Why Do We Accept Aging?

When I was in undergrad, a professor asked our whole class a strange question. The question was strange because it seemed totally out of context, but I think he had a point, so I present it here as a worthy thought experiment.

“Lets say that I have in my hand, right now, a pill,” he said, holding up an invisible tablet between his thumb and index finger. “This pill, if you take it, will make you ageless. You will not age or suffer the diseases of aging if you take this pill. You can still die, commit suicide, etc, but you will not age. There is, however, a catch. The catch is that you don’t get to think about this decision. You have to choose right now, will you take this pill. Alright, if you would take this pill, raise your hand.”

My hand, tentatively went up. This all occurred before I was interested, heck, had ever heard of transhumanism, mind you. The professor was notoriously difficult (by that I mean stubborn and odd, not smart and challenging) and I had little reason to want to incur one of his rants, but my hand went up all the same. I was the only one in the room, and whether he noticed me or not is irrelevant. His point was not that people want to age and die but that we naturally distrust such offers. It simply sounds too good to be true.

Our brains are trained, over time, to understand what a reasonably possible benefit can exist for a given price. A free pill that has no side-effects and no Twilight Zone caveats (you have to be alive, can’t die so are tortured, etc) seems more impossible than the idea of anti-aging itself. The problem is that this protective aspect of our mind can become over excited, so we stop believing certain solutions are ever possible. To cure, or even significantly reduce the damages caused by aging, are such an epic benefit that it seems our minds will actively manufacture problems, because the benefit must have some sort of epic cost associated.

So we tell ourselves curing aging will cause too many problems and that aging has a lot of natural beauty to it and creates a lot of meaning and that all of that is good. But I think there is one other reason. Imagine we suddenly discover we can cure aging. It’s simple, cheap, universal, and we manage to quickly adapt society to deal with an undying population. All of the impacts described by bioconservatives don’t exist, anti-aging is a glorious and beautiful time and everyone lives for centuries.

The cost is the realization that every death was preventable. That billions of people have been, in effect, tortured for decades by nature and because we could not change it we described it as beautiful and honorable. The crisis in our collective psyche would be something of unparalleled magnitude. Our species is a master at making virtue of necessity, but what becomes of our virtue when that necessity ceases to be? Does it cease as well?

Had I World Enough, and Time

Aubrey de Grey, Robert Butler, and Leonard Guarente recently sat down to discuss anti-aging medicine. One of the most common critiques of anti-aging – one I didn’t address in my FAQ – is one of existential crisis. Let’s say that I knew that medicine had advanced to a point where I could reasonably expect to live to be 350 years old, with the first two decades of course going to maturation, and let’s say the last two decades resembling our current aging process.

The question one is asked and must ask oneself: what would you do with all of that time? Wouldn’t you get bored? What would you do?

I asked myself those questions and realized that right now I feel impossibly rushed. There is so much life to experience, in so many ways that I feel compelled to try and do everything at once. Some people spend their teens and twenties partying and living paycheck to paycheck in a visceral, hedonistic, perpetual Bacchanalia of youth. Others cloister themselves away in libraries and academia to emerge in their late twenties/early thirties as The Next Big Thing in their field, granting them a position of influence for decades to come. Others travel, seeing the world, discovering who they want to be and meeting their fellow human beings. Still others start their careers, steadily moving up the ranks and in the process have the financial stability to settle down and have a family.

Yet for everyone of these potential ways of living comes at a cost of all the others. The very process of aging forces a choice. But what if I didn’t have to choose because I wasn’t aging? What if raising a family didn’t take half of my adult life, but barely a tenth of it? What if I could be a reckless youth, traveling, partying, living on a shoe-string budget and making loads of mistakes, for decades without worrying that I was “too old” or not “preparing for the future.” What if I could work for a couple years, putting most of it into savings, and then, 100 years down the road when I decided to have kids, have an enormous nest egg? There are so many questions we don’t even consider because we frame our lives as windows of time, wherein we get to do somethings but not others, because you only get that one chunk of time once. But what if instead of a couple decades of youth and vigor with another several decades of slow decline and aging, what if a person lived for over three centuries, with nearly all of it in a state of youth akin to a twenty-five year old. What would it be like?

Had I world enough, and time, here is how I would spend it.

