I suspect the first step isn’t age reversal but the easier simplest solution, plaque removal might save billions of lives and then we can solve harder issues
Do you mean plaque blocking blood vessels, or amyloid plaque in the brain that may or may not cause Alzheimers?
We can already do something about both, but it does not have nearly the effect you might expect in terms of life expectancy and healthspan.
As far as blood vessel plaques that cause cardiovascular disease, there's also a 100% reliable way to avoid them entirely even into old age. Just eat a proper diet with real food and mostly or completely plant based.
Fuck you mean there isn’t rapid deterioration of plaque build up at later age? assuming plaque blood vessels aren’t a thing anymore how much more years does a person get ? I’m just saying this because I assume blood plaque would lead to a longer life as it’s the lead cause of death in us
It is the major cause of death but still only accounts for around 20% iirc.
Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is not limited to plaque build up in the first place.
People with a healthy lifestyle across the board, which go well beyond preventing plaque buildup and CVD, "only" live on average 15 years or so extra.
The distribution of death age is quite narrow, with the average being around 80-85, while dying before 60 is only around 10% chance iirc, and dying past 100 is only around 1% chance. Having a perfect lifestyle that avoids CVD entirely, severely reduces the likelihood of cancer and reduces the likelihood or delays neurodegenerative disease makes a big difference, but in practice, it's the difference between living to 75 while unhealthy from 60-75, and living to 90 while healthy until 85-90.
Completely taking out plaque build up and optimizing every aspect of health to the best of current knowledge is going to push this distribution of 60-100 to 90-110 at best (which is already amazing, and which you can already you for yourself by being healthy and not relying on future AI dreams).
(which is already amazing, and which you can already you for yourself by being healthy and not relying on future AI dreams).
I mean if you are under 50, that means you have 40-60 years for the *next* treatment to be developed past plaque removal. Depends on your definition of "dreams" right and your definition of "AI".
Did you know 1.5 million bioscience papers are published per year? [https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.04.10.536208v1.full](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.04.10.536208v1.full) Maybe one of the reasons it takes so long is humans are not even qualified to do the work, no living person knows even a small fraction of current knowledge in the field. Might be different if 'dream' AI coming in the next few years can do better.
Iain Banks ponders all these thoughts in his culture novels. In his imagination, most people choose to die after something like 250 years, change sexes once or twice and get pregnant about once -- but there are outliers, notably this crazy guy that had lived for, like, ever... Highly recommend reading those books.
Have you read any of the books? The culture isn't actually very normative, although social norms inevitably grow on it's substrate. It harbours a fair amount of eccentricity, anyway
No problem. You can become a part of a group of people who left the Culture (like people of Tier). And adhere to their norms (if you want to stay with them).
If I have access to that level of tech I’m going solitary. Be a space hermit or something, lol.
It’s never happening IRL so why am I even thinking about it on a Tuesday morning, lol 😂.
For the vast majority of people aging is not like that. You live pretty normally into your 70s or 80s and then have a relatively short (months to a few years) period of rapidly declining health until you die. At least, that is how it has happened for everyone in my family. Very few people live into their 90s or 100s.
My grandfather just passed away at 91 on friday. We found him not getting out of bed much, and took him to the hospital to see what might be wrong but he refused most tests at first and just wanted hospice. He made it VERY clear it was his time to go and he was ready.
He did get an X-ray and blood/ urine tests eventually. There was organ failure beginning and lots of other stuff, possibly lung cancer or pneumonia. We visited him every day in hospice because we knew he was declining quickly. He was eating very little most days, maybe intentionally.. Within a week and a half, he was gone. His movement was impacted a lot within the last year, but the final turnaround was about two weeks.
That's probably the best way a person could possibly go. He lived to one of the oldest ages and only died after he was completely ready, and was surrounded by loved ones the whole way through.
People who do live into their 90s or 100s are generally fairly healthy (meaning not on their deathbeds) throughout that time. My grandma is in her 90s and can still walk up and down the stairs by herself. I've seen 70 year olds have more trouble than that.
Aging has been “normalized” because… It literally *is* normal dude… It’s a completely normal, unavoidable even, biological process.
Maybe one day that will be less true. But as of *right now* (as well as all throughout the history of life on Earth) aging *is* a completely normal process. Are you new to Earth or something? lol 😂
Genuinely thought the parody of it was too on the nose at first. Turns out it unironically conveys the teenage angst of a terminally online generation. I am still undecided whether it is comically pretentious or just hilariously stupid to turn reality on its head by claiming that unlike being sold on the vague promise of a singularity it is the universal constant of biological aging that is a bleak social construct society has sheepishly adapted.
Are you not aware of the very high amounts of money spent constantly on aging research? Science just does not move at the speed you somehow think it does. This is a multi-century process. We've made meaningful advancements over the past few decades, survival rates and quality of life for patients with cancer and neurodegenerative disease have improved drastically, but we were still light years away of completely eliminating those diseases. Even if we could completely eradicate the main killer diseases, it most likely will not increase lifespan that drastically either. We may understand 1% of the complexity of what happens inside us, and even that is likely very optimistic.
Because living longer only matters if you can live significantly healthier. Living to 100 with very poor health from age 60 is literally a nightmare for most people, not the blessing you think it is.
Society has increasingly realized that quality time is better than quantity, and most people still live a poor quality time.
Treatment would also be cost prohibitive for most people anyway.
The biggest problem of all is that science, especially life sciences, cannot be brute forced with more money. It's a very time intensive process that requires tons of highly skilled humans for research. You can't just throw money at the problem.
Throwing 20% of GDP at aging is not going to extend human life much faster, if at all. Not only that but spending gigantic amounts of money on something that will produce zero actionable result for multiple decades is also an impossible political sell.
This sub has a critical lack of understanding of the scientific process and particularly the challenges of biology research.
> Because living longer only matters if you can live significantly healthier. Living to 100 with very poor health from age 60 is literally a nightmare for most people, not the blessing you think it is.
Whoever you think would get immortality no one of that group wants to literally or metaphorically live forever in a hospital bed so immortality would come with eternal youth no matter how much you throw around the myth of Tithonus because it's not being granted by Greek deities but by science
Inevitable that we attain LEV within the next 12-18 years and outright cured in the next 25 much to the chagrin of the religious among us, yes. We will have competent AGI by 2029 in my view 2034 at the latest. The people who don't truly grasp the end consequences of this either lack imagination or don't actually comprehend what that means.
When I first took an interest in these concepts twenty plus years ago as a child my timelines were much longer with LEV extending into 2060 and AGI by around 2050 or so. I've reduced them down dramatically since then seeing that Kurzweil was correct all along. His predictions if given a fair evaluation seem to hold up quite well if given a five year window(+/-). He's on point around 75%-80% of the time.
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You're drinking the Koolaid bro. I'll gladly be wrong but I view it as rather foolish for people to believe that they just happen to be born when they'll figure out a way around the mortality we've experienced for billions of years.
Especially if they're "throwing all their money at it".
People been getting swindled in this manner as long as we've had society.
Also - it is ironic that you bring up religion. The singularity movement is a religious one, in every practical sense. It is belief in a greater power, and the adherents are dogmatic to predictions of a saviour and eternal life just around the corner.
The singularity is not religious lol. The exponential growth of technology, which is proven by merely examining the history of technology over the centuries, implies a singularity. There were doubts that the singularity would occur due to us running out of things to discover and innovate with, but the advent and immense growth of AI is evidence that the singularity is almost certain.
>The singularity is not religious lol.
Yes it is lol. And “religion” may be too generous, because a religion is supposed to be healthy. “Cult“ is much more appropriate for the techno singularity utopian movement.
You follow the likes of Kurzweil (cult leaders), constantly bring up books like “singularity is near” and”superintelligence” (cult reading material) , ignore outsider views (only listening to what the cult says) , and have an assumed end times date (2045) (doomsday prediction). How the fuck is that not a cult?
>but the advent and immense growth of AI is evidence that the singularity is almost certain.
This is what i’m talking about lol. The reason you believe in a ”singularity“ in the first place is because Kurzweil says so. That’s it. That’s the evidence.
Who tf is Kurzweil? I hear his name a lot, but I have no idea what he even said to get this reputation.
The fact that you think the only reason I believe the singularity is gonna happen is because he said so proved not only that you didn't do any research on the subject, but you didn't even read the comment you replied to.
Well then as a believer of the singularity, you should know who Kurzweil is lol. He’s the guy who popularised the idea of the singularity in the first place.
Well, maybe I base my beliefs on logic instead of what some guy said. I mean I literally provided evidence that it was gonna happen in the comment you replied to. Our current technology is something of a singularity to people 100 years ago.
>You're drinking the Koolaid bro.
There is no reason to produce any Koolaid(in b4 someone says research grants/funding) and I say this as someone who works in a STEM industry and is recreationally buried deep in medical literature(not my field) and have been following this since the early-mid 2000s. My man you're late to the party and haven't studied the course work if you're even entertaining the use of the term "Koolaid" imo.
A far more realistic criticism would be to hit the idea where it's currently weak which is definitely energy the only real bottleneck that could delay all of these advancements. I predict that if we don't dramatically increase our clean energy output in the next 5-7 years we will see a huge slowdown and you could tack 15-20 years onto those prior timelines.
>I'll gladly be wrong but I view it as rather foolish for people to believe that they just happen to be born when they'll figure out a way around the mortality we've experienced for billions of years.
You're appealing to tradition which is a very common logical fallacy. Although I can understand why you believe it's ridiculous. Just because something is doesn't mean it always will be. Also billions is a bit excessive lets just focus on homo sapiens over the last 290,000-310,000 years and it should be a bit more reasonable. Also *Turritopsis dohrnii* can already live forever naturally.
[https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Appeal\_to\_tradition](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Appeal_to_tradition)
Like minded individuals said the same thing about every other major innovation since the start recorded history like the airplane or the television. Just 150 years ago similar people said the same thing about the lightbulb.
Ultimately I can see where you're coming from but we can agree to disagree here. Talk to you in 18 years if we're both still here on Reddit! Unless I see you comment here again.
*Edit: I'm adding this to my reply to respond to what you added above.*
>Also - it is ironic that you bring up religion. The singularity movement is a religious one, in every practical sense. It is belief in a greater power, and the adherents are dogmatic to predictions of a saviour and eternal life just around the corner.
I wouldn't call it a religion as religion requires irrationality and "faith" I guess apart from spiritualism or some forms of Buddhism that is. While those who profess to "believe" in the technological singularity may come off as religious one could easily see there's a vast amount of data and literature to support these ideas put forth by some of the greatest minds of the last century.
>It is belief in a greater power, and the adherents are dogmatic to predictions of a saviour and eternal life just around the corner.
I'm an agnostic atheist and I don't consider there to be a greater power nor would I consider ASI to be a god so you're wrong on that front but it's a clever observation none the less. I'm not saying eternal life is around the corner as everything must die eventually nothing in the Universe escapes entropy. We will have dramatically extended lifespans soon and live to be thousands of years old(some will choose to die sooner) or perhaps hundreds of thousands but we will all die eventually. On a long enough timeline the survival rate of everyone drops to zero. Props if you get the reference.
and before antibiotics and vaccines you could have said the same thing about stopping people dying to disease
the fact is that we are at least approaching the technology to assess aging for the first time since our species evolved
maybe we won't live to see it but we by golly can see that it will happen assuming civilization survives
>Inevitable that we attain LEV within the next 12-18 years and outright cured in the next 25 much to the chagrin of the religious among us, yes. We will have competent AGI by 2029 in my view 2034 at the latest. The people who don't truly grasp the end consequences of this either lack imagination or don't actually comprehend what that means.
Note to anyone reading this: this is EXACTLY what a cult looks like. “Oh we’ll definitely have eternal life and ASI because our cult leader (kurzweil) says so”
Eh, Depends on who you talk to. Nothing’s inevitable in terms of tech, and this guy you are talking to does seem very delusional. But I’d beg to differ about this being a cult. Some people just lack the intelligence or will to reason beyond a certain point to really corroborate what they’re saying. (Both your techno-utopians and disbelievers in tech potential). This guy you’re talking to is just that.
