The Importance of Surviving 40 more years

http://www.lettersfrompeter.com/theory-human-lifespan/

by ypeterholmes • 13 years ago

39 88 13 years ago

eps• 13 years ago

This is all great, but where does the number of 40 come from? After all Kurzweil said it'd be in 20-25 years and he's got more street cred :)

Udo14• 13 years ago

Kurzweil is just a popularizer of this idea, which is an important part of the road ahead. If nothing else, this article illustrates that more and more people are beginning to see the possibilities on the road ahead.

However, neither Kurzweil nor anybody else has actually enough information to make a solid prediction as to the time frame.

Your guess is as good as his.

tluyben25• 13 years ago

Kurzweill is 65, so he has 20-25 years to live probably in the currently system; figures he would say 20-25 years. The blog owner probably thinks he has 40-50 years more to live so is gunning for 40 years. I remember Larry Ellison mentioning 20 years for such a revolution in a speech some years ago. People are less likely to say 'in 100 years' if they won't make that themselves. 1000 years is easier to talk about than 'just' after you're dead yourself, but what would be the fun in saying 'in 1000 years' ; no-one would listen.

greeneggs• 13 years ago

Forty years is incredibly optimistic. But beyond that issue, I don't see how transferring my brain to a computer does anything for me. I don't want a copy of me to live forever, I want to live forever myself. Copying my brain won't copy my conscious self. (It can't; after all, if you can make one copy then you can make ten copies.)

kelnos• 13 years ago

If the computer can actually model the brain itself, copying your brain may well copy your conscious self as well. If true, this would raise quite a few metaphysical questions, to say the least.

jaggederest• 13 years ago

Ship of Theseus argument applies here - done gradually enough there's no perceptual difference between a brain running in a computer and on a biological substrate. You 'die' in that sense every time you lose conciousness - a different you wakes up.

I think we have a much better chance of extending human life biologically in the next 40 years than we do running the brain in software. 100TB for a brain map is extremely optimistic - that's assuming a byte per connection, and I bet it's a lot higher than that.

Like effective fusion power, it's always 50 years away, unfortunately.

tluyben25• 13 years ago

Another instance of me is not me; everyone will think it's me (I will think so too, however I see a nice psychological Philip K Dickian mess coming up with you thinking the rest of your life that you are not you) but it's not. I wouldn't really care at all for that kind of 'immortality'.

I don't remember which sci-fi book it was, but I read that book (or story) a long time ago where the brain itself was, in a flash (no losing consciousness), turned into a kind of 'plastic'; literally every part, so you are you and after that nano machines would create the new cells, destroy others and create connections from that plastic mimicking the exact way the brain works. Give me one of those.

arethuza• 13 years ago

I'm skeptical that it will happen in the planned timescale - but the current estimates for "effective fusion power" are actually 20 years away. This is based on ITER (currently being built) going well and the DEMO plant - which will actually generated power, being built after that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMO

For fusion there is at least a plan for getting there, and some understanding of what the engineering challenges are.

adrianN• 13 years ago

Slightly off-topic: Fusion power keeps being "50 years away" because nobody funds it. See this interview on Slashdot from 2012

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/04/11/0435231/mit-fusi...

In particular note the funding graph in question 3.

atlantic• 13 years ago

Excellent point. But do we ever lose consciousness, though? Arguably, a continuum of consciousness is what defines us as individuals. If there was an absolute loss of consciousness, you would indeed die every time you fell asleep, but this is never the case. The impression of loss of consciousness is related to the fact that memories cannot (usually) be transferred between different states of consciousness.

Moreover, when you talk about the substrate of consciousness, that begs the question of what consciousness actually is, and how it can be transferred. Creating an exact copy of the substrate (or an exact copy of the data pattern, but on a different kind of substrate), and then destroying the original substrate and crossing your fingers - this is a product of magical thinking on the part of scientists.

0110111008• 13 years ago

"there's no perceptual difference between a brain running in a computer and on a biological substrate"

Who "perceives" a brain running? What do you mean? Is there some higher order process that can do a "perceptual" comparison between a brain running in the world and an identical brain running in a computer? Is the brain doing this comparison?

It may seem like I'm "nitpicking", but I'm not sure if your statement is even well-defined.

Udo14• 13 years ago

It can't; after all, if you can make one copy then you can make ten copies.

