This story reminds me of a little-known movie called The Rapture.[1] It lacks the technological spin, but is otherwise also about a lost woman adopting a strange, cultish faith. Some religious people have taken offense at its view of Christianity, and it's obviously a low budget movie, so you have to tolerate some consequences of that, along with a bit of soft-core sex, but otherwise it's really interesting and definitely a challenging view of religion.
Transhumanists have a time-frame problem. They're very concerned with the opportunities and problems of people who are not going to be them. You must earn the right to be around to face those future challenges. As it stands, just like nearly all of the futurists of the past, they're dead, they don't get to see all the robots, flying cars and shiny clothes of 2017.
Build the future you wish to see. Biotech, the life you save may be your own.
If you like nanobots, try your hand at the white blood cell, it's pretty great at what it does. You'll get farther hacking it, than trying to build your own nanobot version. Same for trees. Pick up where nature left off. Nature's already done a pretty great job of it over the very long time it's had. Imagine the difficulty of building an artificial tree, compared to efficiently planting more.
The problem with the genetic solution of the WBCs is that they are unstable. There are plenty of cancers and diseases affecting them (including autoimmune) and the complexity is immense. Immunology is a young science still, and it is only a small part of the war on aging.
WBCs are grown and raised in a stochastic, vastly imperfect process. It might be indeed easier to build an equivalent from ground up, similar to how AI algorithms do not quite copy the neuron. Some are inspired by it, but not a copy.
If everyone expected results immediately we would be nowhere now. Typically "normal science" works incrementally with occasional flashes of insight and paradigm changes.
"there has also persisted a tradition of Christians who believed that humanity could enact the resurrection through science and technology. The first efforts of this sort were taken up by alchemists."
There has been some debate about what true goals of the alchemists were, and whether they were using religious language merely as a veil of indirection and as protection against the religious intolerance of their time. Some believe that the alchemists had religious motives, others that they were really after worldly wealth achieved through chemical means, others that they were after a psychological transformation.
The entire narrative woven by this story is certainly fascinating, but I am not persuaded by the thesis that Christians deserve all the credit for the religious strains in the transhumanist and singulitarian movements. Similar aspirations are certainly reflected in these movements, but these aspirations are shared by many religions all over the world.
Even if we limit the focus to just America, where the computer revolution could be argued to have been born, there are many religious influences outside of Christianity, such as the attraction to and adoption of Eastern religions by at least much of the American intelligencia in the 50's, 60's, and 70's around the dawn of this very computer revolution. Eastern religions have their own stories of transcendence and of humans essentially becoming gods.
I am also reminded of Eric Voegelin[1], who thought many modern movements, from Communism to Fascism, were actually gnostic in nature, and sought to transcend humanity through knowledge. Some have characterized gnostics as a "Christian sect", but in fact they may have had influences from various religions and may have predated Christianity.
Everyone talks about extending life and eventually becoming immortal, yet no one asks what happens when we are immortal. What happens when one accumulates centuries of data and witnesses numerous traumatising events?
I mean I'm 34 and I get ever more paranoid, suspicious and corrupt as I age. I can't image what 3400 years would do to my head.
Immortality is impossible. You'll die of something else if it isn't old age. Even your copies will die, and the means for making them will be destroyed at some point or succumb to entropy.
Right. Immortality is impossible without indestructibility. The mean time from birth to a fatal accident is probably around 200 years. But indestructibility is worse than mortality - imagine yourself stuck forever in a situation you can't get out of, like being accidentally buried inside a slab of concrete. What a boring life that would be!
Christ you just described the nightmare scenario I've been having since hearing the possibility of the universe being infinite, which would mean a consciousness exactly like mine is stuck under a pile of stone somewhere.
Summary of pro death arguments re: longevity progress
Fairness
Only rich people will get it. (no tech has ever done this.)
Better to give money to the poor than science. (family,city,state,nation, has proven local investment beats foreign.)
Bad for society
Dead people make more room for new, other people. (consider going first.)
Run out or resources (live people discover/extract/renew better than dead or nonexistant)
Overpopulation (colonize the seas, solar system, or have a war.)
