> Bryan Johnson is an interesting case here. If you take the longevity project to its logical end, you get someone who's stopped living in order to keep living - for the most part not eating food he enjoys, not drinking, not doing anything spontaneous, all in service of more years.
I never understand this type of critique of Johnson. It's framed like he's suffering daily for his project, but the guy sounds happy as a clam - especially contrasted with his pre-Blueprint podcast with Lex Fridman.
Perhaps he is happy. In my personal experience, people who aim to tackle these kinds of large problems do so out of an inability to let go and accept life as it is. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but founders tended to be some of the most unhappy and unsettled people I have known in my life, they were just really good at channeling that lack of acceptance into their work and lives.
My hope for anyone who dedicates their lives to this kind of work are able to let go if they reach their deathbed without a solution, because if they can't, that would be a deeply painful way to leave this world.
He’s going to spend the remainder of his life obsessing over something he cannot control, and then he’s going to die at a normal age (or probably earlier) any way
Agreed on Bryan Johnson. Before I actually watched a bit of his content, I just thought he had nutjob vibes and looked weird. No offense intended, if possible.
But honestly he just seems like a guy enjoying a fun project. He seems calm and happy in his videos.
Barring any hidden issues with chronic depression, it would be unlikely that he's unhappy. He's very well off financially, has a nice beautiful girlfriend who's with him in his journey, he sleeps a ton, works out, eats well and in general experiments with life.
People see him living a lifestyle without the "necessary" vices they have gotten accustomed to in their own, and it confuses them. They can't conceive the notion that a man can still be perfectly happy and abundant without those Pavlovian indulgences, because they have never known a world without them.
In sum, the author proclaims that without human death, nothing people do has a time limit so people wouldn't have any incentive to do.
But this is false - even if we were a sovereign observer only, the universe is constantly changing and evolving, species go extinct, the seasons are never the same. And we are not just observers, we are also actors - we have opportunities to create today which will not be available in the future. You cannot create the Internet today, it already happened. You cannot spend arbitrary time traveling to and fro across the galaxy to talk to friends, the molten iron geyser you wanted to see at Betelgeuse will no longer be running by the time you get there. Perhaps time motivates us, but our death is not the only thing which limits time.
I've had this (often drunken) conversation many times, I think mortality is fundamentally ingrained in not just the human condition, but the fabric of our universe. Without the finality of death, life seems to lose its meaning. Not only do we need to die, we are compelled to die, we should die. This memento mori makes every day, ironically, worth living. One of my favorite verses from the Bible is Job 1:21, where he somehow reconciles this tragic finality with trascendent faith:
“Naked I came from my mother’s womb,
and naked I will depart.
The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away;
may the name of the Lord be praised.”
> mortality is fundamentally ingrained in not just the human condition, but the fabric of our universe
church fathers say that creation fell because of the fall of man
> Without the finality of death, life seems to lose its meaning. Not only do we need to die, we are compelled to die, we should die
deadlines help. the soul is eternal and there is a deadline for the body
> [Job] somehow reconciles this tragic finality with transcendent faith
he later falls into despair when things get worse, who wouldn’t, but he is made well after he is humbled. this golden moment of humility forges him into a true person, winning him heaven not death
“If you die before you die, then when you die you won’t die.“ Death to the world is the last true rebellion.[1]
The author talks about the how the certainty of death ultimately coming to all of us (sooner or later), gives us drive.
In terms socio economic issues of immortality, the Altered Carbon books (or the first season on Netflix), paint a somewhat bleak picture how immortality makes the rich and powerful even more privileged. Not to say it’s all bleak, but I would certainly say it’s dystopian overall.
One guy with a tendency to procrastinate extrapolates his expierence as a universal truth without providing any grounding.
Cool man, don't try and live forever.
Maybe people who haven't had their innate curiosity beaten out of them will get more resources to explore.
I just can't help seeing the same moral panic in this as I see in arguments against UBI.
It's like how many people with fuck you money have you met? I would say: "Trust me, humans do just fine without external deadlines or want." but it only takes like 30 seconds to find countless real people whose lives trivially destroy the whole line of argument.
How about this obvious counter point, making long term, 100 year research investments makes way more sense to any person who has the chance to see them pay off.
Right now this type of longterm thinking has only a few hive entities (RCC, governments, research labs) who can operate this way and we'd get a lot more exploring done if we can enable whatever percentage of the population was born with unbound curiosity to explore to their merriment.
Bah, nah, I’ll take immortality thanks. I want to see where it all goes.
