I've been away from this blog for a while. I guess one has to be a paying member of the Immortality Institute to post? For some reason I used to be able to post, but then the software wouldn't let me. When I first started writing here, there was a prize for the best blog here (I won, go me!) Maybe the blogs were free back then for that purpose?

Anyway, as it's been a while, I should write an update. There are other corners of the web where I express myself, but I like the anonymity here, and the intersection of topics surrounding health and immortality and the future.

I'm a 42 year old male astrophysicist. Probably the most severe health problem I've had is bipolar disorder, which thankfully only impacts my life during infrequent episodes. For the past year I've been taking hardly any medication and have not had an episode. I've found some natural herbal remedies to be very helpful: ashwagandha and bacopa (from the ayurvedic tradition) in particular. Lately though I've taken a break from the bacopa. One study suggested that high doses in rodents could cause a temporary drop in fertility, which could be restored by stopping treatment. Though I'm not trying to father a child just now, that kind of side effect made me feel a little queasy about the stuff.

As the pseudonym nootrope suggests, I'm interested in improving the clarity of my thinking in general. When I started this blog I was between jobs, and that was a good time for tending to self-improvement. Now I'm burnt out by the daily routine, where I become unmotivated and sometimes make careless errors. When I get home from work I'm no longer so energetic that I want to improve my skills. The one region of my life I have been consistently improving myself in has been physical fitness. I've continued to work out at the gym, both cardio and weight lifting sessions. As studies and anecdotes attest, exercise can be a nootropic. Having a week off between Christmas and New Year's now allows me to take stock a bit and, perhaps if I feel rested enough, start some more self-improvement projects.

Nutrition: A couple of years ago, I was vegetarian. Now I am a healthy carnivore, trying to navigate between the healthiest traditions, incorporating meals from the Mediterranian diet, while often thinking along the lines of the paleo-dieters (i.e., what did we humans evolve to eat?) I've incorporated grass-fed beef into my diet, and some more obscure meats, and liver, while continuing to dine on lots of fatty fish (particularly those low in mercury, like anchovies), fresh fruit and vegetables, nuts and seeds, olive and coconut oil, and some grains and beans. Now and then I'll have a pizza or a dessert. I still drink at least 10 cups of tea a day, usually green or white tea, but sometimes black or oolong. Now I sometimes have a cup or two of coffee as well, and a couple of days a week I'll have a chocolate bar (75% or higher). A couple of days a week I'll have a glass of red wine.

Supplements: still taking the ashwagandha. I find it most useful for when I've woken up early and want to sleep a few more hours. Then 1/4 teaspoon of 5% withanolides powder will put me back to sleep and I'll wake up rested. I'm glad to see there is a study in progress that will look at how bipolar patients respond to the sensoril brand of ashwagandha. I'm also taking cordyceps mushroom extract, zinc, magnesium, borage oil, vitamin D, sometimes gotu kola, sometimes ginkgo, sometimes drink some aloe juice, sometimes resveratrol, sometimes ALCAR, sometimes lecithin, sometimes echinaecia, sometimes schisandra, sometimes siberian or american ginseng. By "sometimes" I mean these are supplements I experiment with, or cycle, or take before going to the gym. Supplements I'm considering: CDP choline, considering adding back lion's mane mushroom, reishi mushroom.

Genetics: Following the discovery through 23andme.com that I'm a "slow methylator" I've been taking methylfolate and methylcoalbumin supplements. However, now I've added TMG (trimethylglycine) as a methyl donor.

I've stopped playing the "n-back" test though perhaps this vacation I'll get started again.

Overall, knock on wood, I'm in good shape: good mental health, muscular yet not overweight, all my hair on my head in its original color (though a few gray hairs creep into my beard). My life itself could use some improvement: more time to myself away from work to be creative, more self-direction at work, the independence and motivation and support to make some major accomplishments in life, the search for a girlfriend or life-long mate. I could probably use some involvement in something like yoga or meditation.

These are all only personal aspects of my life, and all intertwined with extending healthy human lifespan for myself... As for the movement itself, I will probably discuss that in later entries on this blog.

So I'm trying modafinil, a very popular "nootropic", mentioned left and right in articles (The New Yorker, the Nature article on scientists who use mental performance enhancers). This is a bit of a departure for me and I feel a little strange about it. A friend of mine, who knows I am interested in nootropics, and who is also bipolar, gave me a few pills from her prescription. From what I read, this is standard practice among stressed out college students.