Stop having kids
Worse wars (nukes are more dangerous than having your first 220 year old person in 2136)
Dictators never die (they die all the time and rarely of age)
Bad for individual
You'll get bored. (your memory isn't that good, or your boredom isn't age related)
You'll have to watch your loved ones die. (so you prefer they watch you?)
You'll live forever in a terrible state. (longevity requires robustness.)
Against gods will (not if he disallows suicide, then it is required.)
More people make more progress faster. I'm glad my parents didn't decide the world would be prettier or work better without me in it. Einstein, Bell, Tesla, Da Vinci etc, still alive and productive would be nice. Many literally asking for others to die out of their fear. The burden should be higher. Have courage. If living longer sucks, we'll know 100 years from now, and decide then. First 220 year old in 2136 unless you know how to make one faster than 1 year per year? And that's if you added 120 years to a 100 year old person starting TODAY.
Man up, save your family, save yourself.
P.S. Curing aging isn't immortality. You die at 600 on average by accident, and if the parade of imaginary horribles comes true, even earlier.
> it's 2017, and despite all our impressive progress, we still [haven't solved x]
People tend to think that [current year] is super late and advanced in the history of the world, and seem to infer from that impression that things that haven't been solved yet are unlikely to be solved. The germ theory of disease is about 150 years old; practical uses for electricity are just over 100; powered flight is just over 100; not using horses as primary transportation is the same; etc. Now is early in the possible history of discovery. There remain hundreds of thousands of important things we don't understand, or even know about, yet.
Besides which, we are talking about a hypothetical future in which we have solved aging; to suppose that future would exist without comparably revolutionary advances in intimately connected biological problems like cancer and dementia is odd.
I think your line of argument is more odd than his. We've discovered antibiotics, and promptly created superbugs. We've gotten rid of horses, and promptly replaced horse poo with PM2.5. We've domesticated plants and animals, and promptly been rewarded with smaller brains, worse bodies, and mass extinction of fellow inhabitants of this planet.
If you believe we're doggedly and linearly solving Problems Humanity Faces one at a time, and that techno-utopia is around the corner, I think that's mistaken. We continue to remain blind to unforeseen consequences, and it is unclear to me that we'll figure them all out before we wipe ourselves off of the face of the earth.
My first argument was that, in a hypothetical future world which had solved aging, it would be likely they would have also solved cancer, dementia, etc.
My second argument was that our current moment in time is not likely to be near the end of the possible tech tree, that large advances in technical knowledge and ability are very likely still in front of us, and that therefore it doesn't make sense to argue that if by now we haven't already solved [x,y] then we probably never will.
Your argument seems to be that we don't fully understand the unintended consequences of our inventions, and that there's a distinct possibility that some of those unintended consequences may cause us to go extinct before we get smart enough to stop making those kinds of errors.
I agree with that argument. I don't see any conflict between your point and my point - just between your point and some claim I didn't make about techno-utopia being just around the corner.
Some kind of "techno-utopia" does seem like a possible future, but not necessarily a probable one. I don't know if we'll make it there. We're not reasonable enough, maybe. And one of the ways in which we're unreasonable is that we tend to read into our opponents' arguments things they didn't say and impute to them beliefs we don't have evidence that they hold. That isn't helpful, and on the large scale it's distinctly harmful - it's a major part of the political polarization and divisiveness that is dragging down our collective ability to cooperate and come to reasonable compromises.
I interpreted the OP's comment to refer to the article's theme of consciousness transfer/ascension rather than countering the effects of aging, which as you point out is different.
In that context many of these arguments seem moot. Even the idea that "More people make more progress faster" becomes speculative as "people" would no longer be constrained by genetics to specific distributions of neurons.
Why do you include Einstein, Bell, Tesla, and Da Vinci while not mentioning the likes of Hitler, Stalin, and Genghis Khan?
I am not so optimisitic about what life extension and other technologies that transhumanists get excited about would mean for humanity. I am reminded of Douglas Adams:
"Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all
barriers to communication between different races and cultures,
has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the
history of creation."
> persecution, unwarranted jealousy, or exaggerated self-importance
Which aspect do you feel is manifesting?
What the years (59) have taught me is other people very RARELY care enough about anyone else to persecute them.
