@houseoftolstoy @judgedread @p

Allowing existing humans that have skills and experience to retire and die from aging and replacing them with morons that can't even speak and need 20 years of learning to become useful doesn't seem very optimized for me

@lonelyowl @houseoftolstoy @judgedread You've gotta start from the other direction: here we have the way things are, so we can reason that it's worked, and is, if not optimal, at least a local optimum. You do that 19th-century scientist thing and go "I don't know what this is for, must be useless" and you'll end up wrong a lot when trying to figure out something that, since time immemorial, has been just grinding itself down.

Here's something: the skills and experience you are talking about are, for the most part, related to surviving longer. You're wired to value those things. Much like losing some satisfaction from eating if you just receive perfectly uniform nutrient cube at regular intervals (to the extent that it's been ruled cruel and unusual punishment to feed nutrient slop to prisoners), you'd lose something if you couldn't die. You'd have to be rewired to not be miserable, because your value system is constructed around your instincts and your upbringing (which is a way of saying the aggregation of your culture and your ancestors' instincts). See Uncle Ted's essay, or spend some time playing a video game on easy mode. (Also if I had fixed attachments already, I could attach St. Terry's video about getting the most out of your fuckin' video game.)

@p I've been around for quite some time and I'm not bored yet. I can easily envision spending another XX years catching up on my reading, maybe learn Japanese to watch Kurosawa and Miyazaki in the original language, read those thicc Russian novels. Many options.

Iain Banks speculated that even with effective total immortality - not only no disease or aging but soulkeepers and neural laces to preserve mindstates in case of mishap - that most humanoids would suicide at around 300 years.

I don't buy it.

As to the function of death, it might be a spandrell. Just a side effect of cumulative genetic damage incentivizing early reproduction, and once reproduction is accomplished selection is weak.

@judgedread @p what is your physical age rate? are you 20 for hundreds of years or are you an old man that never died?

@TreemanHunglow My premise is longevity with good health. If the best they can do is wandering around as a drooling turnip like Biden I'll pass.

@judgedread @p It will be very funny as people re-invent cancer trying to escape death.

@0 Once you're at the stage where true escape of death (meaning total genetic repair and engineering) is feasible cancer will have been long since cured.

You'd have to be crazy to be an experimental subject for the early attempts.

@judgedread

Like waves of nightmares as the clear each hurdle, and then find the next.

"Turns out the brain decays into a puddle after 500 years, sure hope that wasn't horrifying to behold Grandpa's decent into madness with ~500 years worth of resources."

@0 If.

Some trees live thousands of years. Of course then the Entwives wander off.

Noooooooo!

@p @houseoftolstoy @judgedread

> I don’t know what this is for, must be useless

That would be silly, and no, it isn’t something i do. Humans study nature to discover why things are the way they are, to better understand the reality and eventually modify the it to make it better serve human needs. The evolution theory explains how did we get here, it is an explanation of the status quo, and i see it as something that need to be taken into account to modify the human nature. But it looks like you see the human nature as a sacred thing and the evolution theory as a guide to action to maintain the sacred status quo.

> Much like losing some satisfaction from eating if you just receive perfectly uniform nutrient cube at regular intervals

Probably you’re right about this particular thing, though i’m not really sure if i will be unhappy if i lose the need to eat at all.

> you’d lose something if you couldn’t die.

I will shamelessly reply with lesswrong copypasta:

At another point in the discussion, a man spoke of some benefit X of death, I don’t recall exactly what. And I said: “You know, given human nature, if people got hit on the head by a baseball bat every week, pretty soon they would invent reasons why getting hit on the head with a baseball bat was a good thing. But if you took someone who wasn’t being hit on the head with a baseball bat, and you asked them if they wanted it, they would say no. I think that if you took someone who was immortal, and asked them if they wanted to die for benefit X, they would say no.”

> You’d have to be rewired to not be miserable, because your value system is constructed around your instincts and your upbringing (which is a way of saying the aggregation of your culture and your ancestors’ instincts).

Yes, my personality is indeed shaped by the current state of affairs, but i don’t think i’ll stop valuing those skills if i lose a direct need to use them to survive longer. It also won’t stop me from finding new things to value. SD3 can generate a better picture than i can draw for now, and it can do it thousand times faster. But i still love to draw. And i’ll still love computer programming, even if it’s no longer directly necessary for it.