But I'd entered this "hobby" with more of a humanistic and holistic mind-set. My idea was that instead of just trying to get ahead or develop myself in ways to impress people, that I'd pay more attention to the subtle enhancing effects of good diet and exercise, focusing on legal and over the counter supplements that had been developed by trial and error by traditional cultures.

On the other hand, modafinil IS hyped a lot--and as someone who has chosen to review "nootropics" on this forum, for the sake of completeness (and curiosity!) I couldn't pass up the offer. Furthermore, my genetic testing from 23andme.com says that my version of the COMT gene that codes for the breakdown of dopamine means that I am of the class of people most likely to benefit from modafinil (even if by suffering from bipolar disorder there may be some risk of a stimulant sending me into mania.) Link to abstract of research paper.

Well, I don't feel hyped up or manic at all. I think the effect is like being anti-drunk. If you imagine having a couple of drinks, and then somehow undoing that, becoming sober, and then overcompensating and becoming extra sober, that's a little like my subjective impression of modafinil. I have mixed feelings about it, and my observations of my mental state on modafinil are mixed. I actually lost my keys (some nootropic!) and spent 30 minutes cleaning my room, looking for them, when it turned out I'd left them in the laundry room! (D'oh! Homer Simpsonized!) I think I had some creative intelligent abstract ideas, although they had holes in them. My piano playing on modafinil has been par for the course, with perhaps a little extra sharpening of my attention. Surfing the internet on modafinil seems if anything even more addictive, as the effect seems to be to help one continue to pay attention to the same thing for a long time... I think maybe having a modafinil trial over the weekend was a mistake, and I should have tried it during the work week!

In my last entry I was a little too caught up in the hype of personal genomics. So far, taking methylated B12 and folic acid doesn't seem to have had any noticeable effects. Maybe I need to take methylated B6 also? Or TMG? Or maybe this will only have long-term preventative effects that I will never notice.

I've been a little too tired to work out at the gym at my regular schedule. I think a week off was probably what my body needed. I'm squatting 300 pounds now, and have "maxed out" the leg press machine (I press more than 400 pounds for 20 repetitions, although I guess one could use the leg press machine with only one leg at a time?) I may start to focus more on aerobic exercise again though, as all the muscle building (while retaining visceral fat) may just make me look squat myself... At some point the weight-training becomes an end in itself and a hobby instead of a means for overall health and longevity, it seems.

Kurzweil and Grossman have a new book out, on Transcending biology. The first 3 chapters are available for free download on the internet. Some of it seems a good introduction, but the discussion with the fictionalized authors from the future seemed a little cheesy.

I haven't updated this in a while. I have lots of news!

1) I got another fitness assessment at the gym. Not as much progress as I'd like. I've obviously been becoming more muscular, as my chest circumference has increased a few inches, but my body fat % has stayed the same at around 15%. My "body age" is 35 years, which would seem good as my actual chronological age is 41, yet my body age was 34 a year ago, so I've aged a year in a year. The trainer advocated changing around my workout routine completely, emphasizing shoulder and back muscles more, and trying "superinterval training" to burn fat. Superinverval training involves moderately easy aerobic activity for a few minutes (I go at 4 miles per hour on the treadmill), followed by a minute or two of all-out sprinting (I go above 10 or 11 miles per hour), repeatedly. It gets my heart rate to 175 beats per minute at maximum, and throughout a 30 minute workout, my heart rate rarely goes below 140 (I have a high base heart rate of 90).

2) I got my results back from 23andme.com. Fascinating!

a) I don't have a super-longevity gene common to those who live to 100
b) No major problems otherwise, and some genes that benefit intelligence
c) I have the version of the MTHFR gene, expressed in 7% of the population, which makes it harder for me to use folic acid. So I bought some folinic acid; I'm going to look into other versions of this and other B vitamins. Who knows, perhaps this genetic knowledge will have a big change on my life!
d) I'm COMT val/val, which lowers my prefrontal dopamine so I don't have as much working memory; in combination with c) above this can cause cognitive problems. I'm considering asking my doctor about adding a COMT inhibitor, or using quercetin (which unfortunately for me has a strange side-effect of making the skin on my hands thin, easily bruised, and a pulpy mess!)
e) I don't have the bipolar genes 23andme.com discuss in their research reports; however, there are hundreds of such candidate genes. I wonder if I may be somewhere else on the schizoaffective continuum than pure bipolar, or whether perhaps the genes in c) and d) have caused cognitive problems.

