Longevity Research

[KSK]

If you haven't read it already, Mazon, I highly recommend Greg Egan's 'Permutation City'. Sounds like it would be right up your street from what you were saying there. Or you could try Diaspora and it's loose prequel, Zendegi, for a couple of excellent novels about consciousness uploading, and what it might be like to live in such a state.

From Wikipedia: "Egan published his first work in 1983.[1] He specialises in hard science fiction stories with mathematical and quantum ontology themes, including the nature of consciousness. Other themes include genetics, simulated reality, posthumanism, mind uploading, sexuality, artificial intelligence, and the superiority of rational naturalism over religion. He is known for his tendency to deal with complex technical material, like inventive new physics and epistemology, in an unapologetically thorough manner."

[Mazon Del]

Sounds interesting! If you enjoy that sort of topic you should look into a book called Accelerandro. Slight disclaimer, in its attempt to be "look how shocking the near future could be!" it gets a little adult at a few points.

There is a book series that I am struggling to remember the name of right now that operated a bit similar to what I describe, except biologically in a way. You have a chip in your head that is recording your mind at all points of the day. Every couple of months you schedule a trip to the backup-center and download the current copy. If say you get impaled on a spike from a horrific and unforseen tennis accident, they just rip the chip out, plug it in to the quick-cloner and in less than a month you are you, 21, and back at it. If your chip is unrecoverable (feel into a black hole or a star for example) then they just load the most recent backup.

They play quite a lot of games with this as time goes on in the universe (it occasionally skips hundreds of years at a time). It is quite fashionable to swap out your body on your next death. Want to be half-bird and the opposite gender? Sure, just let them know before you die. It eventually gets to the point where its perfectly acceptable to not even wait till your next accidental/medical-related death to have a body swap. They abhor the idea of duplicate conciousnesses, but even that eventually fades as you get people "going multi" where they have 60 bodies spread throughout all of human space, connected via zero-latency wormhole internet to be a pseudo hive mind. They are very clear that while they are all one "mind" every body involved IS its own copy of the person in question. One guy was noted for having several dozen bodies and he was a "one man" company. Didn't need to hire anybody else. As his needs grew he would just add some more bodies. If one died, the others would be sad, but there was no true conciousness lost because their minds are basically set up to parallel process everybody at the same time. It's more like losing a mirrored hard drive you've had for a hundred years. Kinda sad because it has served you faithfully, but at the end of the day you didn't really lose anything. After a few events in their history, they now ensure that backups on one world are also backed up on worlds hundreds/thousands of light years away.

Their whole system of crime and whatnot has been changed to reflect all of this. If you kill someone on purpose/by accident and it was caught right away, you are fined the cost of their replacement body (think, buying a new computer grade cost), maybe forced to take an anger management class, etc. If you kill someone and they don't figure it out for 40 years (sometimes people go off exploring the depths of the galaxy) then your punishment is the fine for the body, a fine for any assumed financial damages that person encurred by lacking 40 years of life, and you are put into stasis for three times the amount of time they were 'out of touch'. Their society evolves at a pretty fair rate, so losing 40 years of exposure is somewhat debilitating for a couple years while you catch up. Losing 120 is preferred to death, but still terrifying to them. Entire languages, memetic complexes, civilizations could have evolved and crashed in that time and now you have to try and figure out how to connect your old fashioned ways of thinking to the present day without forever (probably takes another 60-80 years before the new ways of existing have overridden the old within you) being a young "old man".

[vger]

Yes yes, the usual argument that a copy/parallel process continuing on isn't the same as avoiding death. I agree with this technical definition, but my point of view has always been somewhat akin to parents defending their young. It matters more that the children continue on than that the parent does. It matters more to me that some "me" continues on than "me" continuing on. I would of course ideally love for the "me" that is operating to be the most up to date and complete version of me, but there WILL be situations where this cannot be. Fork a copy of me to pilot the ship against the alien mothership in a kamikaze attack? Sure, why not. Multiple "me's" at the same time is fine, if our tech is good enough to do this in the first place, it shouldn't be that hard to 'merge' the forks. Sure depending on how long the two have been separate this will result in some unique "identity death" going on, but if all parts are from me anyway then they will accept this. Yeah, if I could I'd pull a Doctor McNinja, fork myself hundreds of times, go to college in all the things, merge again.

