I wonder why people like us who talk about wanting to “live forever” don’t think more seriously about what that could mean in terms of overturning our current assumptions and background conditions, if our lives stretch into centuries and then into mlllennia.
I started to think about this based on something Mike Darwin wrote on his blog a few years back:
Many years ago, when I was a teenager, Curtis Henderson was driving us out of Sayville to go the Cryo-Span facility, and I said something that irritated him – really set him off on a tear. Beverly (Gillian Cumings) had just died, and it had become clear that she was not going to get frozen, and I was moaning about it, crying about it in fact, and this is what he said to me: “You wanna live forever kid? You really wanna live forever?! Well, then you better be ready to go through a lot more of this – ’cause this ain’t nothin. Ever been burned all over, or had your hand squashed in a machine? Well get prepared for it, because you’re gonna experience that, and a lot more that’s worse than either you or me can imagine. Ever lost your girlfriend or you wife, or your mother or your father, or your best friend? Well, you’re gonna loose ‘em, and if you live long enough, really, really long enough, you’re gonna lose everybody; and then you’ll lose ‘em over and over again. Even if they don’t die, you’ll lose ‘em, so be prepared. You see all this here; them boats, this street, that ocean, that sun in that sky? You’re gonna lose ’em all! The more you go on, the more you’ll leave behind, so I’m telling you here and now, you’d best be damn certain about this living forever thing, because it’s gonna be every bit as much Hell as it Heaven.”
So, for example, I’ve started to question the assumption that the social ideology we’ve inherited from the Enlightenment—a recent intellectual movement only 300 years old—has gotten locked in as a permanent part of the human condition. Now I wouldn’t assume anything of the sort, and I can see the likelihood of Neoreactionary future societies. Even if we don’t get that way because of the inherent weaknesses of the Enlightenment Project itself, we could stumble into them regardless through a drunkard’s walk.
I also like to ask christians why their religion can’t disappear eventually, and I don’t mean through that ridiculous rapture belief some simple-minded evangelicals hold. From the perspective of people living ten thousand years from now, assuming humans survive, their dominant world religion might have started sometime between now and then, and if knowledge of christianity still exists then, only a few academic specialists would know anything about it from fragmentary evidence.
In practical terms, this perspective helps me to disengage from current events that don’t matter much in the long run. At my current age (55), for example, American Presidents come and go subjectively quickly, so I tend to ignore them as much as possible compared with longer-term trends like the demographic social engineering in the U.S. that bloggers like Steve Sailer write about. I also tend to ignore geek fads that will allegedly “change everything,” like Bitcoin, 3D printing and seasteading, until the beta testers beat the hell out of these innovations and we can get a more realistic view of what they can do despite what the hype and propaganda say.
So what do you think about the conditions of human life over, say, the next 300 years?
About that quote: If life is not worth living for 1000 years, then why is it worth living for 80? And if it’s worth living for 80, why not 1000? If you don’t want to live 1000 years, why not kill yourself now?
Is there some utility function that is positive up to 80 years but starts to become negative after that? (independent of level of health, since we’re implicitly assuming that if you lived for 1000 years you’d be reasonably healthy during most of that time). If so, what is it?
In practical terms, this perspective helps me to disengage from current events that don’t matter much in the long run. At my current age (55), for example, American Presidents come and go subjectively quickly, so I tend to ignore them as much as possible compared with longer-term trends like the demographic social engineering in the U.S. that bloggers like Steve Sailer write about. I also tend to ignore geek fads that will allegedly “change everything,” like Bitcoin, 3D printing and seasteading, until the beta testers beat the hell out of these innovations and we can get a more realistic view of what they can do despite what the hype and propaganda say.
If the relative (dis)value of gains or losses for society at large regress to a mean over time, why wouldn’t this trend extend to what happens to us personally? Why wouldn’t everything we observe or experience not matter as much? In a lifetime of centuries, if I see everything I now love degrade or disappear, I may also have the opportunity to grow a more nuanced love for things or persons that are more robust over time. The sting of pain at losing something loved in our first century of living may fade as its dwarfed by how deeply we feel the loss or gain of love for something greater, something that can only be appreciated in a lifetime spanning centuries.
Empirically, it seems to be nearly identical to the age of retirement as things stand. Lots of 70 year olds are just punching the clock most of the time(though there’s certainly exceptions).
I don’t claim that we’ve extended life as long as our attention spans can allow. I think we could live longer and be okay. But current human psychology and culture are not designed for extremely long lives, even if we solved the issues of physiology.
