Objections To Immortality :: Michael Anissimov

Objections to Immortality
‘Answering Leon Kass’
By Michael Anissimov :: Feb. 2003

How far can we push life extension? A panoply of technologies currently under development could, in principle, extend the human lifespan indefinitely. Deaths in accidents may continue to be possible, but there’s no physical law that would necessarily prevent a human’s body from being immortal by design. A triple wave of future advances - sophisticated biotechnology, medical nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence - all offer powerful theoretical and practical arguments for the realistic achievability of radical life extension.

Biotechnology, such as in gene therapy, telomere-extension, or the cheap manufacture of replacement organs, is a continuously growing area of research, but is also one of the most ethically troublesome areas of research, and therefore is heavily regulated by conservative policymakers. The Life Extension Foundation is a good example of an organization focusing primarily on the biological approach to immortality. Medical nanotechnology entails the control of large groups of molecular-scale machines, which could enter the body noninvasively and regularly repair biological damage on a fine-grained level, before it can accrete. The Foresight Institute (www.foresight.org), most notably the researcher Robert Freitas Jr., is widely known for studying the technical and political aspects of medical nanotechnology, among other types of nanotechnology. Creating benevolently self-improving artificial intelligence is the pursuit of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (www.singinst.org), a research project aiming to create genuine transhumanity by exploiting the unique cognitive advantages a general AI would have relative to humans. These cognitive resources could rapidly be applied in humanitarian areas, such as life extension research, with rapidly effective results (from the human perspective.) The Immortality Institute and the Extropy Institute (www.extropy.org <http://www.extropy.org>) are additional organizations representing proponents of scientific immortality from a variety of different approaches and perspectives.

But the pursuit of radical life extension, of course, is not without opponents, and there exist a number of prominent individuals in politics and science who see longer lifespans as undesirable and threatening to the spirit of man. Perhaps the most active of these individuals is Leon Kass, the head of President Bush’s bioethics steering committee, who has given numerous talks about the perils and foreignness of human life extension and lobbies for intense regulation in this area. As a director of the Immortality Institute and the author of this document, I present a series of rebuttals to six of Kass’s most central objections to immortality, in an argument-counterargument format.

Firstly, Kass argues that if everyone overcame aging it could lead to negative social consequences, a "Tragedy of the Commons" that could include such things as overpopulation and skewed demographics.

Widespread extreme life extension will most definitely reshape the fabric of society in profound ways, but these are challenges that will need to be faced head on, not avoided. A society with the technological capacity to overcome aging is also extremely likely to possess other useful technologies that will soften or eliminate the negative social impact of widespread life extension usage. Profound social and technological events (such as the rise of capitalism or the invention of cheap aircraft) have had unique impacts in the past, challenging societies to reform and adapt to these inevitable milestones along the path of man’s moral and technological development. Many of the issues presented by life extension are issues already in need of an urgent solution, such as the overpopulation problem or diminishing fossil fuels, and where advances are already starting to be made. Extreme life extension isn’t liable to introduce any new fundamental problems that we wouldn’t have had to deal with to begin with, and will in fact correct the problems of aging and death, which limit human choice in our own lives. A growing technological civilization must ultimately address these issues whether or not extreme life extension becomes available in the near future. Near-term progress in genetic engineering, nanotechnology, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence will increase mankind’s problem-solving capacity and enable us to better confront current or forthcoming problems along the imminent route of technological acceleration ahead of us.

For example, the researcher Eric K. Drexler has already developed extensive theoretical arguments for the feasibility of nanotechnology¹, a bottom-up manufacturing technology which will allow the synthesis of cheap food and housing from raw materials for extremely low costs. This technology could also be applied towards the construction of cheap spacecraft or space elevators², giving millions or billions of individuals the opportunity to colonize the solar system should the Earth become uncomfortably overpopulated. Marshall T. Savage has estimated in his book "The Millennial Project"³ that the Solar System could sustain upwards of billion billion humans, each with mansions upon mansions of living space, for several billion years. (Outer space is big.)

For better or for worse, widespread demand for extreme life extension will surface once people are convinced of its possibility, and there would be no greater social injustice than to withhold that privilege from them. Unless vast sectors of scientific and technological research are completely shut down or dictatorially regulated, progress will continue and we will have to confront these changes. Longer and longer lifespans will incrementally emerge due to better nutrition, medicine, and a more widespread, sophisticated, scientific awareness of what factors add or subtract from living a long, healthy, happy life. To place some arbitrary cap on lifespan due to an anticipation of future society’s ineptness at handling the challenge is not only morbidly pessimistic, but robs everyday people of their right to live and pursue happiness indefinitely.

Secondly, Kass worries that life extension technologies will widen the gap between the rich and the poor, leading to greater social inequities and an overall regression in society’s well-being.