My desire for physical things has lessened significantly, since unless you have an extreme amount of money, more things just complicate life more. As for self importance, I want to contribute to making life better for mankind, but I don't think a lot of being recognized for it.
Suspicious is just being wise as long as it doesn't rule your life.
Corruption is a choice you make in order to have more physical things or feel more important.
I feel every year makes me wiser and increases my desire to help mankind.
Maybe we need to have a test at 100 years, and cull the self important, corrupt individuals.
I personally would love 3400 years! All the things I could learn, all that I could contribute.
"What the years (59) have taught me is other people very RARELY care enough about anyone else to persecute them."
The Holocaust. Pogroms. Pol Pot. China's Cultural Revolution. Wars without number (often for racial or ethnic reasons). Genocides. The Inquisition. Witch-hunts. Lynchings. Jim Crow laws. Slavery. McCarthyism. Homophobia. Hate crime. Anti-immigrant xenophobic policies. The racist War on Drugs.
The list goes on and on. I see persecution everywhere, and many, many people all too eager to take part.
What you cite is not the persecution of an individual, but persecution of class'es of people. I totally agree that exists, and with nationalism growing, becomes a greater risk in the world. I was talking individual persecution.
Also, what about your perception of time? Would it pass the same as it does now? Compress or expand?
I think mortality is fundamentally wired into the thought processes of earth bound organisms. Part of that is how one perceives even smaller units of time like a minute, second, hour..
I dread that in all likelihood, due to their money, power, and determination, it is kleptocrats, sociopaths, and fanatics that may get access to this or other advanced technology first, and come to dominate either the "left-behind", primitive humans, and/or whatever form of existence they transcend to.
True but then again we are all most certainly descendants of rapists and murderers.
Point being, life apparently doesn't care much about situational and human derived ethics. And that's what got us here. So what gets us there may not be according to values of our culture and time.
>Everyone talks about extending life and eventually becoming immortal, yet no one asks what happens when we are immortal.
I see the opposite picture when these discussions pop up: everybody tries to find a downside in increased lifespan, be it personal or social. It looks like a pretty obvious defense of status-quo to me.
What is really-really sad and what really bothers me is that this attitude is so prevalent in the modern West, when the West is the only society on planet Earth that has knowledge and resources to make some version of life extension happen. Other parts of the world are de-facto firmly in the survival mode.
The societal problems this would exacerbate are already very hard to fix. It's not that the status quo is good, but immortality is solving a non-problem that may make the real problems intractable.
I think a lot of it is rationalization. People figure they are going to die and so the brain comes up with reasons to rationalize why it should be so - extended life must suck and so on. I find it a little sad too but I think attitudes will change if it becomes real.
There're likely to be some structural issues with human neurology - things like Alzheimers, but software-level bit rot or overfitting instead of physical failure - that will need to be addressed as part of immortality science. For example, we'll likely need to tweak our brains' hard-coded exploration/exploitation tuning so people don't end up stagnating or ossifying and not being able to appreciate the future. Trauma is somewhat related here; suicide, and the mental health issues that lead to it, is just as valid immortality-research topics as cancer and general senescence.
Summary: "Immortality" isn't just anti-aging. Mental health and intellectual extensibility are just as important to immortality as oncology.
But...why? What possible good could come out of immortality? Why do we never stop to ask "why" anymore? The trite "Just because we can..." thing is irritating but true.
My utopian vision doesn't involve millenia-old people everywhere. It involves a smaller world population that succeeds in leaving ever smaller footprints on the planet and living in harmony with other creatures.
If brain function does not degrade it's obvious that more experience to draw upon means better decisions. Hence voting age etc. Maybe others assume those decisions will be net detrimental to others but I don't. Who is anyone else to decide who survives anyway?
Agree completely. Renewal has been central to the development of the world. So unless people are able to reset their mindsets at intervals, all we'll get is curmudgeonly old people set in their ways --few sons or daughters questioning the status quo and overthrowing their mothers' and fathers' thinking.
I think that curmudgeonly mindset sets in due to your physical deterioration and hormonal changes. You'd be grumpy too simply getting up out of a chair causes you pain.