Just because you find a notion inconvenient to deal with doesn't mean it's not factually possible. It basically comes down to your view on the supernatural, and by extension the role of your brain. If you're a materialist, we can talk. Otherwise it's just about religion (which is fine if that works for you personally) and in that case a conversation isn't really possible.

Much like space flight and killer drones, this will one day mature from science fiction to reality and we'll have to deal with it in some form. At this point, you have a choice to make: either hang on to centuries worth of convoluted ideas about the soul made by people who didn't know anything about anything, or move on to a new substrate that is much better aligned with the way our minds actually work and better suited for moving us forward as a civilization.

And it's most likely not going to be a do-or-be-damned choice. Barring unforeseen social dynamics, nothing is going to prevent you from choosing to stick with a biological existence.

javert5• 13 years ago

because you find a notion inconvenient to deal with doesn't mean it's not factually possible.

That is a completely unjust accusation.

Even from a materialist perspective, I think the guy was raising one of the most important questions.

0110111008• 13 years ago

You didn't actually understand the parent post. If we make a copy of you and I kill you, am I extending your life? You're dead (you are not capable of having conscious experience). But there's a biological system with a nearly identical behavior that's living. That copy of you will have a similar conscious experience, but it won't be you. That's the point of the parent. The parent's not talking about a soul.

nostromo• 13 years ago

If I made an exact copy of you, right now, you'd both swear you were the original.

In fact, I'm not even so sure I'm not a copy, as most of the original stuff that made me is long gone.

ewoodrich• 13 years ago

That made me think, what if technology was developed that allowed a portion of the brain's processing functions to be offloaded to an external system.

So, you would copy most motor functions to a "brain emulator" first.

And after you have acclimated, you would continue to the copying process (I have very little doubt that if properly done, the brain wouldn't be able to readjust to this, just like a prosthetic limb or "seeing" through stimulation of nerves on the tongue).

And this process is gradually performed until the entire "consciousness" is running on the external artificial computer.

I wonder how the perception of self would be affected by such a method.

Fuxy• 13 years ago

I don't know what consciousness is but I'll be the first to volunteer to copy my brain and find out.

Screw theory lets just do it and see what happens.

Houshalter14• 13 years ago

Forty years isn't optimistic at all if you allow for the possibility of smarter than human intelligences speeding up technological progress in that time.

A copy of you IS you. If you change the atoms that make up your brain you are still the same person. It's not like the atoms themselves are sacred. Likewise if you replace the computational substrate your brain runs on it's still you. Why do you care if it's neurons or transistors? Consciousness is a pattern, an algorithm maybe, not a physical thing.

parasight3• 13 years ago

This has yet to be proven. The non-existence of something like a soul seems to be a general concensus but so far a person has never been copied.

JacobAldridge• 13 years ago

Good article series on the limitations of mice as research animals - http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/the_mouse_t...

I also came here to say what greeneggs already stated about the digital brain - I want to live forever, not have a copy of my brilliance survive for future generations (though I'm sure they'd be grateful).

pmiller2• 13 years ago

I'm a little skeptical of this whole mind uploading business. How do we really know consciousness isn't in the brain, anyway? I prefer to achieve immortality by not dying, like Woody Allen.

jferguson4• 13 years ago

Consciousness is in the brain; the idea here is to simulate the brain, resulting in the mind.

wbhart3• 13 years ago

The human brain is designed to live inside an innervated body. It receives constant updates on how the body is doing, and unconscious processes, some of them chemical, control every aspect of our internal life, from homeostasis, to the perception of time, to breathing, mood and muscle tone. Upset one part of that balance and the brain goes into blind panic. Although the brain also has electrical activity, it is not just a sophisticated computer program running on a general purpose computer. For one thing, the hardware is unique in every individual! Secondly, what makes you you? And what is consciousness? We have no idea. Perhaps it is not possible to reconstruct the real you, rather than an emulation of you, without copying the exact quantum states of the atoms in your body. But this may require complete destruction of the old you and construction of an identical quantum copy elsewhere (teleportation), which is hardly an electronic download of "data" into a computer. You might be able to extract your memories and store them in a Von Neumann architecture, but the rest is a pipe dream.

alexandros• 13 years ago

Still beats dying.

tluyben25• 13 years ago

Might not do. There have been experiments with people with mental issues or just general experiments abusing or cutting nerve endings in different ways and a lot of the more radical ones (like this would be, at least for the first 1000s of subjects) end up in insanity. And you would rather be dead I think.

wbhart3• 13 years ago

The exact "copy" of you would be you, exactly as you are now, i.e. equivalently mortal.

jferguson4• 13 years ago

A computer with input and output, yes. Some representation of relevant neurotransmitters and sensory inputs and such seems necessary. Think whole brain emulation, rather than extracting the "mind information" while ignoring all the physical information.

wbhart3• 13 years ago

And if I make 100 copies of this computer program and run them on 100 different computers, which one will I be aware is me? Or will I just be aware of being 100 different beings at once? I think it should be obvious that a simulation of reality is not the same thing as reality itself. For one thing, perhaps we need to know a lot more about how the universe works at the quantum level to even emulate reality faithfully.