@lonelyowl @p Biological immortality isn't going to happen all at once. It may not happen at all. But if it's possible it will be a long grind solving each problem, which will leave some unsolved and reveal new ones. So early on you will get an extra 20 years of good health, for example, and most people will be able to think of some way to fill those 20 years. Even really unimaginative people. Then assuming it doesn't hit a plateau (and that might happen, some really difficult problem involving cleaning out debris from cells and repairing cumulative DNA damage one nucleus at a time could crop up, meaning nothing less than full nanotech will do) it will gradually add more decades. Then people will have to decide if they want to kick the can and stick around.

My guess is they will, but that's their choice. I'm 99% sure I will.

@judgedread @lonelyowl @p I'm going for the high score. It's the Christian thing to do. If medical immortality is available, is refusing it suicide?

@lonelyowl @houseoftolstoy @judgedread

> But it looks like you see the human nature as a sacred thing and the evolution theory as a guide to action to maintain the sacred status quo.

Not remotely. Chesterton's Fence. I am old, so I know what happens if you start fucking with something you don't understand. The first thing you want to consider is "What am I missing?" and the second is "What if what I'm saying is retarded and the opposite is true?" You're not talking about moving taco night from Friday to Saturday, this is something fundamental.

> I will shamelessly reply with lesswrong copypasta:



Anyway, I haven't died or been hit in the head with a bat, and I did not say death was great. I think you just can't write it off so easily and utopian thinking creates nothing but disasters.

> Yes, my personality is indeed shaped by the current state of affairs,

Human nature goes way deeper than your personality or the current state of affairs. See previous remarks about dogs.

> SD3 can generate a better picture than i can draw for now,

So can a camera. People treat the apparent skill at drawing as the reason to look at a picture. The robot doesn't have anything it wants to convey to you, the robot isn't expressing anything. People get irritated when a rock star that lives in a 6-bedroom house in a gated community writes a song about being down on your luck and life being really hard, because that guy is writing something flat about things he doesn't understand. Technical skill developed to draw is something that you use to get better at conveying your ideas: even manga full of unshaded line drawings, you see the artist put a hint of an expression on the character's face, a touch the person added, the character feels alive because of those things. A robot puts an enigmatic expression on a generic anime girl's face: why did it do that? Maybe a glitch and you're seeing an enigmatic expression that isn't there because you're ascribing motivation that isn't present, maybe its training data associated the thing it was drawing with enigmatic expressions. You can be certain, though, that the robot wasn't hinting at anything.

A program, that's different if it's something completely utilitarian. I have discussed that elsewhere, maybe I'll put that on the blog.

@p @houseoftolstoy @judgedread

> Not remotely. Chesterton's Fence. I am old, so I know what happens if you start fucking with something you don't understand.
> The first thing you want to consider is "What am I missing?" and the second is "What if what I'm saying is retarded and the opposite is true?"
> You're not talking about moving taco night from Friday to Saturday, this is something fundamental.
> I think you just can't write it off so easily and utopian thinking creates nothing but disasters.

I'm late in noticing this, but it seems this conversation don't make sense.
You're talking about stopping humans from dying like there is a high probability that it will cause some kind of irreversible insurmountable harm on global scale, but refuse to provide any arguments in favor of this except the default conservatism "the status quo in more safe than change in general case"

> People treat the apparent skill at drawing as the reason to look at a picture.

No, absolutely not. At least for me.
As a viewer i don't give a fuck if a picture was generated with a computer or drawn by someone, if it's bad - it's bad, if it's good - it's good.
I was talking about my own motivation to draw, it has nothing to do with the practical purpose. And so with programming, i just love to learn and understand new stuff, it is fun and entertaining.

@lonelyowl @houseoftolstoy @judgedread

> I'm late in noticing this,

It seems to be the same incorrect observation you have been stuck on. "It's not quite that simple" appears to mean "I LOVE THE STATUS QUO".

> conservatism "the status quo in more safe than change in general case"

No, that is what you are missing: that has nothing to do with anything I have said.

