[ 22/October/21 ]
There is another way of looking at this and thinking about it that isn’t either as common or as pessimistic.
That is that if you think about it from the perspective of life at the level of cells, then every cell alive today, whether in you, me, grass, bacteria, fungi, birds, whatever; can be thought of as having been alive for over 3 billion years.
Cells can join together, or divide; and when they do either their contents mix and essentially become one. We each come from a long line of cells that have been doing that for about a billion years, living in large cooperative colonies we call bodies.
So from this perspective, death may be common, but not certain, because all these cells have been alive for several billion years, many of them having passed through many millions of cooperative colonies on their way to becoming us.
From this perspective, indefinite life extension is the default mode of cellular life; and should be generally available to any large colony that wants it by about 2035.
From this perspective we all have a responsibility to ensure our choices support life and liberty generally (and liberty always has to come with responsibility if it is to survive, Liberty without responsibility is necessarily destructive of the conditions required for survival at that level).
So we live in interesting, and rapidly changing, times.
[followed by]
Hi Judith and Lulu,
What I meant by that phrase was that indefinite life extension should be available to those who want it by about 2035 based upon current trends.
The last major obstacle was working out how to predict protein structure based upon a sequence of nucleotides. That was solved last year by a Google AI system called Alpha fold 2 (a descendant of Alpha Go).
There remains substantial work to be done but with AI systems improving on a double exponential I think 2035 is a conservative estimate for general availability.
And to be clear I am not afraid of death. I was forced by the medical establishment to accept it as a high probability outcome 11 years ago. And I am clear that death is the end. Nothing more beyond it. I understand enough of the systems of life and evolution to have no shadow of remaining reasonable doubt about that.
And I will do everything that I reasonably can to continue living just because it seems to be the most interesting thing to do.
[followed by]
Hi Judi and Lulu,
The role of AI in life extension is to accurately model all of the critical processes going on at the cellular level, and then to help search and sort for effective mitigation strategies for each.
On the subject of consciousness I am reasonably confident that the hard problem is not really that hard, and it is deeply complex and has more than a few levels of fundamental uncertainties involved.
And I am confident that I understand how consciousness evolved, and how it works, at least in broad principles.
So consciousness very definitely requires some form of body. No shadow of remaining reasonable doubt about that in my mind.
[followed by]
Hi Judith,
For me, the idea that “consciousness is the ground out of which all objects/things are found”… is similar to the idea that the sun revolves around the earth. That is what we see, it is what we directly experience, but with a bit more experience, it clearly isn’t how things actually work.
Certainly, what we experience as conscious entities isn’t what is “objectively real”. The evidence is overwhelming that whatever reality actually is, it is simplified by many layers of perceptual and pattern matching systems to give us our individual experiences.
So there is certainly a sense in which we each get to have our own personal experiences of whatever objective reality actually is. Some may more closely approximate it in some circumstances than others.
And to me, with my experience set of over 50 years of interest in the details of systems, biochemistry and evolution – the evidence sets are overwhelming. And it is not simple. We are the most complex things yet known in the universe. And I am an autistic spectrum geek, with a 160+ IQ, who has been interested in this stuff for a long time; so I really do get that what seems obvious to me can seem like magic to others. And I have always loved the Arthur C Clarke quote “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” – and there is a very real sense in which we are the most advanced technology evolution has come up with in some 4 billion years.
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