5 replies to this topic

[advancedatheist]

Refer to:

http://www.sciencenews.org/20030726/bob10.asp

Catch Zero
What can be done as marine ecosystems face a deepening crisis?
Ben Harder

Give a man a fish, goes the Chinese proverb, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. If he catches too many fish, however, he may leave few fish behind for his children's table. It has taken less than a generation for modern industrial-scale fishing, once it's deployed in an ocean area, to exhaust the vast majority of that area's edible bounty. These massive harvests have left behind devastated ecosystems and depleted economic opportunities.

I think we're finally seeing the empirical falsification of the argument presented by Julian L. Simon, and recently updated by Bjorn Lomberg, that industrial economic practices aren't "really " harming the environment. Immortalists, who ideally should be taking a practical, long-term view of the resources situation, probably shouldn't adopt uncritically this kind of short-range apologetics for modern capitalism. Even if you defend capitalist values and practices, you have to take into consideration that they incorporate the assumptions of people who don't expect to be around very long, It's easy to "discount the future" when you won't be around to have to deal with it. Considering that we're living in "the long run" discounted by the people who ran things in earlier decades, it's clear that we've inherited the problems and costs they decided to postpone until after their deaths. Immortalists should rationally try to make better decisions, or we won't last very long ourselves.

Edited by advancedatheist, 28 July 2003 - 03:02 AM.

[Mind]

Immortalists will make better decisions precisely because they expect and desire to live very very long. The social, economic, and evolutionary pressure on past generations led to short term thinking on the environment, but I expect that will change.

Also, it is a bit early to dismiss the arguments of Julian Simon. The fish are not extinct nor is the ocean ecosystem destroyed, "depleted in areas" is a far cry from "dead" or "extinct". On the flip side, Simon's critics have continually fallen by the wayside, nearly all their predictions haven been proved false (over a period of many decades I might add).

Here is a post I made earlier relating to this subject:

Hi Bob, Here is a link you might find interesting. It is about the famous bet between Paul Erlich and Julian Simon. It directly relates to the usage and scarcity of resources.

www.carnell.com/population/simon_bet.html

Paul Erlich also once predicted (in 1968) that the United States population would be less than 23 million by the end of the century...and those that were left would be living on a Spartan Diet. It could not be more ironic that in the present day more people in the U.S. are likely to be obese than living on a Spartan diet. In fact, there is so much fattening food available that there are serious considerations to tax sweet and/or fatty foods.

Here is a a fact that is quite interesting also "All 6 billion of us could live in the state of Texas, with enough room for every family of four to have a house and one-eighth of an acre of land". This comes from Stephen Moore, “Defusing the Population Bomb,” The Washington Times, October 13, 1999.

Now, I am not saying blindly that there are no problems with the environment. Certainly there is bad news out there, but there is also good news. And most trends point to improving conditions in coming decades(population growth is slowing, the air is getting cleaner, fresh water is getting cleaner here in the U.S...etc.)

[advancedatheist]

Also, it is a bit early to dismiss the arguments of Julian Simon. The fish are not extinct nor is the ocean ecosystem destroyed, "depleted in areas" is a far cry from "dead" or "extinct". On the flip side, Simon's critics have continually fallen by the wayside, nearly all their predictions haven been proved false (over a period of many decades I might add).

The historical record supports Malthus until the Industrial Revolution, when Western Europeans and Americans began to use fossil fuels on a large scale and found that the energy subsidy from ancient sunlight could circumvent natural constraints on food production & population levels, for example, by artificially fixing nitrogen for fertilizer. Today each American has something like 8,000 nonhuman "energy slaves" at his disposal, mostly coming from fossil fuels. Considering that we're already fighting wars for control of the last decent oil supplies, you have to wonder what might happen when the subsidy begins to dry up.

