It’s quite cool that you’re doing this. Thank you!
It’s a physical law of the universe that you will age.
This, as a summary of one of the book’s points, slams my deathism alarm bells. It causes me to go on alert for where the author is trying to confuse me with their own deathist confusions.
I assume the author is hinting at entropy. How life can be thought of as an entropy pump, keeping internal entropy low even at the cost of increasing net entropy. And yes, on long enough timescales this is guaranteed to eventually fail. Even if nothing external destroys the pump directly, eventually entropy will affect the pump itself, resulting in a downward spiral of its functionality. And sure, we could call that last effect “aging” in some generalized sense.
But this is hugely dramatically different from the claim that our bodies have to break down within about a century. That it’s inevitable that the thing we normally think of as aging absolutely has to happen in roughly the way it currently does.
This conflation is a common deathist refrain. It reminds me of the argument against curing aging that goes “Well, you still might die in a meteor crash or from murder or from any other of a number of things, and the longer you live the higher the probability accumulates to something killing you… so it’s not really immortality.”
As though the fact that curing aging wouldn’t count as “true” immortality makes it irrelevant.
Whenever someone conflates these two elements — the entropic inevitability of death vs. the engineering complexity of dealing with aging as it currently appears — I usually find deathist ideas woven elsewhere in what they have to say. They’ll say a bunch of objective and often informative things… and then slip in something about how “You wouldn’t want to live forever anyway” based on getting tired or bored or watching people you love die or something.
Often it’s more insidious than that. Like a general defeatist tone. “Well, gosh, there’s no real point in honestly trying to cure aging, but given these biochemical facts we might be able to make the decline a little more pleasant in thus-and-such a way.”
I’m still grateful you’re putting this summary together. I don’t mean any of this as a criticism of you or of what you’re doing! I liked reading through the rest of what you’ve written here.
I just mean to issue a memetic caution about the book for anyone who might have missed the signs based on what you’ve summarized here.
(I’m particularly sensitive to these signals. I was raised immortalist. Homeschooled by transhumanist cryonicists. This stuff just really stands out for me.)
Thank you for the encouragement! I would suggest reading the complete post once more, because the post/article specifically points out that that aging, which is indeed entropic and inevitable, is counterbalanced by repair: “We can overcome the extrinsic damage and gradual aging of our houses, cars and clothing with cleaning, maintenance and repair.” The key to geroscience medicine—targeting aging—will be to slow the aging process (it can’t be stopped), but also to enhance repair (which can in theory indefinitely prolong life by replacing worn out parts to keep the system as a whole functioning).
It also discusses the principles that explain why we can expect scope to improve longevity via modern medicine, such as antagonistic pleiotropy and the loss of selection pressure beyond child rearing age. Evolution isn’t trying very hard to optimize for longevity and health span, so we can do better.
Finally, the whole chapter is on the geroscience hypothesis, advocating a new approach where we treat disease by targeting aging itself. I didn’t include the fact that it specifically mentions the SENS foundation, cites de Grey, etc, but it does!
My aim in these posts will be to pretty faithfully track the order of ideas and main biological points as presented by the handbook, rather than layering in my own interpretation about the political or long-term research prospects and ethics if they’re not explicitly mentioned in the book. But the book is certainly not “deathist.”
One thing you, as a transhumanist-diaper baby and (perhaps) a person who doesn’t work professionally in biomedical research, may not know, is that there’s quite a lot of pressure in biomedicine to make measured, noncontroversial public statements about topics like this. Some writers like Aubrey de Grey just ignore all that (I believe de Grey is independently wealthy which may enable him to do so), but many are for whatever reason going to make careful statements that fit within the conventional vibes of the medical field, but still read intelligently point in a radical direction. Figuring out how to make geroscience sound conventional, safe, and like everything else we study in medicine is an important normalizing step within the research community to counterbalance the hype and controversy machine.
I edited the first point to make the non-deathism more clear, since I would hate to lose my audience at paragraph 1! Thanks for giving me your reaction.