It has other uses too. Death and rebirth is a lot like reinventing the wheel in a way. If someone gets far enough to become a supergenius in their scientific field (which in some cases, can take 60 years or more), then you've only got a decade or two if you're lucky with which to make your breakthrough contribution. Then you're dead, and someone else has to learn whatever you did, and spend 60 years before having a chance at taking things further.

Upload your consciousness to a computer and continue your research? Why not? People can donate their bodies to science, why not their minds?

[-Velocity-]

Even if we could do that, we'd never know for sure if we were preventing death or creating a copy. The mind in the computer would think it was the original regardless.

I think it's (at least mostly) a false distinction. The computer mind is just as much the original as the biological mind. A mind is just information and rules for interacting with that information and new information that comes in. Making a distinction between a mind in a brain and an exact copy of that mind on a computer that runs an exact brain simulation is false, just as it would false to make a distinction between KSP installed on two identical computers. Yes, you can say that both computers have separate instances of KSP installed, but neither of them have any differences until they experience different inputs. And even after they have diverged from each other, neither of them is the "original", since, at the time of installation (or in the case of mind copying, the copying event), they both started out as being exactly the same information.

Another way to look at it, if you installed KSP on a computer, and then immediately installed KSP again in a separate location on the same computer, would it make sense to call the first one the "original" and the second one the "copy"? No, it would make more sense to simply refer to their different locations on your hard drive.

In essence, our minds are not much different than a computer program, except that the program is executed on a neurological biological processor that is specialized to just run the "human mind" program, and the program's code is realized structurally and is thus harder to erase than our silicon computers.

I also think that this idea about the interruption of consciousness while transferring a mind being death is just silly. I had my consciousness interrupted for 8 hours last night. It was quite nice, actually.

No, death is the permanent, irreversible interruption of consciousness, with no restoration of the information your brain contained ever being possible.

Edited November 10, 2014 by |Velocity|

[Godot]

....

I also think that this idea about the interruption of consciousness while transferring a mind being death is just silly. I had my consciousness interrupted for 8 hours last night. It was quite nice, actually.

...

Sleep is totally different from death.

In sleep your brain still works, but in a diffferent mode ... your neurons still fire in a regulated pattern (and not only those that are needed f0or the body to function) and after a certain while your brain switches from sleep to awake mode. You merely are in an altered state of consciousness.

You actually can see this for yourself when you are in REM sleep (i.e. the sleep porton where we dream) ... you are conscious in your dream world and even can make conscious decisions (I for my part, for example, have often turned nightmares with zombie like settings into rather nice dreams by recognizing that they are dreams and giving myself the ability to fly [flying over your neighborhood with no artificial help ... and not having to worry about the monsters on the ground]).

Totally different from death where no neuronal activity takes place anymore.

[-Velocity-]

Sleep is totally different from death.

In sleep your brain still works, but in a diffferent mode ... your neurons still fire in a regulated pattern (and not only those that are needed f0or the body to function) and after a certain while your brain switches from sleep to awake mode. You merely are in an altered state of consciousness.

You actually can see this for yourself when you are in REM sleep (i.e. the sleep porton where we dream) ... you are conscious in your dream world and even can make conscious decisions (I for my part, for example, have often turned nightmares with zombie like settings into rather nice dreams by recognizing that they are dreams and giving myself the ability to fly [flying over your neighborhood with no artificial help ... and not having to worry about the monsters on the ground]).

Totally different from death where no neuronal activity takes place anymore.