I know, but that’s not the biggest reason for retirement. Remember, a lot of people despise their jobs—they’re looking to get out as soon as they can. A lot more don’t really hate it, but wait for the time when they can quit working financially(due to pensions, etc.), and leave as soon as they can, because retirement is seen as more fun. Those aren’t dependant on aging.
A lot of people who say they’re looking to get out of retirement as soon as they can are optimising for it very poorly, as the early retirement community will argue and in many cases demonstrate. If you’re in a sufficiently high-earning job OR are sufficiently frugal that you can save two thirds of what you earn or more and still enjoy your life with expenses at that level, you can retire in about ten to fifteen years. Social effects dominate—if you earn three times the median salary or more, probably most of your peers earn comparable amounts and spend ~90% of what they earn, so trying to live on what’s actually a perfectly normal amount to live on seems like extreme deprivation. And what the social effects do is keep the age of retirement at the age it was set at by governments enacting the first pension schemes a hundred years ago when everyone was a factory worker. And that age was decided upon based on health deteriorating.
I concur that if the issues of physiology are solved, the layout of culture and psychology would have to change to accommodate, lest quality of life decreases. Just because humans might start living for several more centuries or millenia into the future doesn’t mean we can assume there’s a hunky-dory post-scarcity wonderland waiting for us there. For one, a longer lifespan means longer time meant working to save for a future of greater needs and wants, to sustain that longer lifespan. Maybe humans would despair that several more centuries of living means several more centuries of work. Alternatively, as how humans experience time changes as a function of how long they live, they may be more willing to work longer if there’s a greater diversity of work, and more opportunity for novel experiences and projects that a shorter lifespan couldn’t afford.
I think life after 80 goes downhill not just because of health but because people you are familiar with and things start going away. Things change so quickly the world starts to become unfamiliar to you. Its like living on an alien planet. I think living to 1000 years would require one to leave the world, do some adjusting/re-education/reworking and then re-engaging with the world again. It would be like every 100 years going back to college and starting again. New friends, new music, new everything so that one could keep going.
Have you read R. Scott Bakker’s fiction? You might enjoy it, he deals with some issues that arise with living forever. I am surprised more LW folks aren’t into Bakker. It’s sort of Tolkien by way of Herbert with heavy rationalist overtones, e.g.:
“This trilogy details the emergence of Anasûrimbor Kellhus, a brilliant monastic warrior, as he takes control of a holy war and the hearts and minds of its leaders. Kellhus exhibits incredible powers of prediction and persuasion, which are derived from deep knowledge of rationality, cognitive biases, and causality, as discovered by the Dûnyain, a secret monastic sect. ”
I read the first book in the series (after seeing it mentioned here some years back), and got some way into the second, but once I put it down I couldn’t pick it up again. There are six books (so far). Are they worth it?
I started wondering who the books were about, and if different readers would have different answers to that question. To someone interested in rationality, Kellhus is the obvious protagonist, at least in the first volume, or perhaps, just if introduced to the books through a mention on LessWrong. In the second, that theme is not prominent, as far as I recall, and the whole arc of Kellhus waging jihad across the world seems to be merely background—but to what? Other readers might consider the relationship between Achamian and Esmeret to be the focus of the story. Others, the power struggles amongst the various factions. Others, the nature of the dark force of past ages that is emerging into the world again, which is mentioned but hardly appears on stage.
What are these books about?
HT to the Prince of Nothing wiki for refreshing my memory of character names. Maybe it would be quicker to read the wiki than labour through the books.
One heuristic I heard is that if you didn’t like the Silmarillion, you probably wouldn’t like Bakker’s stuff.
These things are a matter of taste, I suppose. I was not very interested in Kellhus the rationalist Mary Sue so much, but I found it interesting to ponder the ontological puzzle of the “No-God.”
So what do you think about the conditions of human life over, say, the next 300 years?
Global warming; Islam; a cure for ageing; practical use of space; AI; something else. To know anything about the next 300 years one would have to know how all of these pan out.
Are there any lesser cultural or technological trends that, if they panned out, you expect might have just as great an impact as the greater trends you’ve just mentioned above? I’m interested in your thoughts in this regard.
Getting more information out of less data, with the notable current example being discovering exoplanets from tiny variations in starlight and the history of humanity and other lifeforms from DNA.
I’m expecting this trend to continue, but I have no idea what else it will apply to.
