Emortalists

The Importance of Forgetting

2010-04-14T21:35:00.000-07:00

Please go to the original blog post.

Immortalism, Existentialism and Twilight

2009-11-19T19:31:00.001-08:00

CLICK to go to the blog entry.

Imagination, Memory and Age

2009-07-01T17:15:00.001-07:00

Click here.

BMI and Longevity

2009-06-25T16:36:00.000-07:00

Click here.

Why we need a war on aging

2009-02-17T18:53:00.000-08:00

Because it is a war situation. People keep on talking about 'wars' on health issues, or obesity, or cancer or poverty or... You get the picture.

This article tries to explain why aging should become the real target for our scientific wars.

Woody Allen and the Fire Inside

2008-12-08T12:27:00.000-08:00

In a recent edition of the Australian ABC's 7.30 Report there was an interview with Woody Allen. It's mostly about film and stuff, of course, but since Allen is an Atheist/Absurdist with a long history of statements about his personal aversion to dying, I thought it would be worthwhile for Emortalists to have a look at it. It's all of 13 minutes long, which are 13 minutes well worth investing in listening to one of the world's most open-about-it Emortalists; yet no one seems to fully appreciate this, as Allen hides his proclivities under a carefully cultivated veneer of quips and wry NY Jewish humor.

I was struck particularly by his references to the terror associated with 'life', which is, of course--and this much is clear from the context and his other pronouncements--the terror of one who is, and has always been aware, of the presence and inevitability of personal extinction; or, as the Bog Seger lyrics to his song Fire Inside would have it, of the fact that "...no matter what you dream or feel or say, it ends in dust and disarray".

It occurs to me yet again that those with the awareness of this truth and who have none of the consolation provided by those religions who do provide it (which include all monotheisms), cannot help but be profoundly affected by the 'terror' Allen speaks about, and which some of us share; especially those who aren't very good at the art of 'denial'.

Emortalist Practice — for those too stingy to pay for the book

2008-11-22T02:14:00.000-08:00

You'll find the book serialized here, though you'll have to live with the odd comment from others on the forum.

I'll give it a couple of weeks before deciding that my initial impression of the reaction ("Why don't we just get back to our usual business and ignore Till?") is accurate.

R.I.P.

2008-11-10T12:11:00.000-08:00

That's what I'm talking about...

Emortalist Practice

2008-11-07T13:03:00.000-08:00

OK, so the title changed, but the book—a rather small monograph of just over 30k words—is now available from lulu.com.

The Vultures Are Circling

2008-10-17T18:05:00.000-07:00

Click here to redirect.

For those interested: very soon there will be a book. It's probably going to be called Emortalism 101: Perambulations Across the Mental Landscape of an Unrepentant Emortalist.

Long title, I know.

The book is almost complete and will initially be available from lulu.com.

More on this when it's 'out there'. I'll probably post a few excerpts as time goes on.

WR 104: 8000 light years way and waiting to pounce...

2008-10-16T18:11:00.000-07:00

As if we needed yet another reason to get our eggs out of the one basket...

Letter From Utopia

2008-08-02T15:07:00.000-07:00

OK, so the first version of the Absurdist's response to the original is here.

No doubt there will be refinements, but I thought I'd start somewhere.

An Alternate Letter From Utopia

2008-07-27T13:52:00.000-07:00

I've previously mentioned Nick Bostrom's Letter From Utopia. Having thought it over some more I've decided that it's probably appropriate to pen an alternative version, from an Absurdist perspective. Initially the task appeared daunting, for how could Absurdism—and especially the kind I favor, with a goodly bit of General Semantics thrown in for good measure—be compatible with Utopianism?

Well, it is—so watch this space, because it is gaining shape.

On the Way to Utopia

2008-07-19T04:51:00.001-07:00

Following on from here...

...and in particular this statement:

I think that the effect of the transformations on human individuals is going to be like that of Global Warming [...]. Far from flattening individual attributes to creating a goal-less blah-society, it is instead going to emphasize the extremes: the good will become better and the bad more evil.

The 'transformations' alluded to were (1) the attainment of significant longevity, (2) the enhancement of human mental capabilities, (3) a decrease in human suffering (or, if you will, un-wellbeing; depending on how you look at it).

I've thought about that statement above I made some more, and I think it's going to be borne out by future history.