I would grow up, I presume, as normal, but after undergrad, I wouldn’t have immediately started fretting and panicking about careers or graduate school or “what are you going to do with your life?” Instead, I’d spend a few decades, say three or four, living the life of a bachelor. No marriages, no living in one place for more than a couple years, career changes constantly, living with low inhibitions, thrill seeking, unworried about mistakes, bank accounts, savings, or nice things. I would take my time with everything. I’d try living for a while with almost no worldly possessions, going from hostel to hostel, working odd jobs and making barely enough money to pay for the next ticket or meal. I’d meet people and interact and learn. Then maybe I’d spend a few years just partying, embracing utter hedonism. Maybe after that, as a sort of cleansing, I’d go volunteer in one of the countries I’d visited a decade before, spending a few years giving myself freely to others. Thirty years of youth.

Perhaps somewhere in there I discovered a career I loved. Let’s say it’s marketing. I don’t want a family yet, don’t want to settle down, but I love this job: the people, the work, the company, all of it. I do well, make big bucks, put a bunch into savings and use the rest to live it up in a nice apartment, buy flashy crap I don’t need, go for the gusto with materialism. Just to see if I like it. Play the stock market with my extra bucks. Maybe I’d have a long term relationship, maybe I’d date, maybe I’d be so involved in work I’d barely have time for more than the occasional fling. I could live the life of a man about town, doing a job I loved, with money to spare.

But after a while, maybe fifteen years, I’d feel I’d done all I could in marketing, and my arm chair study of economics has really been intriguing me, so I decide to use some of my savings to go back to school. Maybe before I retired from marketing, I’d take some refresher courses, and then dive into things full time in a grad program. With my savings, I can pay tuition and go to school full time while still living comfortably. Having traveled and partied and worked for almost half a century, I’d revel in the solitude of study, spending whole weeks cooped up in the library or my home office, investigating nuanced, esoteric trains of thoughts and reading the enormous tomes of the greats at my leisure. I graduate in a decade with a Ph.D. and go out into the field.

Maybe I end up with a job at the IMF, over seeing development in South East Asia, a place I know well after traveling there for two years a few decades before. I speak Thai and Vietnamese, of course. I see it as one of the many homes I’ve had and take a personal investment in working to do the best for the region because of the time I spent there. While working for the IMF, I meet a woman. We fall in love, courting, dating, and experiencing each other over the next several years while working in Asia. We decide to get married.

Anticipating kids, we both quit our jobs at the IMF and get stable, low demand jobs back in the states in our respective fields. As we plan the wedding, we put most of our earnings into savings. A decade and a half after we first meet, we decide to have kids. We both take work off for a decade to raise the kids, living off of our enormous next egg from our previous decades of work and nearly century old savings accounts. I’d be able help my kids go through school, being deeply involved in their lives, continuing my learning with them, helping them discover as much of the world on their own terms as possible. Instead of supporting my family and having it at the same time, I’d support it first, then have it.

With our kids grown and happy, going off into their own lives and adventures, I’d still have nearly two hundred years of life left. By now, I’m approaching 110 years old. Maybe my travel itch is back, and probably the itch for week-long parties too. Maybe my wife has got the same urges, and now, instead of traveling, partying, living recklessly, and on a shoestring budget alone, I’m doing it with a partner, re-seeing the world again with her.

And so the cycle would continue. I wouldn’t live one life, I would live lives, experiencing being every version of the good life out there. Imagine being able to genuinely start over, to be always able to live your life as if you’ve just turned twenty-five and your whole life is ahead of you to explore, but you’ve already lived a century and a half. Life goals wouldn’t just be to read the great works, but maybe every work by every great writer. Or maybe not to learn just an instrument, but perhaps how to play every instrument in the orchestra. The options are so preposterously wonderful that they are hard to contemplate not because they are impossible to imagine but because they remind us of how little time we really have.

There is too much to do, how could one not want enough life to be able to do it?

