Immortality just around the corner or a pipedream?

[Jon]

There has been much talk in the press in recent years about life extension technologies moving into overdrive. If you think about it, medical science and hospitals are all about extending your life. Yet they are missing out on tackling the root cause of most killer diseases: ageing.

Yet, with breakthroughs coming thick and fast, are we on the verge of a inflection point in the human condition?

Let me give some buzz words worth Googling. Gene therapies, senolytics, stem cell treatments, 3D printing, artificial intelligence in diagnosis/drug research/prediction etc, robot surgeons, telemere therapy, custom therapies based on your own DNA and so on.

What are your thoughts on the topic and did you know a revolution is underway?

 

[The_Doc_Man]

Until Man's brain can expand to hold more information, there is a question as to the desirability of extending life by more than a small amount. It has been many years ago and I don't remember the case studies, but I have heard of cases where a student used hypnosis as a memory enhancer and drove himself insane by (in essence) filling up his memory. While I'm not seeking death, I think that there will come a time when I am ready to go.

I can't wait to find out what religious fundamentalists think of the idea of living forever without having to go through God or Heaven. That should be a real donneybrook.

 

[Jon]

How about if we could wipe the slate clean and start again? There could be a clinic that erases a substantial portion of your memories. You leave surgery forgetting why you went there in the first place.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

See Phillip K Dick's "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" (in movie form, "Total Recall")

My problem with that concept ties in to the thread on whether we control our own thoughts. It is our memories that provide the psychological forces that drive our decisions. If we have someone else's thoughts inserted into our heads or if we remove certain thoughts from our heads, we change who we are. Experience is still the best teacher, whether it is a traumatic experience or a pleasant one or a bland school-room experience.

Wiping the slate clean sort of indirectly reminds me of one of my favorite lines in the movie "Sky High." The villainess escaped capture by regressing herself back into infancy and entrusting herself to an uncle. She grows up a second time, attempts her villainy again, and fails again. As she is being taken away, she says something like "I went through puberty TWICE for THIS?"

I think Man, for all his desire for immortality, is not ready for the practical side effects thereof.

Then there is the question of, "What if this immortality is not for everyone?" Then you face the heartache of outliving your loved ones if this type of immortality turns out to not work for them for any reason. It is bad enough that we lose our parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, etc. Do you want to add the burden of losing children and grandchildren? Unless this works for everyone, it should be used for no one. AND if it is expensive, it becomes yet another elitist ability to be envied by the poor. Not to mention putting a target on your back.

 

[Jon]

I agree, who we are is a composite of our memories. However, could our identity be heavily weighted towards our formative years, from age 1 to 3? Many things are "set" from such an early age, with everything else a little more fossilised the older you get. Memories are built upon memories, with the later ones less malleable than the early ones, or perhaps having a lesser impact on personality. This is not completely set in stone, as recent research suggests there is plenty of neural plasticity left in even an ageing walnut brain. So if you imagine your identity as a spectrum of weighting, with more emphasis based on the early years.

With the above in mind, perhaps if there was a technology to remove the older stuff, thus retaining the core you, it would be a good thing. Or, if you had a traumatic early period in your life, why not have that nuked with the robot laser arm that is probing away inside your skull?

I haven't seen the movie "Sky High". Worth a watch? I did see Benjamin Button though as the cinema.

The "not for everyone perspective" differs from mine, since I look at the total death count and therefore the aggregated human suffering index score (I made that last bit up!). What if your children were going to have their lives truncated due to disease? Would you not want life extension for them? If you saw your partner dying, would you not want to restore them to health? Many people have the problem with the term "life extension". So, those in the relevant fields are repositioning their marketing angles as "maintaining health." The net effect is the same: life extension.

Essentially, nearly all medicine and hospitals are there to extend life. They just do it incrementally and not very disruptively.

The cost of medicine is heavily weighted towards your last year of life. Something like 80% of your entire lifetime of medical budget is allocated to the final year. So, it would pay to provide the drugs to keep people alive, forever putting off the final year issue.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

"Sky High" is a bit of a fluff piece. I watched it because I had the temporary hots for Diana Panabaker at the time.

 

[Bee]

I've just found an interesting article that was published a couple of days ago. Plenty of fodder there for discussion.

 

[Jon]

There is plenty of good info out there. The Reddit Futurism channel has lots of stuff about this.

 

[Jon]

The following video gives some interesting information on current developments. This video is also in another post, but I figured it was highly relevant to this thread too.