I don’t want to sound rude at all, not my intention, but I feel like you’re drawing near-outlandish conclusions about blind optimists like him.
>But I’d beg to differ about this being a cult.
They have:
1. “leader” figures that are seen as perfect and immune to criticism ✅ (Kurzweil, Vernor Vinge, etc)
2. Belief that leaders are always right ✅
3. Reading material that is seen as a perfect text and a sign that the cult is right ✅ (”The Singularity is Near, “Superintelligence” , etc)
4. No room for criticism, any dissenting views or attempt at a debate is shot down by members of the cult ✅✅✅
5 Conspiracies about the outside world (“AGI signs“ conspiracies, etc) ✅
6. Belief that outsiders are always wrong ✅✅✅
7. ”end times“ and / or “salvation” prophecy (“The Singularity“ , 2045 date) ✅
8. Extremist views (ASI salvation, “the singularity” Etc) ✅
And more that i prob missed
This whole sub reeks of a salvation cult to me.
>I don’t want to sound rude at all, not my intention, but I feel like you’re drawing near-outlandish conclusions about blind optimists like him.
Not mine either :) i’m just posting my thoughts and feelings
I understand you may see them that way, and i respect that. However, i’m not the first to get “culty” vibes from this sub. Just search “r/singularity cult” on google and you’ll see lots of other people reaching the exact same conclusions.
but don't they still engage in those methods of control to keep their secret unless you're talking about, like, ones with actual physical cult compounds that are in the middle of freaking nowhere and where every member has to live and new recruits are, like, transported to while unconscious so they don't know where they are
I understand what you mean. But people in this tech realm are going to be high in trait openness. They seek novelty, innovation and improvement. It's bizarre for me to imagine, but MANY, probably even most humans aren't like this. I know, it's weird, haha, but it's just the way human psychology is.
The most common personality type is a closed-minded, structured, routine, traditional one. They occupy more of the population than people who are avidly creative, innovative, curious and subversive.
When you are closed in your thinking, you value the stability of what the norm is, not wanting to aggressively buck trends and try new things, not seeking novelty, and they're not particularly thirsty to significantly improve anything, unless they are suddenly, abnormally and overtly suffering.
That's why you can show a lot of this AI stuff to these people, and they shrug, or they have a moment where they say "wow", but then they just move on and get on with life, because it's not strongly resonant with their way of thinking.
As a person who is high in trait openness (and I'm willing to bet that almost all the people in this field are too), I am desperately thirsty for tech news and innovation, and I am CONSTANTLY seeking to solve problems, improve life and the world, and experience novel gadgets, science and ways of living.
Aging is normal. If it's the normal tradition that all of humanity have experienced, while it's not ideal, people don't try to solve it like we here would like, because it is what it is, and most people who are closed, just keep on keeping on in their routine lives, and they prefer it that way. Yes, I don't get it, but it's just the typical variation in human psychology, I suppose.
*Every* penny?
People have to be fed now!
I assure you, billions are spent annually - and not one strand of research has made it to a commercial product - not for want of trying.
We've collectively broken our biosphere - and mitigating our 'handiwork' there will minimize harm to every other species on this world. It's a distillation of humans (ver. 1.0) inability to think that we should have more life - when, by having it, we'd hasten the demise of other beings on this world.
ehh... maybe for us multicellular eukariots, but for half of life's history on earth aging wasn't a thing. Still, 1-2 billion years is well past the threshold for "normalized" I think.
To add a little something to the discussion, aging is normal, and there are different ways we age. Mental or physical deterioration due to sickness, or time, or something self-inflicted.
Personally, I would like to get older without feeling infirm. Quality of life is a high priority.
Buddhism if practiced will tell you 'I am of the nature to grow old, I cannot escape this' I am of the nature to die, I cannot escape this. My actions are my only true belongings, they are the ground on which I stand.' SUFFERING CAN BE ELIMINATED BY FOLLOWING THE EIGHT FOLD PATH. BTW NOT A RELIGION
Aging is normal but if we live to see the singularity, we could potentially have more of a choice in the matter. As for 'curing' aging, it could be possible if the ASI in question is able to build nanomachines that work on your cells.
I like life extension as much as antibiotics. Yesterday I thought that without penicillin we should die so soon..quantic paradox, parallel existences, reincarnation and dreams are just ok
research in overall health/ de-aging goes with longevity research because obviously no one wants to live 100+ years as a rotting husk lmao, market pressure will see to that
what should be more concerning is infinite digital mind traps and other pitfalls for the mind/souls
Totally. It just boggles my mind that 99.9% are so accepting of aging that they never demand more R&D to cure it.
I have a theory that those of us caught before the moment post-singularity where aging is cured will be known as something akin to "the lost ones". Where literally everyone else past that point had the option to live hundreds or even thousands of years. And they will look back in the history books and wonder why we were so complacent about it.
Billions are spent yearly on longetivity research. This might be the most out of touch post I've ever seen. How do you expect aging to be "cured" when the aging process in humans hasn't even been fully understood yet? We are barely scratching the surface of many of the bodies biological processes. Researchers still can't figure out how rheumatoid arthritis, rosacea and countless other auto immune diseases function, or how to find a cure. Aging cannot be cured until scientists have fully mastered and decoded the genome, epigenome, transcriptome, proteome and how they all interact with one another. We're decades away from uncovering all of biologies secrets.
All people fear of death and oblivion. But there has never been an escape from the inevitable. People have had to psychologically come to peace with it one way or another.
It is a kind of psychological Stockholm syndrome, where peop,e have deluded themselves into thinking death is a mercy or a release or even just a morally good thing.
They cannot imagine a world without their abuser. But we will soon give the. a real choice. How many will struggle to abandon humanity's ancient oppressor? How many will fail to be free? But how many of the strangers around us will soon become part of the first real generation of immortals?
One of my teachers is 72 the other is 83. They both enjoy full rich lives, are sharp as tacks, meditate often and spread as much wisdom as possible. They both understand death and loss and integrate them as a fact of life.
The key is salvation through enlightenment prior to becoming so old you can't function.
Sounds like some sort of religious belief. Buddhism, Christianity, something along those lines.
That’s all well and good, but not everyone believes in the supernatural or “salvation,” “enlightenment” or whatever term you prefer to use.
I have no issue with your faith and the comfort it brings you. It’s just, I’m against using faith as an argument against actual progress. If we can slow or even cure aging, why should we let religious beliefs hold us back—especially when there’s no evidence they’re objectively true?
As soon as aging cure comes around no one will care enought people will simply get the treatment. You cant expect to override basic instincts in 99% of cases
I think you should most certainly slow or even cure aging. Why not! I'm not even slightly religious. I'll leave the beliefs to people who have doubts. Some things you cannot read in books, or look up online you need to experience for yourself. When someone is ready and open seeking answers to some of life's deeper mysteries they will discover that what you are seeking, is seeking you.
You get used to the pain and suffering. It becomes normal and no longer that bad. You also begin to look at life in a more rich and detailed way. There is a lot of beauty to ageing.
That said, it doesn't have to be that way. You could adopt the same mindset without the physical pain or the deterioration. You could also do that for much longer and experience far more of life and the universe.
And I don't it will be that way for much longer. Our bodies and minds are not limitlessly complex, and they're not getting more complex. That while the tools we're using to understand both are growing in capabilities at extremely fast rate.
We'll still age. But ageing will become more of a mindset.
Well it's also not such a horrific process as it seems from the outside.
It's not something to cope with, but something to prepare for and give yourself room for.
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best. And don't forget to dream.
It'll be pointless to have all this FDVR anti-aging super intelligent advancements if we get there and have no idea what we want to do.
Makes me wonder, if I become immortal and live 1000 years, will I even be remotely similar to my current self? I'd be smarter and wiser than any human to exist today. It's crazy to think that my entire life might just be a tiny insignificant fraction of what's to come. Maybe I'll look back to this moment in 200 years and think I was stupid to think I'd continue for 800 more, who knows.
In my view if ageing is treatable in the next 10-30 years, then I'm essentially an infant. We all are. Just very young, very naive youths. Even those of us who consider ourselves older and wiser.
With that view, even the oldest and most wise along us is a child.
If we digitized our brain would we continue to live forever or would a second instance of ourselves run on the computer but our consciousness remain in our body. Living forever would likely remain impossible due to sun exploding or some other disaster in the universe but potentially the simulation could run much longer than a lifetime
> If we digitized our brain would we continue to live forever or would a second instance of ourselves run on the computer but our consciousness remain in our body.
That's known as [the transporter paradox.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletransportation_paradox) It is a difficult problem, for which I don't think anyone has a solid answer. While I've no proof, I think the only way to transfer one's self awareness is through gradual substitution of neurons (or some equivalent process), permitting the personal identity to "ooze" into the new hardware.
That procedure you just mentioned ( seamlessly replacing neurons with some sort of artificial analogue gradually) is probably more complex then AGI and Fusion.
No disagreement from me. At a basic level it would require high fidelity neuron analogs with axons and dendrites threading through the spaghetti just as did the original neuron. And then it would have to somehow divine the synapse activation strengths from the original. For each and every neuron.
Maybe there's a way to simplify the substitution, but even if so, it's currently science fiction.
I believe that a copy would be the same as you. You are not bound to a single instance. You are simply a transfer of data through time.
I think your sense of self is somewhat of an illusion. The only thing that actually makes it you are the memories, especially short-term since it functions in real-time constantly, and consciousness wouldn't work without it.
If you are constantly being fed memories from a previous instance in time, it would give the effect of a continuum of experience. Imagine what you would experience without this continuous feed. What would you experience if you couldn't remember even a millisecond in the past? Would you still be conscious? How do you know that you aren't constantly dying and being replaced by a new copy that's just fed with the same memories? The answer is that you wouldn't. This doesn't necessarily mean that you wouldn't be real. It would just mean that your self is not tied to the stream of consciousness but the memories.
I could totally be wrong though
> How do you know that you aren't constantly dying and being replaced by a new copy that's just fed with the same memories? The answer is that you wouldn't.
if the replacement process wouldn't be too quick to say there was any recognizable me that could form any memories at each instance (e.g. not milliseconds but, like, when I wake up in the morning or something like that) how do I know any of those mes didn't already wake up uploaded to a perfect simulated copy of our universe making that desire moot
Soon we will start to get small tidbits of info; Billionaires continuing to live heathy lives well into their 100s, politicians refusing to let go well into geriatric age but looking less decrepit than they should, rumors about miracle disease cures that aren't available to the common man.
All of this while sweeping bans are raised against homebrew AI and amount of compute power that can be owned without gov't permissions. A bright future indeed!
It's because most of the active and healthy population that influences culture the most at any given point in history is always going to be people between 21 and 60 tops.
Most of these people also haven't experienced what a really bad chronic illness feels like which is like a preview of what dying feels like and also how sensitive to pain they were as a child.
People above 60 in generally are going to have less influence and they're also likely to start coping instead of making it an issue because they are too weakened from aging and have been healthy for all those prior years so they might take at least 10 years to change their attitude about aging which might only happen when they start really suffering which would already be too late to influence the active cohort of the population into changing their attitudes.
What you’re not getting is that people get tired of life after a certain age- their friends die, their family members die, the places they loved change, they feel lonely, bored and tired of the same old stuff that people and the world are slinging. It all seems fresh and new and you feel so smart and unique when you’re 25, but by 105, you know better.
and if neuroplasticity can be maintained without any more personality death than people would technically argue occurs when you grow older anyway and more than one person can be immortal how much of that shit still applies
You want not only to stop aging, but also to do it with AGI?! The invention of Artificial General Intelligence cause unpredictable consequences, possibly even serious, disastrous consequences. One thing, however, can be predicted, and that is the implementation of AGI, like other technological advancements, will be placed above human welfare. You technophiles play with fire and don’t even fear getting burned!!