3) Changes to my supplement routine

I'm taking ashwagandha now only once daily

I've added medicinal mushrooms, which I think are under-appreciated on some of these forums: reishi, which is calming and acts synergistically with green tea to prevent cancer, and cordyceps, which helps with working out at the gym

I've had a swollen lymph node in my neck for a couple of years, and I've become determined to use natural supplements to reduce it (my doctor said it wasn't a serious problem): red root and cleavers have been working slowly but surely

I'm trying astragalus for its general adaptogenic effects as well as the possibility that it could lengthen telomeres

And of course now I'm taking folinic acid, 800 mcg daily

Well, I wrote an entry a few weeks ago, but the computer ate it!

There's been some discussion of a computer-assisted memory exercise that, according to academic research, may be able to increase one's score on "fluid intelligence" tests. The trick is to train your memory of two independent sequences at the same time. In the version you can download from this site, you get a tic-tac-toe style 3x3 grid, and are given one by one a letter in each grid space. Then you have to remember whether the letter you have right now was the same as the letter 3 steps ago or in the same place (or 4 steps ago, or 5, as you improve your short-term memory: in general, n steps ago, thus the name "n-back" for this exercise; "dual" n-back because you have to remember both the position and the letter.)

I tried this out for about a week, although travel and work and laziness made me miss some time or have partial days (leading to some backtracking). My "working memory" has never been anywhere near as good as my long-term memory (which is very impressive), but I started near the normal range and worked my way up as most people do. Below I show a graph of my progress as I increased the n in the n-back:





I'm not sure if this had any effect on my real-life thinking ability, although this could be because I simply didn't notice or be because I didn't stay with the exercise long enough. Once though I did notice in a political discussion that I gave an unusually complex answer, juggling many different factors in mind at once.


I was a bit surprised to realize that there was a cost to the concentration that I was developing! At one point I realized that I hadn't quite consciously noted that the program was not actually showing the letters, but only saying them out loud (which is the purpose for having the sound turned on--but I was concentrating only on the memory of the last n letters, not my actual experiences!) Then I realized I didn't remember just what was done to signal where the letter was on the grid--the grid space turned blue. At some point I realized that with 9 grid squares, it probably was also using only 9 letters, but even after several days of 20 trials each day, I could only remember 6 or 7 of the 9 letters that were being used. I just wasn't paying attention to anything outside of the problem at hand. That was helping me get better at concentrating, but how much interesting and useful information, and how much lateral thinking, might one be missing by concentrating so much?


Around the same time I also sent away for my DNA to be sequenced by one of the popular services that do this. I'll probably report back once I get the results. I'm particularly eager to see if there may be any clues on how to deal with my bipolar mood disorder and or temporal lobe epilepsy. If the research doesn't yet exist that could be useful to me, it may exist in the future, and having a personal stake in what the effects of particular genes are will motivate me to learn more about cutting-edge genetic research. I doubt I'll have any genetic dispositions that make a long life less likely.


I'm still concentrating on building muscle mass over cardiovascular, endurance-based workouts. Now that I'm no longer vegetarian, I'm finding it easier to put on muscle. I'm a bit surprised by how easy it is, in fact. I'm 41 years old. When I was in my mid-20s, I worked out at the gym a lot, thinking that as I got older, I'd never again have the chance to be buffed. I don't think I would have expected 15 years ago that at 41 I'd be this muscular. I'm sure I could go further; I'm not a complete gym rat. I'm squatting 220 pounds (with the use of a machine) for about 15 repetitions and bench-pressing two 80 pound dumbbells (I use dumbbells instead of barbells because I don't use a spotter--it's generally harder to lift the same weight in dumbbells as barbells.)


I'm still up in the air about whether a vegetarian or meat-based diet is healthier. Probably it's a meaningless question and it depends on the particular diet and what one wants to optimize. And probably we are still ignorant of all the bodily effects of meat. I did manage to find a meat store nearby that has grass-fed beef and even some exotic game meats: turtle, kangaroo, llama, even bear! I haven't tried those exotic meats though. I haven't gone completely paleo yet!


But I think that at least subconsciously, I'm treating the fact that I'm getting more muscular as vindication of the meat-based diet for health if not ethical or environmental reasons. It feels, not in a rational way, that this is the way my body is more meant to be. Maybe I'm just taken with the novelty of it, and the realization that change is good when not everything in one's life is going one's way.