What does it imply or 'mean'? Or, for that matter why should anybody really give a shit?

Last question first: nobody 'should'. Of course not. There's no such thing as a Categorical-Imperative-type 'Should'. Period.

So, why would you care?

I have no idea!

But the thing is this: is nobody cares then it'll never come about, because evolution isn't going to bring it about—and, touching though it may be to argue that God will take care of it, that's just plain silly.

And there's another reason, more selfish, to give a crap, and it is this: you might just be around to see the longer-term fruits of your current actions. Unless you don't want to, even though you might be given the opportunity. Which is a possible choice, but would you choose to die when you could live?

To the first question. When you read utopianist projections, and especially those having to do with the development of the human mind—whatever that is!—they usually come out looking a bit like the mental equivalent of the heat-death of the universe, or something along those lines. Everybody is nice. You get the kind of people who think there's tragedy in the melting of a snowman and you actually will be able to gaze into a beloved's eyes for a day. Kind of like heaven-on-earth; paradise regained—or finally-attained (-ish), because there was nothing to 'regain' to begin with; because we made it so. Warm and fuzzy and rational and emotional—in a rational kind of way.

Nick Bostrom's visions of the "What is XYZ in Utopia?" kind are like that. I said that they are a start, and, yes, they are. But they are a start from very conventional concepts that owe more to the fuddy-duddy 'heavens' of worldly religions—and especially the Western ones and their relatives, including Islam—than to, for example (like you didn't know that was coming) Existentialist/Absurdist considerations. Which is unsurprising, but that's no reason to suffer them in silence.

Thing is, these kinds of visions leave me more than just a tad uneasy. I'm all for improving cognition and using whatever it takes to do so; and if the aids are technological and 'unnatural': fine. They'll have to be, because our brains are as they are and they work as they work because they are as they are; and that's what makes us human. Personally I'm not really into 'trans-human', which means 'beyond human', i.e. on the other side of it, having gone through it and come out somewhere else. I'm more into 'super-human', meaning that we retain 'humanity', but make it 'better', whatever that may mean. Right now we don't really know what 'better' is; that's for us to find out—if keep walking the often-rocky, twisted path to Utopia, and if we manage not to slide off into oblivion into the abysses yawning on either side of us.

The 'everybody-is-nice(ish)'-Utopias remind me of the Whedonesque version implemented by the 'Alliance' on the planet Miranda; which didn't come out too well. In this instance there was, of course, the issue of Utopia being imposed by force and superior power. But if everybody on Miranda had agreed to being 'nice'-ified, it would have been exactly the same disaster. 'Nice' in the context of the movie Serenity, of course, meant 'compliant' and 'non-pugnacious' and things like that. But nice-people-Utopias come down to this, because if everybody is nice, there will be no conflict and everybody will indeed comply with the 'niceness'—just because...well, because they're nice. If everybody is 'sensible' then everybody will agree on what matters and what doesn't and all problems are solved and we can mourn the melting snowman. Case closed.

The essence of the people-are-nice-Utopia assumption is that people, given the choice—and longer life and resulting experience, and improved mental powers, and a greater resulting capacity for joy-of-living—will eventually all opt to be 'nice' and rational and do good things and not bad. Like it was an engineering issue, where convergence to the best 'solution' is a common phenomenon, after all the not-so-good solution have been tried and found wanting. The answer to the question of how humans should live and will end up living is usually thought by Utopianists to be in the 'best-solution' region of the space of possibilities. The argument goes, correctly I believe, that what evolution has produced is nasty and brutish because that's the way it came out. 'Mother Nature' doesn't really give a shit. It's all 'Blind Watchmaker' and not a trace of 'nice' in sight—unless it's by accident.

That kind of future-mind Utopia does give me the willies, because it isn't 'transhuman' but inhuman. It can only be achieved by taking something way from us—and that is not the way to go about being more than we are now. The 'old' parts of our brains must not be disabled, as it were, for it is from there that a lot of our energy as living creatures emanates from. That energy, when properly guided, is the source of all that is 'good' in us, of all our creative energies, plus a lot of stuff that we simply don't understand, and maybe don't actually need to understand. What we have to learn though—something that many of us already do, quite without being 'transhuman' or 'superhuman'—is to live with the stuff that lurks there, some of which is very, very dark; to use it to be better human beings. 'Better' is, of course, a value judgment, for what's 'better' for one isn't for another—and it appears to follow that, if we allow those energies to continue flowing from the dark recesses of our minds, it's not going to be all peace and harmony and everybody being sickeningly rational and agreeing with each other to do this but not that and definitely to avoid the other.