If life extension reverses / resets aging at the cellular level and you have the endocrine system of a 20 year old , it is likely that one could retain a youthful mindset. I think people overestimate the significance of experience and underestimate how your body's chemicals regulate your mood.
One of the big problems is that death happens to a wealth redistributing event. Imagine being a billionaire who can live forever, collecting rent indefinitely..
The book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom explores some of the issues that could occur if we achieve immortality.
People regularly perform backups of their mind. In the case of death or injury or illness, a new body is grown and their backup is restored into a new body.
It also presents interesting solutions to currency/wealth and what happens when life gets boring when you can live forever.
People regularly perform backups of their mind. In the
case of death or injury or illness, a new body is grown
and their backup is restored into a new body.
...
and their backup is restored into a new body.
Well, yeah, of course you'd want that. Because it's just SO reassuring to know that even if you die, an identical twin can pick up where you left off.
What a relief, to know that something that looks like you, can keep listening to your favorite bands, wearing your clothes, eating the same favorite foods, and having the same opinions about the world after you die.
Me? If I had a brain back-up, and they could grow a copy of my body in a vat... Why, I'd just run around fighting lions with my bare hands, and wrestling hungry sharks in the ocean. Who cares if I get completely eaten and digested?
The new copy can pick up where I left off, and just beat up whichever animal ate me!
I don't care about my duplicate. I only care about whether my current consciousness continues. I don't think so highly of myself that there needs to be duplicates running around. Maybe Elon Musk or Ray Kurzweil feel differently.
Still if you get knocked unconscious or even sleep who's to say if that's the current consciousness or a new copy.
One of Kurzweil's projects is he wants to resurrect his dad because he misses him. Making copies kind of makes more sense if they interact with others rather than a brain in a vat type scenario.
Also, and I know this may sound crazy, but what if we are already immortal? If consciousness doesn't come from the brain, or if other theories like quantum immortality are real, then this could be the case.
Vernor Vinge had a talk related to what if the singularity doesn't happen, he said people in that future would call the current era the Age of Failed Dreams.
This kind of philosophy revolves around a theoretically unlimited supply of resources, wealth, time, and of course a completely frictionless society.
"Immortality" will eventually be possible in the form of biotech, given enough time with uninterrupted technological and medical progress. But before that happens we're going to be torn apart, either by our own humanity (nuclear war, politics/religion, pollution, overfishing, antibiotic resistance, etc) or nature (new ice age, giant meteor, etc).
We can't even agree on why the seas are rising, much less decide to do anything about it. And these people think we're going to evolve? Not if we drown in ignorance first.
But really, transhumanism is common sense. You see a problem and you fix it. That inevitably leads to the end of suffering, which requires medical control of aging, complete control of the biosphere, comprehensive neurotechnology, and so forth. The only open question is how long it all takes to run through the development pipeline.
If longevity-assurance technologies existed, everyone would use them as a matter of course, just like people go to the doctor when they are sick, take vitamins, and go for flu shots. We're in a strange part of history at the moment, transitioning from a state of abject technological poverty, unable to affect our environment, to a state of technological wealth in which all of these items - aging, intelligence, the human condition - are becoming malleable. All of the mental and philosophical architecture put in place to enable people not to go mad in the face of death and limitations will come crumbling down, but not without a fight.
Humans are nothing if not conservative at root, and all change is fought. Not an advantage in an age of vastly beneficial change, but it is what it is until the human mind changes.
59 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 52.1 ms ] thread[1] - https://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/The-Rapture/60034962
Build the future you wish to see. Biotech, the life you save may be your own.
If you like nanobots, try your hand at the white blood cell, it's pretty great at what it does. You'll get farther hacking it, than trying to build your own nanobot version. Same for trees. Pick up where nature left off. Nature's already done a pretty great job of it over the very long time it's had. Imagine the difficulty of building an artificial tree, compared to efficiently planting more.
WBCs are grown and raised in a stochastic, vastly imperfect process. It might be indeed easier to build an equivalent from ground up, similar to how AI algorithms do not quite copy the neuron. Some are inspired by it, but not a copy.
If everyone expected results immediately we would be nowhere now. Typically "normal science" works incrementally with occasional flashes of insight and paradigm changes.