I do think there’s a risk of societal stagnation if we all stick around forever. But, maybe we can make a deal—if we all end up immortal, we can make a threshold, maybe even as young as 80 or something, and have people retire and stop voting at that point. Let society stay vivacious, sure. Give us an end point for our toils, definitely, and a deadline for our projects.
Put us in computers. We’ll stick around as digital ancestor spirits. Just to see how it goes.
Being stuck in a computer might not be so bad. "Wake up" once a year decade for a few hours, see what happened, go back to "sleep". Immortality on call.
> Put us in computers. We’ll stick around as digital ancestor spirits. Just to see how it goes.
It's cute to think that simply creating some digital representation of us would be a solution to such a problem when one of the founders of the internet has spoken at length about the dangers of hardware compatibility and media obsolescence putting much of today's data at risk from being inaccessible tomorrow.[0]
Nothing, and I mean nothing, is immune to the decay of time.
whenever I imagine immortality en masse I imagine the hobbies that people started experimenting with after exposure to the concept of deathlessness in the short story 'The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect'.
that story is flawed for a lot of reasons, but it's interesting to explore what happens if death is essentially conquered.
it's hard to judge whether or not society as depicted in that story stagnated.. but it was wholly different.
It's a fascinating book indeed, just finished the second chapter, and it is surprisingly accurate in many regards of AI representation, given it's from 1994. Will read on, thank you
I feel like this is a modern version of believing in souls. You are matter, not data. If you find a way to simulate yourself on a computer, this will not prevent you from experiencing death. And if that's the case, what's the point? Stroking your ego with the knowledge that a simulation of you will stick around for some time after you give up the ghost?
I think it's the opposite. Believing that something special exists in brains that can't in be replicated in a (sufficiently complex) computer is spirituality, a belief in the supernatural.
> I do think there’s a risk of societal stagnation if we all stick around forever. But, maybe we can make a deal—if we all end up immortal, we can make a threshold, maybe even as young as 80 or something, and have people retire and stop voting at that point. Let society stay vivacious, sure. Give us an end point for our toils, definitely, and a deadline for our projects.
> And here's what I've been circling around: I think the only reason any of this is true is because of death. Without that horizon, we could defer everything indefinitely. Why start the difficult journey today when you have infinite tomorrows? Just as you "remember your death" to really live life, perhaps we need the deadline to do the work at all. Death is what pulls us out of pure consumption and into pursuit. You could call it "just a deadline", but I disagree. It's what makes us begin.
I'm not sure it's transparently bad that we could defer everything indefinitely. Why would that matter? Also, it's not certain that we would. Perhaps we would get very bored and then be spurred to action.
Immortality is absolutely not compatible with our current capitalistic social system. Whenever you see startups and rich guys financing research in that domain, there is never any talk about giving it away to hoi polloi like you and me. Death is the last economic redistribution system still standing - and when you see they are doing everything they can to nullify any inheritance tax, you can imagine they don't intend to give away anything - fortune, position, power - once they become immortal.
And imagine the North Korean or Russian dictators (or American "President") having access to the technology.
There have been many, many stories over the millenia that try to empart the wisdom that mortality is necessary. Some present it as being a gift.
I don't think any one source made it click for me, but I think some combination of watching The Good Place, Sandman, and a lot of Black Mirror got me really stretching my imagination of what it would feel like to be truly immortal. I had a moment that felt like my horizons had been expanded very slightly when I felt this severe dread for maybe half a second. A feeling of being inescapably trapped.
There's also this PC game called The Coin Game that's just a solo-dev making lots of arcade games. They exist on an island where you have a home and some hobbies and a few arcades and I think even a mall. But the entire island is devoid of humanity. There's just a bunch of robots. I don't know if the game has a backstory, but the one my brain filled in is that this is a sort of playground for you to live in forever... and it's got a San Junipero feel, but far more bleak. Gave me the chills. I'm happy to be mortal.
It seems absurd to argue that death is necessary or good when there is exactly zero experience with the alternative.
Imagine a society where everyone has a ball and chain permanently attached from birth. It would be just a part of life. Some thinkers might write articles about how much better things would be if a way could be found to get rid of the ball and chain. Others would come up with arguments for why the ball and chain is actually good, or even necessary. The limitation on movement gives life a purpose. The resistance helps build strength.
Looking at such a society from the outside, we'd find the latter arguments ludicrous. How can it possibly be better to stuck with a major physical restriction your entire life? If anyone said we should start doing this to all our children, they'd be run out of town.