Are there any lesser cultural or technological trends that, if they panned out, you expect might have just as great an impact as the greater trends you’ve just mentioned above?
I’m sure there must be. That was just a list of what immediately came to mind, with a catchall at the end. The Great Stagnation? Dysgenic breeding patterns? Malthusian limitations closing in? Genetically modified humans? Rationalism going viral? (“There is no God but Bayes and Eliezer is His prophet.”) Rationalism going viral differently? (“Neuroscience proves that you do not exist. I do not exist. Even Eliezer does not exist. Room 101 exists.”)
It’s just ridiculous to say that the puritians that got homosexuality banned have roughly the same ideology as today’s diversity advocates.
Right- and even if you take the more reasonable view and claim that the Puritans have the same genes or personalities or social roles or so on as today’s diversity advocates, that means that we need to explain future social change in terms of those genes and personalities. If there will always be Mrs. Grundy, what will the future Mrs. Grundy oppress?
You see all this here; them boats, this street, that ocean, that sun in that sky? You’re gonna lose ’em all! The more you go on, the more you’ll leave behind, so I’m telling you here and now, you’d best be damn certain about this living forever thing, because it’s gonna be every bit as much Hell as it Heaven.”
Sounds good to me.
(Disclaimer, or something: I am not signed up for cryonics.)
if knowledge of christianity still exists then, only a few academic specialists would know anything about it from fragmentary evidence.
In Asia, there are ideologies, philosophies, and/or religions two- or threefold older than Christianity, and they still have hundreds of millions of followers, or, at least, more than ‘only a few academic specialists’ who know about them. In particular, thought from ancient Chinese and Indian civilizations still have great impact on the modern incarnations of those civilizations. Also, how evidence is gathered and stored is so much better than it was two thousand years ago. If ever a point comes that future civilizations look at ours as ancient, they will have information on our histories and cultures much better (in quality and quantity) than we have of, e.g., the origins of Hinduism, Judaism, or Mesopotamia.
I like this Curtis Henderson guy. My great-grandmother lived to be 96 and one of her complaints was that everyone she knew, loved, and cared about had died and she hardly had anyone left.
what that could mean in terms of overturning our current assumptions and background conditions
“Our”? From othercomments of yours I gather that you expect your own assumptions to be upheld, it was only everyone else’s (outside the NRsphere) who were due for a come-uppance.
Christians believe that a god exists and was interventionist enough to start a religion that taught the truth about him, so why wouldn’t they expect him to at least also be interventionist enough to prevent that same religion from disappearing? And I’m not sure how, given someone already believes in an omnipotent interventionist god who’s revealed his will to mankind, also believing that he’ll perform a particular intervention in the future is “ridiculous”—do you have a theological argument or one based on the bible for why only an idiot would think God plans to make the rapture happen?
I wonder why people like us who talk about wanting to “live forever” don’t think more seriously about what that could mean in terms of overturning our current assumptions and background conditions, if our lives stretch into centuries and then into mlllennia.
I started to think about this based on something Mike Darwin wrote on his blog a few years back:
http://chronopause.com/chronopause.com/index.php/2011/04/19/cryonics-nanotechnology-and-transhumanism-utopia-then-and-now/index.html
So, for example, I’ve started to question the assumption that the social ideology we’ve inherited from the Enlightenment—a recent intellectual movement only 300 years old—has gotten locked in as a permanent part of the human condition. Now I wouldn’t assume anything of the sort, and I can see the likelihood of Neoreactionary future societies. Even if we don’t get that way because of the inherent weaknesses of the Enlightenment Project itself, we could stumble into them regardless through a drunkard’s walk.
I also like to ask christians why their religion can’t disappear eventually, and I don’t mean through that ridiculous rapture belief some simple-minded evangelicals hold. From the perspective of people living ten thousand years from now, assuming humans survive, their dominant world religion might have started sometime between now and then, and if knowledge of christianity still exists then, only a few academic specialists would know anything about it from fragmentary evidence.
In practical terms, this perspective helps me to disengage from current events that don’t matter much in the long run. At my current age (55), for example, American Presidents come and go subjectively quickly, so I tend to ignore them as much as possible compared with longer-term trends like the demographic social engineering in the U.S. that bloggers like Steve Sailer write about. I also tend to ignore geek fads that will allegedly “change everything,” like Bitcoin, 3D printing and seasteading, until the beta testers beat the hell out of these innovations and we can get a more realistic view of what they can do despite what the hype and propaganda say.
