I'm so disillusioned.

I was alerted by an uncritical reference to homeopathy in one of their latest issues: February 2009 "Ask the Doctor".

The product being sold is Natural Relief 1222: http://www.lef.org/Vitamins-Supplements/It...elief-1222.html

Granted its 6x, not 30x, so maybe there's still some active ingredient in there, but homeopathy is a slippery slope. How long until they are selling sugar pills with 30x (ie no active ingredient) concentrations? /sigh.

I actually wrote to them but got the standard marketing brushoff, you know, we sell it because our customers think it works: "Many members have obtained benefits from the Natural Relief 1222. Whether it is due to the homeopathic ingredients or the other ingredients is unknown". Thats science for you.

And the truth is out, I suck at maintaining a blog.

But anyways, don't forget to use Goodsearch when buying things online.

Goodsearch total for this year so far for the Methuselah Foundation: $82.31

Christmas is approaching, a good time to get that total up...

- Tracy

Goodsearch

Total: Year-to-Date $58.59

This is updated weekly.

I had mentioned on the forums earlier that it would be nice to see a carnival of life extension/transhumanist blogs. Well here's an even better idea, a Carnival of Biogerontology, via Ouroboros.

I happened to be reading the latest Carnival of the Godless this morning, which contained, among other things, the usual discussions about the rational bases (or lack thereof) of morality.

This actually impacts life extension. First of all, whatever society we build we are going to have to live in for a very long time (assuming success). Secondly, one of the common objections I hear to extreme life extension goes along the lines of "do you really want to do all this longer than you have to"?

I'm of the general opinion that the evolution of society will happen without conscious direction, much like the evolution of the internet. I'm also of the hopeful opinion that, as societies grow more and more rational (a long term side effect of globalization, exposure to other ways of thinking, and continued scientific growth) then this unconscious evolution will be more and more driven by what works, rather than by bronze age ideals or strange ideologies.

You'd think history would eventually teach us something after all...

As to an actual rational basis for morality, mine (surely not original and definitely influenced by the Social Contract Theory of John Locke - but don't mistake me for a philosopher) goes like this. This is not rigorous, its more of an overview:

One of the core arguments about morality is how to define what is good, if a definition is not imposed from outside. Well, lets start with, what is good to the average person? Things that make you happy and fulfilled. Family, loved ones, liberty, successful careers, bunnies, chocolate...

In fact, the American definition is pretty succinct: Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

So now, to expand this a little, what is in your short term self interest for a society that will allow you to develop your life along lines that are good to you?

You'll want a stable society, since stable societies are capable of producing so many things that can be used to add to your happiness (rather than forcing you to spend most of your time worried about basic survival). Societies strong enough to protect your interests, with a decent justice system so other people can't interfere unfairly with your goals. Societies big enough and stable enough to allow production of the fine things in life: books, movies, art, fine medical establishments, plentiful food, sports, things like that.

What values do people need to develop in themselves to maximize the potential to build such happy societies, which is in all of their best interests? Things like this:

* trust: this is a big one. Can't have a wealthy society if you don't have enough trust to enable commerce. Who wants to spend all their time looking over their shoulder?

* patience: not as big but lets face it, we're all imperfect humans. If we all have a bit of patience with each other life is so much more pleasant. Or we can waste all our time being jerks...

* punishment of cheaters: got to keep people attempting to maximize their own happiness at other's expense down, or the whole trust thing falls apart.

So there are a certain set of values that are logically in your self interest (happily, evolution has already seen this and has built in mechanisms making a large majority of us prefer to act in these ways, at least on average). They promote your own immediate good. I don't think they need a justification beyond that. Stable productive societies maximize our happiness (Even for recluses, who may not prefer to deal with people, but likely enjoy the products of people. Arguably, even for sociopaths).

Now, to go a little further, what is in your long term best interest? You will want to ensure the survival of your society, and you will want to ensure you do not get into a bad position from which you cannot extricate yourself. What values/behaviours does your society need to have to promote this?:

* Some sort of a social safety net, to ensure that you can still survive to pull yourself out of a fall, even if it requires a great deal of effort.

