Bravo to this post. Whether or not you agree with Aubrey de Grey, you have to admit that he is a true radical, whereas the man portrayed in this article strikes me as little more than a conceited tinkerer--one of our contemporary capitalist hippies who seem to combine the worst of both those worlds. Death cannot be "redesigned" because it is the end of a dynamic human life, with all the possibilities entailed by that life. It is intrinsically "a downer." Let's do something about that.

I think the problem is actually exactly the opposite. People are horribly afraid of dying and incredibly uncomfortable discussing it. No one accepts death as part of life and everyone wastes a lot of time and money treating terminal illnesses without actually recovering very many QALY's from the effort. People invent religions that posit some sort of afterlife so they can comfort themselves with the belief that they are immortal, and this is such a powerful impulse that even the supposedly non-religious, like de Grey, recreate this belief in the guise of science fiction.

“Don’t look down on death, but welcome it. It too is one of the things required by nature. Like youth and old age. Like growth and maturity. Like a new set of teeth, a beard, the first gray hair. Like sex and pregnancy and childbirth. Like all the other physical changes at each stage of life, our dissolution is no different.

"So this is how a thoughtful person should await death: not with indifference, not with impatience, not with disdain, but simply viewing it as one of the things that happen to us. Now you anticipate the child’s emergence from its mother’s womb; that’s how you should await the hour when your soul will emerge from its compartment.”

Excerpt From: Marcus Aurelius & Gregory Hays. “Meditations.”

I read some Stoic writings and while I find some concepts useful, this is rather horrid. You don't lump "old age" in with maturity, sex and pregnancy. Old age is just a gross euphemism. But I guess the writing is too obviously nonsensical when if you say "health and organ failure" "happiness and memory loss". To take what would be, if inflicted by another person, torture -- to call that "required by nature" and to welcome it is just vile. At best it's a grief counseling strategy, though I'm not sure on the ethics there.

You should have disdain for death. It's a stupid, terrible, senseless thing. Just because we can't fix it yet[1] makes no difference to the terribleness that it is. Saying "death is part of nature" with a deep voice doesn't make it suddenly profound. You know what else is natural? Getting infected with botflies.

1: At least for fix=million year delay

> to call that "required by nature" and to welcome it is just vile.

Imagine, for a moment, that we have come up with a way to prevent aging and death tomorrow. How do you support the sudden 50% increase in population growth? Babies aren't going to stop being born. Old folks aren't going to stop consuming resources. Are you willing to give up your food to help feed the 56 million extra people alive every year? Are you willing to give up the right to have children so someone 100+ years old can continue to live and eat?

There's a lot wrong with the Torchwood "Miracle Day" miniseries, but it's worth watching the first five episodes to see one writer's interpretation of how we would handle it. It's perhaps a tad bit cynical, but it's also not unreasonable.

Until we have the ability to support exponential population growth (through the ability to populate the universe, or social controls on when or if you can have children), death is going to be a required part of life. You live, you die, you make space on this earth for the generations which follow. What's so vile about that?

Well, uploading sidesteps a lot of those issues, and it seems that's the only conceivable thing that could happen "tomorrow". Optimized engineering should be capable of solving many problems (i.e. a world run by a single intelligent entity). The technology itself should have a major impact on birth rates, as, hopefully, such tech world instantly kill many memes that cause high birth rates. And in " highly developed " countries, we see people willing to postpone having children, so it stands to reason others would go along with that, given that their life expectancy just skyrocketed.

But the idea that it's more acceptable to torture nearly every human on earth because "you live, you die" - that sounds like, at best, a local maxima. And even if there were insurmountable resource issues, we should still not hand wave things, but any explicitly admit our policy is to permanently destroy people, look them in the eye when we free their resources. Like a real world OOM killer.

>Well, uploading sidesteps a lot of those issues, and it seems that's the only conceivable thing that could happen "tomorrow". Optimized engineering should be capable of solving many problems (i.e. a world run by a single intelligent entity).

You know, spouting transhumanism would be far more socially acceptable if you didn't answer the legitimate questions spawned by mild transhumanism with severe, world-dominating transhumanism.