There has been some debate about what true goals of the alchemists were, and whether they were using religious language merely as a veil of indirection and as protection against the religious intolerance of their time. Some believe that the alchemists had religious motives, others that they were really after worldly wealth achieved through chemical means, others that they were after a psychological transformation.
The entire narrative woven by this story is certainly fascinating, but I am not persuaded by the thesis that Christians deserve all the credit for the religious strains in the transhumanist and singulitarian movements. Similar aspirations are certainly reflected in these movements, but these aspirations are shared by many religions all over the world.
Even if we limit the focus to just America, where the computer revolution could be argued to have been born, there are many religious influences outside of Christianity, such as the attraction to and adoption of Eastern religions by at least much of the American intelligencia in the 50's, 60's, and 70's around the dawn of this very computer revolution. Eastern religions have their own stories of transcendence and of humans essentially becoming gods.
I am also reminded of Eric Voegelin[1], who thought many modern movements, from Communism to Fascism, were actually gnostic in nature, and sought to transcend humanity through knowledge. Some have characterized gnostics as a "Christian sect", but in fact they may have had influences from various religions and may have predated Christianity.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Voegelin
I mean I'm 34 and I get ever more paranoid, suspicious and corrupt as I age. I can't image what 3400 years would do to my head.
Almost like a partial reset or wipe of ourselves ?
Man up, save your family, save yourself.
P.S. Curing aging isn't immortality. You die at 600 on average by accident, and if the parade of imaginary horribles comes true, even earlier.
People tend to think that [current year] is super late and advanced in the history of the world, and seem to infer from that impression that things that haven't been solved yet are unlikely to be solved. The germ theory of disease is about 150 years old; practical uses for electricity are just over 100; powered flight is just over 100; not using horses as primary transportation is the same; etc. Now is early in the possible history of discovery. There remain hundreds of thousands of important things we don't understand, or even know about, yet.
Besides which, we are talking about a hypothetical future in which we have solved aging; to suppose that future would exist without comparably revolutionary advances in intimately connected biological problems like cancer and dementia is odd.
If you believe we're doggedly and linearly solving Problems Humanity Faces one at a time, and that techno-utopia is around the corner, I think that's mistaken. We continue to remain blind to unforeseen consequences, and it is unclear to me that we'll figure them all out before we wipe ourselves off of the face of the earth.
My second argument was that our current moment in time is not likely to be near the end of the possible tech tree, that large advances in technical knowledge and ability are very likely still in front of us, and that therefore it doesn't make sense to argue that if by now we haven't already solved [x,y] then we probably never will.
Your argument seems to be that we don't fully understand the unintended consequences of our inventions, and that there's a distinct possibility that some of those unintended consequences may cause us to go extinct before we get smart enough to stop making those kinds of errors.
I agree with that argument. I don't see any conflict between your point and my point - just between your point and some claim I didn't make about techno-utopia being just around the corner.
Some kind of "techno-utopia" does seem like a possible future, but not necessarily a probable one. I don't know if we'll make it there. We're not reasonable enough, maybe. And one of the ways in which we're unreasonable is that we tend to read into our opponents' arguments things they didn't say and impute to them beliefs we don't have evidence that they hold. That isn't helpful, and on the large scale it's distinctly harmful - it's a major part of the political polarization and divisiveness that is dragging down our collective ability to cooperate and come to reasonable compromises.
In that context many of these arguments seem moot. Even the idea that "More people make more progress faster" becomes speculative as "people" would no longer be constrained by genetics to specific distributions of neurons.
I am not so optimisitic about what life extension and other technologies that transhumanists get excited about would mean for humanity. I am reminded of Douglas Adams:
Maybe that is because of the time pressure?
I guess we will be doing the same just on a different scale, e.g. most of us will be chasing money, power and status
Which aspect do you feel is manifesting?
What the years (59) have taught me is other people very RARELY care enough about anyone else to persecute them.
My desire for physical things has lessened significantly, since unless you have an extreme amount of money, more things just complicate life more. As for self importance, I want to contribute to making life better for mankind, but I don't think a lot of being recognized for it.
Suspicious is just being wise as long as it doesn't rule your life.
