61–70 of 99 posts
We can extend healthspan, how about that?
Imagine that the status quo was that everyone lived forever. If someone suggested that we should kill literally everyone to solve overpopulation or rich people or meaning of life or whatever, they would rightly be called batshit insane.
I think this is the appropriate framing. The problems that would arise as a result of a “cure for aging” should result in societal decisions that fix existing problems we just push to the side because death kind of solves them.
Interestingly the people who say others should die to “fix” overpopulation change their minds when they’re up. We can solve overpopulation in other ways than letting people die.
The very idea of “overpopulation” is a rich man’s trick to arrest Humanity’s collectively-singular evolution to Oneness. We can become The Pyramid Unfinished together instead, racing against ourself to convert lifetimes worth of our only truly-limited human resource (our attention) into a non-human form that can be accumulated into a godlike simulacrum, beating death via the symmetric property of equality where money…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hm, is that an ethical way to approach ethics? I think it's problematic, honestly.
Any alternatives?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is the appropriate framing. The problems that would arise as a result of a “cure for aging” should result in societal decisions that fix existing problems we just push to the side because death kind of solves them.
Sadly I’m not sure I’m convinced that a need for a solution generates one. See Covid response or climate change.
We can't currently cure aging and there is little convincing evidence that suggests we will be able to anytime soon. This is despite the claims of many attempts at peddling false hopes by folks like David Sinclair and Aubrey de Grey. We can mitigate some downsides of aging at best. Aging is baked into our genes as natural selection never had a reason to favor any other approach.
Imagine that the status quo was that everyone lived forever. If someone suggested that we should kill literally everyone to solve overpopulation or rich people or meaning of life or whatever, they would rightly be called batshit insane.
Making people like forever would automatically incentivise people to solve a whole host of problems. The young care more about the future because they worry how emerging problems may affect them, and death is distant and abstract. Whereas older people feel their mortality more concretely, and wonder how they extract as much in the time they have left.
I think the only thing that will happen for sure if we make people live forever is stagnation as all the people who feel strongly about something that is wrong don't die off and instead accumulate, likely filling up good positions in society that otherwise would have gone to a younger, more dynamic up and coming person.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The very idea of “overpopulation” is a rich man’s trick to arrest Humanity’s collectively-singular evolution to Oneness. We can become The Pyramid Unfinished together instead, racing against ourself to convert lifetimes worth of our only truly-limited human resource (our attention) into a non-human form that can be accumulated into a godlike simulacrum, beating death via the symmetric property of equality where money…
Wut
We can't currently cure aging and there is little convincing evidence that suggests we will be able to anytime soon. This is despite the claims of many attempts at peddling false hopes by folks like David Sinclair and Aubrey de Grey. We can mitigate some downsides of aging at best. Aging is baked into our genes as natural selection never had a reason to favor any other approach.
Are you basing this on research you've seen that runs counter to the unbridled optimism of Sinclair and others, or is this belief of yours just a consequence of your belief about "natural selection never had a reason to favor any other approach"? I'm just wondering for myself, as an outsider to all this, what reason I would have to take your view rather than theirs.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016749432...
Brenner also had a debate with de Grey:
I was initially put off by Brenner because he can be abrasive but as far as I can tell he is correct and unrelenting when it comes to pointing out bad science.