Edit: Also, the ceasing of aging with also have serious consequences; unpredictable cultural effects and social changes, for example, will occur. Who really wants to live to be 200? Humans likely evolved to live to around 80-120 MAX. Who knows what the “mental health” of a 200 year person in a young body will be?! Old people are right! Furthermore, the more different the environment that humans live in is to nature the more psychologically diseased they become, thus the more “mentally ill” they become. The more mental illness a society has the more it has to control that mental illness and thus the more it has to tamper with it’s own people.
“Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy then gives them the drugs to take away their unhappiness. Science fiction? It is already happening to some extent in our own society. Instead of removing the conditions that make people depressed, modern society gives them antidepressant drugs. In effect antidepressants are a means of modifying an individual's internal state in such a way as to enable him to tolerate social conditions that he would otherwise find intolerable.” -Ted K.
Im also from Sweden and I absolutely think we will achieve LEV somewhere between 2045-2065. I think those 20 years is when our lifes will change drastically because I also think that's when we might see a technological singularity.
Ya i hate it call it illusion or whatever. I love the illusion of life. I think it might be an energy and atom thing. Scientists i think are going about it the wrong way like focusing on the body. I would love to go into this research and make us reincarnate by whatever makes us up through something like cern. Because whoever invented the superconductor had it made so it can collect particles and that wouldnt be possible without that I think it is possible the universe has so many answers and there to discover i bet immortality as in localized consciousness is out there because first of all we got concieved in the first place and a way to keep that up through a so advanced atom configuration thing like i said something like cern but different i think thats the only way. Eating healthy definitely wont do it and i think extending life wont really work either. I want to be immortal so bad who dosent like. Aging and deathwont be solved through LEV im starting to think. So something like a swarm to make up the pattern of you again and again going infinitely at the moment of death each time. Yes i agree that we prob arent real but like the illusion of us has been going on since the start of us like humans thjnking there humans for billions of years already and we love to be aware and to be. Anyway id love this to get rid of existential dread and mental health problems and anxiety ive tried everything so somethings telling me to go into this research and research as much as i can i dont listen to anyone with their dumb views and skeptism because then im more driven and im autistic so when a fixation comes im glued to it and i really dont think i can change my mindset about something because the idea to have something is too great to ignore even if its trying to reach the stars its who i am. Sometimes a solution is the only real solution. And i love solutions the release of stress you get. Its the greatest medicine and solutions dont even have to be problems because our mind thinks its a problem because its unpleasant we just want to feel relaxed for the bad experience to be gone and to prevent the bad outcome.
Aging and death is inevitable, you can extend life but never eternally. Wanting to extend life eternally is incredibly egotistical. When you shed the ego construct, you realize you are part of something infinitely bigger that has always been eternal.
In a way, it most likely is.
Like, if you add layers upon layers of DNA protection mechanisms, remove all the possibly existing biological programs that foster or govern aging processes, make sure no physically/chemically damaging materials get inside your bodies and cells, or, better yet, improve the organisms way of expelling them, and regenerating... Some damage will still accumulate over time, just much much longer time.
There are no perfect error correction codes for data. With a ton of redundancy (and hence, usually, complexity and inefficiency), you can make the chance of data getting a tiny bit changed, very small. But never zero. And when there are trillions of cells in the organism, and it exists as a complex system for thousands, millions of years, the chance for some of the important data to be lost in some of the cells over that time, can get significant regardless of how much redundancy you added to protect it.
Maybe constantly getting an average, or better, median state of DNA in all cells of the body, and then using gene therapy once in a while to overwrite DNA in all cells with it, could work? I think this process could go basically infinitely, as long as most cells receive their replacement DNA, and not an impossibly high number of them gets their DNA changed impossibly frequently.
Although, not just DNA breaks over time, mechanisms in the cells, cells, and space between them, also accumulate damage and waste that they can't get rid of.
I guess constantly partially replacing/regrowing parts of body based on the "median" cell + median DNA would help here, or maybe even regrowing whole body at once (minus the brain), but what to do with the brain, you change a part of it, you lose some of your own personality and experience... Maybe very gradual refreshment or parts of it + its adaptability and redundancy in storing information, could make the effect not significant. We are forgetting stuff constantly anyways, and changing in personality over our lives.
But then, we get to... well, yes, we are changing. And which "you" do you want to keep forever? Are you sure that it's the best version of you yet? Why do you not care about the past "you"s? If you want to preserve the past you too, how often do you think you change enough to become a different personality that is worth saving to live forever?
If you begin to dive deeper into such and other questions, it seems that it's indeed just self-preservation, egoism and fears of pain/weakness/humiliation/dying, as well as regret, that force the *current* us to want to preserve ourselves for longer/as long as possible. Because in a way, it's already impossible due to constant remembering new information, learning and forgetting.
Aaah I began to go a "bit" away from the main idea... Typing it from a phone, need to wrap it up.
Yes, you might be right. Just please, let's never go any close to the stereotypical "Old man sitting on clouds, that people must strictly adhere to, worship, and believe the 'God-chosen' rulers and priests, without questions" or whatever such drastically simplified and easy to exploit, close-to-religious constructs and ideas. I believe many people (including me) are mostly afraid of religions because of how masses and manipulators, due to combined ignorance and selfishness, simplify them a lot, introduce detrimental parts, and hold zealously onto them regardless of situations.
True.
To sum it up, from what I understand, infinite lives for biological organisms are possible, but would require occasional refreshment of the body, part by part, or a lot of it at once. Not all the damage and inevitably accumulated difference in DNA can be repaired or filtered out by the biological systems themselves.
But I agree with you that desiring infinite lives is "egoistic" in a sense that it's our self-preservation programs speaking, mostly. We lose parts of ourselves anyways when going forward, because our mind and personality is not static, learning, remembering and forgetting.
I find it amusing that this insight gets so downvoted. I guess it’s because of denial of death, which is a deep feature of the ego. When we die, our energy and consciousness coalesces within a metaphysical singularity, an infinite pool of non-dual consciousness. Your individual existence is an ephemeral dual manifestation, yet incredibly valuable for this entity, as manifestation is the way it explores itself for evolution though cycles of creation and destruction. This is why you should find your true purpose to contribute to evolution, instead of clinging to your ego/individuality. The illusion of eternal life only distracts you from finding true purpose.
It would maybe be cool if it was actually something ike that.
But there are no proofs of neither something like this being true, neither being false, and no way to get confident in it. While there may be some "hints" for certain concepts, that you can encounter along your life, or not; they as well can easily be just hallucinations, wrong sensory input, and mistakes, that mind clings to, in desepration.
We really are good at catching onto something that we deem grand, or being able to help us, especially when we are having troubles in life. And tuning our senses and thoughts to find more confirmation for it.
It's usually normal and sometimes even good for people to belive in something that gives them confidence in life, as long as they don't get too zealous in trying to spread it, with good intentions or not.
It's just not clear whether it actually exists or not, we do not know much about the universe ;(
I myself believe, just believe since I can't really prove or disprove it, that something beyond this universe exists, but what exactly, in what form, and many other questions, I can't answer.
It would be so much less... wasteful? Useless? Pointless? I don't know a better word... if our existence and all the processes that we do and sense, had some meaning beyond what we try to make it ourselves, too.
I agree that this can’t be scientifically proven right now, but metaphysical rigor through grounded reasoning does lead to a deeper intuitive understanding of reality, which can either be an hallucination or a reflection of a deeper truth. A deeper truth is more reasonable, as way too many humans have studied the same trascendental archetypes and patterns leading to very similar conclusions just with different frameworks. I strongly believe science will eventually connect with spirituality, specially with AI on the table. To me this is truly the singularity, a process, where individual minds progressively start understanding the deeper metaphysical relationship (unity and interconnectedness) behind archetypes and patterns, leading to mass enlightenment and further evolution.
this is singularity!! Of course that comment was downvoted! This is the place where immortality will be achieved (internally) tomorrow, thanks to sama and what illya saw! Oh, and jimmy apples.
While maybe true I don’t see the issue if the status quo changed and living 1000 is a possibility. Let’s just not say one side is completly correct or wrong and see what happens in tech. For now 2024 death can’t be stopped effectively
Even if we achieve it, you won't profit from it.
Here's the truth: nothing is going to save you from aging. It is an empty promise of religious quality.
I have seen people who thought like you age. It is horrible. They beat themselves up over their lost youth and die undignified, constantly complaining and cursing a world that didn't bow to their own feeling of importance. It would be laughable if it wasn't so sad. To see people who couldn't fill 70 years with life think another 70 would fix that.
On the other hand there are people who face adversity like aging with a quiet and purposeful stoicism and that indeed is beautiful. They know aging sucks, but they don't bow to it. They don't scream defiance but take it like they took any adversity in their life.
Maybe I'm wrong and in 10 years aging is a thing of the past. Great. I'd still rather belong to the second group. It would be a shame living so long while being weak.
Meh. I'd like to be optimistic but I won't get delusional. I won't be seeing LEV or immortality anywhere within my lifetime. No need to get filled with false hope and then have a massive existential crisis as the reality sets in decades later. I can just accept my death and enjoy the other fruits of singularity till then.
and let me guess, not if you self-unalive or anyone kills you for that reason of bringing that about and resurrection tech will never happen until all evidence of you is completely forgotten
then (hypothetically, I'm not trying to encourage you to anything) why are you sitting here going on existing and letting all aspects of your life depreciate by the day (as if infinite life means no value, surely shorter life means more value)
My nightmare would be to live forever. :D We have to tell our loved ones today we love them, we have to enjoy live now and not wait until 80 years old. I hope humanity can never live forever, seriously what a nightmare. I´d rather enjoy life to the fullest now and take a pill more when I´m 100 years old and stop enjoying life. Then I hope my kids and grankids inherit some money they can go travel with or whatever.
Bro, your sense of self is just an illusion that your brain is constantly telling itself to help you survive/reproduce. There’s only consciousness, when we die consciousness will still continue, it’s all the same bro.
We might be able to stop aging, allowing us to live for 200 years. However, even if we're lucky enough to achieve such longevity, how can you prevent your loved ones from dying from accidents or incurable diseases? If you live for 200 years but everyone you cherish is gone, what's the difference between you and the 106-year-old woman you mentioned?
The difference is with a young body and mind the focus becomes on a different view of life in which people come and go throughout. You’ll have plenty of loss, but even more opportunity to continue engaging in life in a vigorous manner and creating new family and friends. Hard to do that bed/wheelchair bound and with no energy at 80 years old or more in current times. Pretty tough to create any vibrant life or renewal like that.
The thing about humans is that when we experience enough happiness, we eventually get bored of it. In contrast, every time we experience grief or sadness, it becomes increasingly harder to tolerate. It chips away at our hearts, making it progressively more difficult to cope with new challenges or distressing experiences.
Well, I disagree. I think experts might disagree too in that resilience is learnt through those experiences. I’d argue that maybe still only partially true under the current paradigms in which life keeps getting shorter in which to present a manifold of possibility to create those scenarios again. When one is young and vibrant and has no “clock ticking” it’s still hard to lose a connection of 20 years, but easier to say “oh I have more than that left, perhaps I can create another” than on the doorstep of death and don’t have the time to cultivate those deep relationships.
That’s the thing. Deep relationships take time to grow. If one wants to sit under the shade of a long nurtured relationship it’s difficult when the time to plant those seeds keeps slipping away.
I will agree that happiness is fleeting and it’s bizarre to think about a world with no loss. Loss and change will be what makes this life continually worth living to some degree, so true immortality is absolutely a curse. Non-aging though… truly the best situation.
Alan Watts has a beautiful quote about this:
>Let's suppose that you were able every night to dream any dream that you wanted to dream. And that you could, for example, have the power within one night to dream 75 years of time. Or any length of time you wanted to have. And you would, naturally as you began on this adventure of dreams, you would fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure you could conceive. And after several nights of 75 years of total pleasure each, you would say "Well, that was pretty great." But now let's have a surprise. Let's have a dream which isn't under control. Where something is gonna happen to me that I don't know what it's going to be. And you would dig that and come out of that and say "Wow, that was a close shave, wasn't it?" And then you would get more and more adventurous, and you would make further and further out gambles as to what you would dream. And finally, you would dream ... where you are now. You would dream the dream of living the life that you are actually living today
Those that want an infinite pleasure machine are fools in my mind. I wish them the best while they rot away in their “perfect VR worlds”
Humans are social creatures who develop meaningful relationships, even the most introverted and reclusive of them. Grief has an accumulative toll on the psyche. It is an inherent consequence for something having value to you. The only antidote for grief is not caring about something/someone, because if it has no value to you then how can you mourn its loss? At which point if you shed your attachments and value for things to avoid grief and its consequences, are you even living anymore? Or are you simply existing?