Yes, death is different than sleep, but I have a problem with saying that the interruption of neural activity during mind transfer being equated to death for the original mind. Minds are information; if you were to temporarily halt execution of a computer program, does that mean that the program died? Of course not- it just temporarily halted execution, and the program can be continued at a later time with no loss of information or functionality.

Also, I'm pretty sure that anesthetics can produce artificial comas where our neural activity in the areas of the brain that produces consciousness goes significantly lower than during any stage of sleep. Is that death? Of course not. The person wakes up, and resumes being the person he was before. He/she just temporarily had their conscious state suspended- there was no information loss and there was no change in the "program".

[Bill Phil]

Yes, death is different than sleep, but I have a problem with saying that the interruption of neural activity during mind transfer being equated to death for the original mind. Minds are information; if you were to temporarily halt execution of a computer program, does that mean that the program died? Of course not- it just temporarily halted execution, and the program can be continued at a later time with no loss of information or functionality.

Also, I'm pretty sure that anesthetics can produce artificial comas where our neural activity in the areas of the brain that produces consciousness goes significantly lower than during any stage of sleep. Is that death? Of course not. The person wakes up, and resumes being the person he was before. He/she just temporarily had their conscious state suspended- there was no information loss and there was no change in the "program".

But if they don't wake up? What about that? Could it then be equated to death?

[vger]

Also, I'm pretty sure that anesthetics can produce artificial comas where our neural activity in the areas of the brain that produces consciousness goes significantly lower than during any stage of sleep. Is that death? Of course not. The person wakes up, and resumes being the person he was before. He/she just temporarily had their conscious state suspended- there was no information loss and there was no change in the "program".

Interestingly though, coming out of a coma can sometimes result in partial or total amnesia. Even medically-induced ones where no trauma is involved.

[KSK]

Sounds interesting! If you enjoy that sort of topic you should look into a book called Accelerandro. Slight disclaimer, in its attempt to be "look how shocking the near future could be!" it gets a little adult at a few points.

There is a book series that I am struggling to remember the name of right now that operated a bit similar to what I describe, except biologically in a way. You have a chip in your head that is recording your mind at all points of the day. Every couple of months you schedule a trip to the backup-center and download the current copy. If say you get impaled on a spike from a horrific and unforseen tennis accident, they just rip the chip out, plug it in to the quick-cloner and in less than a month you are you, 21, and back at it. If your chip is unrecoverable (feel into a black hole or a star for example) then they just load the most recent backup.

They play quite a lot of games with this as time goes on in the universe (it occasionally skips hundreds of years at a time). It is quite fashionable to swap out your body on your next death. Want to be half-bird and the opposite gender? Sure, just let them know before you die. It eventually gets to the point where its perfectly acceptable to not even wait till your next accidental/medical-related death to have a body swap. They abhor the idea of duplicate conciousnesses, but even that eventually fades as you get people "going multi" where they have 60 bodies spread throughout all of human space, connected via zero-latency wormhole internet to be a pseudo hive mind. They are very clear that while they are all one "mind" every body involved IS its own copy of the person in question. One guy was noted for having several dozen bodies and he was a "one man" company. Didn't need to hire anybody else. As his needs grew he would just add some more bodies. If one died, the others would be sad, but there was no true conciousness lost because their minds are basically set up to parallel process everybody at the same time. It's more like losing a mirrored hard drive you've had for a hundred years. Kinda sad because it has served you faithfully, but at the end of the day you didn't really lose anything. After a few events in their history, they now ensure that backups on one world are also backed up on worlds hundreds/thousands of light years away.

Their whole system of crime and whatnot has been changed to reflect all of this. If you kill someone on purpose/by accident and it was caught right away, you are fined the cost of their replacement body (think, buying a new computer grade cost), maybe forced to take an anger management class, etc. If you kill someone and they don't figure it out for 40 years (sometimes people go off exploring the depths of the galaxy) then your punishment is the fine for the body, a fine for any assumed financial damages that person encurred by lacking 40 years of life, and you are put into stasis for three times the amount of time they were 'out of touch'. Their society evolves at a pretty fair rate, so losing 40 years of exposure is somewhat debilitating for a couple years while you catch up. Losing 120 is preferred to death, but still terrifying to them. Entire languages, memetic complexes, civilizations could have evolved and crashed in that time and now you have to try and figure out how to connect your old fashioned ways of thinking to the present day without forever (probably takes another 60-80 years before the new ways of existing have overridden the old within you) being a young "old man".

