Hacker News Reader

Comment by grishka | Hacker News Reader

As an anti-aging intervention, this is useless because it still doesn't uncover the master organism development regulator, and it doesn't actually "fix" aging, it doesn't make the organism believe that it's younger. The aging process still happens and the organism still dies of the passage of time.

It might be useful as a lead to that master regulator, though. Or it might be not.

View on HN

Fifteen to twenty extra years of lifespan is useless? With reduced odds of cancer?

(20-25% longer life x 80 year current lifespan.)

I’d still take it (or, something that does the same but is proven safe and effective in humans) while waiting for something that matches your desiderata. I’ve seen what ageing can do to people,…

All you need is something that extends your healthspan at slightly greater than the rate that new discoveries to extend your healthspan are made.

Yes, this is called longevity escape velocity, except this is not quite how aging works. The organism wants to destroy itself. It's part of the developmental program that starts with conception but eventually turns self-destructive. Trying to use the modern medical approach, where the body is assisted with what it wants to do anyway, is going to be an uphill battle.

What do you mean "wants to destroy itself"? Why does it "turn self-destructive"?

The best interpretation I can make is an allusion to how we're designed to be fundamentally unmaintainable (think Twitch's codebase), so living is synonymous with eventual ruin.

Fun biofatalistic fact: some evidence alleges that genes regulate our IQ to keep it within a narrow range, keeping from going too low or too high. :D

So, maybe, by just disabling some regulator gene somewhere, we could all be von Neumanns! But the true fix for all this is to rewrite the genome in Rust.

It would be fun to speculate what IQ escape velocity looks like. Just how much can we boost those neurons? How many Whetstones can your wetware do?

Yeah! That's how I'm forecasting the first "superhuman AGI". We don't need a dozen civilizations' training data, either; just enough cheeseburgers. And we have loads of those already. ;D

There’s no proof of decline and death being “intentional” (as much as nature has intentions). At this point it’s just as likely that our bodies just tend to naturally poison us with glycated connective tissue, transthyretin, various peptides and what have you.

The proof that it's intentional is that Yamanaka factors work. They reset any cell, no matter the age or the specialization, to a perfectly young stem cell. Another proof is that heterochronic parabiosis works. Transplanting an old organ into a young body rejuvenates the organ as well. High concentrations of exosomes taken from young blood also have a rejuvenating effect.

> proof that it's intentional is that Yamanaka factors work

Not really. Multicellular life is messy. Neglect and bad intent, so far as nature can have intention, are difficult to distinguish.

> organism wants to destroy itself

Organisms don't want anything. They're a complex cascade of chemical processes.

You're correct in that programmed death is a factor in aging. (It's most dramatic in octopuses: removing a physical gland causes them not to brood. Unfortunately, octopuses being aggressive cannibals, this also causes them to devour their young [1].) But if it were 100% programmed death, the problem would be easy: change the code. It's not solely programmed death, but a complex mix of programmed death, accumulated damage and the body not really bothering with the latter, maybe due to the existence of the former [2].

> Trying to use the modern medical approach, where the body is assisted with what it wants to do anyway

A lot of medicine is forcing the immune system to stop going Rambo.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17787564/

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41392-022-01251-0

> But if it were 100% programmed death, the problem would be easy: change the code.

The problem is finding the code in the first place. To my programmer mind, biology feels like it must be comprised of layers of emergent behavior. We're not very good at understanding these right now. It might well be that the code you're talking about is not in the DNA, but rather it emerges somewhere where we aren't looking.

> A lot of medicine is forcing the immune system to stop going Rambo.

Okay you win :P

Maybe developers should spend more time in bio tech, rather than ad tech.

Imagine if we spent 30% of our effort to improve humanity.

If want to take a stab at me personally, I'm helping build the fediverse. Ads are cancer. I don't want to be anywhere near them.

To really improve humanity more is needed in ethics and morality

I should have said "simple" instead of "easy." It isn't easy. But if it's all in our genes, that's a finite search space. In reality, the search space is indeterminetedly bounded, possibly unbounded. It's hard not because it's elusive, but because it's complex.

> To my programmer mind, biology feels like it must be comprised of layers of emergent behavior.

Think of it as a billion years of kludges.

This runs counter to most physiology textbook introductions which tend toward making statements like, "The body's main goal is maintaining homeostasis," and from there framing the rest of the bodily processes as various feedback mechanisms which normally align to achieve homeostasis. Sometimes these processes are at odds with each other, and only their combined effect is homeostatic, but pedagogically the nuance of that is present from the start of education.

> This runs counter to most physiology textbook

Which part?

I'm sorry, I meant to respond to the parent, but responded here instead.

It was in reference to the >organism wants to destroy itself. My apologies

Steps to biological immortality would look exactly like these.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com