* The society has to be built in such a way that poverty is not intractable. This is going to mean education (eg. for retraining yourself) needs to be attainable for everyone, as does medical care for problems that prevent you from supporting yourself. In addition to being long term self protective, you don't want people on the poorer side of your society having no better option than to take your things to advance themselves...

But there's more. Life is not fair. People outside your nice society can harm you. In fact, if they do not share in its benefits, there really is no reason for them not to harm you. You are not part of their society, your condition does not affect their happiness, and they clearly have much less happiness than you. So you not only want a stable society, you want a stable world. What does this imply? Things like this:

* Never take an approach to trade that maximizes your own country's good unfairly. It may come back to bite you.

* Smart, targeted foreign aid for societies in intractable poverty traps who can be helped. Not only are such societies going to get more and more dangerous to you with improved technology allowing more damage from fewer people... but they are breeding grounds for dangerous diseases and ideologies.

* Recognize other people's rights to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness. You never know when your own society might hit rock bottom, and you sure don't want other people deciding its easier to nuke you so you won't be a disease reservoir. Its best to establish such things are bad right out, even when they may appear to be in your short term interest.

All things we wrestle with all the time right now. The roots of morality really aren't that confusing. Most of us seem to almost instinctively know what is needed. Now if we can just get rid of all those irrational ideologies so we can think collectively more clearly about the issues.

One of the consequences of the above is life extensionists have more of a need to behave morally, since they are more likely to see the consequences of their own actions (something many life extensionists have pointed out already). They also have to live longer with the societies they build, and due to the chaotic nature of life are more likely to have to experience the downsides of their own societies at some point.

I take exception to philosophies that seem to abandon the collective good of society for extreme individualism (eg. extreme libertarianism). Yes, the fact that your neighbor can't afford to educate their children does affect you, directly (especially if they vote). No, you shouldn't necessarily have a choice about everything a society pays for, as that opens the door to getting a free ride by having other people pay for something that is clearly in your long term interest. Its a balance we have to learn from experience.

Superintelligent robots ruling us all may bypass us having to solve all these issues ourselves, you never know...

A bit off topic, but these are absolutely beautiful creatures! Via Pharyngula.

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/06/...let-photography

This one is my favorite. It looks like it should be a beanie baby.

I've decided to go with using my real name here.

I've always liked the anonymity of the internet, but thats more because I'm not a good study of interpersonal relationships and has nothing to do with my identity per se. Can't carry on your side of a conversation... blame lag!

I've never been much for hiding my identity anyways, most people who know my gaming characters well also know who I am (and how I sound, thanks to Vent).

But being as this is a serious forum with impact on my real life, I've chosen to make the switch. At least now I match my folding@home identity 8)

I've been reading this:

http://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-Jeff-Ha...7890&sr=8-1

He presents an interesting hypothesis based on the cortex running a uniform pattern matching and prediction algorithm that can be adapted to many purposes.

It works something like this:



This is a vastly simplified cortical column. There are of course many horizontal attachments, and several layers in the column have various types of neurons. The cortex is a hierarchy of regions of these columns. Note that we know such columns and regions exist from experiment and observation, so here at least the model matches reality.

Information can travel both up and down this hierarchy. When information travels up the hierarchy, the cortex is pattern matching on input from the outside world. When information travels down the hierarchy, the cortex is predicting what pattern it should match next.

A Cortical Column

Information from the next lower cortical region enters a column via synapses in layer 4. Multiple columns from the lower region will synapse here. The column will only turn on for certain combinations of these inputs. Note how this neatly handles ambiguity: the match doesn't have to be exact, it just has to cross a certain threshold. Columns also inhibit neighboring columns, reinforcing this ambiguity resolution.

When layer 4 fires, it lights up the rest of the column, essentially signaling a certain input has been recognized. This match then propagates around the hierarchy in 3 main ways:

* Up the Hierarchy: layers 2 and 3 synapse with layer 4 in various columns in the next higher cortical region, signaling the pattern match.
* Recursively: Layer 5 sends its information to the thalamus, which sends it back to layer 1 of the same cortical region. Since this is time delayed, it allows the region to know what the last input it matched was. This is important for temporal pattern matching.
* Down the Hierarchy: Layer 6 sends its information to layer 1 of the next lower cortical region.