That's not Utopia anymore, you say? Well, only if your definition of Utopia is the clichéd one drummed into you by those who believe that 'peace' can ever be a stable state. But does it have to be that? Could Utopia not be a world where, to start with, necessary death is abolished, and our mental and emotional scope has been expanded? Where humankind has freed itself from the bonds of its home, to avoid being wiped out by some freak cataclysm? Where people have learned to understand the importance of choosing and taking responsibility for their actions? Where the supid inequalities of today, those based on differences we cannot change, have become a thing of the past? Where the large scale suffering of innocents has been diminished to occasional aberrations, that are soon taken care of by those in whose power it lies to defend those unable to defend themselves? Where we've learned that there are powerful and cogent reasons to 'save the environment', if only because we need it to support us and ours?

Way I see it, somebody's lacking imagination here, and it's either me or those who think that taking away the darkness, or even emasculating it, is going to do anybody any good. The real issue is, it seems to me, to learn to live with it; to make our choices with the darkness fully present—and the light. That's what drives human life. Without it, all is pretty much blah!, and I think that a blah! Utopia won't last.

Utopia

2008-07-09T21:07:00.001-07:00

Every now and then I change my mind about something important. That doesn't happen a lot—indeed it is an unusual event in the vast majority of people—but it does happen. When it happens, it seldom announces itself in obvious ways, though I suspect that if I'd known what signs to look out for I would have noticed them. That usually means that such changes of mind appear to happen suddenly; overnight, from one instant to another, between starting to read something and finishing it, driving back home from work, thinking about things apparently completely unconnected to the issue at hand, and so on.

The change of mind I'm talking about has to do with my attitude toward 'Utopias'. Anybody who knows me more than fleetingly, and certainly anybody who's read my novels, will realize that I think utopias are unattainable and that, more to the point, any attempt to establish them will eventually result not just in failure, but in a plethora of, usually unpleasant-to-horrific, unforeseen consequences. And that's ignoring what is likely to happen along the way to the utopia, which may eclipse, in terms of horror, the unforeseen outcomes.

As Nick Bostrom writes, rather poetically, in Letter from Utopia:
"I fear that the pursuit of Utopia will bring out the worst in you."But he also continues:

"Seek the light! But approach with care, and swerve if you smell your wingtips singeing. [alluding to the moth-light/flame metaphor] Light is for seeing, not dying."

And, maybe most tellingly—and I think this is the sentence that tipped the scales into another path of thought:

"...go easy on your paradise-engineering until you have the wisdom to do it right."

Letter from Utopia is written as a plea to the reader from a writer in a possible transhumanist 'future'; a utopia that might or might not be, but which the writer clearly considers attainable—with a whole bunch of provisos and cautions like the ones above attached. But attainable.

It could be argued, and indeed I have done so at length and I will continue to do so, that, given 'human nature' as-it-is, utopias will not only be unattainable, but attempts to achieve them will invariably and inevitably cause more harm than good. This is the way things are and that's that.

However, I have been inconsistent; and, looking back I'm wondering why I was living in denial of the glaringly obvious. I suspect it had to do with a) being cautious and b) not seeing something else that was glaringly obvious, and again it took a Nick Bostrom article, The Future of Human Evolution, to make clear what should have been clear much sooner. But, hey, nobody's perfect, and even I sometimes miss that which dangles right in my field of view. The point here is that having said what I said in the previous paragraph (...given 'human nature' as-it-is...etc), how the hell could I possibly miss the point here?

I'm going to come back to the human evolution thing in another blog, but right now let's focus on the 'Utopia' issue. The 'point' is that you can't be an emortalist/immortalist without being a Utopian. Somehow you've got to be thinking, believing, theorizing that the world would be a better place if we didn't have to die shortly after the time when many of us—not all, because some never do—figure out some important things about what's important in life and what matters and what's bullshit.