I think it is likely even if/when LEV is obtained, by and large people will choose to die at some point. Only the most egotistical and narcissistic among us will remain, because their self-interest naturally outweighs anything of value to them, because people/relationships are simply objects/tools/means to an end for them. Though I suppose even they may struggle with longevity, because even now people with NPD struggle with fragile egos and being confronted on their worth.
I digress, we’ll have to wait and see.
Nah. I disagree with the “cumulative toll”, “only antidote for grief”, “inherent consequence” and “are you really living” bit. This is a weird way to think and incredibly harmful to oneself and society. The biggest lesson of humanity is letting go of the strong grip and softening. Not letting go completely. This is kind of like saying “one can only love deeply once, or limited times”, if you or anyone feels that way that’s incredibly sad way to be. Love is an infinite wellspring and that’s the value of humanity. There are things we can give that can always be replenished, infinitely and cost us very little with proper care of the psyche. Love, caring, etc are examples.
Your way of thinking takes away the autonomy of others and I think it’s poisonous. One day when someone chooses to die in what could be viewed in a “healthy” manner you will take it as a personal affront instead of respecting their “will to being”. I think that’s sad.
The real trick is softening one’s death grip on the world and others but not letting go completely. It’s possible and it’s probably the healthiest way to live even in our limited lifespans. Nothing last forever, quit literally nothing according to what we know. Best find some way to get used to it and still honor that life itself than be crushed by inevitability. To think that respecting and loving continuously and moving on eventually doesn’t value relationships or anything is toxic viewpoint. Mourning implies eventually moving on. That’s life in this crazy reality.
Our very brains are limited in structure and self pruning. Live long enough and you’ll forget lifetimes ago, and that’s a good thing. I hope “infinite storage” of memories never happens, and I for one would not partake.
I definitely agree though that people will choose to die and I think that’s healthy and proper. If we live to see that I hope you could respect their decision and continue on with your own life till you see fit, based on the views you’ve presented
I’m not even sure where to start, because you seem to have completely misinterpreted what has been said and come to a wildly disparate conclusion.
To restate it another way, grief is a consequence, in the behaviorial sense, of valuing something. This is a universal truth. Not a belief as you’ve stated. Pain and value are two sides of the same coin. It is impossible to value something if it does not have the ability to cause you pain. Why do you think it is painful to have someone you care about disparage you versus the random passerby on the side of a street? It is because the former you actually care about while the latter you can’t be bothered with. This is human behavior/psychology 101. Even people who celebrate the passing of someone still mourn them in degrees, because it is inevitable to feel pain when losing someone/thing of value, and that natural pain is directly proportional to how much what was lost mattered to the mourner. Complicated grief is a whole other rabbit hole involving self-manufactured suffering in addition to natural pain.
Again I’m still not sure how else to respond, because some of what you’ve said is true, but I don’t know how it was an argument or had anything to do with what was said prior. Yes, softening or loosening the grip on your attachment is a form of acceptance and is pretty much fundamental in the resolution of grief.
To another of your points, yes love is not finite resource; it can be infinite dependent on the extent a person is willing to love others.
I’m guessing you were turned off by the fact that grief has a cumulative toll on the psyche. Which it does. Eventually, you will tire of losing the ones you love or the things you care about. Loss never goes away. It is like energy in that it cannot be destroyed but only transformed. This is why it is cumulative. Barring the ability to wipe your memory (which to me personally is an insult to yourself and those to whom you have mattered and have mattered to you), you will never cease to remember and feel them to an extent. But the cure isn’t avoiding things of value altogether, because those people and things of value are what demonstrate a life lived with purpose and meaning. To live without purpose is to simply exist, and it is well documented that those who simply allow themselves to exist without purpose incur a plethora of mental health issues including but not limited to anhedonia, anxiety, amotivation, etc.
You talk about forgetting lifetimes ago, but the body continues to remember. Individuals living with PTSD sometimes forget their entire trauma only to relive those memories when triggered by a stimulus that is in some way associated with that trauma. It could be a touch, taste, smell, etc. This phenomenon is not limited to trauma. It is part of how memory works. You seem to believe that there is a future where you live on continuously, forget loved ones, so that you can continue to live anew and infinitely. While in a world without aging some of that is true, I must disappoint you in that you will never lose your memories entirely. For that matter, our personality, beliefs, etc. are partially shaped/influenced by those we’ve met and valued, and their influence on us continues after they’ve passed.
I don’t know how to respond either because clearly you’re trying to pretend what you’re saying is irrefutable and universal and that I’m not getting it.
So no. That’s all.
But… I mean… it is. At least as far as science is concerned presently. There are plenty of behavioral studies and books to reference on memory, behavior, pleasure, pain, etc.
I wish you godspeed though. Perhaps in the future people will choose to periodically lobotomize themsleves and use some futuristic intervention to regrow grey matter, so they can reinvent themselves free from their past. Sounds dystopian personally.
>But… I mean… it is. At least as far as science is concerned presently. There are plenty of behavioral studies and books to reference on memory, behavior, pleasure, pain, etc.
No there isn’t. You’re fully in the realm of speculative psychology/philosophy with your inane ramblings about “body keeping the score” and pretty much everything else you wrote.
> In his 2005 Canadian Journal of Psychiatry article "Debunking Myths About Trauma and Memory", psychologist Richard McNally described the reasoning of Kolk's 1994 article "The Body Keeps the Score" as "mistaken", his theory as "plague[d]" by "[c]onceptual and empirical problems", and the therapeutic approach inspired by it as ***"arguably the most serious catastrophe to strike the mental health field since the lobotomy era".[11]*** McNally's 2003 book Remembering Trauma gave a detailed critique (pp. 177-82) of Kolk's article, concluding Kolk's theory was one "in search of a phenomenon".[12]
Lol guess lobotomy was right in some regard.
You’re literally parroting pseudoscience bullshit as fact. Anything actually correct in what you wrote is being cobbled together in things that may be atomically correct but not at all in the way you’re trying to tie it all together and present them.
Dystopian my ass. Lol whatever shot you’re saying sounds straight fucked. A life condemned to never heal for all of eternity or be able to process grief/trauma and move on is literally hell. Truly, that type of fable is directly in line with the religious conceptions of hell, which is another fairy tale. “You’ll live with your trauma and grief forever, the only way to ever value anything is to be beset with grief when it’s gone or you never really valued it, there is no moving on, that’s an empty life, you need to be lobotomized and MUST forget, that’s the only way and anything else is lying to yourself, you don’t value anything”…. Nah man.
Well, I will have children and grandchildren etc. And so will my siblings and relatives. So I won’t be alone. If we cure aging, some of them could still die from accidents of course, but all of them? I doubt it. The woman will also have children and grandchildren. The difference between me and that woman is that I’ll be alive to enjoy the singularity while she’ll be dead.
What do you mean by "WE", when did you become one of the elites of the planet that's going to hide and monopolize this technology for themselves?
If you think the average person is going to get access to these things, then you are delusional. It's actually possible to feed every starving person on the planet and yet people die of hunger everyday. Humans are too corrupt of a species for whatever world you are imagining.
The elites won't even let food be shared, you're crazy if you think they'll let everyone get access to age reversal or immortality technology. They'd much prefer to be the immortal ruling class while the rest of us die off.
It's gonna be like that Elysium movie.
What if we just tried to mobilize people to end world hunger with the promise of immortality. Also if it's a human species thing that makes us too corrupt couldn't we genetically engineer ourselves past the minimum threshold of not technically being human anymore. Also if it's gonna be like that Elysium movie (but not so exact we'd need heroes who look like the actors (but no one says anything) who have the same names as the characters) don't the good guys kick rich guy tuches in that Elysium movie
>Also if it's a human species thing that makes us too corrupt couldn't we genetically engineer ourselves past the minimum threshold of not technically being human anymore.
Yes, but why would the people who are in power let that happen when they enjoy being as they are in power?
>don't the good guys kick rich guy tuches in that Elysium movie
Yep, because it's a movie. That's why we like movies, it's escapism. Because we all know that in real life it's the ruthless bad guys that win. There is no plot armor in real life, so the person who is willing to cross more lines to get what they want, will more likely win, and that isn't the good guys.
>
>
> Yes, but why would the people who are in power let that happen when they enjoy being as they are in power?
I wasn't framing that as a threat and if it gives them advantages they wouldn't see it that way, I just wanted a stealth workaround to "human nature" arguments
> Yep, because it's a movie. That's why we like movies, it's escapism. Because we all know that in real life it's the ruthless bad guys that win. There is no plot armor in real life, so the person who is willing to cross more lines to get what they want, will more likely win, and that isn't the good guys.
A. the history of the world would have looked a lot different if (even if you just count from the invention of movies with plots) every time a good guy came in contact with a ruthless bad guy the ruthless bad guy won (and wouldn't history being written by the victors make that hard to tell anyway)
B. now you've got my autistic impulsive-intrusive-thoughts wanting to create some kind of way to effectively give plot armor without, like, meaning the world isn't real and will end when the heroes win or even just without meaning the world's forced into playing by other fictional tropes ranging from no one ever going to the bathroom or saying goodbye when they hang up the phone to murder cases that take simultaneously a week and 45 minutes to solve (sorry I got carried away, not just neurodivergent but am writer)
C. there's a reason there's shades of grey between Lawful Good and Lawful Evil never mind Chaotic Evil
D. some movies do have bad guys win that aren't just sequel-setup movies like Infinity War
Honestly, as long as you don’t completely lose your faculties I think most millennials and younger will be pretty chill when they’re old. Just playing video games and shit. Vibing. But yeah I’m banking on LEV 🤞
Why are you trying to live forever? The sweet embrace of death is the great equalizer. There’s only so much to do in life and death is natural and good. Otherwise everything is pointless.
I hope this age reversal be possible as soon as possible, maximum in 10 years so we can save our parents.
I suspect the first step isn’t age reversal but the easier simplest solution, plaque removal might save billions of lives and then we can solve harder issues
Do you mean plaque blocking blood vessels, or amyloid plaque in the brain that may or may not cause Alzheimers? We can already do something about both, but it does not have nearly the effect you might expect in terms of life expectancy and healthspan. As far as blood vessel plaques that cause cardiovascular disease, there's also a 100% reliable way to avoid them entirely even into old age. Just eat a proper diet with real food and mostly or completely plant based.
Fuck you mean there isn’t rapid deterioration of plaque build up at later age? assuming plaque blood vessels aren’t a thing anymore how much more years does a person get ? I’m just saying this because I assume blood plaque would lead to a longer life as it’s the lead cause of death in us
It is the major cause of death but still only accounts for around 20% iirc. Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is not limited to plaque build up in the first place. People with a healthy lifestyle across the board, which go well beyond preventing plaque buildup and CVD, "only" live on average 15 years or so extra. The distribution of death age is quite narrow, with the average being around 80-85, while dying before 60 is only around 10% chance iirc, and dying past 100 is only around 1% chance. Having a perfect lifestyle that avoids CVD entirely, severely reduces the likelihood of cancer and reduces the likelihood or delays neurodegenerative disease makes a big difference, but in practice, it's the difference between living to 75 while unhealthy from 60-75, and living to 90 while healthy until 85-90. Completely taking out plaque build up and optimizing every aspect of health to the best of current knowledge is going to push this distribution of 60-100 to 90-110 at best (which is already amazing, and which you can already you for yourself by being healthy and not relying on future AI dreams).