If humanity does solve the problem of death, I doubt it will be absolute, in any case. Aging might be stopped, maybe added resistance to disease and injury, but nothing is going to allow you to survive hugging a detonating nuclear bomb, or any number of other physically extreme events. If you decide forever is not for you, then you'd be able to make that choice.
> watching The Good Place… I had a moment that felt like my horizons had been expanded very slightly when I felt this severe dread for maybe half a second. A feeling of being inescapably trapped.
Most of those stories are just sour grapes. Dying has been the biggest fear for all of history for most people, and especially back then people were losing their family and friends at young ages.
You have to have some kind of belief in that situation that dying has a special purpose, or something happens after you die so that you’re rewarded.
It’s the same as the suffering of a medieval peasant, which they thought was so important. Nowadays we have eliminated that. Was it really giving them such an important meaning and rich life? No, they just thought it did to cope.
Besides, even if we cured aging it wouldn’t mean we’re trapped living forever, you’d be guaranteed to get killed some other way anyway.
>You can see this in retirement, actually. There's real data showing mortality spikes in the years after people stop working. The structure of striving, even when it felt like a burden, was providing something that leisure alone can't replace. People who stop pursuing things often just... decline.
Or maybe people stop working because their health was declining?
Not the argument I expected. I'm also against people living forever, but more because it's a way for society to go forward and get rid of old ways of thinking. There's a saying that science advances one death at a time. And can you imagine a world where current leaders are still in power 1000 years later? Or where the leaders of 1000 years ago were still in charge? Whenever I hear people talk about living forever I think of how it'd be something tech billionaires and autocrats would use to oppress us forever. No thanks.
Two major counterpoints, the second borrowed from de Grey.
1. I am young enough that a sense of mortality is not a true motivation to start things now. While I know about my mortality, I do not, in the visceral sense, believe it. My motivation to start things now instead of later is to experience the rewards sooner, not a foreboding panic of losing finite time. I suspect this is true for at least very many people.
2. The argument doesn’t survive a simple inversion test. Let’s concede every single disadvantage immortality might bring— lack of motivation, innovation, housing. Suppose we already live in that world. Would a reasonable solution be to introduce a massive, rolling holocaust (i.e. introduce into this world the concept of death)?
Would a reasonable solution be to introduce a massive, rolling holocaust (i.e. introduce into this world the concept of death)?
And not only death, but aging. Even if that society decided (wrongly IMO) that nobody should live longer than 100 years, it would be insane to enforce that by making everyone's bodies and minds deteriorate over several decades.
I don't think there are is an issue with finding ways to extend life. But there is an issue with people clinging to life out of attachment; part of getting older is accepting change & the flow of things.
You might start questioning meaning of life with a billion year time budget. A million years seems reasonable to cover the range of things you could anticipate wanting to learn or experience. A few thousand years, no, that's not enough, you have to start cutting corners, you can barely even visit nearby worlds and only cover a few intellectual disciplines.
To me the "revelation" came via Emil Cioran's book "The inconvenience of being born" (the actual book's title in English is "The Trouble with Being Born", but I like better the term that's closer to the French original). Excellent justification.
I don't see how any sort of immortality can be supported by the infrastructure of the world. It's based on people dying, civilization has factored it in. How could you manage resources for populations that never disappeared? No immortal organism exists, I'm pretty sure Darwin already solved this question for us.
The punishment for crimes in Altered Carbon was sending you to a far enough future so you know nothing and no one. With age you get alienated in a similar way, maybe adding (lack of) understanding on the mix. Your brain have limits, your adaptability have limits, your physiology have limits, pushing them forward doesn't take them out. Eventually you get tired, bored, or want to get out. At least speaking about most and not special cases (I hope).
And having a simulation of ourselves in a different media is a different game.
Then there'd always be the risk of a gigantic asteroid hitting the earth.
Stuff like that.
Which makes me wonder: if there was no more aging and no more illness and accidents and terror attacks / crimes were basically the only way to die, how would society deal with those?
I take we'd focus on preventing accidents / safety even more? For at the moment there's definitely some "we're not going to live forever anyway, so it's just bad luck if an accident happens".
And what about suicide? Taking your life when you're going to die anyway is one thing, taking it out when you're near immortal is something else altogether.
