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Comment by patcon | Hacker News Reader

Surprise, a counter-argument on hacker news! :)

Why does it seem no one worries about what we might break in humanity by disrupting the evolved pattern of death. It's a network characteristic selected for in living system, and very few creatures have survived into our epoch without developing the capacity to die.

It's literally an evolved feature of our lifecycle and our existence within this web, and it terrifies me (esp everything going wrong already in our world) that we're not being more critical and cautionary toward life-extension....

Every time I read about life extension, I have almost zero positive thoughts about its effect on our common good, and it's just "oh shit, this is going to have bad outcomes for us all" :/ It's pursuit feels like peak selfishness in our individualistic society, one that really need collectivist thinking.

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You’re kidding, right?

These conversations frequently tend to devolve into a long discussion about the negative on hacker news.

In fact, 3 years ago I wrote that this story should be banned from HN:

https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2017/03/28/stories-that-should-...

“Death gives life meaning”

“It’ll only be for rich people”

“The money should be spent on something better.”

If we spent as much time trying to solve the problem, rather than having philosophical discussions, we’d all probably be living to 200 by now.

Thanks. Sorry, realizing I avoid clicking into these most times, so just finally did now and saw nothing but boosting (and I unfairly generalized).

If i understand, you feel that death is a curable condition, and not an evolved adaptation of a population within living networks?

I guess i just find it difficult to conclude that death, an evolved trait for 99.999% of lifeforms, esp ones like us (with its uncountable trillions of iterations of validation) is something we should allow our members to cavalierly just brush aside. My "survival of species" lens says we should just "cap" lifespan -- so that no set of individuals can bend the structure of biology and society to create such an existential asymmetry in the our shared systems. But that has obvious clashes with the belief systems we've established.

There's a rad allegory in city planning. A student wants to remove a fence across a narrow laneway. She says to her wise mentor "hey this fence is here and it's not doing anything. can i remove it and improve the flow". The mentor replies, "sure, but before you remove the fence, you should first uncover why it was there."

I feel like our wise mentor is the process of evolution. She's been around the block. She wasn't born yesterday. I truly don't feel we're wise on this topic. And conveniently, there are essentially no death-defeating maverick species to teach us their learned wisdom. It feels like hubris to presume that we know better than this mentor...

More of my 3 year old post:

“Finally, let’s not delude ourselves into thinking that death is going to be an easy disease to cure. Maybe we’ll get a few breakthroughs over the next couple of decades and we’ll figure out how to add a few extra healthy years to the average person. We definitely need to move beyond long term studies and peer deeper into our bodies. By the way, the latest study says we need to take 15,000 steps a day to live a longer life.”

If you have a way to brush aside death, do share with us.

So far as I can tell, nothing about the attempts have been cavalier. Fortunes have been squandered, tears wept over the fresh graves of the beloved, lives were focused in an all-consuming passion, and so forth. The subject has already been rendered not cavalier by the agonies of our past.

We haven't a "skip death" button to press.

Chesterson's fence, which you referenced, is only applicable to the conscious acts of thinking beings. Evolution is not wise, evolution is not careful, evolution did not plan or reason for that fence. Evolution also gave us susceptibility to diseases, revolting parasites, defects of birth, and an often tragic fragility. Shall we preserve those as well? After all, they must be there for a reason.

Under that aegis, nothing which applies to death does not equally and as thoroughly apply to quite literally every other medical intervention humanity has invented starting with the humble bandage.

Evolution gave us allergies which cause people to asphixiate and clotting disorders which have children bleeding out from a casual scrape. Blindness, gangrene, arthritis: this is the wisdom of evolution.

> Evolution gave us allergies which cause people to asphixiate and clotting disorders which have children bleeding out from a casual scrape. Blindness, gangrene, arthritis: this is the wisdom of evolution.