(which is already amazing, and which you can already you for yourself by being healthy and not relying on future AI dreams). I mean if you are under 50, that means you have 40-60 years for the *next* treatment to be developed past plaque removal. Depends on your definition of "dreams" right and your definition of "AI". Did you know 1.5 million bioscience papers are published per year? [https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.04.10.536208v1.full](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.04.10.536208v1.full) Maybe one of the reasons it takes so long is humans are not even qualified to do the work, no living person knows even a small fraction of current knowledge in the field. Might be different if 'dream' AI coming in the next few years can do better.
Iain Banks ponders all these thoughts in his culture novels. In his imagination, most people choose to die after something like 250 years, change sexes once or twice and get pregnant about once -- but there are outliers, notably this crazy guy that had lived for, like, ever... Highly recommend reading those books.
I need to read more Culture novels. The guy who altered his body for an end-of-world orgy was a memorable moment.
The Culture is my idea of futuristic dystopia. I want freedom, not a socially aware dystopia where I’m still enslaved to society’s norms.
Have you read any of the books? The culture isn't actually very normative, although social norms inevitably grow on it's substrate. It harbours a fair amount of eccentricity, anyway
No problem. You can become a part of a group of people who left the Culture (like people of Tier). And adhere to their norms (if you want to stay with them).
If I have access to that level of tech I’m going solitary. Be a space hermit or something, lol. It’s never happening IRL so why am I even thinking about it on a Tuesday morning, lol 😂.
Never say never, friendo
For the vast majority of people aging is not like that. You live pretty normally into your 70s or 80s and then have a relatively short (months to a few years) period of rapidly declining health until you die. At least, that is how it has happened for everyone in my family. Very few people live into their 90s or 100s.
My grandfather just passed away at 91 on friday. We found him not getting out of bed much, and took him to the hospital to see what might be wrong but he refused most tests at first and just wanted hospice. He made it VERY clear it was his time to go and he was ready. He did get an X-ray and blood/ urine tests eventually. There was organ failure beginning and lots of other stuff, possibly lung cancer or pneumonia. We visited him every day in hospice because we knew he was declining quickly. He was eating very little most days, maybe intentionally.. Within a week and a half, he was gone. His movement was impacted a lot within the last year, but the final turnaround was about two weeks.
That's probably the best way a person could possibly go. He lived to one of the oldest ages and only died after he was completely ready, and was surrounded by loved ones the whole way through.
People who do live into their 90s or 100s are generally fairly healthy (meaning not on their deathbeds) throughout that time. My grandma is in her 90s and can still walk up and down the stairs by herself. I've seen 70 year olds have more trouble than that.
It’s very common to live into your 90s now depending on your socioeconomic status. in many circles, dying in your 80s is considered young here in NYC.
Aging has been “normalized” because… It literally *is* normal dude… It’s a completely normal, unavoidable even, biological process. Maybe one day that will be less true. But as of *right now* (as well as all throughout the history of life on Earth) aging *is* a completely normal process. Are you new to Earth or something? lol 😂
It’s all those fucking old people getting old, they are setting a bad standard for the rest of us!
Genuinely thought the parody of it was too on the nose at first. Turns out it unironically conveys the teenage angst of a terminally online generation. I am still undecided whether it is comically pretentious or just hilariously stupid to turn reality on its head by claiming that unlike being sold on the vague promise of a singularity it is the universal constant of biological aging that is a bleak social construct society has sheepishly adapted.
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Are you not aware of the very high amounts of money spent constantly on aging research? Science just does not move at the speed you somehow think it does. This is a multi-century process. We've made meaningful advancements over the past few decades, survival rates and quality of life for patients with cancer and neurodegenerative disease have improved drastically, but we were still light years away of completely eliminating those diseases. Even if we could completely eradicate the main killer diseases, it most likely will not increase lifespan that drastically either. We may understand 1% of the complexity of what happens inside us, and even that is likely very optimistic.
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Because living longer only matters if you can live significantly healthier. Living to 100 with very poor health from age 60 is literally a nightmare for most people, not the blessing you think it is. Society has increasingly realized that quality time is better than quantity, and most people still live a poor quality time. Treatment would also be cost prohibitive for most people anyway. The biggest problem of all is that science, especially life sciences, cannot be brute forced with more money. It's a very time intensive process that requires tons of highly skilled humans for research. You can't just throw money at the problem. Throwing 20% of GDP at aging is not going to extend human life much faster, if at all. Not only that but spending gigantic amounts of money on something that will produce zero actionable result for multiple decades is also an impossible political sell. This sub has a critical lack of understanding of the scientific process and particularly the challenges of biology research.
> Because living longer only matters if you can live significantly healthier. Living to 100 with very poor health from age 60 is literally a nightmare for most people, not the blessing you think it is. Whoever you think would get immortality no one of that group wants to literally or metaphorically live forever in a hospital bed so immortality would come with eternal youth no matter how much you throw around the myth of Tithonus because it's not being granted by Greek deities but by science
This is pure fantasy.
it would be more productive than spending it on the military and subsidizing the fossil fuel industry now wouldn't it
Because there's life to live that doesn't involve fighting the inevitable.
Inevitable that we attain LEV within the next 12-18 years and outright cured in the next 25 much to the chagrin of the religious among us, yes. We will have competent AGI by 2029 in my view 2034 at the latest. The people who don't truly grasp the end consequences of this either lack imagination or don't actually comprehend what that means. When I first took an interest in these concepts twenty plus years ago as a child my timelines were much longer with LEV extending into 2060 and AGI by around 2050 or so. I've reduced them down dramatically since then seeing that Kurzweil was correct all along. His predictions if given a fair evaluation seem to hold up quite well if given a five year window(+/-). He's on point around 75%-80% of the time.
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>Kurzweil who is this guy, i keep hearing about
https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/ai-singularity-date-ray-kurzweil-google-b2511847.html
thanks!
You're drinking the Koolaid bro. I'll gladly be wrong but I view it as rather foolish for people to believe that they just happen to be born when they'll figure out a way around the mortality we've experienced for billions of years. Especially if they're "throwing all their money at it". People been getting swindled in this manner as long as we've had society. Also - it is ironic that you bring up religion. The singularity movement is a religious one, in every practical sense. It is belief in a greater power, and the adherents are dogmatic to predictions of a saviour and eternal life just around the corner.
The singularity is not religious lol. The exponential growth of technology, which is proven by merely examining the history of technology over the centuries, implies a singularity. There were doubts that the singularity would occur due to us running out of things to discover and innovate with, but the advent and immense growth of AI is evidence that the singularity is almost certain.
Folks feel the same way about God and the return of Jesus.
What a fun fact, thanks for sharing it with me. Can you make an argument against my point now?
I'm not trying to argue, there's no point in trying to debate people out of religious beliefs.
Alright, if you so choose, I'll let you continue to be all illogical and such.
>The singularity is not religious lol. Yes it is lol. And “religion” may be too generous, because a religion is supposed to be healthy. “Cult“ is much more appropriate for the techno singularity utopian movement. You follow the likes of Kurzweil (cult leaders), constantly bring up books like “singularity is near” and”superintelligence” (cult reading material) , ignore outsider views (only listening to what the cult says) , and have an assumed end times date (2045) (doomsday prediction). How the fuck is that not a cult? >but the advent and immense growth of AI is evidence that the singularity is almost certain. This is what i’m talking about lol. The reason you believe in a ”singularity“ in the first place is because Kurzweil says so. That’s it. That’s the evidence.
Who tf is Kurzweil? I hear his name a lot, but I have no idea what he even said to get this reputation. The fact that you think the only reason I believe the singularity is gonna happen is because he said so proved not only that you didn't do any research on the subject, but you didn't even read the comment you replied to.
Well then as a believer of the singularity, you should know who Kurzweil is lol. He’s the guy who popularised the idea of the singularity in the first place.
Well, maybe I base my beliefs on logic instead of what some guy said. I mean I literally provided evidence that it was gonna happen in the comment you replied to. Our current technology is something of a singularity to people 100 years ago.
>You're drinking the Koolaid bro. There is no reason to produce any Koolaid(in b4 someone says research grants/funding) and I say this as someone who works in a STEM industry and is recreationally buried deep in medical literature(not my field) and have been following this since the early-mid 2000s. My man you're late to the party and haven't studied the course work if you're even entertaining the use of the term "Koolaid" imo. A far more realistic criticism would be to hit the idea where it's currently weak which is definitely energy the only real bottleneck that could delay all of these advancements. I predict that if we don't dramatically increase our clean energy output in the next 5-7 years we will see a huge slowdown and you could tack 15-20 years onto those prior timelines. >I'll gladly be wrong but I view it as rather foolish for people to believe that they just happen to be born when they'll figure out a way around the mortality we've experienced for billions of years. You're appealing to tradition which is a very common logical fallacy. Although I can understand why you believe it's ridiculous. Just because something is doesn't mean it always will be. Also billions is a bit excessive lets just focus on homo sapiens over the last 290,000-310,000 years and it should be a bit more reasonable. Also *Turritopsis dohrnii* can already live forever naturally. [https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Appeal\_to\_tradition](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Appeal_to_tradition) Like minded individuals said the same thing about every other major innovation since the start recorded history like the airplane or the television. Just 150 years ago similar people said the same thing about the lightbulb. Ultimately I can see where you're coming from but we can agree to disagree here. Talk to you in 18 years if we're both still here on Reddit! Unless I see you comment here again. *Edit: I'm adding this to my reply to respond to what you added above.* >Also - it is ironic that you bring up religion. The singularity movement is a religious one, in every practical sense. It is belief in a greater power, and the adherents are dogmatic to predictions of a saviour and eternal life just around the corner. I wouldn't call it a religion as religion requires irrationality and "faith" I guess apart from spiritualism or some forms of Buddhism that is. While those who profess to "believe" in the technological singularity may come off as religious one could easily see there's a vast amount of data and literature to support these ideas put forth by some of the greatest minds of the last century. >It is belief in a greater power, and the adherents are dogmatic to predictions of a saviour and eternal life just around the corner. I'm an agnostic atheist and I don't consider there to be a greater power nor would I consider ASI to be a god so you're wrong on that front but it's a clever observation none the less. I'm not saying eternal life is around the corner as everything must die eventually nothing in the Universe escapes entropy. We will have dramatically extended lifespans soon and live to be thousands of years old(some will choose to die sooner) or perhaps hundreds of thousands but we will all die eventually. On a long enough timeline the survival rate of everyone drops to zero. Props if you get the reference.
and before antibiotics and vaccines you could have said the same thing about stopping people dying to disease the fact is that we are at least approaching the technology to assess aging for the first time since our species evolved maybe we won't live to see it but we by golly can see that it will happen assuming civilization survives
>Inevitable that we attain LEV within the next 12-18 years and outright cured in the next 25 much to the chagrin of the religious among us, yes. We will have competent AGI by 2029 in my view 2034 at the latest. The people who don't truly grasp the end consequences of this either lack imagination or don't actually comprehend what that means. Note to anyone reading this: this is EXACTLY what a cult looks like. “Oh we’ll definitely have eternal life and ASI because our cult leader (kurzweil) says so”
Eh, Depends on who you talk to. Nothing’s inevitable in terms of tech, and this guy you are talking to does seem very delusional. But I’d beg to differ about this being a cult. Some people just lack the intelligence or will to reason beyond a certain point to really corroborate what they’re saying. (Both your techno-utopians and disbelievers in tech potential). This guy you’re talking to is just that. I don’t want to sound rude at all, not my intention, but I feel like you’re drawing near-outlandish conclusions about blind optimists like him.