Corruption is a choice you make in order to have more physical things or feel more important.
I feel every year makes me wiser and increases my desire to help mankind.
Maybe we need to have a test at 100 years, and cull the self important, corrupt individuals.
I personally would love 3400 years! All the things I could learn, all that I could contribute.
Edit: I MIGHT even learn spelling and grammer!
The Holocaust. Pogroms. Pol Pot. China's Cultural Revolution. Wars without number (often for racial or ethnic reasons). Genocides. The Inquisition. Witch-hunts. Lynchings. Jim Crow laws. Slavery. McCarthyism. Homophobia. Hate crime. Anti-immigrant xenophobic policies. The racist War on Drugs.
The list goes on and on. I see persecution everywhere, and many, many people all too eager to take part.
I think mortality is fundamentally wired into the thought processes of earth bound organisms. Part of that is how one perceives even smaller units of time like a minute, second, hour..
Point being, life apparently doesn't care much about situational and human derived ethics. And that's what got us here. So what gets us there may not be according to values of our culture and time.
I see the opposite picture when these discussions pop up: everybody tries to find a downside in increased lifespan, be it personal or social. It looks like a pretty obvious defense of status-quo to me.
What is really-really sad and what really bothers me is that this attitude is so prevalent in the modern West, when the West is the only society on planet Earth that has knowledge and resources to make some version of life extension happen. Other parts of the world are de-facto firmly in the survival mode.
Summary: "Immortality" isn't just anti-aging. Mental health and intellectual extensibility are just as important to immortality as oncology.
My utopian vision doesn't involve millenia-old people everywhere. It involves a smaller world population that succeeds in leaving ever smaller footprints on the planet and living in harmony with other creatures.
Renewal would be more or less dead.
If life extension reverses / resets aging at the cellular level and you have the endocrine system of a 20 year old , it is likely that one could retain a youthful mindset. I think people overestimate the significance of experience and underestimate how your body's chemicals regulate your mood.
People regularly perform backups of their mind. In the case of death or injury or illness, a new body is grown and their backup is restored into a new body.
It also presents interesting solutions to currency/wealth and what happens when life gets boring when you can live forever.
What a relief, to know that something that looks like you, can keep listening to your favorite bands, wearing your clothes, eating the same favorite foods, and having the same opinions about the world after you die.
Me? If I had a brain back-up, and they could grow a copy of my body in a vat... Why, I'd just run around fighting lions with my bare hands, and wrestling hungry sharks in the ocean. Who cares if I get completely eaten and digested?
The new copy can pick up where I left off, and just beat up whichever animal ate me!
One of Kurzweil's projects is he wants to resurrect his dad because he misses him. Making copies kind of makes more sense if they interact with others rather than a brain in a vat type scenario.
It's nice to dream, but it's in the realm of visiting other star systems at this point.
"Immortality" will eventually be possible in the form of biotech, given enough time with uninterrupted technological and medical progress. But before that happens we're going to be torn apart, either by our own humanity (nuclear war, politics/religion, pollution, overfishing, antibiotic resistance, etc) or nature (new ice age, giant meteor, etc).
We can't even agree on why the seas are rising, much less decide to do anything about it. And these people think we're going to evolve? Not if we drown in ignorance first.
https://www.exratione.com/2017/04/blind-upon-the-eve-of-apot...
But really, transhumanism is common sense. You see a problem and you fix it. That inevitably leads to the end of suffering, which requires medical control of aging, complete control of the biosphere, comprehensive neurotechnology, and so forth. The only open question is how long it all takes to run through the development pipeline.
If longevity-assurance technologies existed, everyone would use them as a matter of course, just like people go to the doctor when they are sick, take vitamins, and go for flu shots. We're in a strange part of history at the moment, transitioning from a state of abject technological poverty, unable to affect our environment, to a state of technological wealth in which all of these items - aging, intelligence, the human condition - are becoming malleable. All of the mental and philosophical architecture put in place to enable people not to go mad in the face of death and limitations will come crumbling down, but not without a fight.
Humans are nothing if not conservative at root, and all change is fought. Not an advantage in an age of vastly beneficial change, but it is what it is until the human mind changes.