And so, yes, the first step toward getting to a point where we know and have experienced and thought enough to even be able to consider what a 'better world' could actually look and be like has to be what in Letter from Utopia is called the 'first 'transformation' required to get us there; and it is this:

Secure life.

Meaning, of course, just what I said earlier: stop people from having to die, except by choice. This is the basic driving ambition and focus of the emortalist/immortalist movement.

The second 'transformation' called for is:

Upgrade cognition.

Yeah, I can relate to that. And anybody who's read Kluge will probably have gained a fairly good understanding of just what a hotch-potch, cobbled-together, duct-taped construction our 'mind' is; and how much it could so with some serious 'upgrading'.

That doesn't mean actually replacing it with something that will deprive us of our humanity—like the horror stuff that went on in Serenity—but we're 'upgrading', or are trying to, our minds all the time anyway; every time we, for example, learn or learn-to-do 'special' things that people ordinarily aren't able to do, or interested in doing for that matter. 'Education' is an attempt at 'upgrading' the mind—though by and large I think 'education' as practiced does a lousy job of it, and maybe that's why we don't notice the 'upgrade'. Thing is that education is designed and delivered by people who really need some serious upgrading themselves, so that's a serious problem with unfulfilled prerequisites...

The third 'transformation':

Elevate well-being.

A double-edged sword, no question. Unwell-being (a.k.a. 'suffering') fulfills a purpose, too. But there are many kinds of 'suffering', and those inflicted on the innocent who cannot defend themselves against it, but have it imposed on them through starvation, disease, oldage, war and similar contingencies, hardly qualify as 'necessary' for human existence. They just are. Indeed, people go out of their way to alleviate that kind of suffering in others.

But 'suffering' is also a motivator. For example, the presence of all those kinds of suffering mentioned above in ourselves or in people with empathize with leads us to make efforts to improve things; and, when you come to think about it, all of science, for all it pretensions to 'knowledge' is really about alleviating and preferably abolishing that kind of suffering.

Consider someone like Stephen Hawking, who, in that pathetic body of his, is a mind concerned with 'pure knowledge'—for whatever else could he possibly want, except maybe relief from his disease...

But it this really so?

"The long-term survival of the human race is at risk as long as it is confined to a single planet. Sooner or later, disasters such as an asteroid collision or nuclear war could wipe us all out. But once we spread out into space and establish independent colonies, our future should be safe.

"There isn't anywhere like the Earth in the solar system, so we would have to go to another star."

That's Stephen Hawking speaking, using some very nifty technology, because he can't really 'speak'. He obviously considers that the risky research from CERN's LHC is worth it. An interesting point of view, because it doesn't appear to come from someone blinded by the prospect of 'knowledge for its own sake'.

Back to suffering. It isn't the only motivator for human agency; just the most obvious. And the abolition of the most distasteful forms of suffering need not imply the cessation of striving, investigation, curiosity, purpose. If it did, then we'd be very misguided right now to alleviate them whenever they appear! And we certainly should not apply medical science as we do now to avert misery, illness and dying; or even to delay the latter.

The 'other motivators' for human agency do not have a concrete name, and I suspect that a current visions of all utopias suffer from a lack of imagination and ability to grasp the notion of motivators-that-are-not-suffering. Well, I think, while they may not have a name, they all will have to have something in common and it is this:

Engagement.

What I mean by that is a connection of the individual with the world and the remainder of humanity and that thing we know as 'life', whatever that is.

Criticisms of even a benign and what you might call 'successful' Utopia—a Utopia we don't actually know yet, and could not even begin to know or conceive until we have gone a long way with those 'transformations' mentioned above—almost always involve a claim that somehow these transformations will remove from individuals the ability/desire/motivation to maintain this engagement or connection. That they would make us somehow inhuman.

They also usually assume, without justification, that in a future of emortal, cognition-updated and joyfully-alive humans all problems of existence have disappeared. Or that it'll make all people into 'good people'. That being emortal and cognitively enhanced and full of joy-of-life won't allow one to be a rogue and do things that whatever society there is won't condone. Also, there's no reason to suggest that conflict will become a thing of the past. And it is not even certain that all people would be willing to live without death and dying. People do and think and believe lots of very strange things and act on those beliefs; if only becaus they may find in them meaning and purpose, no matter how incomprehensibly dim-witted that purpose may appear to others.