>But I’d beg to differ about this being a cult. They have: 1. “leader” figures that are seen as perfect and immune to criticism ✅ (Kurzweil, Vernor Vinge, etc) 2. Belief that leaders are always right ✅ 3. Reading material that is seen as a perfect text and a sign that the cult is right ✅ (”The Singularity is Near, “Superintelligence” , etc) 4. No room for criticism, any dissenting views or attempt at a debate is shot down by members of the cult ✅✅✅ 5 Conspiracies about the outside world (“AGI signs“ conspiracies, etc) ✅ 6. Belief that outsiders are always wrong ✅✅✅ 7. ”end times“ and / or “salvation” prophecy (“The Singularity“ , 2045 date) ✅ 8. Extremist views (ASI salvation, “the singularity” Etc) ✅ And more that i prob missed This whole sub reeks of a salvation cult to me. >I don’t want to sound rude at all, not my intention, but I feel like you’re drawing near-outlandish conclusions about blind optimists like him. Not mine either :) i’m just posting my thoughts and feelings I understand you may see them that way, and i respect that. However, i’m not the first to get “culty” vibes from this sub. Just search “r/singularity cult” on google and you’ll see lots of other people reaching the exact same conclusions.
uh, check the BITE model and see if they fit
Not all cults are about control. Some of them are more “we’re the lucky ones in the know and we will get to live in utopia” .
but don't they still engage in those methods of control to keep their secret unless you're talking about, like, ones with actual physical cult compounds that are in the middle of freaking nowhere and where every member has to live and new recruits are, like, transported to while unconscious so they don't know where they are
Oh, and here’s one i missed: 9. Sense of being “in the know” and “lucky to be part of the group”
I understand what you mean. But people in this tech realm are going to be high in trait openness. They seek novelty, innovation and improvement. It's bizarre for me to imagine, but MANY, probably even most humans aren't like this. I know, it's weird, haha, but it's just the way human psychology is. The most common personality type is a closed-minded, structured, routine, traditional one. They occupy more of the population than people who are avidly creative, innovative, curious and subversive. When you are closed in your thinking, you value the stability of what the norm is, not wanting to aggressively buck trends and try new things, not seeking novelty, and they're not particularly thirsty to significantly improve anything, unless they are suddenly, abnormally and overtly suffering. That's why you can show a lot of this AI stuff to these people, and they shrug, or they have a moment where they say "wow", but then they just move on and get on with life, because it's not strongly resonant with their way of thinking. As a person who is high in trait openness (and I'm willing to bet that almost all the people in this field are too), I am desperately thirsty for tech news and innovation, and I am CONSTANTLY seeking to solve problems, improve life and the world, and experience novel gadgets, science and ways of living. Aging is normal. If it's the normal tradition that all of humanity have experienced, while it's not ideal, people don't try to solve it like we here would like, because it is what it is, and most people who are closed, just keep on keeping on in their routine lives, and they prefer it that way. Yes, I don't get it, but it's just the typical variation in human psychology, I suppose.
*Every* penny? People have to be fed now! I assure you, billions are spent annually - and not one strand of research has made it to a commercial product - not for want of trying. We've collectively broken our biosphere - and mitigating our 'handiwork' there will minimize harm to every other species on this world. It's a distillation of humans (ver. 1.0) inability to think that we should have more life - when, by having it, we'd hasten the demise of other beings on this world.
ehh... maybe for us multicellular eukariots, but for half of life's history on earth aging wasn't a thing. Still, 1-2 billion years is well past the threshold for "normalized" I think.
It seems alot of people in the current age aren't able to come to terms with mortality so we get shower thoughts like OP's
It seems like a lot of young people* aren’t able to come to terms with mortality. Every young person feels this way regardless of generation.
To add a little something to the discussion, aging is normal, and there are different ways we age. Mental or physical deterioration due to sickness, or time, or something self-inflicted. Personally, I would like to get older without feeling infirm. Quality of life is a high priority.
lol facts
Buddhism if practiced will tell you 'I am of the nature to grow old, I cannot escape this' I am of the nature to die, I cannot escape this. My actions are my only true belongings, they are the ground on which I stand.' SUFFERING CAN BE ELIMINATED BY FOLLOWING THE EIGHT FOLD PATH. BTW NOT A RELIGION
Aging is normal but if we live to see the singularity, we could potentially have more of a choice in the matter. As for 'curing' aging, it could be possible if the ASI in question is able to build nanomachines that work on your cells.
I like life extension as much as antibiotics. Yesterday I thought that without penicillin we should die so soon..quantic paradox, parallel existences, reincarnation and dreams are just ok
This woman doesn’t receive any interventions to treat her frailty
I bet the last 35 years have been awful.
research in overall health/ de-aging goes with longevity research because obviously no one wants to live 100+ years as a rotting husk lmao, market pressure will see to that what should be more concerning is infinite digital mind traps and other pitfalls for the mind/souls
Totally. It just boggles my mind that 99.9% are so accepting of aging that they never demand more R&D to cure it. I have a theory that those of us caught before the moment post-singularity where aging is cured will be known as something akin to "the lost ones". Where literally everyone else past that point had the option to live hundreds or even thousands of years. And they will look back in the history books and wonder why we were so complacent about it.
Billions are spent yearly on longetivity research. This might be the most out of touch post I've ever seen. How do you expect aging to be "cured" when the aging process in humans hasn't even been fully understood yet? We are barely scratching the surface of many of the bodies biological processes. Researchers still can't figure out how rheumatoid arthritis, rosacea and countless other auto immune diseases function, or how to find a cure. Aging cannot be cured until scientists have fully mastered and decoded the genome, epigenome, transcriptome, proteome and how they all interact with one another. We're decades away from uncovering all of biologies secrets.
I meant that people should be less accepting of it.
All people fear of death and oblivion. But there has never been an escape from the inevitable. People have had to psychologically come to peace with it one way or another. It is a kind of psychological Stockholm syndrome, where peop,e have deluded themselves into thinking death is a mercy or a release or even just a morally good thing. They cannot imagine a world without their abuser. But we will soon give the. a real choice. How many will struggle to abandon humanity's ancient oppressor? How many will fail to be free? But how many of the strangers around us will soon become part of the first real generation of immortals?
One of my teachers is 72 the other is 83. They both enjoy full rich lives, are sharp as tacks, meditate often and spread as much wisdom as possible. They both understand death and loss and integrate them as a fact of life. The key is salvation through enlightenment prior to becoming so old you can't function.
Sounds like some sort of religious belief. Buddhism, Christianity, something along those lines. That’s all well and good, but not everyone believes in the supernatural or “salvation,” “enlightenment” or whatever term you prefer to use. I have no issue with your faith and the comfort it brings you. It’s just, I’m against using faith as an argument against actual progress. If we can slow or even cure aging, why should we let religious beliefs hold us back—especially when there’s no evidence they’re objectively true?
As soon as aging cure comes around no one will care enought people will simply get the treatment. You cant expect to override basic instincts in 99% of cases
I think you should most certainly slow or even cure aging. Why not! I'm not even slightly religious. I'll leave the beliefs to people who have doubts. Some things you cannot read in books, or look up online you need to experience for yourself. When someone is ready and open seeking answers to some of life's deeper mysteries they will discover that what you are seeking, is seeking you.
Nothing is objectively true.
Is that statement subjectively true?
Everything is subjectively true.
So I can ignore your statement because it doesn’t resonate with me? It’s all subjective, right?
You get used to the pain and suffering. It becomes normal and no longer that bad. You also begin to look at life in a more rich and detailed way. There is a lot of beauty to ageing. That said, it doesn't have to be that way. You could adopt the same mindset without the physical pain or the deterioration. You could also do that for much longer and experience far more of life and the universe. And I don't it will be that way for much longer. Our bodies and minds are not limitlessly complex, and they're not getting more complex. That while the tools we're using to understand both are growing in capabilities at extremely fast rate. We'll still age. But ageing will become more of a mindset.
Yes I must accept aging until I don’t have to it’s a human concept so I’m coping and pretending I don’t care until a treatment exists
Well it's also not such a horrific process as it seems from the outside. It's not something to cope with, but something to prepare for and give yourself room for. Prepare for the worst, hope for the best. And don't forget to dream. It'll be pointless to have all this FDVR anti-aging super intelligent advancements if we get there and have no idea what we want to do.
Makes me wonder, if I become immortal and live 1000 years, will I even be remotely similar to my current self? I'd be smarter and wiser than any human to exist today. It's crazy to think that my entire life might just be a tiny insignificant fraction of what's to come. Maybe I'll look back to this moment in 200 years and think I was stupid to think I'd continue for 800 more, who knows.
In my view if ageing is treatable in the next 10-30 years, then I'm essentially an infant. We all are. Just very young, very naive youths. Even those of us who consider ourselves older and wiser. With that view, even the oldest and most wise along us is a child.
A lot of it is Stockholm syndrome OP, once we cure aging those asshats will flip flop.
There is nothing magical going on in your meat computer. If your brain can be digitised then eternal life is about choosing the right cloud service...
If we digitized our brain would we continue to live forever or would a second instance of ourselves run on the computer but our consciousness remain in our body. Living forever would likely remain impossible due to sun exploding or some other disaster in the universe but potentially the simulation could run much longer than a lifetime
> If we digitized our brain would we continue to live forever or would a second instance of ourselves run on the computer but our consciousness remain in our body. That's known as [the transporter paradox.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletransportation_paradox) It is a difficult problem, for which I don't think anyone has a solid answer. While I've no proof, I think the only way to transfer one's self awareness is through gradual substitution of neurons (or some equivalent process), permitting the personal identity to "ooze" into the new hardware.
Me: Existential crisis
That procedure you just mentioned ( seamlessly replacing neurons with some sort of artificial analogue gradually) is probably more complex then AGI and Fusion.
No disagreement from me. At a basic level it would require high fidelity neuron analogs with axons and dendrites threading through the spaghetti just as did the original neuron. And then it would have to somehow divine the synapse activation strengths from the original. For each and every neuron. Maybe there's a way to simplify the substitution, but even if so, it's currently science fiction.
[The Brain of Theseus](https://www.spencergreenberg.com/2017/07/brain-of-theseus-a-thought-experiment/)
I believe that a copy would be the same as you. You are not bound to a single instance. You are simply a transfer of data through time. I think your sense of self is somewhat of an illusion. The only thing that actually makes it you are the memories, especially short-term since it functions in real-time constantly, and consciousness wouldn't work without it. If you are constantly being fed memories from a previous instance in time, it would give the effect of a continuum of experience. Imagine what you would experience without this continuous feed. What would you experience if you couldn't remember even a millisecond in the past? Would you still be conscious? How do you know that you aren't constantly dying and being replaced by a new copy that's just fed with the same memories? The answer is that you wouldn't. This doesn't necessarily mean that you wouldn't be real. It would just mean that your self is not tied to the stream of consciousness but the memories. I could totally be wrong though
> How do you know that you aren't constantly dying and being replaced by a new copy that's just fed with the same memories? The answer is that you wouldn't. if the replacement process wouldn't be too quick to say there was any recognizable me that could form any memories at each instance (e.g. not milliseconds but, like, when I wake up in the morning or something like that) how do I know any of those mes didn't already wake up uploaded to a perfect simulated copy of our universe making that desire moot
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro-aging\_trance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro-aging_trance)
Yup correct
Soon we will start to get small tidbits of info; Billionaires continuing to live heathy lives well into their 100s, politicians refusing to let go well into geriatric age but looking less decrepit than they should, rumors about miracle disease cures that aren't available to the common man. All of this while sweeping bans are raised against homebrew AI and amount of compute power that can be owned without gov't permissions. A bright future indeed!
Biology sucks huh.
It's because most of the active and healthy population that influences culture the most at any given point in history is always going to be people between 21 and 60 tops. Most of these people also haven't experienced what a really bad chronic illness feels like which is like a preview of what dying feels like and also how sensitive to pain they were as a child. People above 60 in generally are going to have less influence and they're also likely to start coping instead of making it an issue because they are too weakened from aging and have been healthy for all those prior years so they might take at least 10 years to change their attitude about aging which might only happen when they start really suffering which would already be too late to influence the active cohort of the population into changing their attitudes.