For instance, words like "world run by single intelligent entity" carry an extremely high prior chance of denoting an incredibly terrible idea. At the very least, you've taken something that was already an argument, statements that already required justification, and "fixed it" by appealing to statements that require far more justification. Basically, you've answered "Won't the elimination of aging cause a population boom?" with a combination of "Not if we do it in the way that most easily allows Malthusian population booms!" and "Not if someone I approve of is made Dictator of the World."

And, of course, your next line is that your planned Dictator isn't even a human being in the first place. While I fully know where you're coming from on this point, it still requires far more justification and explanation than either of us can give in an HN comment, and should a priori be considered a bloody terrible idea.

I answered "won't a highly improbable magical cure that appears out of nowhere cause problems" with "nope, not if other high improbable magical solutions happen at the same time".

It's my guess that anti aging will happen slowly, and hopefully we can also slowly make policy changes over that time too. I just don't see the default answer of "don't worry, we have a process to go around killing people" to be acceptable.

But if the point was to say that major changes in the world could have major negative consequences, yeah, sure. Maybe they aren't solvable. But just don't pretend that Natural Death is OK because it's slightly alleviating one problem.

>death... It's a stupid, terrible, senseless thing.

And what is life then? Is it rational, great, makes sense?

I do agree with you that viewing death as 'natural' is part of a questionable ideology about human nature, a kind of "circle of life" viewpoint that doesn't hold up to scrutiny. People make naive leaps when they say "here is our nature as told by biology, evolution, and evolutionary psychology; so we as humans should now construct identifications and take normative prescriptions based on it, which will instruct us how to relate to ourselves and the world." One could point out the glaring gaps between these two realms... I think that evo-psych reductionism, while in vogue, tends to suffer from oversimplification.

If you're gonna take the position of being able to value judge anything, then, yeah, life's pretty special. Fair enough that not everyone would agree with my particular words.

As to the rest: I've heard that called "can't get an ought from an is".

Fear of death is a product of the human mind. Animals, for instance, have no idea that they will one day die. Even when an animal is under attack, it will have fear, but not of death.

Now, death itself, is, in a way, also a product of the human mind. For we are, on a fundamental level, all the same creature; it just happens that there are no neuronic connections between our brains, so it appears to us that we are different creatures, but we are not. So in effect, death does not exist in the way that most people envision it.

But it is required by nature. Even if you could somehow extend human life significantly, at some point parts would wear out and faculties would diminish. Everything in the world eventually crumbles and erodes to dust or rust or rot, even the earth and stars. Why not us?

A million years isn't that long, cosmologically. I would not attempt to guess what computational powers we may figure out in that timespan. And even if we never do get unlimited computation, giving people eons seems like a better state than now.

A million years isn't that long and if you could give everyone on earth an extra million QALY's that would be wonderful, but it still wouldn't circumvent mortality.

It looks like in your excerpt from 'Meditations' you've had a phrase: "You should await the hour when your soul will emerge from its compartment."

Judging by it, it looks like Aurelius expects some kind of after-life. And this is exactly what you suggest not to do "people invent religions that posit some sort of afterlife", so I'm not sure how this quotation from this early AD emperor can either confirm or deny your own statement.

Having read Marcus Aurelius extensively, he doesn't seem to expect a personal afterlife at all but rather as a dissolution back into one's constituent parts--material and spiritual--from which new life could arise. He writes repeatedly about the futility of worrying about one's place in history, because of the inevitability not only of one's own death but of the deaths of everyone who could have possibly cared about or remembered one's accomplishments anyway. It's definitely worth a read; the Hays translation in particular is extremely approachable.

>People invent religions that posit some sort of afterlife so they can comfort themselves with the belief that they are immortal, and this is such a powerful impulse that even the supposedly non-religious, like de Grey, recreate this belief in the guise of science fiction.

Just because immortal life is a religious belief doesn't mean that someone seeking it scientifically is "science fiction". Nor is something being science fiction evidence that it's actually scientifically impossible (Jules Verne was actually right in a large proportion of sci-fi predictions he made!).

Nature doesn't dictate how you "have to" feel about death. Welcome it, be indifferent to it, hate it -- whatever. Your life, your view.