So, to equate 'Utopia' with 'perfection' is foolish, and indeed Letter from Utopia says also:

"Utopia is the hope that the scattered fragments of good that we come across from time to time in our lives can be put together, one day, to reveal the shape of a new kind of life."

Whatever that shape is: who knows? I certainly don't. But does that mean that it isn't worth trying to start those transformations to see where they lead us? Can it really be so bad? What twisted kind of mind—excepting that of some religioid or ideologue—would consider the suffering of the innocent to have any 'value'—or be it to prompt those who do have a choice into action to choose and act on those choices. But, much as I'm for choice, this price is too high.

Insofar as visions go, Letter from Utopia offers this:

What is Tragedy in Utopia? There is tragedy in Mr. Snowman’s melting. Mass murders, we have found,are not required.
What is Weakness in Utopia? Weakness is spending a day gazing into your beloved’s eyes.
What is Imperfection in Utopia? Imperfection is the measure of our love for things as they are.
What is Dignity in Utopia? Dignity is the affirming power of “No” said discriminately.
What is Suffering in Utopia? Suffering is the salt trace left on the cheeks of those who were around before.
What is Courage in Utopia? Courage is the monarchy of the self, here constrained by a constitution.
What is Solemnity in Utopia? Solemnity is the appreciation of the mystery of being.
What is Body in Utopia? Body is a pair of legs, a pair of arms, a trunk and a head, all made of flesh. Or not, as the case may be.
What is Society in Utopia? Society is a never-finished tapestry, its weavers equal to its threads; the parts and patterns an inexhaustible bourne of beauty.
What is Death in Utopia? Death is the darkness that enshrouds all life, and our guilt for not having created Utopia as soon as we could have.

Like all utopian visions it's as-seen-from-today, sounding a bit naive and woolly-imagined, and based on ignorance about what will be or what might lie beyond the horizon imposed by the fog that lies between us and the future. It's not a bad start though. Not a bad start at all.

Utopia is a process, not an end. Where it ends nobody knows. Yet the Absurdist creed that the only thing that matters is what we do today, here and now, remains truer than ever before; because only if the here and now and today is a part of that process, can we and/or our descendants ever hope to get there. That not only makes the Absurdist creed into a serious option, but indeed it may lead the Absurdist to choose it to become an obligation—to him- or herself and the whole human race.

I think that the effect of the transformations on human individuals is going to be like that of Global Warming (sorry, GLOBAL WARMING!). Far from flattening individual attributes to creating a goal-less blah-society, it is instead going to emphasize the extremes: the good will become better and the bad more evil.

There, how's that for a prediction? Utopia promises to be very interesting indeed.

How To Live Forever or Die Trying

2008-06-30T16:38:00.001-07:00

How To Live Forever or Die Trying is the title of a book by Bryan Appleyard, which I finished over the weekend. Fascinating in parts, somewhat tedious and losing-the-plot-a-bit in others. The conclusions of the book are mixed. Yes, extensive human longevity is going to happen soon. No, it actually isn't desirable because people need death to...well, be 'people', I guess. At least 'people' as we know them now, and, presumably, as they should continue to be.

I judge the contents of a book of this type using a lot of criteria, but one of them is the list of references. And, in the case of this book, apart from a couple of references who serve the author's purpose—and probably reveal the extent, or lack thereof, of his scope of reading—immortality-related fiction is absent. Now, it may be argued that, in the case of something like the introduction of biomedically-initiated physical longevity, non-fiction references are probably considerably more germane than flights of the imagination. Fiction, in this instance 'science'-fiction, writers, with a few notable exceptions and cases, have not been at the forefront of actual scientific research itself.

Fiction has a different aim, and that's as it should be. But are non-fiction writers, or scientists, biomedical or social, or philosophers, really any more relevant or likely to come up with material that helps us to figure this or that, when it comes to anything beyond the purely 'scientific' or 'technical'; and especially anything that lies on the other side of what is likely to be* the most profound change in history ever to come upon us? Does anybody seriously think that just because someone is a 'thinker' he or she is going to come up with more accurate predictions for what the future will hold and what something like the introduction of extreme physical longevity will do to us as human beings? That's as opposed to trying to figure out what the more practical effects—social, political, demographic, environmental—will be in the short-to-medium term.