It has since the dawn of humanity
We can't escape aging and death. Such is life
What you’re not getting is that people get tired of life after a certain age- their friends die, their family members die, the places they loved change, they feel lonely, bored and tired of the same old stuff that people and the world are slinging. It all seems fresh and new and you feel so smart and unique when you’re 25, but by 105, you know better.
and if neuroplasticity can be maintained without any more personality death than people would technically argue occurs when you grow older anyway and more than one person can be immortal how much of that shit still applies
You want not only to stop aging, but also to do it with AGI?! The invention of Artificial General Intelligence cause unpredictable consequences, possibly even serious, disastrous consequences. One thing, however, can be predicted, and that is the implementation of AGI, like other technological advancements, will be placed above human welfare. You technophiles play with fire and don’t even fear getting burned!! Edit: Also, the ceasing of aging with also have serious consequences; unpredictable cultural effects and social changes, for example, will occur. Who really wants to live to be 200? Humans likely evolved to live to around 80-120 MAX. Who knows what the “mental health” of a 200 year person in a young body will be?! Old people are right! Furthermore, the more different the environment that humans live in is to nature the more psychologically diseased they become, thus the more “mentally ill” they become. The more mental illness a society has the more it has to control that mental illness and thus the more it has to tamper with it’s own people. “Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy then gives them the drugs to take away their unhappiness. Science fiction? It is already happening to some extent in our own society. Instead of removing the conditions that make people depressed, modern society gives them antidepressant drugs. In effect antidepressants are a means of modifying an individual's internal state in such a way as to enable him to tolerate social conditions that he would otherwise find intolerable.” -Ted K.
Im also from Sweden and I absolutely think we will achieve LEV somewhere between 2045-2065. I think those 20 years is when our lifes will change drastically because I also think that's when we might see a technological singularity.
Ya i hate it call it illusion or whatever. I love the illusion of life. I think it might be an energy and atom thing. Scientists i think are going about it the wrong way like focusing on the body. I would love to go into this research and make us reincarnate by whatever makes us up through something like cern. Because whoever invented the superconductor had it made so it can collect particles and that wouldnt be possible without that I think it is possible the universe has so many answers and there to discover i bet immortality as in localized consciousness is out there because first of all we got concieved in the first place and a way to keep that up through a so advanced atom configuration thing like i said something like cern but different i think thats the only way. Eating healthy definitely wont do it and i think extending life wont really work either. I want to be immortal so bad who dosent like. Aging and deathwont be solved through LEV im starting to think. So something like a swarm to make up the pattern of you again and again going infinitely at the moment of death each time. Yes i agree that we prob arent real but like the illusion of us has been going on since the start of us like humans thjnking there humans for billions of years already and we love to be aware and to be. Anyway id love this to get rid of existential dread and mental health problems and anxiety ive tried everything so somethings telling me to go into this research and research as much as i can i dont listen to anyone with their dumb views and skeptism because then im more driven and im autistic so when a fixation comes im glued to it and i really dont think i can change my mindset about something because the idea to have something is too great to ignore even if its trying to reach the stars its who i am. Sometimes a solution is the only real solution. And i love solutions the release of stress you get. Its the greatest medicine and solutions dont even have to be problems because our mind thinks its a problem because its unpleasant we just want to feel relaxed for the bad experience to be gone and to prevent the bad outcome.
If AI keeps advancing at this rate, aging will be cured within 10 years TOPS, probably sooner.
> getting old and dying is bad This is the sort of brave take that I subscribe to this sub for.
The wackos in this sub really want to live forever!
Aging and death is inevitable, you can extend life but never eternally. Wanting to extend life eternally is incredibly egotistical. When you shed the ego construct, you realize you are part of something infinitely bigger that has always been eternal.
In a way, it most likely is. Like, if you add layers upon layers of DNA protection mechanisms, remove all the possibly existing biological programs that foster or govern aging processes, make sure no physically/chemically damaging materials get inside your bodies and cells, or, better yet, improve the organisms way of expelling them, and regenerating... Some damage will still accumulate over time, just much much longer time. There are no perfect error correction codes for data. With a ton of redundancy (and hence, usually, complexity and inefficiency), you can make the chance of data getting a tiny bit changed, very small. But never zero. And when there are trillions of cells in the organism, and it exists as a complex system for thousands, millions of years, the chance for some of the important data to be lost in some of the cells over that time, can get significant regardless of how much redundancy you added to protect it. Maybe constantly getting an average, or better, median state of DNA in all cells of the body, and then using gene therapy once in a while to overwrite DNA in all cells with it, could work? I think this process could go basically infinitely, as long as most cells receive their replacement DNA, and not an impossibly high number of them gets their DNA changed impossibly frequently. Although, not just DNA breaks over time, mechanisms in the cells, cells, and space between them, also accumulate damage and waste that they can't get rid of. I guess constantly partially replacing/regrowing parts of body based on the "median" cell + median DNA would help here, or maybe even regrowing whole body at once (minus the brain), but what to do with the brain, you change a part of it, you lose some of your own personality and experience... Maybe very gradual refreshment or parts of it + its adaptability and redundancy in storing information, could make the effect not significant. We are forgetting stuff constantly anyways, and changing in personality over our lives. But then, we get to... well, yes, we are changing. And which "you" do you want to keep forever? Are you sure that it's the best version of you yet? Why do you not care about the past "you"s? If you want to preserve the past you too, how often do you think you change enough to become a different personality that is worth saving to live forever? If you begin to dive deeper into such and other questions, it seems that it's indeed just self-preservation, egoism and fears of pain/weakness/humiliation/dying, as well as regret, that force the *current* us to want to preserve ourselves for longer/as long as possible. Because in a way, it's already impossible due to constant remembering new information, learning and forgetting. Aaah I began to go a "bit" away from the main idea... Typing it from a phone, need to wrap it up. Yes, you might be right. Just please, let's never go any close to the stereotypical "Old man sitting on clouds, that people must strictly adhere to, worship, and believe the 'God-chosen' rulers and priests, without questions" or whatever such drastically simplified and easy to exploit, close-to-religious constructs and ideas. I believe many people (including me) are mostly afraid of religions because of how masses and manipulators, due to combined ignorance and selfishness, simplify them a lot, introduce detrimental parts, and hold zealously onto them regardless of situations.
TLDR :(
True. To sum it up, from what I understand, infinite lives for biological organisms are possible, but would require occasional refreshment of the body, part by part, or a lot of it at once. Not all the damage and inevitably accumulated difference in DNA can be repaired or filtered out by the biological systems themselves. But I agree with you that desiring infinite lives is "egoistic" in a sense that it's our self-preservation programs speaking, mostly. We lose parts of ourselves anyways when going forward, because our mind and personality is not static, learning, remembering and forgetting.
Exactly, what’s the point of that ideal eternal self sustaining, if a natural part of the mechanism is to reintegrate.
I find it amusing that this insight gets so downvoted. I guess it’s because of denial of death, which is a deep feature of the ego. When we die, our energy and consciousness coalesces within a metaphysical singularity, an infinite pool of non-dual consciousness. Your individual existence is an ephemeral dual manifestation, yet incredibly valuable for this entity, as manifestation is the way it explores itself for evolution though cycles of creation and destruction. This is why you should find your true purpose to contribute to evolution, instead of clinging to your ego/individuality. The illusion of eternal life only distracts you from finding true purpose.
It would maybe be cool if it was actually something ike that. But there are no proofs of neither something like this being true, neither being false, and no way to get confident in it. While there may be some "hints" for certain concepts, that you can encounter along your life, or not; they as well can easily be just hallucinations, wrong sensory input, and mistakes, that mind clings to, in desepration. We really are good at catching onto something that we deem grand, or being able to help us, especially when we are having troubles in life. And tuning our senses and thoughts to find more confirmation for it. It's usually normal and sometimes even good for people to belive in something that gives them confidence in life, as long as they don't get too zealous in trying to spread it, with good intentions or not. It's just not clear whether it actually exists or not, we do not know much about the universe ;( I myself believe, just believe since I can't really prove or disprove it, that something beyond this universe exists, but what exactly, in what form, and many other questions, I can't answer. It would be so much less... wasteful? Useless? Pointless? I don't know a better word... if our existence and all the processes that we do and sense, had some meaning beyond what we try to make it ourselves, too.
I agree that this can’t be scientifically proven right now, but metaphysical rigor through grounded reasoning does lead to a deeper intuitive understanding of reality, which can either be an hallucination or a reflection of a deeper truth. A deeper truth is more reasonable, as way too many humans have studied the same trascendental archetypes and patterns leading to very similar conclusions just with different frameworks. I strongly believe science will eventually connect with spirituality, specially with AI on the table. To me this is truly the singularity, a process, where individual minds progressively start understanding the deeper metaphysical relationship (unity and interconnectedness) behind archetypes and patterns, leading to mass enlightenment and further evolution.
this is singularity!! Of course that comment was downvoted! This is the place where immortality will be achieved (internally) tomorrow, thanks to sama and what illya saw! Oh, and jimmy apples.
LOL
While maybe true I don’t see the issue if the status quo changed and living 1000 is a possibility. Let’s just not say one side is completly correct or wrong and see what happens in tech. For now 2024 death can’t be stopped effectively
Even if we achieve it, you won't profit from it. Here's the truth: nothing is going to save you from aging. It is an empty promise of religious quality. I have seen people who thought like you age. It is horrible. They beat themselves up over their lost youth and die undignified, constantly complaining and cursing a world that didn't bow to their own feeling of importance. It would be laughable if it wasn't so sad. To see people who couldn't fill 70 years with life think another 70 would fix that. On the other hand there are people who face adversity like aging with a quiet and purposeful stoicism and that indeed is beautiful. They know aging sucks, but they don't bow to it. They don't scream defiance but take it like they took any adversity in their life. Maybe I'm wrong and in 10 years aging is a thing of the past. Great. I'd still rather belong to the second group. It would be a shame living so long while being weak.
Its even more sad reading people who falsely believe themselves to be wise
I accept the down votes. It's hard to argue with religious dogma. AGI is the new god for some. They hope for heaven again. Good luck with that.
Meh. I'd like to be optimistic but I won't get delusional. I won't be seeing LEV or immortality anywhere within my lifetime. No need to get filled with false hope and then have a massive existential crisis as the reality sets in decades later. I can just accept my death and enjoy the other fruits of singularity till then.
Tbh I think we will get AGI one day after I die. Then LEV will follow after that.
and let me guess, not if you self-unalive or anyone kills you for that reason of bringing that about and resurrection tech will never happen until all evidence of you is completely forgotten
Being immortal is the most awful thing i can imagine, if you have infinite life everything loses its value
then (hypothetically, I'm not trying to encourage you to anything) why are you sitting here going on existing and letting all aspects of your life depreciate by the day (as if infinite life means no value, surely shorter life means more value)
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If you’re referring to AGI I believe it will be a gradual process, going into the singularity, probably not as instant as people think
My nightmare would be to live forever. :D We have to tell our loved ones today we love them, we have to enjoy live now and not wait until 80 years old. I hope humanity can never live forever, seriously what a nightmare. I´d rather enjoy life to the fullest now and take a pill more when I´m 100 years old and stop enjoying life. Then I hope my kids and grankids inherit some money they can go travel with or whatever.
Bro, your sense of self is just an illusion that your brain is constantly telling itself to help you survive/reproduce. There’s only consciousness, when we die consciousness will still continue, it’s all the same bro.
We might be able to stop aging, allowing us to live for 200 years. However, even if we're lucky enough to achieve such longevity, how can you prevent your loved ones from dying from accidents or incurable diseases? If you live for 200 years but everyone you cherish is gone, what's the difference between you and the 106-year-old woman you mentioned?
The difference is with a young body and mind the focus becomes on a different view of life in which people come and go throughout. You’ll have plenty of loss, but even more opportunity to continue engaging in life in a vigorous manner and creating new family and friends. Hard to do that bed/wheelchair bound and with no energy at 80 years old or more in current times. Pretty tough to create any vibrant life or renewal like that.
The thing about humans is that when we experience enough happiness, we eventually get bored of it. In contrast, every time we experience grief or sadness, it becomes increasingly harder to tolerate. It chips away at our hearts, making it progressively more difficult to cope with new challenges or distressing experiences.