But most people who've been fairly close to death don't exactly want to invite it where it hadn't already stuck its head in.

I fear getting old - don't fear death itself, but the thought of being incapable of taking care of myself, of becoming a burden for my children, or of dying in pain. I fear Alzheimer's or dementia or cancer more than I fear the thought of going into an eternal slumber.

> Believe it or not, everyone hates diseases, but everyone seems to love death

That's totally understandable IMHO. People are conservative in nature and an anti-aging treatment would change the very fabric of our society. Examples: death would no longer be a potential cure for despotism. We would no longer be able to raise children. What would happen with a brain that has 500 years worth of memories? Etc, etc... This is one of those cases in which we think further than our own personal interest.

And surely, if an anti-aging treatment gets invented, I don't think anybody would reject it, mostly because we are creatures favoring instant gratification.

Therefore I have trouble believing that Aubrey de Grey couldn't get funding because the population is against such a treatment. The simplest possible reason for why Aubrey de Grey couldn't get funding is because the potential investors saw snake oil.

You're not harsh enough. On life extension research, the article says:

  One way or another, Bennett told me, “We’re all holding hands and saying, ‘Forget that shit. Not going to happen.’”

While that may apply to some or many people interested in life extension, to dismiss all research as useless, while claiming to need to "sense-make" around the "design experience" of death at "The Convening", yikes.

I really hate attacking them personally, but their big idea was that someone might leave a letter for other people? Perhaps what they were missing was a study "how-might-we" of "empowering" people with a "hybrid digital-analog" death.

Seriously, am I totally out of line here or is this an emperor lacking clothes scenario? If you hired these folks and they talked like that while billing you -- you just smile and go along with it?

(The product idea is sound: I'd buy a dead mans switch product if it comes with a stackable, provable M-of-N secret system, maybe with plausible deniability (so my family can't be compelled to reveal secrets). Can't imagine that's a large market, though.)

This very much reminds me of Nick Bostrom's 'The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant' [0].

[0] http://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html

I think that, in spite of some pro-aging/death views, society acts to prevent aging and death by treating disease.

You seem to want a radical solution, but I think the main reason that there are few people trying to directly prevent aging/death, is because the medical profession doesn't consider this possible at this time.

Here's the truth about the medical profession, based on my internet search over the last couple of years as an enthusiast on this topic.

It's a sleeping giant. It's like the mechanical engineers of 1880s who had the idea of the impossibility of flight so entrenched in their minds that not only they kept claiming that it's impossible, they were quite proactive in dismissing the efforts of those trying to do something about it. (I always like to use this link: http://www.spacequotations.com/predictions.html).

If people had attempted flight in 1690s, it would not have gotten us anywhere. The science and engineering wasn't developed enough. But at some point, someone had to realize that "yes, now we have enough knowledge, resources and tools, to give it a last push". And that was what flight pioneers realized in 1890s, and 1900s.

For aging, are we in the 1690s, or 1890s of flight?

If it comes down to medical community agreeing to seek an answer to that, consider that a solved problem for someone like me.

The problem is, most medical researchers simply dismiss the idea as over-ambitious, resort to ad-hominems, socioeconomic criticisms, and (surprise, surprise) the pro-aging trance, instead of technical critique. So the honest discussion about the technology gets lost in all that noise.

> Here's the truth about the medical profession, based on my internet search over the last couple of years as an enthusiast on this topic.

You say this without irony?

You don't have to be a member of a community to recognize something about it from the outside.

People can critique scientology without being members. The same can be done with medical research goals.

Yes, but the criticisms of Scientology having merit doesn't mean that these criticisms have merit. And people thinking that airplanes were overly ambitious when they were just around the corner doesn't mean that a cure for death is just around the corner.

Both those things might be true, but I would need stronger evidence than has been presented thus far to convince me.

Take it from someone who went to medical school: you'd be hard-pressed to find people with an anti-aging/anti-death stance among a random sample of medical professionals.

It's a social experiment you can actually do yourself: find an MD or med researcher who's easy to talk to and ask them about the subject. Chances are, they mirror the exact position laid out by fizixer. You might argue this is because they reflect the opinion of our population at large, but - anecdote alert - in personal conversations I found that medical professionals are in fact more likely to assert that death is natural and/or can't be opposed on religious grounds.