That sounds like one of Peter F. Hamilton's series to me, although I don't recall which one off the top of my head. If I recall, the notion of 'going multi' got fairly suggestive at one point, with a female protagonist and her 'multi' lover. Not overtly graphic, but definitely suggestive.

Accelerandro sounds good - thanks! I'll have to have a look for that.

[Nuke]

perfect immortality violates the second law of thermodynamics. virtual immortality might work, possibly through nanotechnology, where you dont naturally die but you can die from other causes. for example in events where terminal damage is done before the internal damage control nanobots can do anything about it. i can imagine having these nanobots installed and maintained costing a fortune, considerable opportunities for conflict to make a good scifi.

life extension is another possibility where you have lifespans of a few hundred years, simply through advances in medicine. such as the doubling of natural life expectancy we have already accomplished since the stone age. growing of replacement bodies may also be a thing, but you cant do this to a brain. neurological degeneration may ultimately limit the effectiveness of such a process. cyborgification has the same problem, bodies are easy, but if you dont have a method to upload a consciousness, then its no different than a meat mech.

if a way is devised of backing up the human mind to a computer then that would give you virtual immortality. but i have a feeling this would be like plugging a hard drive for a running system into another machine with different hardware. nothing would work right and it would fundamentally alter ones consciousness. you could still die and you would have to face the heat death of the universe, and that would probibly kill you. this is also going to be a high cost affair and source of conflict.

in scenarios where immortality of any kind is viable, you are going to end up with a gerontocracy government run by the oldest individuals, younger immortals would make up the middle class and normal humans would be relegated to a disposable lower class. obviously since it would be possible for immortals to die through various accidental and intentional means, the dangerous jobs would mostly be relegated to the lower class. but thats ok, conflict makes good scifi.

[Mazon Del]

...but i have a feeling this would be like plugging a hard drive for a running system into another machine with different hardware. nothing would work right and it would fundamentally alter ones consciousness. you could still die and you would have to face the heat death of the universe, and that would probibly kill you. this is also going to be a high cost affair and source of conflict.

in scenarios where immortality of any kind is viable, you are going to end up with a gerontocracy government run by the oldest individuals, younger immortals would make up the middle class and normal humans would be relegated to a disposable lower class. obviously since it would be possible for immortals to die through various accidental and intentional means, the dangerous jobs would mostly be relegated to the lower class. but thats ok, conflict makes good scifi.

The issues about "nothing working right and being fundamentally altering" are pretty much solvable. We have plenty of situations where we need to run old equipment on new, we set up an artificial environment so that the old equipment think's everything is happening as it always has, but additional software/hardware emulators provide the bridge to ensuring that everything happens as it should. As far as being fundamentally altering, this isn't a really fair complaint to have. The instant someone becomes immortal through whatever means (magic, nanotech, mind uploads, etc) they WILL experience a fundamental shift of some kind. Take me. I assume that short of an accident or something, I will live long enough for one flavor of immortality or another to apply to me. But deep down I have this dark knot of fear that I might not (those accidents I mentioned). The instant I no longer need to fear I might not make it, suddenly whole new aspects of the world are mine to try.

As far as the issue of ancient people just being far more capable than younger people. In some ways this will be an issue and in others it wont. With wide spread adoption of mind upload tech, it probably wouldn't take too long to reach the point where if you wanted to become the foremost expert on wormhole theory after having been a biologist your whole life, you could just buy the download package and after a recompile of your mindware suddenly you have the fullest understanding we have at that time of wormhole theory.