0110111008• 13 years ago

"Once the brain is understood well enough to be modeled digitally, it stands to reason that the complete set of data representing an individual person (at a particular state of time) could be copied or transferred just like saving a file."

What exactly are you going to save to that file? Positions of molecules? States of atoms?

Oh, so we're assuming we can abstract away from the physical system? Either we abstract or we save everything. Well, what's everything? Or can the abstraction be "good enough"?

jferguson4• 13 years ago

Some abstraction would probably be involved; the idea is to recreate all the relevant activity that impacts consciousness while avoiding going any deeper, and most neuroscientists would (I think) speculate that individual molecules aren't necessarily the finest level of detail needed. Neurotransmitters, maybe, but I imagine a neuron doesn't have to be simulated as its constituent atoms to exhibit identical enough behavior.

Udo14• 13 years ago

It's scientifically certain that we can abstract away from the physical system. In fact, we're already doing that today. We run simulations of molecular interactions all the time. We can even "do" a cortical column in incredible detail.

The problem is not that we don't know whether it's possible. There are two issues concerning this development: we need to know what the right detail/abstraction level is for simulating a mind, and once we do we need to actually get that information. Doing the simulation itself is comparatively easy, though certainly not trivial.

What exactly are you going to save to that file? Positions of molecules? States of atoms?

To be useful, it can't be just a file, it needs to be a database that can be executed. Positions of molecules seems to be the right detail level according to our current understanding. That includes the spatial configuration of proteins and their exact position in relation to another. But there might not be that many unique molecules to store, just a few thousand maybe.

An interesting question then becomes how can we abstract these scans even further and still be able to have a high fidelity mind simulation?

0110111008• 13 years ago

We can abstract however we like whatever we like. The point is: will the abstraction accurately represent the original physical system? And how do we know? We run simulations of molecular interactions. So what?

TausAmmer• 13 years ago

That would be extremely boring to live endlessly. Farewell services must be introduced, exciting ways to go "events". :)

then you wake up as a yourself from copy

Would you be more afraid to loose it? Right now you will die anyway, we accept that(some more, some less). Some build fear based communities around death.

Would everyone regress in preserving "life" instead of being bold and exploring where no man would go. What gives if I get deadly radiation poisoning, I might discover something. What gives if I drown in my new innovative diving gear, this shit is revolutionary.

I rather do nothing on that sort if I can live forever, I will be as safe as possible, taking no risks?

But, there is saying about crossing bridge when one gets there.

codeboost2• 13 years ago

What's wrong with dying ? I mean, obviously people want to live longer for some (mostly selfish) reasons, but isn't dying part of the 'living' deal ?

Dying is similar to being born - your whole universe changed when you transitioned from womb to this world and the same happens when you die. In other words, they have cookies and chocolate there :).

The whole deal about spirituality is that one discovers that we are in fact immortal and that this life is a step of an infinity of other steps, before this life and after.

The other thing one realizes is that each individual is actually a facet of an infinite whole (some call this God, but it is actually You), or in other words - We are all One.

That's what all the religions and mystics have been telling us for millenia.

coffeemug• 13 years ago

Isn't dying part of the 'living' deal?

This is somewhat equivalent to saying "isn't dying from infectious diseases part of the 'living' deal?" It is, but antibiotics are really nice, and now that we have them, it's hard to imagine a world where people would happily give them up because getting infected is just part of living.

Anti-death technology sounds really similar. If we were to have this technology now, it would be a pretty big stretch of imagination to picture a world where people would happily give it away because death is part of living.

The whole deal about spirituality is that one discovers that we are in fact immortal

We're immortal once you break down duality, but that's not what we're talking about here. People want to have the option to live forever in the conventional reality, not the ultimate reality.

ux-app2• 13 years ago

"What's wrong with dying"

It's such a terrible waste. All that knowledge accumulated over years of life... gone. We don't know what the species is capable of if we could double or triple human life span. What if we could indefinitely extend the most productive years? Where might we be if we could have given Einstein the chance to live hundreds of years with his mind and body in prime condition?