Similarly, regarding life extension, the majority opinion seems to be that this is literally evil since it would flood the industrialized nations with elderly and sick people. Yes, that means they can't wrap their heads around what life extension actually stands for (which is the opposite of what they claim).

That said, hueving is absolutely correct: judge an argument by its merits, not by the credentials of the person putting it forth.

Suppose we cure aging. If there is such a "culture" of pro-aging, then supposedly you expect them to refuse the treatment?

I do not see that happening in the long-term. Maybe a few fringe sects, but never the majority.

Instead, as soon as some people use such treatment, most everyone else will as well.

What this conjecture tells me, is that this "culture" is probably just based on the belief that anyone who refuses to accept aging, must be a fool.

If however a cure is demonstrated, this belief will be disproven, and people will quite immediately embrace longevity.

Or.. do you expect otherwise?

I tried to create a detailed response to this but in the end I gave up (also I have other things to tend to).

Please. It is not okay to keep supporting an idea until the minute the counter to that idea becomes available, when you'll be eager to benefit from the "counter" solution.

It was not okay for Ayn Rand to be a libertarian all her life, only to start collecting welfare checks at the end of her life when she went broke.

I'm not even getting into the practical aspects of how badly the pro-aging trance is affecting the funding problem.

Until the possibility is established, many people are going to make fun of, and sideline those working on a solution.

However, I think this thought experiment can bring them to understand that their own beliefs are temporary. If there was a popular movie that followed the plot of how the cure of aging was slowly accepted in society, for example.

Just a short story might be a start.

I think the problem is not that people "support" the idea, but that they are not properly aware of the alternative.

People have a fairly strict limit on the kinds of counterfactuals they can conceive, and thus use as "measuring sticks" for evaluating the actual facts. Even the very imaginative still require a leg up in terms of being told, sometimes, being supplied with information, that what their mind had registered as constant was actually quite variable.

Ayn Rand didn't change her views. Period. She was just blatantly self-serving.

Most people do not support some Moral Ideal of Death. They just consider the actual dying bit inevitable. This is why they will change their minds once you show, in the real world, that it's changeable.

I personally fear the aftermath, because we're venturing into unknown territory.

You're assuming that the treatment will be within reach for everybody. What if only rich people will be able to afford it?

If the treatment is a product of the current pharmaceutical industry, I think one might have to worry about that - especially in the beginning.

It might be seen as even less important than distributing food to the starving, and medicine to the sick, of which there is still not enough going on.

But there is at least one other pathway. As an AGI researcher, I believe that artificial intelligence will solve the problem for us, and, all other things being equal, the cure will be made available everywhere, at the same time.

My own research makes me believe that we are not very far from that outcome.

AGI-15 local chair here. Please, would you send me an e-mail (see profile)?

Well, if you're so close to so many major breakthroughs, mind showing a grad-student some publications? I'm always interested to see what sorts of learning and modeling go under the label "AGI".

Okay, supposing you've done that. How will this help people who are dying, supposing these people still exist?

Eventually there won't be people dying. That's the whole god damn point.

How do you plan to circumvent the second law of thermodynamics?

Here is the TED talk of Aubrey de Grey about mortality: http://www.ted.com/talks/aubrey_de_grey_says_we_can_avoid_ag...

Worth watching

I think people are skeptical, which is fair, given that having cure for aging would also suggest having cures for basic health problems like cancer, heart disease, mental decline.

Pssst...memento mori. :)

Death, in the abstract, has very little wrong with it, and also very little to recommend it. Almost all the assorted ways to die, however, are fucking terrible.

And the funny thing is, if the world is so "deathist", why have so few countries legalized voluntary euthanasia?

http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/17/who-by-very-slow-decay/

> You want to "take on the end of life", you want to "redesign death"? you want to be radical? and that means putting the metaphorial mirrors on the gurneys, and creating an iphone app "After I Go"?

I had my doubts about the title and how pompous it sounded, suspecting that it wasn't nearly as radical or visionary as it sounded. But jeez, that's it? Thanks for saving me the trouble of skimming that thing.