For politics, that gets into such an upredictable area as to be more amusing speculation than anything else. Maybe we adopt a rule that if you get immortality serum you cannot run for president? Unlikely, but possible. People get dissatisfied with the current ancient political leaders? Snag a space ship and run off with some friends and build a new civilization. The options for how this plays out are pretty much limitless.

Incidentally yes, right now there is no escaping heat death...unless certain random hyper techs turn out to be true.

[Duxwing]

How long has there been a "War on Drugs" or a one child policy in China?

I don't think force will work unless you are willing to terrorize on a Stalin or North Korean like scale and that means killing large numbers of people.

The only humane way is to go down a slow educational approach which may take a hundred years or more.

Edit: On a historic example you may want to look at the history of eugenics.

It started out as one thing, but as governments got involved it slowly turned into something truly horrific.

I know you mean well, but things like this often end badly as they often get out of hand especially when bureaucracy and over zealous people come together.

It was an example! >_< I thought it was obvious that I didn't think it through!

-Duxwing

Edited November 11, 2014 by Duxwing

[-Velocity-]

But if they don't wake up? What about that? Could it then be equated to death?

Well, if they are never able to wake up, yes, it's effectively death. The importance is that no significant amount of the information required to describe the mind is lost, AND that the mind IS restored, or at least, can be restored.

If we get to the point where we can actually store and restore people's minds, death isn't something that will be able to be easily defined. More people will come to understand that our minds are just a process, the sense of a constant "self" is illusionary, and that the distinction between "alive" and "dead" isn't as clear-cut as once thought because it's based on something that isn't physically definable. I mean, it is RIGHT NOW, because we lack the capability to explore the "grey" areas. But if we get to the point where our minds can reside inside a computer, then that will radically change what we think being alive even means.

Edited November 11, 2014 by |Velocity|

[-Velocity-]

I personally haven't put that much thought into how eliminating aging would change society. I mean, I have given it thought, there are a few obvious effects that seem likely- mandatory birth control, people in general becoming more risk adverse, a loss of creativity caused by fewer new, fresh minds, and few others. However, overall, extreme longevity would change society so radically that I don't think I'm imaginative enough to come up with something realistic regarding how society would work.

[Duxwing]

My blunder aside, I have some responses:

Methods and Purpose

Yes, whatever we do, we should do ethically... and now I look like a totalitarian lunatic for not having mentioned this time-honored lesson.

I meant this thread to inspire clever, interesting ways of achieving immortality: suppose you had nothing holding you back and just had to make everyone live forever.

Ethics

I believe immortality, whether achieved biologically or otherwise, morally-necessary because else everyone dies. Whoever (rightly) considers my example horrific must also believe sacrificing billions of people for 'progress' infinitely-moreso. I strongly doubt that, were humans naturally-immortal, anyone here would say that older ones should be executed lest society should become bad. Yet everyone here also knows they would be just as dead by gunshot as by Alzheimer's, cancer, or a simple heart attack--and that execution need not involve the decades of prior suffering and degradation usually-associated with aging. Therefore, a valid but absurd conclusion of opposing immortality is supporting omnicide.

One might nevertheless argue that immortal life would not be worth living. Again, I disagree because death is the worst fate and cannot be undone. Furthermore, even if some fates were worse than death, and even if people suffering those fates should die quickly, who but those people should choose whether to live or die? Nevertheless, one might argue that immortality would make civilization-scale life not worth living, and I disagree yet again. Our forebears endured worse during the millennia of savagery and barbarism preceding civilization, whereby they overcame their problems: are we not their equals?

Indeed, they have solved problems like those immortality would create. Needing land, they ventured the wilderness like we can the stars; needing minerals, they mined the mountains like we can the asteroids; needing food, they incited several agricultural revolutions like we can today. Engendering the creativity needed to solve these problems was my aim when creating this thread, and I hope we will have it here.

