I am new to this community. Is the anti-aging stuff popular here? To me it comes accross as a bit weird. There is a scale of depression/hedonia from being almost catatonic to being ecstatically happy. Very depressed people often want to kill themselves right now. Supposedly, ecstatically happy people would like to live forever. If you are somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, you supposedly want live another few decades, not more. If you are not hating your life but not loving it very much either, then the idea of dying in a few decades IMHO sounds logical and good. By that time you can expect to be tired about life anyway, you will have less and less of the good stuff (childhood friends, experiences to discover etc.) and more and more of the bad stuff (cumulative stress, aches etc.) and it will sound like a good deal to end it without shame i.e. naturally.
I think this largely depends on one thing really. If you have a purpose for your life, you supposed want to work on it forever. If you are like most people or like me, just going through life and trying to fish out pleasurable experiences from it, nice holidays in interesting places and big laughs with friends drunk, you probably don’t want to do that forever.
Yes, we are generally very anti-aging here. It is probably one of the core parts of our culture.
If you are not hating your life but not loving it very much either, then the idea of dying in a few decades IMHO sounds logical and good.
My response would be: my desire to continue living or die would depend on my expected future utility of continuing to live. That is, if I expected that my future utility would be negative and would continue to always be negative, I might want to die, but that is not the case.
I don’t consider myself someone who is either ecstatically happy or depressed. Like you I am in the middle. However, I feel that this middle state still has an overall positive utility.
But even if I was currently suffering so much that I considered my life to be negative utility, I would still want to live if I expected things could improve in the future, which I do. If we observe the course of human civilization, life conditions have generally improved greatly for almost everyone in society over long periods of time, and will probably continue to do so if our civilization continues to advance technologically, economically, socially, etc.
Thus, I do not wish to ‘only live a few more decades and then die’. Instead, I anticipate that the utility of my living could continue to increase in the far future, and might actually be significantly better than it is now.
For many people in our current time, quality of life declines as they get old, especially near the end, due to health decline, loss of social connections due to friends deaths, etc. As a result, many people ‘accept’ that death is necessary, as life would only keep getting worse anyway.
But if we are able to cure and reverse aging, this would no longer necessarily be the case. We may be able to reach a point where we are able to restore youth, energy, and health to people. If so, living forever would not be a state of being an old., decrepit person with no social life, but would be a return to the healthful youth state that many associate with the best years of their life!
Regarding having a purpose for one’s life: If you do not feel that you have a purpose for you life, this does not mean that you would never find one in the future, especially if one were to live a very long time. For example, if you knew you were going to live forever, and you didn’t have to deal with some of the sufferings and energy drains of your current life, would you then perhaps be more motivated to find such a purpose?
If you are afraid of running out of different experiences to enjoy, consider that people are continually inventing new things to be interested in. Stories, games, knowledge, shared cultural experiences, etc. People are generating new information that you can consume at a rate faster than you can consume it, and in a future more advanced world this would only become more and more true.
f you think you will get bored of everything that there is, consider that we now have ideas and experiences and potential hobbies which were almost inconceivable 100 years ago, and in a universe that allows for infinite complexity we can continue to generate them for as long as the universe lasts, for as long as there is negentropy left for us to consume.
I want to see the future, not just because I think living has positive value, but because I anticipate that value might increase in the more technologically advanced future.
I don’t think I could ever run out of things to explore, but if I did, and I eventually wanted to not live anymore, I would rather make that choice myself when I reached that point, and not have it forced upon me too soon because of accumulated damage to my mitochondrial dna, loss of telomeres, accumulation of mutations, and/or whatever else is the cause of the aging process.
If someone figures out how to stop or reverse aging, presumably that will mean higher quality of life for old people, so the
more and more of the bad stuff
will no longer apply, at least in so far as the bad stuff is physical rather than mental. As for people “somewhere in the middle of the spectrum”—if we suppose roughly constant quality of life thanks to anti-aging treatments, always wanting to live a few more decades means never wanting to stop living just as much as always wanting to live a few more millennia does.