It’s quite cool that you’re doing this. Thank you!
This, as a summary of one of the book’s points, slams my deathism alarm bells. It causes me to go on alert for where the author is trying to confuse me with their own deathist confusions.
I assume the author is hinting at entropy. How life can be thought of as an entropy pump, keeping internal entropy low even at the cost of increasing net entropy. And yes, on long enough timescales this is guaranteed to eventually fail. Even if nothing external destroys the pump directly, eventually entropy will affect the pump itself, resulting in a downward spiral of its functionality. And sure, we could call that last effect “aging” in some generalized sense.
But this is hugely dramatically different from the claim that our bodies have to break down within about a century. That it’s inevitable that the thing we normally think of as aging absolutely has to happen in roughly the way it currently does.
This conflation is a common deathist refrain. It reminds me of the argument against curing aging that goes “Well, you still might die in a meteor crash or from murder or from any other of a number of things, and the longer you live the higher the probability accumulates to something killing you… so it’s not really immortality.”
As though the fact that curing aging wouldn’t count as “true” immortality makes it irrelevant.
Whenever someone conflates these two elements — the entropic inevitability of death vs. the engineering complexity of dealing with aging as it currently appears — I usually find deathist ideas woven elsewhere in what they have to say. They’ll say a bunch of objective and often informative things… and then slip in something about how “You wouldn’t want to live forever anyway” based on getting tired or bored or watching people you love die or something.
Often it’s more insidious than that. Like a general defeatist tone. “Well, gosh, there’s no real point in honestly trying to cure aging, but given these biochemical facts we might be able to make the decline a little more pleasant in thus-and-such a way.”
I’m still grateful you’re putting this summary together. I don’t mean any of this as a criticism of you or of what you’re doing! I liked reading through the rest of what you’ve written here.
I just mean to issue a memetic caution about the book for anyone who might have missed the signs based on what you’ve summarized here.
(I’m particularly sensitive to these signals. I was raised immortalist. Homeschooled by transhumanist cryonicists. This stuff just really stands out for me.)
Thank you for the encouragement! I would suggest reading the complete post once more, because the post/article specifically points out that that aging, which is indeed entropic and inevitable, is counterbalanced by repair: “We can overcome the extrinsic damage and gradual aging of our houses, cars and clothing with cleaning, maintenance and repair.” The key to geroscience medicine—targeting aging—will be to slow the aging process (it can’t be stopped), but also to enhance repair (which can in theory indefinitely prolong life by replacing worn out parts to keep the system as a whole functioning).
It also discusses the principles that explain why we can expect scope to improve longevity via modern medicine, such as antagonistic pleiotropy and the loss of selection pressure beyond child rearing age. Evolution isn’t trying very hard to optimize for longevity and health span, so we can do better.
Finally, the whole chapter is on the geroscience hypothesis, advocating a new approach where we treat disease by targeting aging itself. I didn’t include the fact that it specifically mentions the SENS foundation, cites de Grey, etc, but it does!
My aim in these posts will be to pretty faithfully track the order of ideas and main biological points as presented by the handbook, rather than layering in my own interpretation about the political or long-term research prospects and ethics if they’re not explicitly mentioned in the book. But the book is certainly not “deathist.”
One thing you, as a transhumanist-diaper baby and (perhaps) a person who doesn’t work professionally in biomedical research, may not know, is that there’s quite a lot of pressure in biomedicine to make measured, noncontroversial public statements about topics like this. Some writers like Aubrey de Grey just ignore all that (I believe de Grey is independently wealthy which may enable him to do so), but many are for whatever reason going to make careful statements that fit within the conventional vibes of the medical field, but still read intelligently point in a radical direction. Figuring out how to make geroscience sound conventional, safe, and like everything else we study in medicine is an important normalizing step within the research community to counterbalance the hype and controversy machine.
I edited the first point to make the non-deathism more clear, since I would hate to lose my audience at paragraph 1! Thanks for giving me your reaction.