So what do you think about the conditions of human life over, say, the next 300 years?
I would expect social arrangements to appear that we aren’t even beginning to imagine much more than anything especially neo-reactionary.
About that quote: If life is not worth living for 1000 years, then why is it worth living for 80? And if it’s worth living for 80, why not 1000? If you don’t want to live 1000 years, why not kill yourself now?
Is there some utility function that is positive up to 80 years but starts to become negative after that? (independent of level of health, since we’re implicitly assuming that if you lived for 1000 years you’d be reasonably healthy during most of that time). If so, what is it?
I’m jumping on this bandwagon.
User advancedatheist wrote:
If the relative (dis)value of gains or losses for society at large regress to a mean over time, why wouldn’t this trend extend to what happens to us personally? Why wouldn’t everything we observe or experience not matter as much? In a lifetime of centuries, if I see everything I now love degrade or disappear, I may also have the opportunity to grow a more nuanced love for things or persons that are more robust over time. The sting of pain at losing something loved in our first century of living may fade as its dwarfed by how deeply we feel the loss or gain of love for something greater, something that can only be appreciated in a lifetime spanning centuries.
Boredom.
Why is the threshold for boredom 80 years?
Empirically, it seems to be nearly identical to the age of retirement as things stand. Lots of 70 year olds are just punching the clock most of the time(though there’s certainly exceptions).
I don’t claim that we’ve extended life as long as our attention spans can allow. I think we could live longer and be okay. But current human psychology and culture are not designed for extremely long lives, even if we solved the issues of physiology.
It’s the age of retirement because physical and mental health decreases but I explicitly said assume reasonable health.
I know, but that’s not the biggest reason for retirement. Remember, a lot of people despise their jobs—they’re looking to get out as soon as they can. A lot more don’t really hate it, but wait for the time when they can quit working financially(due to pensions, etc.), and leave as soon as they can, because retirement is seen as more fun. Those aren’t dependant on aging.
A lot of people who say they’re looking to get out of retirement as soon as they can are optimising for it very poorly, as the early retirement community will argue and in many cases demonstrate. If you’re in a sufficiently high-earning job OR are sufficiently frugal that you can save two thirds of what you earn or more and still enjoy your life with expenses at that level, you can retire in about ten to fifteen years. Social effects dominate—if you earn three times the median salary or more, probably most of your peers earn comparable amounts and spend ~90% of what they earn, so trying to live on what’s actually a perfectly normal amount to live on seems like extreme deprivation. And what the social effects do is keep the age of retirement at the age it was set at by governments enacting the first pension schemes a hundred years ago when everyone was a factory worker. And that age was decided upon based on health deteriorating.
No arguments. My comment isn’t that all people are perfectly rational, it’s that many people dislike their jobs.
I concur that if the issues of physiology are solved, the layout of culture and psychology would have to change to accommodate, lest quality of life decreases. Just because humans might start living for several more centuries or millenia into the future doesn’t mean we can assume there’s a hunky-dory post-scarcity wonderland waiting for us there. For one, a longer lifespan means longer time meant working to save for a future of greater needs and wants, to sustain that longer lifespan. Maybe humans would despair that several more centuries of living means several more centuries of work. Alternatively, as how humans experience time changes as a function of how long they live, they may be more willing to work longer if there’s a greater diversity of work, and more opportunity for novel experiences and projects that a shorter lifespan couldn’t afford.
Boredom, memory issues, etc. discussion—it’s both about psychological effects of aging at present tech levels, and what long lives might be like if there were no physiological aging
I think life after 80 goes downhill not just because of health but because people you are familiar with and things start going away. Things change so quickly the world starts to become unfamiliar to you. Its like living on an alien planet. I think living to 1000 years would require one to leave the world, do some adjusting/re-education/reworking and then re-engaging with the world again. It would be like every 100 years going back to college and starting again. New friends, new music, new everything so that one could keep going.
Have you read R. Scott Bakker’s fiction? You might enjoy it, he deals with some issues that arise with living forever. I am surprised more LW folks aren’t into Bakker. It’s sort of Tolkien by way of Herbert with heavy rationalist overtones, e.g.:
“This trilogy details the emergence of Anasûrimbor Kellhus, a brilliant monastic warrior, as he takes control of a holy war and the hearts and minds of its leaders. Kellhus exhibits incredible powers of prediction and persuasion, which are derived from deep knowledge of rationality, cognitive biases, and causality, as discovered by the Dûnyain, a secret monastic sect. ”
I read the first book in the series (after seeing it mentioned here some years back), and got some way into the second, but once I put it down I couldn’t pick it up again. There are six books (so far). Are they worth it?
