38 replies to this topic

[Singularity]

Interview here

Tech. Review: So it doesn't imply that there is a solution to aging?

L. Hayflick: Why would you want to do that?

Tech. Review: Some people would like to slow or halt the aging process.

L. Hayflick: They haven't thought about the consequences. We relate to each other by perceptions of differences in age, which would be destroyed if some chose to increase their longevity and some did not. The social, political, and economic discontinuities that would occur would be enormous. People who say they want extended longevity say they want it to be so when life satisfaction is greatest. Yet they won't know [when that is] until late in life. If you're in your eighties and you decide you want life extended when you were happier, at fifty, it's no longer possible.

That guy is giving some really lame and unscientific answers. Alas, he's just talking to the dumb people, not us. This is to be expected. As technology advances there is always a rift between the "haves" and the "have-nots". True advances will ALWAYS be kept from the general public if those in power can help it. The kind of technology we are talking about here will endow people with a LOT of power. If you think they are not going to try and keep it from you at all costs then you are naive.

We need to keep a watchful eye on all progress being made and keep tabs on promising research that suddenly disappears or get's canceled due to lack of funding or fake failure reports.

[Pham Nuwen]

How awesome would it be if someone like Hitler got to live forever for instance? What if he was in power his whole life? Bet you'd be regretting the hell out of your life extension then.

I am sorry to resurrect an ancient thread, but this argument is so childish, and so fundamentally flawed - not to mention incredibly tired - that at least a cursory examination of the problems inherent to the whole 'immortal Hitler' bogeyman needs to be made.

The people who bring up the specter (pun intended) of an immortal Hitler (or Pol Pot, or Nero, or what-have-you) seem to think that technological progress happens in a vacuum, leaving culture, politics and ethics completely untouched -indeed, they hardly seem to realize the immense progress that society (Western and Japanese society, at least) have made towards peace, human rights, and an understanding of the true value of life. In other words, it's assumed that we will have technologies that give us godlike powers and potential immortality, but our ethical development will regress to the level of Torquemada. This is beyond ridiculous. In primitive foraging societies, which lack even rudimentary medicine, and where deathism is the default worldview, at least 25% of males die by violence between the ages of 14 and 45. With technological progress, however, there has been a very strong and undeniable trend of increasing the value that society places on human life. In our time, for instance, most people regard a 16-year-old getting shot in the middle of the street not as a near-inevitability, or a casual, unremarkable occurrence, but as a senseless tragedy. The more inured a society is to death - whether death of disease, decrepitude, or violence, the less it values human life. Deathism is responsibly, if only indirectly, for monsters like Hitler - when one is raised from child hood to view death as something inevitable, or, Dog-forbid, taught some even more repulsive nonsense, like "death gives meaning to life" one can rationalize murder, even genocide, with a few casual platitudes. Indeed, if one subscribes to the "Death gives meaning to life" school of 'thought' one could easily make the argument that Hitler, Pol Pot, Saddam, and the plethora of other deathist tyrants who've been the bane of humanity for generations, somehow 'gave meaning' to the lives of millions of innocents by murdering them! In contrast, in a society where death due to disease, old age, and decrepitude do not exist, where human beings live indefinitely in robust good health, involuntary death would be seeing as the greatest tragedy, and murder as a, quite literally, unthinkable crime. Any society that places infinite value on conscious, intelligent life would develop extremely powerful restraints and fail-safes to keep the homicidal impulses of would-be Hitlers in check. An immortalist society would love and cherish life in ways quite unimaginable today - let alone in the mid-twentieth century when running into a hail of bullets to die for the fatherland was seen as the highest honor, and where murdering millions of people was seen as an ethical action, if one could argue that it served the interest of said fatherland, or other completely irrelevant political or religious entities. Indeed, it is not merely conceivable but almost certain that given the sophistication of post-Singularity immortalist society, we will find ways to identify the psychopathologies and other abnormalities that lead to murderous thoughts and behaviors (we can already identify psychopaths and sociopaths based on the results of brain scans). To summarize - my personal opinion is that in a post-Singularitarian, immortalist society, conscious life will be treated with something resembling the reverence that most modern people reserve for the religious desiderata, and the superhuman intelligences that populate this society will take all the measures necessary in order to prevent the usage of advanced post-Singularitarian technologies towards murderous ends. It is of course, possible that these precautions will be insufficient, or that we will be unable to heal certain post-humans of their murderous tendencies, but a certain amount of risk is inherent in any undertaking. Personally, I think that a superhuman intelligence that makes us look like mice and has the entire universe (and perhaps other universes) to explore and mine for riches will have better things to do that brood about how best to exterminate this or that human or post-human group, but that is simply my opinion.