In general, I have an allergy to the type of magical thinking people have about escaping biology or physics. If the response to "There are ramifications to this that you have not considered" is "Pfff, you just love the status quo", it's pretty easy to reason that it's downhill from here. Since this is 17 hours in the past, I don't even have to wait to find out what happens, it'll just show up as I scroll.

@p @houseoftolstoy @judgedread

Okay, can you clarify what did you mean by all these posts: "escaping the human biology is bad idea even if we had a practical ability to do it" or "escaping the human biology is okay but at the moment we have absolutely no idea how to do it"?

I disagree with the first but agree with the second.

@lonelyowl @houseoftolstoy @judgedread You'd like to freeze human evolution? We're done, that's it?

@p @houseoftolstoy @judgedread

Why do we need to obey the blind idiot god if we ourselves can become the gods?
Why do we need the biological human evolution if we have technology?
Humans already rely on tech more than on anything natural. I am happily live in siberia at -40 not because i evolved into a walrus but because i have down jacket

@lonelyowl @p How are you going to keep them down on the farm when they have Jupiter brains?

@lonelyowl @houseoftolstoy @judgedread

> Humans already rely on tech more than on anything natural.

Because you have mistakenly separated the two. Domesticating the dog was a hundred thousand years, and we end up with these things that we like, and they like us, and we work well together and make good friends. We've shaped each other's evolution. Cats, on the other hand, are just ten thousand, and they go feral much more readily than a labrador. But we have found barbecue pits created by Australopithecus, 2-3 million years old: ashes, flint knives, knife-scored bones. So twenty times as long as it took to turn a wolf into something you can leave a baby alone with, we've been crafting knives and using fire. The course of humanity is inseparable from technology, we have been creating and using tools since before we were recognizably human. Our arms face inwards and our fingers are designed for leverage and manipulating small objects in front of us. Drywall and copper repiping and cars and wool-lined jackets are as much our "nature" as an anthill is an ant's.

> I am happily live in siberia at -40 not because i evolved into a walrus but because i have down jacket

Well, I ask if you think we're done evolving not because there's anything either of us can do about it, but because I think you will frustrate yourself without accomplishing anything if you put yourself at odds with human nature.

Exactly. And there's another reason to not just rely on current ideals or moral (which I think is really what "tech" meant in this case, even if unbeknownst to ruru). Evolution over long periods is a process that allows for poor results to be weeded out. The beings that survive tend to be better comformed to nature (physis) even if through the application of technology (techne), which is just recursively nature. This may be an analytical definition, but I'll leave that to your pondering.

If the being drastically alters himself over a short period, along with similarly altering other being like himself on a mass level, and the chosen alteration isn't well designed or considered in light of nature, and over long periods, that being will be weeded out.

Thus, there is a huge risk in drastic, immediate change, and perhaps a bit of humility and awe for the unfolding of natural processes and being would better serve man than some foolish rush towards some ill considered ideal.

@Humpleupagus @lonelyowl @houseoftolstoy @judgedread

> If the being drastically alters himself over a short period, along with similarly altering other being like himself on a mass level, and the chosen alteration isn't well designed or considered in light of nature, and over long periods, that being will be weeded out.

Yeah. I don't wanna tear down the fence until I'm damn sure why it was put up.

Right now, what we have is iteration. (More rapid than turtles and whales, but not nearly as fast as fruit flies.) That's valuable. A particularly vicious blight arrives and the banana goes extinct, all of the commercial bananas are clones of the same tree so a fungus hits one, that means they're all vulnerable. Darwin said he somewhat regretted the phrase "survival of the fittest" because it was not understood the way he meant it: species that are over-fit for a niche are fragile, and rapid adaptation is better in the long run. A static population gives us the wrong problem.

@p @houseoftolstoy @judgedread

> but because I think you will frustrate yourself without accomplishing anything if you put yourself at odds with human nature.

Throwing shit at everyone you don't agree with you is absolutely normal and is the part of human nature.
You have put yourself at odds with human nature by running this website, do you feel frustrated

@p @houseoftolstoy @judgedread

I think human nature is something to consider. I don't consider it's holy.

@lonelyowl @houseoftolstoy @judgedread

> I think human nature is something to consider. I don't consider it's holy.