If I came to expect a thousand years of healthy life, I think I would be more inclined to find long-term purposes. (Maybe a succession of projects each taking a few decades to a few centuries.) Wouldn’t you? I mean, my motivation to try to cure aging, or prove the Riemann Hypothesis, or put an end to poverty or malaria, is less than it could be because I don’t expect to be able to make a very large contribution to any of those things. (I am not claiming that this is rational, that an ideal agent would have that motivational structure. Only that I do and I don’t think I’m alone.) If I thought I could make 50x as big a difference, I think I’d be willing to work harder. But I may be wrong; introspection is unreliable.
Thanks. Interesting. I think one issue is maintaining the will to live indefinitely, not getting tired of life, of cumulative stress, basically anti-depresison. I think it would be more useful to focus on fixing that, and when everybody totally wants to live on and on and on, then that generates motivation to throw more resources on anti-aging. Without that, there is a lesser motivation, as people who are not very happy, like myself, will not support it vigorously. Senescence is an acceptable, honorable, non-shameful way of slow suicide, suitable if you are only lightly depressed. You can get old and die without ever having to admit you are depressed or you want to die. If life is extended, you basically either have to endure it longer, or have to own up to, admit defeat, admit you fail at life, and choose suicide. Neither are very attractive options. This is why I recommend fixing the will to live i.e. light depression first.
Fixing the will to live is not going to be easy because it goes against the logic of evolution (which does not care if you are depressed or dead after you have reproduced) and much of human biology. You essentially want to keep people in a constant “expecting rewards” mindset, biologically speaking. In a look forward to tomorrow because something cool with happen mindset. However, it is likely that would lead to some kind of burnout, like, dopamine receptors becoming desensitized from over-use or something like that. Fixing this would be a major brain rewiring.
Hm. This was eye opening enough that I felt like commenting for the first time in a year. I’ve known for a while about people being too despaired to desire living on, but this puts it under a new perspective.
Most importantly it helps explain the huge discrepancy between how instrumentally important staying alive and able is for anyone who has any goal at all (barring some fringe cases), and how little most people do to plan and organize themselves in order to avoid aging and dying, even as it is reasonably expected to be unavoidable with our current means.
What you said suggests maybe another, little explored—to my knowledge—by life-extensionists set of strategies to sustain effective life extension projects—as generalized public acceptance and backing is still very much nowhere as far as it should be.
I have this impression that anti-aging and anti-death on LW is a general extension of that kind of culture in America that 50 and 60 year old still exercise and not smoke and drink little because they still expect a lot of happiness rolling in to worth it. At least this is the culture I generally glean from e.g. The New York times who seem to always have some fad diet and exercise and seem to at least pay lip service to health. They are the kind of people who would NOT find a joke like “A real mans six course dinner is one pizza, five beers” funny, which also suggests that this culture drifted quite afar from blue-collar values, I think it is the white-collarization of American society that ultimately created it. While I was strongly influenced by the culture of the less developed parts of Europe where that joke would be funny, mores are still on blue-collar levels, it is OK to drink and smoke yourself to death at 60 because by that your kids can make a living so you no longer owe much duty to them, and you lived for discharging your duties anyway and not for fun. Or, the fun was precisely in things getting drunk with friends.
What missing from this view is of course the third option, precisely the option that seems most prevalent on LW: living not for discharging duties nor for “partying” but for pursuing personally selected goals. I think the idea of personal selected goals requires a culture or attitude that is individualistic, and even egalitarian, where individuals are expected to be autonomous enough to find goals and empowered enough to have a chance at them. In other words, a political culture where people are more “association members” and less “subjects”. I think it also requires an economic environment with significant discretionary incomes that worrying about bills is no big deal, and people can expect to make a living out of interesting jobs, not simply taking anything that pays the bills.
I mentioned collars, because all this cultural background difference I describe is not that kind of cultural difference that is say between America and Japan, it is a difference in time, not space: almost everything I wrote as my experience would be entirely relevant to an American plumber in 1925 or 1950, not sure exactly when. In other words, it is more about being on different levels on the Maslow pyramid, really the difference is here that the white-collarization of American society is a collective climb upwards on that pyramid which explains more or less everything about this. Longevity is a high Maslow pyramid level desire.
One perfect example of of this climbing of the Maslow pyramid is how women, feminists refer to work as empowering careers. To a blue-collar culture, it is very strange—they see work as torture (French: travail), a necessary evil done for survival. Actually this is one of the best signals and predictors of Maslow level and longevity expectations IMHO.