Edited by Pham Nuwen, 25 April 2010 - 07:04 AM.

[boundlesslife]

How awesome would it be if someone like Hitler got to live forever for instance? What if he was in power his whole life? Bet you'd be regretting the hell out of your life extension then.

I am sorry to resurrect an ancient thread, but this argument is so childish, and so fundamentally flawed - not to mention incredibly tired - that at least a cursory examination of the problems inherent to the whole 'immortal Hitler' bogeyman needs to be made.

The people who bring up the specter (pun intended) of an immortal Hitler (or Pol Pot, or Nero, or what-have-you) seem to think that technological progress happens in a vacuum, leaving culture, politics and ethics completely untouched -indeed, they hardly seem to realize the immense progress that society (Western and Japanese society, at least) have made towards peace, human rights, and an understanding of the true value of life. In other words, it's assumed that we will have technologies that give us godlike powers and potential immortality, but our ethical development will regress to the level of Torquemada. This is beyond ridiculous. In primitive foraging societies, which lack even rudimentary medicine, and where deathism is the default worldview, at least 25% of males die by violence between the ages of 14 and 45. With technological progress, however, there has been a very strong and undeniable trend of increasing the value that society places on human life. In our time, for instance, most people regard a 16-year-old getting shot in the middle of the street not as a near-inevitability, or a casual, unremarkable occurrence, but as a senseless tragedy. The more inured a society is to death - whether death of disease, decrepitude, or violence, the less it values human life. Deathism is responsibly, if only indirectly, for monsters like Hitler - when one is raised from child hood to view death as something inevitable, or, Dog-forbid, taught some even more repulsive nonsense, like "death gives meaning to life" one can rationalize murder, even genocide, with a few casual platitudes. Indeed, if one subscribes to the "Death gives meaning to life" school of 'thought' one could easily make the argument that Hitler, Pol Pot, Saddam, and the plethora of other deathist tyrants who've been the bane of humanity for generations, somehow 'gave meaning' to the lives of millions of innocents by murdering them! In contrast, in a society where death due to disease, old age, and decrepitude do not exist, where human beings live indefinitely in robust good health, involuntary death would be seeing as the greatest tragedy, and murder as a, quite literally, unthinkable crime. Any society that places infinite value on conscious, intelligent life would develop extremely powerful restraints and fail-safes to keep the homicidal impulses of would-be Hitlers in check. An immortalist society would love and cherish life in ways quite unimaginable today - let alone in the mid-twentieth century when running into a hail of bullets to die for the fatherland was seen as the highest honor, and where murdering millions of people was seen as an ethical action, if one could argue that it served the interest of said fatherland, or other completely irrelevant political or religious entities. Indeed, it is not merely conceivable but almost certain that given the sophistication of post-Singularity immortalist society, we will find ways to identify the psychopathologies and other abnormalities that lead to murderous thoughts and behaviors (we can already identify psychopaths and sociopaths based on the results of brain scans). To summarize - my personal opinion is that in a post-Singularitarian, immortalist society, conscious life will be treated with something resembling the reverence that most modern people reserve for the religious desiderata, and the superhuman intelligences that populate this society will take all the measures necessary in order to prevent the usage of advanced post-Singularitarian technologies towards murderous ends. It is of course, possible that these precautions will be insufficient, or that we will be unable to heal certain post-humans of their murderous tendencies, but a certain amount of risk is inherent in any undertaking. Personally, I think that a superhuman intelligence that makes us look like mice and has the entire universe (and perhaps other universes) to explore and mine for riches will have better things to do that brood about how best to exterminate this or that human or post-human group, but that is simply my opinion.

In the The Terasem Journals one can find years of careful thought being given to anticipating and planning for the challenges of conflict that might arise during and following the emergence of self-conscious cyberbeings whose capabilities will far exceed those of the humans who brought about their creation. Indeed, the line of thought here is that it is important that these cyberbeings predominately be emulations of we presently-day biohumans who have made commitments to guard against the kinds of negative outcomes Pham Nuwen sees as preventable.

Stated in more concrete terms, Terasem not only anticipates but is already engaged in work to bring about a state where many of those who are "uploaded" are dedicated and committed to safeguarding those who have not yet made this choice. In the most compassionate way, Terasem's goals are that we not only become a "superhuman intelligence that makes us look like mice", which it describes as a "collective consciousness" where "1.1.2 Collectivity means unity of diversity not mandatory homogeneity," (quoting from The Terasem Truths), but that we protect and revere the (still biological) Human Race from which we will have evolved [as uploaded persons, a network of cyberbeings whose respect for diversity allows them to maintain independent cyberpersonalities with great individual differences, while at the same time holding to a unity of purpose as to the avoidance of the exploitive, dominating and cruel behavious which were so successful in the earlier stages of their evolution, where survival of the fittest, both of individuals and tribes (and then later nations), meant conflicts ranging from those of individuals at the level of office politics all the way to threats of global holocaust where humanity, as Carl Sagan so strongly warned in the final episode of "Cosmos", could "self-destruct" in one day, using its 50,000 thermonuclear weapons to provide a "World War II each second, for the length of a lazy afternoon").]