"Holy" is the wrong concept. If you spend your life trying to create Maxwell's demon or a perpetual motion machine, you will regret this to a greater extent than if you put the effort into cold fusion. There is a very good reason for this, and the reason is not that the laws of thermodynamics are "holy".

So you talk about these things like you're talking to someone that is upset that Pepsi changed its logo and that the music kids these days listen to is all clicks and whistles. "Oh, why do we have to reproduce and die, why can't we just solve that problem?" is not something you're going to get done in your lifetime. Feel free to prove me wrong: I'd be delighted if you could. It seems pretty likely to me that we're going to keep screwing and then grabbing our chests and bargling after we run out of cartilage and collagen and if we're lucky, we snuff it while we can still wipe our own asses. If you have a concrete plan, by all means, do not let me get in your way and I'd be delighted to help, but if you don't, then it's purely philosophical. (I do mean concrete.) I'll go in the computer or let Dracula bite me or whatever, that's fine--if it works--but I'm not factoring it into my plans for the future until it's real.

@p Unlike AI there has been pretty much zero practical progress in real life extension - delaying the onset of aging itself - so far. The upper limit remains firmly fixed at 110 or so, and only outliers get that far.

So a betting man would not place a lot of money on it.

I do keep a toe in the field because I know the signs to look for.

@judgedread Yeah, which signs do you mean?

@p Restoration or extension of youth.

Salma Hayek is the only promising sign I've seen that there are secret anti-aging therapies. And there is an alternative hypothesis to explain her.

@p @houseoftolstoy @judgedread

> "Holy" is the wrong concept.

I agree, but it isn't a wrong concept, rather a wrong word.

> There is a very good reason for this, and the reason is not that the laws of thermodynamics are "holy".

You haven't said "making humans immortal is impossible because there is a physics law that prohibits it", and this discussion isn't about if it's possible.

> I'll go in the computer or let Dracula bite me or whatever, that's fine--if it works--but I'm not factoring it into my plans for the future until it's real.

This is okay, i also do not include it in my plans for the future. Maybe i got you wrong, i thought your point is "we shouldn't make humans immortal even if there will be a practical possibility to do it, otherwise bad things could happen"

@lonelyowl @houseoftolstoy @judgedread

> I agree, but it isn't a wrong concept, rather a wrong word.

It's the wrong concept; I don't suggest these things be treated as sacrosanct but that people understand what they are doing before proposing broad, sweeping changes. Nothing to do with "the status quo should never change" but "There are things about the status quo that are beyond your understanding."

You automate a business process, this involves encoding a large number of complex rules. (You might be astonished what happens when you try to put a business into the computer, or how complicated it is to run a warehouse.) Eventually the codebase gets old and crusty, it's the nature of these things, so someone proposes a complete rewrite and sometimes they get their wish and the new system takes years to catch up to the old, shitty one because there are things the old code accounted for and the new code does not. The old code fucked up, it was fixed to account for some implicit rule, it took years of refining, and the new code does not tend to account for any of those things, because it's not obvious what those things are. That's not to say that a rewrite is a bad idea in every case, but that it is something you have to do carefully and you have to understand the implications.

> You haven't said "making humans immortal is impossible because there is a physics law that prohibits it", and this discussion isn't about if it's possible.

You asked why; whether or not it's possible is possibly the most relevant point, because the answer to the actual question of why we have to cope with mortality is that it's the only game in town.

> Maybe i got you wrong, i thought your point is "we shouldn't make humans immortal even if there will be a practical possibility to do it, otherwise bad things could happen"

If I'm stating it briefly, the point is that if you change some very fundamental things about humanity, it is guaranteed not to go how you think it will go. Suddenly everyone in the Congo is missing a right hand and India is overrun with cobras and rats. Unintended consequences. Blame Leopold, blame the Raj, whatever, the actual thing to blame is a large, sweeping policy change, the thing to blame is top-down decision-making. And in the case of the cycle of birth and reproduction and death, it isn't just "We put a bounty on cobras to get rid of the cobras, but people started breeding them to get more money and now we have too many cobras", this is "You can't die any more" and that is a much bigger thing.

@p The ruling stratum was once instinctively opposed to life extension for various reasons. As it is a very difficult problem the lack of venture capital doomed even the attempt in the short term.