Patterns

A pattern would be a certain set of columns firing together, which would be recognized by a column (or columns) in the next higher cortical region. A pattern can be temporal, since we have incoming information from the thalamus about the last group of columns that fired in this region. Or in other words, a certain sequence of column firing in the current region could cause a column in the next higher region to continuously fire, recognizing this sequence.

Note that this column in the higher cortical region also sends input back to the cortical region, via layer 1. This is the pattern "name".

Prediction

Input from layer 6 of the above region represents the pattern "name". Input from the thalamus represents where we are in the pattern, temporally. Both of these go to layer 1 of the cortical region.

Layers 2, 3, and 5 of the column have synapses in layer 1. If the synapses in layer 1 are active when the column turns on from below (via input to layer 4), these connections grow stronger. Eventually, the column can fire without layer 4 if the correct input is in layer 1. This is a prediction.

How does a column recognize when a prediction is met or not? The proposed hypothesis is as follows:

Layer 2 of all the columns involved in a pattern will stay lit (via those synapses from layer 1) when the cortical region above believes its recognizing the pattern. There are 2 actual layers in layer 3 (there is apparently evidence for this at least): 3a and 3b. When a pattern is in layer 1, layer 3a of the columns in the pattern will inhibit layer 3b. Layer 3b of a column will only turn on if the column fires unexpectedly, via input from below.

Unexpected patterns will propagate up the hierarchy until some level can handle them. Those that propagate all the way up will enter our conscious awareness as an anomaly...

Invariant Patterns

This model helps explain how the brain is so flexible in its pattern matching. A pattern may have variant parts, its the sum of these parts that cause the cortical region to recognize the pattern.

The model also nicely explains what we know about brain plasticity (eg. co-opting of various brain regions for different functionality in injured brains), since it implies the cortex does not start out specialized, it learns to be specialized. Thus, cortical regions could be co-opted for different input if the original input is damaged (eg. loss of a sense, or loss of a cortical region)

For a much better overview of the entire model, see the original book.

Doesn't this just make you want to run out and model it?

Via Technology Review:

http://www.technologyreview.com/Biotech/20640/

I'm definitely getting sequenced when this becomes available...

I thought it might be interesting to examine what I think are some of the positive ways radical life extension will improve our current society.

First up:

1. Balancing Careers and Family

Right now, its unfortunate that everyone's most productive career building years tend to coincide with their most productive family building years. This is especially hard for women. Your typical career woman will have considerable downtime per child, even if she intends to return to work. Plus, many parents of both sexes find themselves missing important aspects of their children's early years by investing too much time in advancing in their careers while their children are young. They have little choice, however. They may not have time to advance their careers as they want if they wait until after their children leave home. So, for many it comes down to a choice: sacrifice quality of life with family, or sacrifice some of your dreams. Whether due to evolutionary biology or to current society, women are still hardest hit finding a balance, and proportionately more women will sacrifice some of their own dreams to stay at home, or limit their work hours, for their children, leading to at least a noticeable percentage of the current disparity in the higher levels of the work force.

Ambition is healthy, dreams are healthy, both help advance the world for all of us. Its a loss for everyone that people have to make such choices. Enter radical life extension. Now, there are a number of choices you can make: sacrifice time and advancement early on to have children young, or develop a strong career, build a large retirement fund, and leave work once you are ready to build your family.

This should also help the current disparity in the work force, something that is important for reducing those aspects of subtle prejudice we all know are still there, since familiarity should teach our subconscious better. It would be nice to reach a time and culture when the talented of both sexes can strive for the same things with equal chances of success, and still have a family and a healthy marriage. No more life changing choice of career or family.

I realize that with radical life extension there will likely be smaller families, but I suspect there will always be children around, at least in some number. Their childhoods should considerably better once we are no longer dying off too soon to balance them and careers both.

- Mey