As for my current supplement "stack":



5 percent withanolides ashwagandha, 1/8 teaspoon 3 times daily
20 percent bacopasides bacopa, 1/8 teaspoon 2 times daily
2 teaspoons matcha green tea, 2 times daily
1 teaspoon maca powder, daily
25 mg grape seed extract, 2 times daily
400 mg gotu kola, 40 mg gotu kola extract, 2 times daily
vitamin shoppe advanced longevity formula (I got at discount), 2 times daily (acetyl l carnitine, alpha lipoic acid, carnosine, n-acetyl cysteine, broccoli seed extract)
2000 iu vitamin d3 daily
580 mg schizandra ad lib



The goals of these supplements are: mood stablization, nootropic effects, anti-anxiety, improved sleep, improved endurance, improved recovery from workouts

I don't think I mentioned that back in September, I had my cholesterol levels and triglycerides measured.

Total Cholesterol: 146
HDL ("good"): 40
LDL ("bad"): 87
TG: 48

Comparing these with results displayed on an Immortality Institute Forum discussion,
makes me think that I'm doing pretty well: the numbers are similar to those from people undergoing a CR (Calorie Restricted) diet. The one number I think I should try to improve is the HDL, which I should find some way to raise.

I tried another experiment with piracetam. At first I think it gave me more social adeptness and enthusiasm, but I had doubts again about whether it might cause problems for my mood, so I discontinued it. At least it gave me some appreciation that "nootropics" also may work some seeming personality change.

As I mentioned before, I'm experimenting with adding meat back to my diet after a long time as a pisco-vegetarian. Considering that my physical health has generally been good, it might not seem like I need to take this step, but I think it's worth stepping back, asking, "Where else could I be in life, in terms of how I'm thinking and feeling?" and then experimenting with various steps.

One danger, though one I find amusing, is that I start to think of meat as a "health food", that it's some exotic addition to my normal diet that offers almost magic powers. I think that's how people in 3rd world countries often have viewed meat. I'm not ready yet, however, to chuck the conventional wisdom of the pisco-vegetarian that too much red meat in the diet can cause problems: hey, I saw "Supersize Me", and taking into account the high fructose corn syrup sodas and the fact that the burgers at Mickey D's are pumped on hormones and slathered in mayo, I still think there are long-term problems with heavy-meat diets, even if they are not of low quality fast food.

My weight has gone up from 160 to 170 pounds, and my waist from 32 to 33, but I've also been getting more muscular, so I'm not yet ready to pull back from the experiment, while I'm also not rushing into the typical American male diet.

I haven't updated this in a while, although I meant to at several times. A couple of changes in my life: my bipolar mood problem flared up for a bit. Apparently the ashwagandha and bacopa remedies weren't strong enough, although at one point I traveled and didn't bring my ashwagandha with me. The conventional medicines may well have made things worse instead of better, but I bounced back eventually, and am back to my earlier medication regime. The other change is that I've temporarily put aside my vegetarianism. I think the second change followed from the first: when things go wrong, I think it makes sense to tinker with how one's living--it pays to take more risk to find a better way of living.

As for supplements and exercise: I'm back on ashwagandha, bacopa, green tea, turmeric, sometimes ALCAR and ALA, resveratrol, fish oil, and borage oil. Also a multivitamin, D3, zinc, and magnesium in the evening. I think with the colder weather and fewer daylight hours I've been getting less exercise, but I'm trying to get back to the gym and back walking. I'm concentrating more on weightlifting than on aerobic fitness during this period of being a carnivore.

I haven't yet failed in my project of living forever, which is good, but my experiments with supplements to help with mood and cognition (which is why after all I call myself nootrope) have had mixed results so far.

As I mentioned in an earlier entry, I was experimenting with rhodiola, which I thought was a bit risky for me to take. It had some positive effects, but as I said I thought it also raised my sensitivity to rejection. Having just experienced some romantic rejection, I figured it was extremely counterproductive for me to continue taking rhodiola, and I stopped it about 3 weeks ago.

In fact, now I'm getting to observe how well my regimen of anti-anxiety and nootropic supplements help me deal with stress. As I've also mentioned, I've been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and this often expresses itself in response to external stressors. I'm experiencing stresses I've felt before, and so far I seem to be doing better. At least that's my subjective evaluation.

As for the changes to my supplement regimen: not so much related to anxiety reduction is my addition of Jarrow Formulas "CarnitAll", which includes Acetyl-L-Carnitine Arginate, which some studies have shown to increase neurite outgrowth even faster than regular Acetyl-L-Carnitine. I haven't tried this form of ALCAR before. However, I'm not entirely convinced that neurite outgrowth is always a good thing! I'm taking this with alpha lipoic acid. I decided to cut costs and bought only the racemic mixture, not the preferred R alpha lipoic acid.

