An age-old question

I will turn 42 this week.

This summer, I bought my first boat. It was a deeply humbling experience - I was quite happy not to take out a row of boat motors when trying to get out of the harbor for the first time. I didn't make it out of the harbor the first time I tried - I got to a corner, decided I wasn't quite ready to make that corner at mid-tide, and returned to try again at high tide. I'm reasonably competent now in mild weather, but I was scared those first few times out in a way I haven't been scared in a long time.

I am really appreciative of having found something that takes me back to those formative experiences of my late teens and early twenties - new adventures that shape the soul. Getting out on the ocean on a regular basis is renewing as well.

I watched my parents stop living when my brother and I graduated high school and left home. They stopped going out as much, they stopped trying new things, and in general they grew more fearful of the world as it changed around them. I vowed to never give in like this, and now that I'm at the age where I saw them stop living, I always check in and make sure I'm learning new things, and taking appropriate new risks.

I'll never be 20 again, and I don't want to be. But I'll be a 40 year old who's living each day with a similar outlook and enthusiasm as I had in my 20's.

If we truly had new frontiers in longevity, this would not be a difficult problem to resolve. It would quickly be established that people need to change their lives every 20 years or so, try new things, keep engaged with the world. People would no longer say that they are too old to go back to school and try a new career. On the contrary, instead of saving for retirement, you would save for your next iteration of schooling and doing something new for a few decades. And the awareness of the cyclical nature of the world would become a way to gain insights into how to innovate at a societal level to a much greater extent than we do now.

A few things ...

First, I'm not worried much about the integration of memory and experience of an extra 50-100 years of life into ones day to day life. If you compare the nuance and complexity of daily urban life in 2014 to, say, daily peasant life in the 15th century, it's a much, much more dramatic enlargement of "scope" than simply adding more years of current experience. I think we have every reason to suspect people will handle it just fine.

What we should worry about, or at least own up to, is that an extra 50-100 years of life is about as revolutionary to us as our current health and food security is to those 15th century peasants. Which is to say, a 15th century peasant could have had the same fantastical questions about "what in the world will people do when they have all the food they could ever want and never go hungry?".

And as we know, the answer is that most of them will just slowly eat themselves to death in front of the (tv or tv equivalent).

So perhaps we can extrapolate from there ... some small number will experience a golden age of speaking italian and learning to play harpsichord, but most will be bloated and stationary with a VR headset on.

I feel the same way he does, but I'm only 24. I'm a lot more short-tempered than I used to be, my short-term memory is quite horrible, and I take anti-inflammatories daily (mine are due to injuries from competing in track though).

I also eschew the news because it all sounds the same to me, and I don't find it particularly entertaining; on the contrary, my mood is significantly worse after reading about current events. I didn't even know what the Ferguson case was until my family started talking about it. I figure if there's something really important that's happening, it will show up in my newsfeed on Facebook.

But I definitely try to avoid routine. My family is always trying to get me to settle into one -- a predictable pattern that's followed every day -- but I'm actively trying to avoid doing that. I recall reading once that having a (boring) daily routine is the quickest way to make your life fly by. I'm not sure if it's true or not, but I've found that it seems pretty accurate for myself.

In addition to not having a routine, I try hard to stay open-minded. I've noticed that as most people become older, they become very opposed to anything that doesn't fit the worldview they've developed over the decades. It's almost disturbing to them on a psychological level if you challenge some strongly held notion about the way the world/reality works (and I've mainly quit trying. Is there really a good reason to convince an 84 year old that global warming is real?).

The antidote to this mental calcification is meditation. As I've become more skilled at meditation, I view things less through my old filters and more as they are, in this moment.

That was a very interesting read - but is there any evidence that the cognitive deficits of middle age are due to having to perform more data processing on incoming information?

It will be nice to have this problem. Several years ago, Eliezer Yudkowsky asked Aubrey de Grey about brains filling up as they age.[1] Aubrey's answer was:

AdG: "I'm not too worried about the brain getting saturated. And the main reason I'm not worried is because I'm pretty sure that even by our age, we're already forgetting old information at pretty much the same rate that we are learning new information."

EY: "What a wonderful and consoling person you are!"

AdG: "I think that's fine. I think there are ways, of course, in which we can train our brains to store more information. I'm not even sure it's a worthwhile thing to do because we have so many extracorporeal ways of storing information these days."

He goes on to back his view up with evidence such as the reminiscence bump.[2]

1. http://bloggingheads.tv/videos/1903?in=35:23 (The HTML5 video is broken. Only flash seems to work.)