Put in the form of an example shaped by the extremely popular movie ("Avatar"), if the Navi were to conceive that they as the highest form of indigenous consciousness on the planet Pandora were sprung from the great trees of that planet, they would protect those trees the way we humans presently protect groves of giant redwoods and Sequoias by maintaining the parks in which they reside. Translating that to Terasem's visions, a cybercommunity of uploaded humans, thinking at speeds thousands to tens of thousands of times faster than present day biohumans would "take care of the Earth" as if it were one huge protected grove of Sequoia trees, while at the same time providing pathways by means of which biohumans who understood what had happened could join the cybercommunity and be "citizens" of it, so long as they similarly committed themselves to these principles of reverence and compassion for their forebears (biohumans).

This is a very hasty and incomplete response to Pham Nuwen's extremely thoughtful posting, which I've quoted as originally posted so that those in Terasem who wish can visit it along with these initial comments, and leave their own if they desire. Thank you, Pham Nuwen, for joining this forum and so quickly (only your third posting) having contributed such perceptive insights as you have (above)!

[chris w]

Hey, sorry to revive this, the quote that I will put is not from Hayflick, but it's a great example of Hayflickism and I just really need to rant about deathism right now, and this thread is rant - friendly from what I see. This is from a reasonable piece by Ben Popper named Immortality's Allure that I just read http://www.obit-mag....rtalitys-allure :

(...)Dr. Raff, 71 and recently retired. Raff concedes that the work on caloric restriction and cellular damage has made many scientists, including himself, rethink the fundamental principle that aging cannot be altered. “But there is a point where, even if we are all beginning to agree technically, the science ends,” says Raff, “and the philosophy begins. Can you imagine an orchestra with the same conductor for that long, or a football team where the players never change? To me, that sounds like hell on earth.”

I mean...WHAT ? I know that he is worried about social ossification and uses that as a figure of speech, but this is one the stupidest things I heard in a long time. "Hell on Earth" ? Is this Dr Raff tripping on acid or something ? I imagine that even an immortalist can be concerned about the "immortal boss problem", but common ! So what ? Every human has to just succumb to cancers and everything else to keep the rotation in orchestras going nice and smooth ? WHAT AN IDIOT ! There, it is done, I can chill now, thanks.

Edited by chris w, 14 May 2010 - 08:44 PM.

[N.T.M.]

"Replacing your brain becomes an insurmountable problem."

Yet introduction of stem cells have already successfully replaced brain tissue. If this were to be done periodically then we could fully compensate for the brain's attrition rate which, in principle, would enable us to eventually replace the entire brain (little bit at a time).

It seems like that insurmountable problem was just solved.

And lets not forget the concept of corporeal continuity which clearly debunks his whole premise.

Edited by N.T.M., 16 May 2010 - 02:03 AM.

[The Immortalist]

What a first class asshole that guy L. Hayflick is.
If you want to die Hayflick go right ahead just don't be against the lifeextension movement because there's alot of people who don't want to die from aging. It's not fair to them when you (an influential scientist?) goes and creates hype against the movement. Go stick your head up your bioluddite asshole Hayflick and let it rot there, and while your at it cut off your clitoris-I mean your 1/8th inch dick and shove it up there too you selfish man.

Edited by The MILE/The Immortalist, 08 June 2010 - 12:56 AM.

[The Immortalist]

I guess HAYFLICK has reached his LIMIT.

Now that's a good one!

[jamesagreen]

Leonard Hayflick's valuable achievements as a scientist in the field of
aging and the cytology of biogerontology are not always accompanied by exhalations of optimism.
On the other hand, we think we can probably manage to deal with the dillemas
of infinite life extension somehow, assuming this can be achieved.
Jim Green - http://greenwdks.hos.../longevity.html (best, includes > 256 Kb files),
backup: http://greenwood.s5.com/longevity.html .

Edited by jamesagreen, 24 June 2010 - 02:49 PM.

[Lassus]

Yeah, i just read this and nearly puked:
http://www.quackwatc...ntiagingpp.html

Also:
http://www.nytimes.c...ht-with-us.html

He dosent seem like a nice person, AT ALL.