To reduce stress and help me sleep, I bought some valerian root and some kava kava extract. The valerian root was much cheaper! It helps me fall asleep, but then I sleep lightly and wake up early. The kava I think mellows me more.

Still, I think it's the ashwagandha and possibly the bacopa that are helping me the most. My priority is to ward off an acute phase, in which herbal supplements may not be adequate.

Unfortunately, in times of stress and or duress, I find it hard to get around to some regular activities that could help reduce stress. I haven't been going to my gym much, although I have been going for nice long walks outdoors. I saw my general practitioner recently and so I should be receiving some blood test reports to help me monitor my health. My weight's at 164, a little on the low side since I started building muscle, but my weight hasn't varied outside of the 160-170 range for a long time.

I need to update this more regularly!

My gym workouts continue to go well. I'm squatting 180 pounds for 15 repetitions, for 1-3 sets. Each time I do a set I get a huge endorphin rush. When I was 25 years old, I decided to do a lot of weightlifting (for a Ph.D. student!), figuring that I'd lose muscle as I aged, and that this was my only chance to seek to reach my maximum potential. However, I'm surprised to find that at 40 I'm putting on muscle as well as, or better than, I did 15 years ago. I take a lot of supplements, but not many of those geared specifically towards body-builders: no creatine, protein powders, whatever the kids are taking these days. I'm pescotarian--that is, the only meat I eat is fish (for the omega-3s): no chicken, turkey, pork, or red meat.

However, I am a big fan and enthusiastic ingestor of adaptogens. I continue to take small amounts of rhodiola. I read somewhere that adaptogens can have something like 30% of the effect of steroids. Though I suspect they are not nearly as dangerous (and certainly have the fact that they are legal going for them!)--my understanding is that adaptogens (like ginseng, rhodiola, ashwagandha) have substances that are similar to hormones, so that if the body has low levels, these substances can add some effect. However, if the levels of the body's hormone are high, the similar chemical in the adaptogen can compete in reaching the receptors. When the adaptogen replaces the actual hormone, it thus diminishes the hormone's effect.

I noticed a slight eye twich that I think was caused by ALCAR, which I'm now off of. I'm going to try resveratrol again. Last time the skin on my knuckles became thin and red, and that worried me a bit.

My 27 year old office-mate was surprised to hear that I'm 40; he said he would have guessed 32. That fits with what my gym assessment concluded (biological age of 34, and that was before I started weightlifting). I started my 10 cup a tea green tea regimen at 32, so perhaps that's when the clock started turning more slowly!

At some level though, I think my interest in anti-aging regimes is motivated by a sense I'm not living life to its fullest, and the prospect of a long life lets me figure I'll get around to doing all that living later! On the other hand, it's also something of a hobby--I'm always learning new things about this food or that supplement or the other variety of exercise. And this new far-out transhuman singularity vision... I do see some downsides though; for example, on the forums here sometimes a very young person will ask for supplements to modulate every aspect of their mood or thinking, when it seems a little more awareness of one's psychology, how to manage oneself, and general nutritional, exercise, and sleep regimen guidelines might help more.

My 73 year old father also seems to be aging well. He takes statins, so I suggested he take co-Q10 (although I've read some controversy involving it). So my independent research helps not only myself!

Increased U.S. Life Expectancy

It's great news that US life expectancy has gone up by 3 months. I think that's just what this community should focus on. There's much that seems from here to be very far in the future, or at last very speculative: downloading our personalities into computers, cryogenics, etc. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

All the talk about the "singularity" sounds a bit strange sometimes when one reads the news, with all the wars and projected resource shortages, and messed up developing nations. One wonders if the future will look like H.G. Wells's The Time Machine, with one portion of the world evolved into child-like creatures who have it all, while the other portion roughly struggles for survival.

A statistic like national life expectancy lets us look at how people in general are doing (at least within our industrialized nation--though we tend to overeat and we have uneven medical care). I think it would be a big problem if life extension technology were available only to a portion of humanity.

Rhodiola

The first time I tried rhodiola, instead of feeling energized or having insomnia, I actually felt run-down and tired. Using it consistently for a week, though, I did notice its stimulating effects, which are contraindicated for someone (as myself) with bipolar disorder, though I continue to test the substance very carefully in small doses. While taking rhodiola, I felt more outgoing, more sensitive to music, and continued to have good results from working out at the gym. However, I think it also made me a little more anxious, sensitive to rejection, and may have lessened my usual calm detachment.