I am new to this community. Is the anti-aging stuff popular here? To me it comes accross as a bit weird. There is a scale of depression/hedonia from being almost catatonic to being ecstatically happy. Very depressed people often want to kill themselves right now. Supposedly, ecstatically happy people would like to live forever. If you are somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, you supposedly want live another few decades, not more. If you are not hating your life but not loving it very much either, then the idea of dying in a few decades IMHO sounds logical and good. By that time you can expect to be tired about life anyway, you will have less and less of the good stuff (childhood friends, experiences to discover etc.) and more and more of the bad stuff (cumulative stress, aches etc.) and it will sound like a good deal to end it without shame i.e. naturally.
I think this largely depends on one thing really. If you have a purpose for your life, you supposed want to work on it forever. If you are like most people or like me, just going through life and trying to fish out pleasurable experiences from it, nice holidays in interesting places and big laughs with friends drunk, you probably don’t want to do that forever.
Welcome to LessWrong!
Yes, we are generally very anti-aging here. It is probably one of the core parts of our culture.
My response would be: my desire to continue living or die would depend on my expected future utility of continuing to live. That is, if I expected that my future utility would be negative and would continue to always be negative, I might want to die, but that is not the case.
I don’t consider myself someone who is either ecstatically happy or depressed. Like you I am in the middle. However, I feel that this middle state still has an overall positive utility.
But even if I was currently suffering so much that I considered my life to be negative utility, I would still want to live if I expected things could improve in the future, which I do. If we observe the course of human civilization, life conditions have generally improved greatly for almost everyone in society over long periods of time, and will probably continue to do so if our civilization continues to advance technologically, economically, socially, etc.
Thus, I do not wish to ‘only live a few more decades and then die’. Instead, I anticipate that the utility of my living could continue to increase in the far future, and might actually be significantly better than it is now.
For many people in our current time, quality of life declines as they get old, especially near the end, due to health decline, loss of social connections due to friends deaths, etc. As a result, many people ‘accept’ that death is necessary, as life would only keep getting worse anyway.
But if we are able to cure and reverse aging, this would no longer necessarily be the case. We may be able to reach a point where we are able to restore youth, energy, and health to people. If so, living forever would not be a state of being an old., decrepit person with no social life, but would be a return to the healthful youth state that many associate with the best years of their life!
Regarding having a purpose for one’s life: If you do not feel that you have a purpose for you life, this does not mean that you would never find one in the future, especially if one were to live a very long time. For example, if you knew you were going to live forever, and you didn’t have to deal with some of the sufferings and energy drains of your current life, would you then perhaps be more motivated to find such a purpose?
If you are afraid of running out of different experiences to enjoy, consider that people are continually inventing new things to be interested in. Stories, games, knowledge, shared cultural experiences, etc. People are generating new information that you can consume at a rate faster than you can consume it, and in a future more advanced world this would only become more and more true.
f you think you will get bored of everything that there is, consider that we now have ideas and experiences and potential hobbies which were almost inconceivable 100 years ago, and in a universe that allows for infinite complexity we can continue to generate them for as long as the universe lasts, for as long as there is negentropy left for us to consume.
I want to see the future, not just because I think living has positive value, but because I anticipate that value might increase in the more technologically advanced future.
I don’t think I could ever run out of things to explore, but if I did, and I eventually wanted to not live anymore, I would rather make that choice myself when I reached that point, and not have it forced upon me too soon because of accumulated damage to my mitochondrial dna, loss of telomeres, accumulation of mutations, and/or whatever else is the cause of the aging process.
If someone figures out how to stop or reverse aging, presumably that will mean higher quality of life for old people, so the
will no longer apply, at least in so far as the bad stuff is physical rather than mental. As for people “somewhere in the middle of the spectrum”—if we suppose roughly constant quality of life thanks to anti-aging treatments, always wanting to live a few more decades means never wanting to stop living just as much as always wanting to live a few more millennia does.
If I came to expect a thousand years of healthy life, I think I would be more inclined to find long-term purposes. (Maybe a succession of projects each taking a few decades to a few centuries.) Wouldn’t you? I mean, my motivation to try to cure aging, or prove the Riemann Hypothesis, or put an end to poverty or malaria, is less than it could be because I don’t expect to be able to make a very large contribution to any of those things. (I am not claiming that this is rational, that an ideal agent would have that motivational structure. Only that I do and I don’t think I’m alone.) If I thought I could make 50x as big a difference, I think I’d be willing to work harder. But I may be wrong; introspection is unreliable.