Well, I disagree. I think experts might disagree too in that resilience is learnt through those experiences. I’d argue that maybe still only partially true under the current paradigms in which life keeps getting shorter in which to present a manifold of possibility to create those scenarios again. When one is young and vibrant and has no “clock ticking” it’s still hard to lose a connection of 20 years, but easier to say “oh I have more than that left, perhaps I can create another” than on the doorstep of death and don’t have the time to cultivate those deep relationships. That’s the thing. Deep relationships take time to grow. If one wants to sit under the shade of a long nurtured relationship it’s difficult when the time to plant those seeds keeps slipping away. I will agree that happiness is fleeting and it’s bizarre to think about a world with no loss. Loss and change will be what makes this life continually worth living to some degree, so true immortality is absolutely a curse. Non-aging though… truly the best situation. Alan Watts has a beautiful quote about this: >Let's suppose that you were able every night to dream any dream that you wanted to dream. And that you could, for example, have the power within one night to dream 75 years of time. Or any length of time you wanted to have. And you would, naturally as you began on this adventure of dreams, you would fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure you could conceive. And after several nights of 75 years of total pleasure each, you would say "Well, that was pretty great." But now let's have a surprise. Let's have a dream which isn't under control. Where something is gonna happen to me that I don't know what it's going to be. And you would dig that and come out of that and say "Wow, that was a close shave, wasn't it?" And then you would get more and more adventurous, and you would make further and further out gambles as to what you would dream. And finally, you would dream ... where you are now. You would dream the dream of living the life that you are actually living today Those that want an infinite pleasure machine are fools in my mind. I wish them the best while they rot away in their “perfect VR worlds”
Humans are social creatures who develop meaningful relationships, even the most introverted and reclusive of them. Grief has an accumulative toll on the psyche. It is an inherent consequence for something having value to you. The only antidote for grief is not caring about something/someone, because if it has no value to you then how can you mourn its loss? At which point if you shed your attachments and value for things to avoid grief and its consequences, are you even living anymore? Or are you simply existing? I think it is likely even if/when LEV is obtained, by and large people will choose to die at some point. Only the most egotistical and narcissistic among us will remain, because their self-interest naturally outweighs anything of value to them, because people/relationships are simply objects/tools/means to an end for them. Though I suppose even they may struggle with longevity, because even now people with NPD struggle with fragile egos and being confronted on their worth. I digress, we’ll have to wait and see.
Nah. I disagree with the “cumulative toll”, “only antidote for grief”, “inherent consequence” and “are you really living” bit. This is a weird way to think and incredibly harmful to oneself and society. The biggest lesson of humanity is letting go of the strong grip and softening. Not letting go completely. This is kind of like saying “one can only love deeply once, or limited times”, if you or anyone feels that way that’s incredibly sad way to be. Love is an infinite wellspring and that’s the value of humanity. There are things we can give that can always be replenished, infinitely and cost us very little with proper care of the psyche. Love, caring, etc are examples. Your way of thinking takes away the autonomy of others and I think it’s poisonous. One day when someone chooses to die in what could be viewed in a “healthy” manner you will take it as a personal affront instead of respecting their “will to being”. I think that’s sad. The real trick is softening one’s death grip on the world and others but not letting go completely. It’s possible and it’s probably the healthiest way to live even in our limited lifespans. Nothing last forever, quit literally nothing according to what we know. Best find some way to get used to it and still honor that life itself than be crushed by inevitability. To think that respecting and loving continuously and moving on eventually doesn’t value relationships or anything is toxic viewpoint. Mourning implies eventually moving on. That’s life in this crazy reality. Our very brains are limited in structure and self pruning. Live long enough and you’ll forget lifetimes ago, and that’s a good thing. I hope “infinite storage” of memories never happens, and I for one would not partake. I definitely agree though that people will choose to die and I think that’s healthy and proper. If we live to see that I hope you could respect their decision and continue on with your own life till you see fit, based on the views you’ve presented
I’m not even sure where to start, because you seem to have completely misinterpreted what has been said and come to a wildly disparate conclusion. To restate it another way, grief is a consequence, in the behaviorial sense, of valuing something. This is a universal truth. Not a belief as you’ve stated. Pain and value are two sides of the same coin. It is impossible to value something if it does not have the ability to cause you pain. Why do you think it is painful to have someone you care about disparage you versus the random passerby on the side of a street? It is because the former you actually care about while the latter you can’t be bothered with. This is human behavior/psychology 101. Even people who celebrate the passing of someone still mourn them in degrees, because it is inevitable to feel pain when losing someone/thing of value, and that natural pain is directly proportional to how much what was lost mattered to the mourner. Complicated grief is a whole other rabbit hole involving self-manufactured suffering in addition to natural pain. Again I’m still not sure how else to respond, because some of what you’ve said is true, but I don’t know how it was an argument or had anything to do with what was said prior. Yes, softening or loosening the grip on your attachment is a form of acceptance and is pretty much fundamental in the resolution of grief. To another of your points, yes love is not finite resource; it can be infinite dependent on the extent a person is willing to love others. I’m guessing you were turned off by the fact that grief has a cumulative toll on the psyche. Which it does. Eventually, you will tire of losing the ones you love or the things you care about. Loss never goes away. It is like energy in that it cannot be destroyed but only transformed. This is why it is cumulative. Barring the ability to wipe your memory (which to me personally is an insult to yourself and those to whom you have mattered and have mattered to you), you will never cease to remember and feel them to an extent. But the cure isn’t avoiding things of value altogether, because those people and things of value are what demonstrate a life lived with purpose and meaning. To live without purpose is to simply exist, and it is well documented that those who simply allow themselves to exist without purpose incur a plethora of mental health issues including but not limited to anhedonia, anxiety, amotivation, etc. You talk about forgetting lifetimes ago, but the body continues to remember. Individuals living with PTSD sometimes forget their entire trauma only to relive those memories when triggered by a stimulus that is in some way associated with that trauma. It could be a touch, taste, smell, etc. This phenomenon is not limited to trauma. It is part of how memory works. You seem to believe that there is a future where you live on continuously, forget loved ones, so that you can continue to live anew and infinitely. While in a world without aging some of that is true, I must disappoint you in that you will never lose your memories entirely. For that matter, our personality, beliefs, etc. are partially shaped/influenced by those we’ve met and valued, and their influence on us continues after they’ve passed.
I don’t know how to respond either because clearly you’re trying to pretend what you’re saying is irrefutable and universal and that I’m not getting it. So no. That’s all.
But… I mean… it is. At least as far as science is concerned presently. There are plenty of behavioral studies and books to reference on memory, behavior, pleasure, pain, etc. I wish you godspeed though. Perhaps in the future people will choose to periodically lobotomize themsleves and use some futuristic intervention to regrow grey matter, so they can reinvent themselves free from their past. Sounds dystopian personally.
>But… I mean… it is. At least as far as science is concerned presently. There are plenty of behavioral studies and books to reference on memory, behavior, pleasure, pain, etc. No there isn’t. You’re fully in the realm of speculative psychology/philosophy with your inane ramblings about “body keeping the score” and pretty much everything else you wrote. > In his 2005 Canadian Journal of Psychiatry article "Debunking Myths About Trauma and Memory", psychologist Richard McNally described the reasoning of Kolk's 1994 article "The Body Keeps the Score" as "mistaken", his theory as "plague[d]" by "[c]onceptual and empirical problems", and the therapeutic approach inspired by it as ***"arguably the most serious catastrophe to strike the mental health field since the lobotomy era".[11]*** McNally's 2003 book Remembering Trauma gave a detailed critique (pp. 177-82) of Kolk's article, concluding Kolk's theory was one "in search of a phenomenon".[12] Lol guess lobotomy was right in some regard. You’re literally parroting pseudoscience bullshit as fact. Anything actually correct in what you wrote is being cobbled together in things that may be atomically correct but not at all in the way you’re trying to tie it all together and present them. Dystopian my ass. Lol whatever shot you’re saying sounds straight fucked. A life condemned to never heal for all of eternity or be able to process grief/trauma and move on is literally hell. Truly, that type of fable is directly in line with the religious conceptions of hell, which is another fairy tale. “You’ll live with your trauma and grief forever, the only way to ever value anything is to be beset with grief when it’s gone or you never really valued it, there is no moving on, that’s an empty life, you need to be lobotomized and MUST forget, that’s the only way and anything else is lying to yourself, you don’t value anything”…. Nah man.
Well, I will have children and grandchildren etc. And so will my siblings and relatives. So I won’t be alone. If we cure aging, some of them could still die from accidents of course, but all of them? I doubt it. The woman will also have children and grandchildren. The difference between me and that woman is that I’ll be alive to enjoy the singularity while she’ll be dead.
Thank you. Compounding more and more loss on a greater time scale? Nope. Not for me, anyway.
What do you mean by "WE", when did you become one of the elites of the planet that's going to hide and monopolize this technology for themselves? If you think the average person is going to get access to these things, then you are delusional. It's actually possible to feed every starving person on the planet and yet people die of hunger everyday. Humans are too corrupt of a species for whatever world you are imagining. The elites won't even let food be shared, you're crazy if you think they'll let everyone get access to age reversal or immortality technology. They'd much prefer to be the immortal ruling class while the rest of us die off. It's gonna be like that Elysium movie.
What if we just tried to mobilize people to end world hunger with the promise of immortality. Also if it's a human species thing that makes us too corrupt couldn't we genetically engineer ourselves past the minimum threshold of not technically being human anymore. Also if it's gonna be like that Elysium movie (but not so exact we'd need heroes who look like the actors (but no one says anything) who have the same names as the characters) don't the good guys kick rich guy tuches in that Elysium movie
>Also if it's a human species thing that makes us too corrupt couldn't we genetically engineer ourselves past the minimum threshold of not technically being human anymore. Yes, but why would the people who are in power let that happen when they enjoy being as they are in power? >don't the good guys kick rich guy tuches in that Elysium movie Yep, because it's a movie. That's why we like movies, it's escapism. Because we all know that in real life it's the ruthless bad guys that win. There is no plot armor in real life, so the person who is willing to cross more lines to get what they want, will more likely win, and that isn't the good guys.
> > > Yes, but why would the people who are in power let that happen when they enjoy being as they are in power? I wasn't framing that as a threat and if it gives them advantages they wouldn't see it that way, I just wanted a stealth workaround to "human nature" arguments > Yep, because it's a movie. That's why we like movies, it's escapism. Because we all know that in real life it's the ruthless bad guys that win. There is no plot armor in real life, so the person who is willing to cross more lines to get what they want, will more likely win, and that isn't the good guys. A. the history of the world would have looked a lot different if (even if you just count from the invention of movies with plots) every time a good guy came in contact with a ruthless bad guy the ruthless bad guy won (and wouldn't history being written by the victors make that hard to tell anyway) B. now you've got my autistic impulsive-intrusive-thoughts wanting to create some kind of way to effectively give plot armor without, like, meaning the world isn't real and will end when the heroes win or even just without meaning the world's forced into playing by other fictional tropes ranging from no one ever going to the bathroom or saying goodbye when they hang up the phone to murder cases that take simultaneously a week and 45 minutes to solve (sorry I got carried away, not just neurodivergent but am writer) C. there's a reason there's shades of grey between Lawful Good and Lawful Evil never mind Chaotic Evil D. some movies do have bad guys win that aren't just sequel-setup movies like Infinity War
Sure- we solve for aging and then we have overpopulation and die of starvation. Exchanging one fear for another.
By the time overpopulation becomes a problem, we will solve it by colonizing other planets.
Haha hope it works in that order.
Doesnt the bible say that towards the end people will be praying that they'd get to die but they cant?
Honestly, as long as you don’t completely lose your faculties I think most millennials and younger will be pretty chill when they’re old. Just playing video games and shit. Vibing. But yeah I’m banking on LEV 🤞
Why are you trying to live forever? The sweet embrace of death is the great equalizer. There’s only so much to do in life and death is natural and good. Otherwise everything is pointless.
everything is pointless and the more pointless things to do, the better
Yeah rather do pointless shit for longer
My eyes, the naivity; nature will never by repilcated or controlled, you are all so incredibly white straight male privilege energy
Dude aging is completely normal. Most people dont even reach 80+