Bailey on Anti-Aging

Ron Bailey combines two new papers, one from John Davis and the other from IEET fellow Russell Blackford, into a serious argument in favor of anti-aging tech. My favorite paragraph is the summary of how Blackford dismantles Singer:

But imposing population control measures should be morally suspect to someone who advocates maximizing total utility over time. Why? As Blackford points out, Singer’s utility logic leads to the irresistible “conclusion that a sufficiently large population with people whose lives are barely worth living would be a better outcome than a much smaller population of people who are very happy.” This is what philosopher Derek Parfit called the “repugnant conclusion.” Parfit never believed that he had resolved the paradox at the heart of a total utilitarian calculus that leads to the repugnant conclusion. One consequence of this line of argument is that people should have as many children as possible in order to maximize the total amount of happiness just so long as they could eke out some minimal amount of pleasure. In fact, it would be immoral for people to restrict the number of children they bear because they would be reducing the overall amount of possible happiness in the world.

If you’re utilitarian, there is math aplenty to pour over. If you’re not, the other moral arguments are well articulated.

(h/t R.U.’s blog.)

Anti-Aging Gene Found?

Researchers are claiming they have pinned down a gene with influence on telomere length and shortening rate:

The scientists have discovered that a variant of the TERC gene determines not only how long the telomeres are when someone is born but also how quickly they shorten.

Prof [Nilesh] Samani, who reported his findings in the Journal Nature Genetics, discovered the variant by comparing the genetic make-up and biological age of more than 10,000 people.

He said: “In this study what we found was that those individuals carrying a particular genetic variant had shorter telomeres i.e. looked biologically older.

“Given the association of shorter telomeres with age-associated diseases, the finding raises the question whether individuals carrying the variant are at greater risk of developing such diseases.”

[“Ageing gene found by scientists could be key to longer lifespans” – The Telegraph via Popsci

A Horrible Thought

Bryan Caplan finds one in Francis Fukuyama’s Our Posthuman Future:

Life extension seems to me a perfect example of something that is a negative externality, meaning that it is individually rational and desirable for any given individual, but it has costs for society that can be negative.

I couldn’t believe my eyes.  Did Frank Fukuyama actually mean that when a person has another year of healthy life, the net effect on other people is negative?  If so, why do people cry at funerals, instead of celebrating?

I still do not see the brightline between anti-aging tech and any sort of medical intervention after the end of youth, period.

GOOD Is “Going de Grey”

Aubrey de Grey is like the Alan Moore of transhumanism, both in surliness and in beard. GOOD asks him some basics:

G: I know you’ve heard this question before, but wouldn’t living for hundreds of years get a little boring?

AD: Yeah, right. Wouldn’t it be so terribly boring not getting Alzheimer’s? At least you had the sense to be embarrassed at even asking the question.

Zing!

Anti-Aging In SEED

A fantastic article in SEED by David Sinclair on the potential of resveratrol:

In 2004 my lab teamed up with Dr. Rafael de Cabo at the National Institutes of Health to see if resveratrol could improve the health and extend the lifespan of mice. When middle-aged mice were fed a low-fat diet, resveratrol delayed diseases of aging but did not extend lifespan. When fed a high-fat diet, mice on resveratrol got chubby but stayed healthy — they were less susceptible to diseases we associate with obesity, like type II diabetes. And with a sufficiently high resveratrol dose, they burned enough fat to stay lean. What’s more, the resveratrol mice on the high-fat diet ran twice as far on a treadmill as their unmedicated counterparts, and their remaining lifespan after treatment began increasing by an average of 25 percent compared with the high-fat controls. Notably, in both the obese and the lean mice on resveratrol, there was the clear physiological signature of calorie restriction.

The trouble is, while resveratrol is found in many foods, it is present only in very low concentrations. Someone wanting to get a resveratrol dose equivalent to what we used in our mice studies would need to consume hundreds of bottles of red wine each day. Resveratrol has served its purpose, proving the possibility of inducing the physiology of dieting and exercise with a small molecule. Now pharmaceutical companies are working on synthetic molecules that are thousands of times as potent as resveratrol: The race to develop a drug that targets sirtuins is on, though the longterm effect of activating sirtuins in humans requires further research. If the mice studies are anything to go by, the side effects of these drugs could include protection from multiple illnesses, including heart disease, osteoporosis, cataracts, and Alzheimer’s.

Hundreds of bottles of wine you say? I can eat all I want, you say? Bacchus would be pleased.

["The Achilles' Heel of Aging - SEED]