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reminiscence_bump

Huh. Funny thought. I was a bitter old git in my teens and find myself mentally aging backwards: the older I get, the more I find the holes where my beliefs don't match the world, the more surprised I can enjoy being. My temper was monstrous as a little child and has mellowed out to be almost difficult to detect now.

I'm only 25 now, but in 30 years I hope to enjoy seeing all the crazy stuff I won't have successfully predicted, as well as having perpetrated some craziness myself.

>As Terry Pratchett put it, "inside every old man is an eight year old wondering bewilderedly what just happened to him."

Damn straight. Honestly, if I hit 70 or 80 without getting killed off by heart disease, stroke, cancer, or any of that stuff, and they've started reengineering human beings, I'm going to start just outright asking to be given the rough emotional and intellectual plasticity of a 10-year-old, just to feel properly comfortable again.

"Examples: getting worked up about people obstructing a sidewalk in front of me, or carelessly blowing smoke over their shoulder and into my face, walking while texting ... you know the drill."

Personally, I have found these gripes more due to socioeconomic factors rather than age. Poor people don't "sweat" the small things in life--eating and shelter become the things they worry about. As to the incessenant texting, and the smart phone stare; I think young and old find it irritating?

I not as optimistic as the original poster about reversing/slowing aging within our lifetimes. It is almost Singularity like thinking ala Kurzweil.

Stopping telomere shortening without cure for the deluge of cancers that would follow seems unlikely.

It may happen eventually for some portion of populace(think Altered Carbon like split of haves and have nots) but not within our lifetimes.

Meanwhile, I have to come to grips with my mortality as a 40+ year old who knows he will not get good at anything where he has to start from a scratch.

Very interesting and thought provoking read. Having seen one parent die recently at 94 and the other fading at 94, I've observed that they were/are both really done with life. Not in a bad way, but they had lived long full lives and were ready to move on. I agree that any advances in extending physical youth will not necessarily change this natural evolution of the mind.

What about getting destroyed by antibiotics and already having the joints and tendons of a 50+ year old but being 24 :(

why wouldn't any rejuvenation techniques we develop also apply to the brain? I'm sure we will have ways to maintain neuroplasticity and I think cognitively alive people with 70-100 years of experience will be able to make huge contributions.

Fixing senescence problem in 20 years is an extremely optimistic forecast.

There are no signs of that happening.

With every year of technical progress, life expectancy of old people is not moving up even 1 year.

Still, the read was very interesting.

First, nice to think it'll happen in time for you personally. But it won't unless a lot more people support the right lines of research over the next ten years. That means those based on repair of causes of aging, the well-cataloged and uncontroversial forms of cellular and molecular damage that distinguish old tissue from young tissue. SENS programs are the exemplar, but a lot of stem cell work and cancer offshoot research (such as senescent cell ablation) falls into the same bucket. Most present research aimed at slowing aging by altering the way in which metabolism works (such as calorie restriction mimetic drug development) is not in any way likely to lead to large extensions of healthy life span, and especially not for those people already old when it is introduced. Most research aimed at the genetics of human longevity won't do much either, as it is just more of the same road to a hard, slow, expensive re-egineering of metabolism to obtain very tiny benefits. You can't add decades to healthy human life spans in the near term without damage repair as your primary approach. It isn't hard to see why: you can repair damage or slow it down, and the former of those approaches is very much better than the latter in terms of benefits delivered and guesstimated cost of producing treatments.

Secondly, there is presently no real reason to suppose that any of the demonstrated limits to human cognitive function are caused by anything other damage: loss of neurogenesis, build up of amyloid and other waste products, progressive demyelination due to a variety of processes, white matter damage from microstrokes resulting from vascular dysfunction, and onward for dozens of other types of harm. Every aspect of memory and executive function is slowed and degraded. The detailed maps of connections between damage and dysfunction are in most cases sketches or unproven or unknown or exceedingly complicated and open to debate. But there is so much damage that it would be going out on a limb to suggest that a periodically repaired brain wouldn't just keep on going, losing the old memories and generating new ones, not filling up.

There are bodily systems that do "fill up" and where we can make good arguments that they have structural issues with long-term operation and would fall over even if every component part worked fine perpetually. The immune system, for example, in its continual assignment of memory cells for herpesviruses such as CMV, may be working as evolved but nonetheless gradually destroying its own effectiveness. That can be argued reasonably, versus it all being the consequences of damage.

But there's no reason to think that any of the brain's processes are in the same boat at this stage. There is every reason to think that dysfunction is all damage until proven otherwise.

Lastly, having the opportunity to be in good health and wrestling with a century of memories while deciding what to do next? That beats the alternatives. High class problem.

Accelerando is a really really good tech novel. http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelera...

+1 for mentioning Lene Lovich!