I started wondering who the books were about, and if different readers would have different answers to that question. To someone interested in rationality, Kellhus is the obvious protagonist, at least in the first volume, or perhaps, just if introduced to the books through a mention on LessWrong. In the second, that theme is not prominent, as far as I recall, and the whole arc of Kellhus waging jihad across the world seems to be merely background—but to what? Other readers might consider the relationship between Achamian and Esmeret to be the focus of the story. Others, the power struggles amongst the various factions. Others, the nature of the dark force of past ages that is emerging into the world again, which is mentioned but hardly appears on stage.
What are these books about?
HT to the Prince of Nothing wiki for refreshing my memory of character names. Maybe it would be quicker to read the wiki than labour through the books.
One heuristic I heard is that if you didn’t like the Silmarillion, you probably wouldn’t like Bakker’s stuff.
These things are a matter of taste, I suppose. I was not very interested in Kellhus the rationalist Mary Sue so much, but I found it interesting to ponder the ontological puzzle of the “No-God.”
Global warming; Islam; a cure for ageing; practical use of space; AI; something else. To know anything about the next 300 years one would have to know how all of these pan out.
Are there any lesser cultural or technological trends that, if they panned out, you expect might have just as great an impact as the greater trends you’ve just mentioned above? I’m interested in your thoughts in this regard.
Getting more information out of less data, with the notable current example being discovering exoplanets from tiny variations in starlight and the history of humanity and other lifeforms from DNA.
I’m expecting this trend to continue, but I have no idea what else it will apply to.
I’m sure there must be. That was just a list of what immediately came to mind, with a catchall at the end. The Great Stagnation? Dysgenic breeding patterns? Malthusian limitations closing in? Genetically modified humans? Rationalism going viral? (“There is no God but Bayes and Eliezer is His prophet.”) Rationalism going viral differently? (“Neuroscience proves that you do not exist. I do not exist. Even Eliezer does not exist. Room 101 exists.”)
Why exactly Neoreactionary? Why don’t you talk about the chance of fundamental Muslims dominating?
Our social ideology changed a lot in the 300 years. The fact that it hasn’t is one of the more central misconceptions of Neoreactionary thought.
Even in 200 years we went from homosexuality being legal, to it being illegal because of puritans, then being legal again and now gay marriage.
It’s just ridiculous to say that the puritians that got homosexuality banned have roughly the same ideology as today’s diversity advocates.
Right- and even if you take the more reasonable view and claim that the Puritans have the same genes or personalities or social roles or so on as today’s diversity advocates, that means that we need to explain future social change in terms of those genes and personalities. If there will always be Mrs. Grundy, what will the future Mrs. Grundy oppress?
Citation please.
Sounds good to me.
(Disclaimer, or something: I am not signed up for cryonics.)
In Asia, there are ideologies, philosophies, and/or religions two- or threefold older than Christianity, and they still have hundreds of millions of followers, or, at least, more than ‘only a few academic specialists’ who know about them. In particular, thought from ancient Chinese and Indian civilizations still have great impact on the modern incarnations of those civilizations. Also, how evidence is gathered and stored is so much better than it was two thousand years ago. If ever a point comes that future civilizations look at ours as ancient, they will have information on our histories and cultures much better (in quality and quantity) than we have of, e.g., the origins of Hinduism, Judaism, or Mesopotamia.
I like this Curtis Henderson guy. My great-grandmother lived to be 96 and one of her complaints was that everyone she knew, loved, and cared about had died and she hardly had anyone left.
“Our”? From other comments of yours I gather that you expect your own assumptions to be upheld, it was only everyone else’s (outside the NRsphere) who were due for a come-uppance.
Christians believe that a god exists and was interventionist enough to start a religion that taught the truth about him, so why wouldn’t they expect him to at least also be interventionist enough to prevent that same religion from disappearing? And I’m not sure how, given someone already believes in an omnipotent interventionist god who’s revealed his will to mankind, also believing that he’ll perform a particular intervention in the future is “ridiculous”—do you have a theological argument or one based on the bible for why only an idiot would think God plans to make the rapture happen?
By modern standarts it will be worse than present. This is how social change works.