Let's say you can rebuild telomeres while curing cancer and keeping arterial walls healthy, and even prevent the physical aspects of dementia or Alzheimer's. Who's to say that an immortal human can retain consciousness, let alone sanity? What would be the psychology of an ancient being? What happens to its memories, how could it recall anything from centuries past? And, as sometimes explored horror and science fiction, how would such a creature retain its humanity rather than becoming a hedonistic, nihilistic misanthrope that considers itself beyond petty morality?
Interesting, but I disagree with the main premise. I am currently not motivated not because of my coming death but because I am frustrated when things are bad. More time would give me more time to be frustrated. I simply don't think that things will be great or boring just because a lot of time passes. Things change at a speed that adaption alone can occupy any one of us forever.
This resonates with me. Too much of anything loses value. This includes life. If there's no death, it would take special individuals to make sense out of it.
95 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 103 ms ] threadI never understand this type of critique of Johnson. It's framed like he's suffering daily for his project, but the guy sounds happy as a clam - especially contrasted with his pre-Blueprint podcast with Lex Fridman.
Seems like he's doing something right.
My hope for anyone who dedicates their lives to this kind of work are able to let go if they reach their deathbed without a solution, because if they can't, that would be a deeply painful way to leave this world.
He’s going to spend the remainder of his life obsessing over something he cannot control, and then he’s going to die at a normal age (or probably earlier) any way
But honestly he just seems like a guy enjoying a fun project. He seems calm and happy in his videos.
Barring any hidden issues with chronic depression, it would be unlikely that he's unhappy. He's very well off financially, has a nice beautiful girlfriend who's with him in his journey, he sleeps a ton, works out, eats well and in general experiments with life.
But this is false - even if we were a sovereign observer only, the universe is constantly changing and evolving, species go extinct, the seasons are never the same. And we are not just observers, we are also actors - we have opportunities to create today which will not be available in the future. You cannot create the Internet today, it already happened. You cannot spend arbitrary time traveling to and fro across the galaxy to talk to friends, the molten iron geyser you wanted to see at Betelgeuse will no longer be running by the time you get there. Perhaps time motivates us, but our death is not the only thing which limits time.
church fathers say that creation fell because of the fall of man
> Without the finality of death, life seems to lose its meaning. Not only do we need to die, we are compelled to die, we should die
deadlines help. the soul is eternal and there is a deadline for the body
> [Job] somehow reconciles this tragic finality with transcendent faith
he later falls into despair when things get worse, who wouldn’t, but he is made well after he is humbled. this golden moment of humility forges him into a true person, winning him heaven not death
“If you die before you die, then when you die you won’t die.“ Death to the world is the last true rebellion.[1]
[1]: https://deathtotheworld.com
In terms socio economic issues of immortality, the Altered Carbon books (or the first season on Netflix), paint a somewhat bleak picture how immortality makes the rich and powerful even more privileged. Not to say it’s all bleak, but I would certainly say it’s dystopian overall.
Cool man, don't try and live forever.
Maybe people who haven't had their innate curiosity beaten out of them will get more resources to explore.
I just can't help seeing the same moral panic in this as I see in arguments against UBI.
It's like how many people with fuck you money have you met? I would say: "Trust me, humans do just fine without external deadlines or want." but it only takes like 30 seconds to find countless real people whose lives trivially destroy the whole line of argument.
How about this obvious counter point, making long term, 100 year research investments makes way more sense to any person who has the chance to see them pay off.
Right now this type of longterm thinking has only a few hive entities (RCC, governments, research labs) who can operate this way and we'd get a lot more exploring done if we can enable whatever percentage of the population was born with unbound curiosity to explore to their merriment.
I do think there’s a risk of societal stagnation if we all stick around forever. But, maybe we can make a deal—if we all end up immortal, we can make a threshold, maybe even as young as 80 or something, and have people retire and stop voting at that point. Let society stay vivacious, sure. Give us an end point for our toils, definitely, and a deadline for our projects.
Put us in computers. We’ll stick around as digital ancestor spirits. Just to see how it goes.
Unfortunately, that's only available for premium max customers. Also you should know, plus is now standard.
It's cute to think that simply creating some digital representation of us would be a solution to such a problem when one of the founders of the internet has spoken at length about the dangers of hardware compatibility and media obsolescence putting much of today's data at risk from being inaccessible tomorrow.[0]
Nothing, and I mean nothing, is immune to the decay of time.
0: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/02/13/386000092...
that story is flawed for a lot of reasons, but it's interesting to explore what happens if death is essentially conquered.
it's hard to judge whether or not society as depicted in that story stagnated.. but it was wholly different.