Appleyard's conclusions about the desirability of physical emortality are flawed, if only because of issues he has not considered. Or maybe he has, but did not find them worthwhile mentioning or unsuitable to his argument. Of course, I'm saying this as an avowed emortalist, which means I'm not exactly unbiased—as nobody is or can be, for that's implicit in just being human; and will forever be, because it's actually implicit in being a 'creature' looking at the cosmos from a particular point of view. But Appleyard is tackling a big subject, potentially the most important one can talk about right now or ever, and it would have been nice if he had done so with an appropriate sense of perspective and the kind of careful consideration that someone like Nick Bostrom brings to most of what he writes about.

But Appleyard didn't, and so that book with the promising title doesn't fulfill the promise. Which a lot of that kind of literature doesn't, even if it comes from pro-immortalists. Many of them, like our average common-garden 'deathist', have issues with what you might call 'broad thinking'. Appleyard is, despite all his statements to the contrary, a deathist—meaning someone who belives that death is either desirable or somehow necessary, or both, for the human race.

As a good Absurdist who doesn't believe that anything is, either a priori or teleologically, 'desirable' and/or 'necessary' for any damn thing, deathism is a lethal (sic!) philosophy whose ahderents I would pity, if only the fact that they exist in such large and influential numbers weren't so detrimental to the emortalist project. Still, I take heart from the fact that these days even the Pope—a personage, and an institution, which I hold in low regard **, but whose power is undeniable—has seen fit to comment unfavorably on transhumanism. That means that the transhumanist project—the spearhead of which is the emortalist/immortalist project!—is being taken sufficiently seriously to warrant such comments. There was a time when the likes of me were regarded almost universally as freaks or weirdos, people who really should not tell anyone about this lest they subject themselves to ridicule, and just basically a bit off-the-beaten-track.

Appleyard, for all the failings of his book, at least makes clear, just how wide-spread and socially acceptable the emortalist vision has become. That he also identifies it as a peculiarly 'American' enterprise was an interesting revelation, because I hadn't thought about it that way. But, yes, he's right. It is. And if you think that American religiosity could not possibly support something like emortalism—or even immortalism, which goes a whole conceptual step further—think again. If anything, the peculiar versions of Christianity that America has given rise to are likely to push the project ahead. If you think that bothers me, the Absurdist, think again, again. Whatever it takes to hasten the enterprise along cannot be, at least to my mind, abything but to be welcomed.

Am I advocating 'fervor'? You bet I am. Like everything else, it can be a useful tool. In this case it may save humanity's collective ass and ensure that it has a future—because there is every suggestion that without it, it won't have much of it.

more on this coming in due course...

* If humanity is lucky enough to escape the results of the apparent innate and fathomless stupidity of some supposedly-intelligent scientists, like those at CERN, who, in trying to answer questions whose relevance to us is minuscule to non-existent, apparently are trying to kill us all in some final and fatal cataclysm that'll annihilate all hope for the future humanity may ever have had. Oh, the terminal, bitter cosmic irony! If I believed in God, I'd suspect that he was nothing but the ultimate cosmic psycho. The suspicion, I must admit, is not entirely new.

** A sentiment shared even by many Christians.

Physical Immortality and the Future of the Species

2008-06-29T17:00:00.000-07:00

Steve Perry, a number of whose books are on my shelf (excepting a few that tie in with franchises and series), recently published a novel called Immune Response, which hasn't hit the bestseller lists, but which also—dealing, as it does, with shenanigans surrounding the development of some ready means to extend the human lifespan tenfold or more—connects up thematically to some other things I've been reading as of recent (see. e.g. this blog), and which happen to be close to my heart; and actually have been for a rather long time: 30+ years, and beyond that.

The pros and cons of the advent of human emortality notwithstanding—to be left for another day...maybe!—one of the things that tends to get lost is the immense significance of how it is going to be implemented.

What I mean by that:

Is it going to be a pill you pop, like in Immune Response, where one gel-capsule has everything you need to get the restoration systems going and working for the indefinite future?
Is it going to be more like a system of treatments, like in, say, Joe Haldeman's Buying Time (a.p.a. The Long Habit of Living)?

Option 2 is definitely only for the rich, because it takes a shitload of money. Not a question of someone profiteering—though people will profiteer, like licensed criminals called 'speculators' do right now in, for example, the oil-business. The SOT (System of Treatments) alternative is likely to be expensive just because it involved lots of technology and resources on an ongoing basis.