It is indeed a wisdom, albeit a primitive one which simply works good enough long term - survival of the fittest, best adapted, strongest, with better immunity etc. Collateral damage for the unfortunate is not important when we talk about billions of organisms over countless generations, and survival of the species as a whole. We also evolved over weaker species, because we were better and luckier. And we will evolve more either naturally or by our hands, if we keep on surviving.

> Evolution is not wise, evolution is not careful, evolution did not plan or reason for that fence. Evolution also gave us susceptibility to diseases, revolting parasites, defects of birth, and an often tragic fragility. Shall we preserve those as well? After all, they must be there for a reason.

Copy. Mutate. Select. Simple algorithm, remarkable results. Incredibly robust to failure.

I think you do yourself a disservice thinking this way about the process that gave rise to you.

Edit: and I didn't even read your whole comment.

It also, apparently, gave us breathtaking ignorance. No wait, that was human society.

This process that gave rise to me also gave me a painful, lifetime disability ... in its wisdom.

I'm sorry that you're suffering. No one should discount your experience. Yet even through our cloudy lens we behold a miracle beyond our possession, even beyond our comprehension. We are all transitional forms, even the best of us. We'll all die. It's nature's equalizer, grinding everything to dust and recycling it. We're all made of garbage. Junkyard parts, you and me both, buddy. Isn't it incredible? We're all Wreck Gar https://tfwiki.net/wiki/Wreck-Gar_(G1). I think the awe of that realization is worth the meager existence allowed to me for the moment.

Miracles do not necessarily have to be positive. Imagine Dante's inferno, where in some sections fire might rain down forever upon the limited sinners. That would also be a miracle. Possession, comprehension of miracles, all irrelevant if it is something to which you are subjected. If you are ill, if you are very ill and occasionally must ingest large quantities of painkillers, marveling at the exquisite engine of torment (how finely tuned! how painstaking its affordances!) is quite beyond one at times.

Evolution is a shuddering conglomeration of what has worked to make a few more copies, over millions of oft-unlucky organisms, than a few thousand years ago. What persists exists, even if it is tortured. Evolution does not respect its individuals, all collateral damage, nor is it tender even to its most faithful adherents, as the male octopus, under a chemical spell, will tear off its own arm to proffer to a mate, and then to starve, function fulfilled.

What a wicked wonder.

I'm not going to negate you here, because you have a lifetime of lived experience and I don't doubt your pain is and has been real. Yet people suffer in many ways and there are some deeply twisted realities that many people have lived. In our darkest moments we all feel we are the tortured one, but that is not the whole truth either. It is tempting to believe that we are at war with an implacable, all-powerful enemy. But truthfully, we are only at war with our own minds.

The mind is ultimately a digging machine. It matters a lot where you point it, more even the lens through which you interpret all that you see. Some very disadvantaged people have put forth some incredible feats of overcoming. They refused to be defined by their disabilities, their pain, their hardship--and refused to rue their existence. This engine grinds us all, but this world is no hell. And that damn octopus, maybe he reaches the height of ecstasy in that moment, an orgasm beyond belief. Wicked is a judgment.

fwiw I find myself very torn to be rationalizing death when my mom just went into paliative care last week. I'm literally typing this as I should be walking out the door to the hospital. I suppose I'd like to push the button that let me mom live 200 years, but i also fear for that button ever existing. I don't think I could NOT push it.

I promise I'm not callous. I'm maybe suspicious of the west's cult of the individual. I feel like sometimes we as individuals can't have what we want for ourselves, if we want the bigger ongoing project to succeed. Things are already so complicated, not least due to accumulation of generational wealth and inaction of the older generation. I worry the "curing" death will doom us all, and collapse this whole beautiful mess in on itself :/ Curing death sounds great when young startup folks are pushing it, but we all age out, we all get stuck inside the minds that grew up in old worlds.

anyhow, much love to you and yours. truly

You genes don't care about you, the individual, one tiny bit. What matters is if a set of genes propagates or not.

You might as well return the favor.

I would also be concerned about people living longer but with the mental sharpness of an (average) 80 year old.