"same happens when you die. In other words, they have cookies and chocolate there"

wouldn't it be great if that were the case? Unfortunately there is exactly zero proof of any kind that this is so.

"each individual is actually a facet of an infinite whole, in other words - We are all One"

This sentence is completely free of information.

"That's what all the religions and mystics have been telling us for millenia."

Religions and mystics have been exploiting the normal human fear of death for millennia. Science might one day give us the keys to finally dodge that inevitable final bullet.

codeboost2• 13 years ago

Unfortunately there is exactly zero proof of any kind that this is so

Oh but there is for those who seek it!

One kind of proof is called dimethyltryptamine. It lasts for 10 minutes, but when you come back, you might have a radically different view on these matters.

Other psychedelics, like LSD, also offer a different perspective on life and death and there are also different kinds of spiritual work one can do - meditation, holotropic breathing or living life in nature. They all help you realise just how fragile and transitory life is in nature and that that is a good thing.

Religions and mystics have been exploiting the normal human fear of death

Isn't science (or rather scientists) driven by the same fear ? Isn't the knowledge that we're going to die a factor in making us go out and do stuff to survive ?

Wouldn't immortality lead to a state where we'd have to invent a simluation of mortal life in order to actually feel alive ?

How can one tell that this life isn't such a simulation ?

Houshalter14• 13 years ago

What's wrong with dying? I don't want to die. I don't want to see the people I love die. It's not "part of life" or some other crazy rationalization to make us feel better about it. It's just ceasing to exist. There is no other life.

We used to think there was some magical soul thing, but now we can look and see how the very neurons in your brain work. And when they stop working, that's it.

I don't accept death. It isn't part of any greater purpose. The universe isn't optimized for human values. But we can change that.

One day future humans will look back on ancient Earth and wonder how terrible it must have been to live for mere decades. If you were to try to convince them that dying was a good thing and they should give up their immortality, they would laugh at you.

bausson• 13 years ago

That's what all the religions and mystics have been telling us for millenia. If they have been telling it for millenia, they are probably right.
What's wrong with dying ? This is actually a subject I speak of with my parents once in a while, they never expected to live longer than a century, so they accept death as a 'natural' part of life, whereas I see death (even of old age) as tragedy, because to me it is supposed to be (or at least to become) optional.

I was convinced death will be optional for me before my majority. It is a belief, since I have no proof of what will be, a belief in mankind's capacities.

Even being a baseless belief, it has literally changed the way I live, and the way I plan my life. I have literally all the time in the world (and hopefully quite a bit more), so no rushed decision.

It also changed the way I see knowledge acquisition, so even if I am actually a currently employed software developer, if someone have an interesting job in genetics, biology or unconventional computing for a software developer, I'm ready to jump ship.

fred023• 13 years ago

I find the simple-minded dogmatism that the mind = brain hugely amusing. The fact is that right now science has absolutely no idea how consciousness works. There is no proof that reductionist materialism can explain how a mind arises from bunchs of neurons. And yet some believe without proof.

fred023• 13 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness

Houshalter14• 13 years ago

Are you suggesting that intelligence can't be explained by neurons or physics as we know them? Seriously?

fred023• 13 years ago

Yes, seriously! Look into the work of the philospher David Chambers. His position is called non-reductive functionalism. Instead of saying "the brain causes consciousness", he would say "it is not ONLY the brain that causes consciousness".[1]

In other words "consciousness is a fundamental property ontologically autonomous of any known (or even possible) physical properties" of the physical universe. [2]

I am amused by discussions like these where simplistic functionalist arguments [3] are taken as being proven. The whole area of consciousness is still side open, none of our current theories are adequate and it is simply wrong to assume that consciousness can be explained away.

[1] http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1997/may/15/conscio...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Chalmers

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functionalism_%28philosophy_of_...

lcedp• 13 years ago

This reminds me of 1900-1950 prognoses that by 2000 we should all have flying cars and apple growing on Mars. These prognoses were inspired by rapid advancements of the technologies of that time. Instead electronics happened which was not imagined or at least underestimated.

Nowadays prognoses are inspired by current advancements but let's just spell out the one thing we can be pretty sure about - we have no idea what the next big thing is.

The Importance of Surviving 40 more years

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