That also means that the treatment could not be applied on a truly large scale. Again, that's not just a question of plutocratic elitism resulting on preferential and unequal access to the required resources—though it will be that, too!—but the fact that you simply could not implement that kind of thing on a large scale.

Meaning that the vast majority of people are going to go without, just because it can't be otherwise. And, yes, that will create an inequality and social resentment such as has never been seen before in the history of mankind. But then again, nothing like emortalism has ever been seen before in the history of mankind!

Chew on that for a while.

Option 1 also has problems. Immune Response outlines some of them, starting with 'greed' and followed closely by 'stupidity'. The bad guy in IR is a BAD GUY. Definitely black, without a trace of white. I know that's considered unfashionable, but, let's hold back the snap-judgment: because, is he actually unrealistic? I think not. There are tens of thousands of his ilk living among us right now. And are the scientists in the novel unrealistically corrupt and venal? Again, I think not. The practice of science per se doesn't make a person into either a good person, or into someone who perceives more of whatever the 'truth' may be than those who don't practice science.

In principle the emortality remedy offered in Immune Response is a once-off treatment, requiring no resources but those required to produce whatever is contained in the gel-cap. Initial development costs are likely to be high, but not that much higher expended by drug companies nowadays on all sorts of exotic medicines. Of course, if drug companies did produce this fountain-of-youth capsule, and even if they charged significantly more than their ripoff prices of today, they'd still be cutting off their own feet, because that kind of thing would be about making them obsolete. You can see where this is going!

The thing about the gel-cap is that there is no in-principle limit to how many you could produce; meaning that, once the news about this thing is out, that's Pandora's box wide open and no holds barred. Only religious nuts—of which there are, admittedly, lots; but would there still be if they didn't think that they have to die?—would consider refusing to jump on the emortality bandwagon.

Option 1 would have a huge BOOOM! effect that would leave nobody on this planet unaffected. And I'm not talking about overpopulation, which wouldn't be an instant thing anyway. But the gelcapsule option is one of those things that is either kept completely hush-hush, or else everybody will know it. There's no middle way; not with the internet and modern communications around. If this became known, the world would be in total upheaval less than a week after the cat was out of the bag.

Option 2 on the contrary, would take much longer to have a noticeable effect. It'll also be much easier to conceal, mainly because the plebs would tell itself that maybe the treatment won't work and that the rich bastards who get it are delusional.

People might react to news of the the gel-cap in a similar way, but I doubt it. When you consider the readiness with which people adopt every fake 'anti-ageing'* treatment from skin-creams to botox, from diets to purging regimes, I think you'll realize that they will jump on the gel-cap option with abandon.** And anybody trying to withhold it from them is going to be crushed: physically, economically, politically; take your pick.

Yeah, it does matter—a lot!—just exactly how emortality is going to enter our lives. And I'd say that, given that its coming is certain, just like Global Warming—sorry, cheap shot, but I couldn't help it—I think it's time to think about what you might call EIM, Emortality Introduction Management. Next to EI, Emortality Implementation, it's probably the most important thing we need to develop to make this future not only happen, but ensure that the changes do not destroy us.

Those who aren't in the vanguard of EI and are feeling useless, because there's nothing they can, apparently, do to help the process along, might consider serious EIM involvement, because after E-Day that will become the most important activity around. Actually, it already is. It's just that right now many 'believers' are either too self-involved to think beyond their own skin, or else they probably consider it just a tad premature.

It isn't.

* Why the scare-quotes around 'anti-ageing'? Because it ain't. It's just about measly, basically futile, slightly-age-delaying treatments. Cosmetics by definition are superficial and mean diddly squat. Diets may add some health and well-being—well, some of them do—but 'anti-ageing' they are not by any stretch of the imagination.

** Yes, and that would include me.

Becoming Immortal

2008-06-29T16:42:00.000-07:00

This is just a link to an article. Saves me a lot of words. Nice intro for immortalist/emortalist newbies and wannabes.

Also, here's the link to another thoughtful article on the subject again.

Greetings...

2008-06-27T19:01:00.000-07:00

Greetings, all.

This blog is the new location for any posts of mine relating to:

Emortalism.
Immortalism.
Transhumanism.