Pre emptive; yes I know there are sharp old people but it’s fair to say that on average old people have significant mental decline hence targeting for scams and what not.

So you wrote your opinion on some blog... doesn't make it any more relevant than any other opinion, here, there, anywhere. This is a public forum.

Death is an interesting topic, plenty of people are scared shitless of it, regardless of their beliefs. Many wish that they would be that special spark that will live almost forever, ideally young, but god forbids that everybody else with them gets the same chance (simple math indicates that would be a bit of catastrophe for whole ecosystem and ultimately mankind too these days).

Research should be definitely done, results might help in places like space travel and probably some diseases, but I don't see it as something super important currently. Maybe because I am at peace with my inevitable death, so other things are considered as higher priority (say pollution, global climate change, inequality, f@cking wars).

I wrote it in a blog so I don’t have to keep repeating myself. The conversation is basically the same every time.

I also addressed your common complaint that there are more important things to work on.

Having the same conversation over and over again with the same result probably qualifies under the “definition of insanity”

What's wrong with all those higher priority items exactly?

Perhaps if we had many more years of useful life we’d learn to take more care because we’d live to see the long term results of our choices.

I truly love the optimism, but even our experiences in democracy don't seem to support this. [1]

Plus, does what you're saying even feel true in your own life now? Does knowing something in your youth make you a louder or better or more powerful advocate in a far future. Slow catastrophies are a human blind spot, and I lack your confidence that extending our individual window from 80 to 120 years would make us better able to grapple. Especially considering that those additional 60 years are going to have a much more stubborn and formed and fully-convicted mind piloting the body around.

[1]: Ch 6 of "Democracy for Realists", "The Specious Present" https://books.google.ca/books?id=M4m9DgAAQBAJ&printsec=front...

To be honest, I probably agree more with what you’ve written than what I wrote.

People don't want to die, I think it's as simple as that.

Evolution is not always correct.

Evolution is correct only for a certain set of circumstances at a certain point in time.

Appendixes are an example of legacy evolutionary artifacts.

Evolution keeps...evolving.

So one could argue that mortality is a legacy evolutionary process and by overcoming it humans are evolving as a species.

Think of all one could accomplish if dedicated 1000 years of learning and research to developing fusion for example or space travel.

I'm not sure our brains are capable of continuously learning for 1000 years without becoming useless. Also, there is a dystopian version of immortality - a tiny fraction of elites becoming immortal super-tyrants.

If we solve aging we may solve brain aging as well as one is a subset of the other.

Appendixes have recently started to be regarded as something functional, a sort of incubator for healthy gut bacteria, but I'm sure there are other examples in nature that could support your point, too.

CGP gray's videos on YouTube are maybe the most concise and fun to watch materials I've seen on the subject.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C25qzDhGLx8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZYNADOHhVY

And you'll be surprised how many people _are_ indeed thinking about all of the outcomes. Have in mind though that as with any technology it is not good or bad, and if it is possible someone will do it sooner or later.

It makes no sense to not do it as your adversaries will, and then they'll dictate how it is used, probably not to your liking. If you develop it first you can talk and deliberate at your leisure and find solutions that look much better to you and yours.

Simply because we reached a state where we can. And also, we evolved a brain that led us here, so why not?

> Why does it seem no one worries about what we might break in humanity by disrupting the evolved pattern of death

Well, we've disrupted pretty much everything else, by inventing modern society. What's one more thing?

> it terrifies me (esp everything going wrong already in our world) that we're not being more critical and cautionary toward life-extension....

Don't worry bro, you'll die and all your fears will go away :). From a personal point of view biological immortality would be great, but I think you're right that there are risks - I can imagine a world where a tiny fraction of wealthy/powerful people make themselves into immortal super-tyrants.

> no one worries about what we might break in humanity by disrupting the evolved pattern of death

Haven't we already disrupted it with spears to ward off predators, and more recently, hand soap and vaccines?

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