[Gewis]

Curiously, it isn't necessarily the fact of immortality that might make immortalists better able to make decisions, but that all their plans provide for a means of clear and intelligent thought. Having intelligent and informed 20 year olds make decisions of the same sort would be likely as beneficial. I'm not sure how valid the notion of age and experience producing a rigidness of thought is, but I know I've seen it personally with a good number of people. Being young, I haven't seen them when they were my age, and it's certainly a possibility that they've always been board-brained, like many people are.

"Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young." -W. Somerset Maugham

This is an interesting concept that certainly deserves some attention, of course. To what extent does age make an individual less able to see unorthodox points of view or solutions? And if so, to what extent is that a feature of experience, as opposed to physiological aging independent of experience? Moreover, considering wide varieties of immortalist schemes, is that likely to be amplified by life-spans at least several factors longer than current ones?

This last question is complex. If we maintain our present organic structure and augment it with nanotechnology, gene-therapy, and implants, present experiential models of humans and their cognitive processes point toward answers. If we're thinking about 'uploading,' (I know Peter doesn't like that term, but lacking one better, I'm going to use it, implying whatever cross-over happens from mind to machine, irrespective of the time it takes to get there, for now) we have a significant gap of knowledge in the human experience, for the simple fact that we have no precedent and everything regarding such is speculation and theory untested.

This question ultimately boils down to whether or not 'immortals' (how do you determine the immortality of a person in question, anyway?) will, according to their increasing experience and concepts of their world around them, become immovable and unadaptable in terms of thoughts and ideas.

Maybe most people here already have an answer to such questions, being geriatric themselves, but my mind is still young and malleable, and inquiring minds want to know.

Oh, dear, I hope I'm not reprimanded for 'geriatric' being a slur for all you old guys. [:o]

[advancedatheist]

Curiously, it isn't necessarily the fact of immortality that might make immortalists better able to make decisions, but that all their plans provide for a means of clear and intelligent thought.  Having intelligent and informed 20 year olds make decisions of the same sort would be likely as beneficial.  I'm not sure how valid the notion of age and experience producing a rigidness of thought is, but I know I've seen it personally with a good number of people.  Being young, I haven't seen them when they were my age, and it's certainly a possibility that they've always been board-brained, like many people are.

I've come to the conclusion that the "wisdom" of the elders is some kind of urban legend. Maybe in premodern times, when old people were scarce and their experiences remained relevant because society changed slowly, the belief in their "wisdom" had some plausibility. But today, developed countries are full of people living to advanced ages, and with a few exceptions, I'm generally not impressed by what I'm seeing.

Even as a child, I could tell that my grandparents weren't all that successful or competent in life. Oh, they were basically decent, but it never occurred to me while growing up that I could go to one of them for advice, because I knew on some level that they had nothing useful to tell me.

Today I can see that my parents aren't all that wise, either. When my mother was about the age I am now (43), she was telling me things about life that I have found from my own experiences just aren't true. I've met very few people of any age who strike me as having deep insight into the practical problems of life, even ones considered "successful" by our society's irrational standards.

It would be so helpful if a lot of people had already jumped the life-extension hurdles ahead of us so that we had some guidance for the task ahead. But there aren't any, and the older I get, the more I have the feeling that we are all going to have to make this up as we go along. Our society is nowhere near optimized for attaining and sustaining immortality, despite the well-intentioned efforts to co-opt libertarianism, social democracy or some other death-assuming ideology into our project. That's why I'm wary of adopting uncritically a controversial economic theory like Simon-Lomberg's, which implicitly discounts the future because it assumes that we won't be around to deal with depleted resources after we've spent our brief decades having a good time with them.

[Mind]

The historical record supports Malthus until the Industrial Revolution

Malthus did factor in human ingenuity. Neither did Paul Erlich. That is why they were wrong. They assumed people are dumb like animals and cannot make rational choices. They expect the human population to cycle like that of "natural" animal populations. Increasing intelligence will allow us to continually "operate" on this planet while lessening our effect on the "natural" environment.

We all know that humans have bad traits and do have an effect on the environment, but it has been 100,000 years and we haven't destroyed the earth yet. Then again, you could argue that we haven't always had the tools to destroy the earth either. Now we do.