a person with 20,000 previous days would have greater prediction than someone with 10,000 previous days. implies on older person should predict a continuation of life, more than a younger one. incorrect?
In a randomly sampled million individuals, what's the probability of any of them surviving another day?
The gambler fallacy talks about a gambler who has won and believes that the cause that made him win is long lasting. But a living man is right to believe that he is alive due to forces that have a lot of momentum and won't vanish suddenly. The fallacy would be assuming that the man is exempt from accidents, that are unpredictable.
“No, no, I have an MBA, I’d never fall for sunk cost. I’m all in on the ‘I’ll travel the world and do all the crazy fun stuff after I retire’ fallacy.”
People were never seriously interested in extending their lives. I submit that there's a pretty easy, macabre (to most) way to go about it:
Monoclonal antigen-free body farms. Grow human bodies in labs -- farmed donor bodies -- and get good at head transplants.
This cures most cancers, most diseases, skipping the complicated molecular biology we've yet to solve for.
Literally replace your whole body as it ages. You can renew the thymus (big!), circulatory, pulmonary system, etc. It would have a rejuvenating affect on the brain. You'd probably give humans 150-year lifespans with it. Be able to run marathons in your 70's.
We'd suck at head transplants for decades (reducing patient outcomes in the initial period), but over time could probably get quite good at it. Initial patient populations could be recruited from terminal cancer patients, where the cancers have not spread to the blood or brain tissues. Survival rates would be low, and a lifetime of paralysis would likely be the penalty for the first decade or so of patients. But in time, we'd get better. Eventually to the point where it was no longer an emergency procedure, but a preventative maintenance measure.
The ancillary tech that would spring up from this would be in the BCI domain and we'd start getting good at modeling brain states. A whole industry of related organismal-level biotech advances would arise, propelling us forward like a new space age (or AI wave, to reference a current trend of advances).
There are crazy other things you could do - race and gender changes, better than natural genes and performance (VO2 max etc) enhancements, transgenic stuff, etc. Why limit ourselves to our previous limitations?
In 200 years we could conceivably move human thoughts onto silicon and stop dying. Too late for us with present day "life extension" / "health span" prognosis, so nobody is trying.
But it's "icky" and you'd get an even worse reaction than artists take to AI art or certain greens take to nuclear. The "people should die" folks raise their pitchforks, as do the incredibly religious. It's a very tough pill to swallow.
It angers me, because it's pretty low hanging fruit. You could grow bodies as vegetables without brains. Cut them off in development genetically and surgically. Innervate and artificially grow the bodies in advanced farms that keep their muscles moving, their hormones and limbic systems pumping, etc.
If I make a billion dollars I'll put everything into it. I want to live 150 years, and I want everyone else to as well. It's way more important to me than buying stuff or collecting "experiences".
As it stands, there's little point to anything we do (despite the fact none of us behave this way). Our experiences and enjoyment are short-lived dopamine hits to decaying neural networks, which on the geologic time scale, are pathetic little flashes that will never be noticed or remembered. When our brain cells bleb and desiccate, they won't remember all the good times we had or money we spent.
My perspective is we're all already dead. We may as well be holograms of our machine descendants playing out historical recreations.
Anyway, we could solve this if we put ourselves to it. I've yet to meet anyone else that's so gung-ho about it. I just think we're too early. And to this decaying neural network, it's kind of a horror to watch how others deal with the fact.
I mostly agree with this. But the real problem is a meta-problem. Which is that society will never allow this unless everybody becomes some kind of moral nihilist ubermensch overnight. Any kind of (recognizable) deontology would have to be left behind completely. And the socially enforced "ick" reflex (which is MASSIVELY strong in most of the population) is something that can really be overcome only by people who are far right-tail in terms of intelligence or creativity or imagination. Read your comment to the average person on the street and see how they reflexively react. People on this site routinely overestimate the quality of the average human (in literally every possible way) because they only work and interact with above average people. I just don't see how we get from here to there, at least not without some massive alteration of humans, which would only really possible with true BCI or some kind of extreme eugenics effort. But in a world where either of those were possible, head transplanation would be a breeze.
You'd need political will for this, who do you think is willing to give this idea a shot/fund it? I'm betting it's the rich, and if you haven't already figured it out, they'd just create another engine of disparity, par for the course. Unlike space tourism, headtransplants scream out the final dystopia of Phillip K Dick's imaginings, a hell world that frays at it seams where you've inadvertently created rich ever-living ubermench, bound up in prolonging life to keep doing their consumption and extraction. Maybe we should invest in consciousness transplants while we're at it
Escaping mortality won’t be so easy. Glioblastoma multiforme is a nasty cancer of the brain. Neuro vascular, degenerative diseases will kill you also. Then there are viruses that give you encephalitis. A hammer and a bullet can be hard to repair also. Even if you move your brain to a computer, hard drives fail, bits get corrupted, computer viruses, denial of service attacks. Mortality is key to survival of the fittest. It’s basically a tautology because the fittest will kill the unfit. There is no immortality against a more powerful being who wants you dead.
the simple answers is that these technologies EITHER simply don't exist OR exist as an option at a great risk. which will be compounded by attempting more than one of these operations
The mind is great at birthing warped antinatural thoughts. Life has so many beatiful facets, if we allow ourselves to see them. Our conscious mind gets to perceive what passed our belief-filters. It's worth trying out new ones. Saying so as a depressed, anti-everything punk radiating hatred turned annoyingly positive optimist, who prefers ugly truths to comforting lies. Got there with a willingness to question my own behaviour, accept criticism (gifts) and taking responsibility for my screwups over two decades.
Not for the easily depressed person and definitely not for the already depressed, but I consider them worth reading. It's an interesting perspective one isn't likely to encounter very much, if ever.
Some people would say that, and in some cases they would be right. I don't particularly believe it to be true, but it is an interesting thought experiment
The human mind makes it very hard for people to do anything but continue living. It takes an unbelievable amount of effort to overcome the natural safeguards our brain has built in. Someone can hate their life, find it exceptionally cruel, yet find themselves unable to end said life despite not waiting to live it.
That aside, you can tolerate or even enjoy life while understanding that for many it's an absolutely awful experience they had no say in partaking in.
Fun fact: the will to live (or, rather, the will to continue your own existence at all costs) is considered to be one of the five poisons of the mind in the Yoga sutras.
