time discount thingy. I will need to think about what it means.

Thanks for engaging! Meaning may be hard to find sometimes, but in contrast to mindless accumulation, even a bit of it (arising from cooperation/coevolution) helps to keep us (philosophically) alive sometimes.

I'm closer to an Epicurean than Stoic, but feel less suicidal as I grow older (and understand what some virtuous people before me have been searching for, why they kept searching. Which then brings bittersweet, more sweet than bitter, tears to my eyes)

Let me know if/when you get any insights into the time discount thing, especially with regards to cooperative cognition.

(One good place to start is what is meant by the global critical time in various related contexts, denoted by T in my earlier notation. E.g. can you have multiple GCTs? The plus and minus is to emphasize that the utility can be discontinuous at these points)

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