I feel like this is a modern version of believing in souls. You are matter, not data. If you find a way to simulate yourself on a computer, this will not prevent you from experiencing death. And if that's the case, what's the point? Stroking your ego with the knowledge that a simulation of you will stick around for some time after you give up the ghost?
How do you feel about dying when your betters won't have to?
Your idea obviously doesn't work. You're basically advocating for something like Chronic lymphocyte leukemia at the society level (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_lymphocytic_leukemia).
I'm not sure it's transparently bad that we could defer everything indefinitely. Why would that matter? Also, it's not certain that we would. Perhaps we would get very bored and then be spurred to action.
And imagine the North Korean or Russian dictators (or American "President") having access to the technology.
I'll take eternal life even if Putin gets it, thanks
I don't think any one source made it click for me, but I think some combination of watching The Good Place, Sandman, and a lot of Black Mirror got me really stretching my imagination of what it would feel like to be truly immortal. I had a moment that felt like my horizons had been expanded very slightly when I felt this severe dread for maybe half a second. A feeling of being inescapably trapped.
There's also this PC game called The Coin Game that's just a solo-dev making lots of arcade games. They exist on an island where you have a home and some hobbies and a few arcades and I think even a mall. But the entire island is devoid of humanity. There's just a bunch of robots. I don't know if the game has a backstory, but the one my brain filled in is that this is a sort of playground for you to live in forever... and it's got a San Junipero feel, but far more bleak. Gave me the chills. I'm happy to be mortal.
Imagine a society where everyone has a ball and chain permanently attached from birth. It would be just a part of life. Some thinkers might write articles about how much better things would be if a way could be found to get rid of the ball and chain. Others would come up with arguments for why the ball and chain is actually good, or even necessary. The limitation on movement gives life a purpose. The resistance helps build strength.
Looking at such a society from the outside, we'd find the latter arguments ludicrous. How can it possibly be better to stuck with a major physical restriction your entire life? If anyone said we should start doing this to all our children, they'd be run out of town.
If humanity does solve the problem of death, I doubt it will be absolute, in any case. Aging might be stopped, maybe added resistance to disease and injury, but nothing is going to allow you to survive hugging a detonating nuclear bomb, or any number of other physically extreme events. If you decide forever is not for you, then you'd be able to make that choice.
Ah, he saw the time-knife
You have to have some kind of belief in that situation that dying has a special purpose, or something happens after you die so that you’re rewarded.
It’s the same as the suffering of a medieval peasant, which they thought was so important. Nowadays we have eliminated that. Was it really giving them such an important meaning and rich life? No, they just thought it did to cope.
Besides, even if we cured aging it wouldn’t mean we’re trapped living forever, you’d be guaranteed to get killed some other way anyway.
Or maybe people stop working because their health was declining?
Well, I'd like to get rid of the old way of thinking that death is good :p
And can you imagine a world where current leaders are still in power 1000 years later?
Leaders generally don't rule for life in functioning countries, and the mortality of individual Kims has not helped the people of North Korea.
I think of how it'd be something tech billionaires and autocrats would use to oppress us forever.
How are these people currently oppressing you, and how would the existence of longevity treatments make that worse?
1. I am young enough that a sense of mortality is not a true motivation to start things now. While I know about my mortality, I do not, in the visceral sense, believe it. My motivation to start things now instead of later is to experience the rewards sooner, not a foreboding panic of losing finite time. I suspect this is true for at least very many people.
2. The argument doesn’t survive a simple inversion test. Let’s concede every single disadvantage immortality might bring— lack of motivation, innovation, housing. Suppose we already live in that world. Would a reasonable solution be to introduce a massive, rolling holocaust (i.e. introduce into this world the concept of death)?
And not only death, but aging. Even if that society decided (wrongly IMO) that nobody should live longer than 100 years, it would be insane to enforce that by making everyone's bodies and minds deteriorate over several decades.
And having a simulation of ourselves in a different media is a different game.
It always would: fatal accidents would still be a thing. So would:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Islamist_terrorist_att...
Then there'd always be the risk of a gigantic asteroid hitting the earth.
Stuff like that.
Which makes me wonder: if there was no more aging and no more illness and accidents and terror attacks / crimes were basically the only way to die, how would society deal with those?
I take we'd focus on preventing accidents / safety even more? For at the moment there's definitely some "we're not going to live forever anyway, so it's just bad luck if an accident happens".
And what about suicide? Taking your life when you're going to die anyway is one thing, taking it out when you're near immortal is something else altogether.