Hello. I am a new member to this forum and I have a blog where my goal is to refute Transhumanism. I have been focusing more on Kurzweil but I am trying to refine my arguments against de Grey now. (I plan to move on to Drexler eventually). I just wrote a new post that I think really nails de Grey's fundamental argument about his longevity escape velocity and I wanted to post it here to get some feedback to see if I am way off or not. Here it is:
I was curious to see if de Grey had actually tried to defend his belief in inevitable accelerating technology when I came across Bret Weinstein's argument in the SENS Challenge (here). In my last post, I claimed that de Grey had read my blog since he seemed to respond to a point I made on the deceleration of aviation technology. This is wrong because de Grey already was forced to respond to this point by Weinstein. It is instructive to read this exchange because it goes right to the heart of de Grey's entire argument.
Weinstein identifies de Grey's fundamental point:
The clear, but unstated, implication of de Grey's framing is that senescence is a tractable engineering problem. In fact, it's not even an implication, it's an assumption.
Precisely. However, I would add that de Grey's assumption is even more expansive than that. He assumes that there is a technical solution to EVERYTHING. This includes preventing earthquakes and hurricanes, space travel, and re-engineering stars to prevent them from going supernova. The only limit comes from our lack of will to solve the problem. However, Weinstein points out that:
(h)e is ignoring the fact of diminishing returns, and the apparent inevitability of the curve leveling off.
Diminishing returns happens to all accelerating trends because each doubling is twice as hard as the previous one. De Grey's thinking (like all Transhumanists') is Malthusian in that he merely assumes that the trend will go on forever.
De Grey responds:
The "escape velocity" concept is based not on faith but on the history of technology, in which incremental refinements of an initial breakthrough reliably occur at, if anything, an accelerating rate rather than encountering diminishing returns, subject only to sustained public enthusiasm for further progress (which faded with, e.g., space travel but seems dependable in respect of postponing aging).
This sentence encapsulates de Grey's entire argument. All of the SENS ideas are just obfuscatory filler compared to it. In short, all technologies inevitably accelerate and only slow down for lack of public enthusiasm.
In responding to Weinstein's main point that 'Diminishing returns is the proper model (for technological progress), and it provides little basis for hope,' de Grey just reverses Weinstein's point back at him:
reasons also exist for optimism regarding our ability to continue to combat new sources of aging damage … we will be taking advantage of … the accelerating rate of progress in biomedical research generally.
Follow that? Biomedical research won't decelerate because it is accelerating.
Another flawed assumption that all Transhumanists have is displayed by de Grey:
Engineering problems are properly considered tractable unless their achievement would contravene scientific laws or mathematical theorems
Weinstein responds to this point in his rebuttal:
And what about the laws, limits and theorems that are emergent in complex systems? Humanity is only just beginning to understand these second order limits that arise in highly complex systems, and yet de Grey would have us believe that the least restrictive set of rules, the ones we already know, are the only ones with which we need to concern ourselves.
Precisely. I made this point in another posting but it is worth repeating. You don't know what is going to happen with any technology until you actually test it. The behavior of even very simple systems can be controlled by complex interactions of multiple factors that can make the technology intractable. De Grey claims that he is an engineer but he thinks like a scientist in how he assumes that the world follows nice regular abstract patterns that can be easily modeled and manipulated. In reality, everything around us is interacting in a complex combinatorial non-linear way that almost always defies description by 'scientific laws and mathematical theorems'.
Weinstein concludes:
What can I say? The conclusion is sacred. Total rejuvenation and perpetual youth are foreseeable for people alive today. If escape velocity is required, then it must be justified. If diminishing returns is an impediment, then it must be entirely sociological.
Yep. These Transhumanists want to believe it and nothing you can say will change their minds. This only reinforces my feeling that I shouldn't be wasting my time with this nonsense. I'm not one to argue with religious believers since it is nearly impossible to change their minds and the main reason they believe is because it makes them feel good about themselves, so let them be.
Fortunately, the looming end of the accelerating price-to-performance ratio of computers should deal a severe, hopefully mortal, blow to Transhumanism.