I've mentioned Drexler and nanotech recently. I've seen the culture shift 180 from when Engines of Creation was released. Now AI, nanotech and life extension are the primary goals of billionaires like Peter Thiel. If a viable path can be demonstrated the cash is going to flood in.

So if you want mankind to avoid developing it (assuming it can be developed at all) you need to become a fascist and ban it.

@judgedread

> The ruling stratum was once instinctively opposed to life extension for various reasons. As it is a very difficult problem the lack of venture capital doomed even the attempt in the short term.

Larry Ellison turns 80, starts funding a bunch of life extension research.

> Now AI, nanotech and life extension are the primary goals of billionaires like Peter Thiel. If a viable path can be demonstrated the cash is going to flood in.

I believe it.

> So if you want mankind to avoid developing it (assuming it can be developed at all) you need to become a fascist and ban it.

I don't want to get in the way if someone does make that; I just think that it will get Weird in a hurry and there will be unforeseen consequences and some of the weirdness might be existentially horrifying.

@p I have a sunny disposition so I don't dwell on it, but the human species' days are numbered, and it's not a large number.

@judgedread @p We've gone full Freejack.

Somebody que up "Hit Between the Eyes."

@judgedread Apotheosis is an often overlooked solution.
howcanyoukillagod.png

@p @judgedread

Watch me walk the impossible.

AWRIGHT LOOK WHEN HE BE CLIMBIN TO DEM NEW HEIGHTS BEYOND THE SCALE OF AWW CRACKUH-ASS WHYBEECHES MAIN IT SHOWS HOW HE BE CLIMBIN REAL HIGH AND GOOD NIGGA KNOWMSAYIN BUT THEN HE DUMPIN DUH MILK ON HIS SELF SO DAT MEANS NO MATTUH HOW HIGH A NIGGA BE CLIMBIN CRACKUHS ALWAYS GOTTA BUSSA NUT ON HIS BOOBIES MAIN AWN GAWD NIGGA, CAN'T ESCAPE DUH WHYMAN CAN YA NIGGA SSHHHHHEEEEEEEIIIIIIT MMMMMMMHMMMMMMMMMMMM DASRITE :lookhard:

@p That's the plan.

@p

@ins0mniak Attachments are working here again.
audrey-spinning.gif

@p @judgedread It's also histories biggest investment/speculation opportunity if you can figure out which companies are going to rocket as a result.

@lonelyowl @p @houseoftolstoy @judgedread

That's a perception issue.

@lonelyowl @houseoftolstoy @judgedread You can claim anything is human nature; reproduction and death are observable in every species, deeper than human nature, and the characteristics that create stability in any kind of system are practically laws.

> You have put yourself at odds with human nature by running this website, do you feel frustrated

Well, uploads are broken.

@p @lonelyowl @houseoftolstoy

@ins0mniak @p @houseoftolstoy

Ewwww 😖

@ins0mniak @houseoftolstoy @lonelyowl The young lady has exposed her bosoms!

@p @ins0mniak @lonelyowl @houseoftolstoy Zounds! She must be punished for this! Send her to my chambers!

@TrevorGoodchild @p @ins0mniak @lonelyowl @houseoftolstoy ...the OTHER chambers I hope...

@SilverDeth @p @ins0mniak @lonelyowl @houseoftolstoy In the Order of the Gash it's all the same chamber

@TrevorGoodchild @p @ins0mniak @lonelyowl @houseoftolstoy Need some hellraiser emoticons.

@SilverDeth @TrevorGoodchild @p @ins0mniak @lonelyowl @houseoftolstoy "It's not hands that call us... it's desire."

@TrevorGoodchild @ins0mniak @lonelyowl @houseoftolstoy I'd like one too, if we're taking orders.

@p @lonelyowl @ins0mniak @houseoftolstoy SEND THIS NIGER TO THE PENIS EXPLOSION CHAMBER AND HAVE HIS PENIS EXPLODED IMMEDIATELY!!!!

and then send the lady to my chambers

@ExtraSpecialK @houseoftolstoy @ins0mniak @lonelyowl So that's three, we're ordering three? Did you wanna order a large or a small, or, like...I assume we are all ordering without pickles.