Welcome! LessWrong is generally anti-Death. See HPMoR or The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant.
Thanks. Interesting. I think one issue is maintaining the will to live indefinitely, not getting tired of life, of cumulative stress, basically anti-depresison. I think it would be more useful to focus on fixing that, and when everybody totally wants to live on and on and on, then that generates motivation to throw more resources on anti-aging. Without that, there is a lesser motivation, as people who are not very happy, like myself, will not support it vigorously. Senescence is an acceptable, honorable, non-shameful way of slow suicide, suitable if you are only lightly depressed. You can get old and die without ever having to admit you are depressed or you want to die. If life is extended, you basically either have to endure it longer, or have to own up to, admit defeat, admit you fail at life, and choose suicide. Neither are very attractive options. This is why I recommend fixing the will to live i.e. light depression first.
Fixing the will to live is not going to be easy because it goes against the logic of evolution (which does not care if you are depressed or dead after you have reproduced) and much of human biology. You essentially want to keep people in a constant “expecting rewards” mindset, biologically speaking. In a look forward to tomorrow because something cool with happen mindset. However, it is likely that would lead to some kind of burnout, like, dopamine receptors becoming desensitized from over-use or something like that. Fixing this would be a major brain rewiring.
I recommend reading the sequences, if you haven’t already. In particular, the fun theory sequence discusses exactly these issues.
Upvoted for suggesting a specific sequence.
Hm. This was eye opening enough that I felt like commenting for the first time in a year. I’ve known for a while about people being too despaired to desire living on, but this puts it under a new perspective.
Most importantly it helps explain the huge discrepancy between how instrumentally important staying alive and able is for anyone who has any goal at all (barring some fringe cases), and how little most people do to plan and organize themselves in order to avoid aging and dying, even as it is reasonably expected to be unavoidable with our current means.
What you said suggests maybe another, little explored—to my knowledge—by life-extensionists set of strategies to sustain effective life extension projects—as generalized public acceptance and backing is still very much nowhere as far as it should be.
I have this impression that anti-aging and anti-death on LW is a general extension of that kind of culture in America that 50 and 60 year old still exercise and not smoke and drink little because they still expect a lot of happiness rolling in to worth it. At least this is the culture I generally glean from e.g. The New York times who seem to always have some fad diet and exercise and seem to at least pay lip service to health. They are the kind of people who would NOT find a joke like “A real mans six course dinner is one pizza, five beers” funny, which also suggests that this culture drifted quite afar from blue-collar values, I think it is the white-collarization of American society that ultimately created it. While I was strongly influenced by the culture of the less developed parts of Europe where that joke would be funny, mores are still on blue-collar levels, it is OK to drink and smoke yourself to death at 60 because by that your kids can make a living so you no longer owe much duty to them, and you lived for discharging your duties anyway and not for fun. Or, the fun was precisely in things getting drunk with friends.
What missing from this view is of course the third option, precisely the option that seems most prevalent on LW: living not for discharging duties nor for “partying” but for pursuing personally selected goals. I think the idea of personal selected goals requires a culture or attitude that is individualistic, and even egalitarian, where individuals are expected to be autonomous enough to find goals and empowered enough to have a chance at them. In other words, a political culture where people are more “association members” and less “subjects”. I think it also requires an economic environment with significant discretionary incomes that worrying about bills is no big deal, and people can expect to make a living out of interesting jobs, not simply taking anything that pays the bills.
I mentioned collars, because all this cultural background difference I describe is not that kind of cultural difference that is say between America and Japan, it is a difference in time, not space: almost everything I wrote as my experience would be entirely relevant to an American plumber in 1925 or 1950, not sure exactly when. In other words, it is more about being on different levels on the Maslow pyramid, really the difference is here that the white-collarization of American society is a collective climb upwards on that pyramid which explains more or less everything about this. Longevity is a high Maslow pyramid level desire.
One perfect example of of this climbing of the Maslow pyramid is how women, feminists refer to work as empowering careers. To a blue-collar culture, it is very strange—they see work as torture (French: travail), a necessary evil done for survival. Actually this is one of the best signals and predictors of Maslow level and longevity expectations IMHO.