Speaking of the gym, my workouts are going well. A month and a half ago I was lifting 70 pounds on the squat machine (for 15 repetitions); now I lift 140 pounds for 15 reps. But I think I may be over-emphasizing weight training over cardiovascular training.

Today I picked up from my ex-housemate my check for the "Mobius award" for blogging here. Thank you, Immortality Institute!

Supplements

I had a look in a paper notebook I've been keeping for a while, and it seems to me as if I was more on top of things back in September: I was coming up with more creative ideas and was being more precise in describing them and looking at their consequences. I wasn't working then, and had the luxury of taking a daily hike; now my job requires that I get a multitude of details right in setting up and adapting my supervisor's computer program. So there may be aspects of my life other than nootropic supplements to look at. But still, the feeling that I've been sliding a bit towards mediocrity has made me think again about how I'm managing myself.

I'm wondering whether bacopa is really doing much for me. I started taking it in January. Perhaps it has been of more benefit in lowering my anxiety than in improving cognition. I had tapered down to a negligible dose of my mood stabilizer/anticonvulsant, and while my mood was nevertheless fine, maybe I used up some mental energy staying that way. Now I'm taking less bacopa and a low but non-negligible dose of the anticonvulsant.

I still think ashwagandha is a great supplement and part of why I've been doing so well since September. But I'm also back on R-ALA/ALCAR (for those supplement buffs who need only the initials), fish oil, and evening primrose oil. I'm looking at other adaptogens: Siberian (eurethro) root (which I was on in September) and rhodiola (which I plan to be very careful with, as I've read it can be over-stimulating.)

For a while I had been interested in all the medicinal mushrooms that could improve immunity; I tried a run of reishi. I even found some fresh Lion Mane's Mushroom in a local Whole Foods (they sell it under the name pom-pom, however). It was yummy! I'm enthusiastic about including in my diet beneficial plants that can be easily overlooked: mushrooms, spices, and herbs.

Exercise

I took the weekend off from the gym, but I thought I'd note that my workout strategy is an unusual one compared with what I've followed most of my life. I had session with a personal trainer, and she wants me doing a large number of "reps"--15 to 20. I used to read the online weightlifting discussion boards, and they always suggested 6-8 reps. Even before meeting the personal trainer, I'd been thinking that I was too slanted towards the weightlifters/bodybuilders because they were the fitness buffs most likely to write in serious detail about what they did in the gym. But I'm looking for general fitness. She also had me go through a very extensive stretching routine.

I spent a couple of years without much regular use of a gym. I did a lot of walking and dancing though. I'm a little surprised now that at 40 I can still build up muscle pretty quickly. Large numbers of repetitions suffice for noticeable improvement.

Futurism / Singularity

Metafilter, one of my favorite online discussion groups, pointed me towards a discussion of The Singularity in IEEE Spectrum magazine. I also came across a Bloggingheads TV show featuring science journalist John Horgan (The End of Science) interviewing Elizaier Yudkowski (of the Overcoming Bias blog).

It's interesting food for thought, and the purported Singularity is far enough in the future that one can pronounce one's opinions (as fact!) without true reality-checks.

I tend to be skeptical of Yudkowski's point of view, that intelligence can be replicated in a "optimized" way completely independently of the architecture that our brains are built on. I think certain "Singularitarian" points of view have their own anthropocentric bias (devaluing non-human animal intelligence), and value science culture over humanistic culture in a biased way. The concept of "optimal" intelligence seems to me to need real scrutiny. Observing myself closely as I respond to "nootropic" supplements has only reinforced to me that thinking and feeling come in many forms and that they respond in interesting ways (hard to categorize) to biology.

I don't have any coherent convincing argument for my skepticism, only a number, really, the number connecting microscopic and macroscopic worlds, 6.02x10^23, Avagadro's number. I just kind of whistle and say, "Gee, that's big--biological systems are very complex!"

But computer and bio tech are certainly accelerating.

The central purpose of this place, the Immortality Institute, I think is less speculative. Certainly some animals live longer than others, and Calorie Restriction has been shown to increase the life span of some animals. I didn't respond that well to resveratrol (evidence shows it may activate sirutins, as does CR, to increase life span as well). A longer life span isn't immortality of course, and de Grey's provocative position to look at natural death as something unacceptable is an interesting spur to action, but I'm not so optimistic that death from natural causes will be completely wiped out soon.