-Duxwing

[Mazon Del]

In the Riverworld book series, SPOILERS, it is actually brought up that the reason they bring people back to life is because it is morally their responsibility to do so. It is within their capability and means. If you had the ability to feed a mentally retarded child a pill to fix his issue, is it not your moral duty to do so? Strictly speaking in their system, they were bringing people back so they could ascend because they never had a chance to do so before. But the point remains the same. /SPOILERS.

In a few sci-fi books they explore this in some fascinating ways. Assuming the sensors that record what goes on in the world (security cameras, social media, etc) continue to grow nigh exponentially for several more decades and data storage technology matches or exceeds this growth, several stories posit that it will become possible for the future to run mega data-mining software to reconstruct your mind from all available data. There would be a few holes admittedly, but for all intents and purposes you wouldn't be any different from a coma patient that woke up and was told you had a mild case of amnesia. IE: You might not remember the super secret affair you had if it was actually a well kept secret.

While I tend to think of this particular style of immortality as being less desired to be my chariot to eternity than others, frankly I'll take what I can get. That said though, I don't participate in social media enough to leave anything even approximating the beginning of an electronic ghost behind for revival.

[KSK]

My blunder aside, I have some responses:

Methods and Purpose

Yes, whatever we do, we should do ethically... and now I look like a totalitarian lunatic for not having mentioned this time-honored lesson.

I meant this thread to inspire clever, interesting ways of achieving immortality: suppose you had nothing holding you back and just had to make everyone live forever.

Ethics

I believe immortality, whether achieved biologically or otherwise, morally-necessary because else everyone dies. Whoever (rightly) considers my example horrific must also believe sacrificing billions of people for 'progress' infinitely-moreso. I strongly doubt that, were humans naturally-immortal, anyone here would say that older ones should be executed lest society should become bad. Yet everyone here also knows they would be just as dead by gunshot as by Alzheimer's, cancer, or a simple heart attack--and that execution need not involve the decades of prior suffering and degradation usually-associated with aging. Therefore, a valid but absurd conclusion of opposing immortality is supporting omnicide.

Hang on - omnicide has only been posited as possible (and extreme) response to the overcrowding, stagnation etc. that has also been posited to arise from mass immortality. Oppose the latter and the former becomes moot. So we oppose immortality because we foresee - and wish to avoid - the need for omnicide, not because we support it.

One might nevertheless argue that immortal life would not be worth living. Again, I disagree because death is the worst fate and cannot be undone. Furthermore, even if some fates were worse than death, and even if people suffering those fates should die quickly, who but those people should choose whether to live or die? Nevertheless, one might argue that immortality would make civilization-scale life not worth living, and I disagree yet again. Our forebears endured worse during the millennia of savagery and barbarism preceding civilization, whereby they overcame their problems: are we not their equals?

Hmmm, if death was the worst fate, then surely there would be no suicide? Agree with your comment about choosing to die though. Regarding savagery and barbarism preceding civilization, I would argue that this is a work in progress, at least on a global scale. A civilized society does not inflict atrocities on it's members over differences of opinion. But that's politics, so lets avoid for the sake of keeping this thread open.

Indeed, they have solved problems like those immortality would create. Needing land, they ventured the wilderness like we can the stars; needing minerals, they mined the mountains like we can the asteroids; needing food, they incited several agricultural revolutions like we can today. Engendering the creativity needed to solve these problems was my aim when creating this thread, and I hope we will have it here.

-Duxwing

If we assume immortality in a physical shell (biological or cybernetic), then we'll need more room for those shells. Habitable planets are going to be in short supply (relatively speaking), so an Ian M. Banks, "Culture" type of future, where most living space is either provided by city-spacecraft, or by space habitats (presumably constructed from asteroids and the like) would seem likely.

[Mazon Del]

So we oppose immortality because we foresee - and wish to avoid - the need for omnicide, not because we support it.

Or. We could do what we always do. We give us the thing that helps us the most in the immediet sense, we ride it till it starts causing us a problem, and then we pour funds in at the last second to solve the problem so we can keep the best thing.