Even if life extension would initially be more accessible to the wealthy, the advantage that the rich would derive from such access would be transient and fleeting - historically, novel technological innovations quickly filter down to the masses, and excepting the case of coordinated global action, extreme life extension will be no exception. This becomes especially true in the case of life extension implemented by nanotechnology or artificial intelligence, where the tools one would use to repair the deterioration of their own body are indistinguishable from the tools they would use to simply cure a disease, mend a broken limb, or conduct a variety of other medical tasks. A postulated scenario in which the rich are able to obtain longer lives and the masses are not for a sufficiently long duration as to contribute appreciably to social inequality assumes that extreme life extension is obtained and all other progress miraculously screeches to a halt, or life extension is globally outlawed and rich people only use it in secret, or other such equally unlikely scenarios. By observing technological patterns in society today, we can see that the cost of various medical procedures and life-enhancing tools is falling at faster and faster rates; in fact, the emotional and personal importance of such technologies place an even stronger pressure on companies to make them available as opposed to technologies which are merely conveniences.

The dynamic flow of progress and capitalism will continue to make technologies available to individuals who are willing to work for them, and create the attendant legal and social frameworks necessary to accommodate these changes. In the instance of immortality implemented through self-replicating nanotechnology, economic divide could actually prove a non-issue due to an influx of abundance; and while I certainly respect due skepticism with regard to more radical technologies such as nanotechnology, the economic divide that many are proposing wouldn’t just require huge classes of projected technologies being somehow stifled or regulated out of existence, but the reverse of millennia of accrued advances in politics, economics, and other social structures.

Thirdly, Kass argues that we'd lose interest and engagement in life if it went on forever, a sort of “immortalists’ enuui” that postulates that life is only worth living if it is short.

This sentiment seems to entail a very morbid view on life. If a member of an elderly couple is on the verge of death when a new life extension technology becomes available, and this couple decides they want to continue to be together, is it right to deny the continuance of their love on such arbitrary grounds? We didn’t lose interest and engagement in life when average lifespan increased from 30 to 70, in fact, thanks to the explosion of culture and technology; there are more exciting things to do than ever before. Cheaper and more effective medical technologies are extending health span as well as lifespan, ensuring that becoming older doesn’t mean becoming more senile.

Our current lifespan has its characteristic length due to one reason, and one reason only; it was the optimal engineering solution on nature’s evolutionary payoff curve for maximizing the adaptiveness of our species - for evolution to build humans capable of living longer, there needs to be an immediate fitness advantage, i.e., a reproductive benefit. These selection pressures did not present themselves during our evolution, hence the average ancestral lifespan of about 25 years. “Investing more resources” in human longevity would be useless unless long-living humans could outcompete their rivals in the ancestral environment, and diverting the preexisting resources from longevity would have resulted in humans whose lifespans were too short to outcompete others. But now these evolutionary/adaptive reasons are obsolete - humans don’t live in environments like we did when we evolved, and we have no reason to accept nature’s limit on our lifespan or healthspan unless we decide that for ourselves. Our particular lifespan is just the consequence of a set of overlapping constraints which produced the human body, constraints without any cosmic purpose. Humans have already resisted and overcome our default biological limitations through medicine, science, social engineering, government, the postal system, the Internet, and so on. The technologies which will soon enable us to indefinitely lengthen our lives are just natural extensions of the preexisting human drive for progress and happiness. And with the opportunity to enhance our minds as well as our bodies, we will create societies so complex and interesting that our attention or engagement will never run dry.

Social systems would, in time, adapt to the changes that life extension will bring. We live our lives for the future of our children and our children’s children, why not also live our lives for our future selves, if we had the chance? Longer lives will encourage people living in the present to address the problems of the future, and will also contribute to a heightened sense of moral responsibility, because many will choose to be continuously moral rather than escape our transgressions through death.

Fourthly, Kass argues that life wouldn't be serious or meaningful without death, which overlaps with point three, but is more specifically concerned with the existential or cultural meaning surrounding death.

As addressed above, life only becomes unserious, devoid of meaning, etc, if we want it to be. Projections of emergent negative social effects fail to consider interim steps taken to stifle these effects, or channel their energy into more positive areas. Approaching an immortal society with the assumptions and reservations of a limited-lifespan society is not the way to accurately project the attitudes and emotions of the former type of society; we need to factor in advances in worldview which would inevitably take place to accommodate the inevitability of life extension technology. If long lives reduce our seriousness, and we continue to see seriousness as important, then individuals will pick goals and philosophies which support serious thinking and adhere to those. Same thing with meaning. If a bunch of beings that happened to evolve with sub-century lifespans can see meaning in their short lives, then there’s nothing to suggest that individuals who deliberately choose longer lives will lose meaning as a side effect of their choices. Incidentally, the futurist Eliezer Yudkowsky has published a paper on Fun theory, which argues that, through mental enhancement, there is potentially an infinite amount of fun available in the universe.

Fifthly, Kass argues that life wouldn't be beautiful without death (just as a pretty flower is beautiful because we know it will eventually wilt, and a sunset is beautiful because it is short-lived), which again overlaps with the above two points.

The human perception of beauty and aesthetics may currently rest upon the characteristic lifespan we evolved, but as our consideration of beauty and aesthetics mature, we will be given the opportunity to become more wise and grow into the profound technologies which will be developed. Our perception of beauty may have deep evolutionary roots, but these roots will one day be open to revision, on a lesser scale through introspective self-modification, or a greater scale through advanced mental reengineering. More intelligent minds will allow us to more deeply appreciate the structures of the universe, including those structures currently invisible to human beings.

Lastly, Kass argues that mortality is necessary for virtue and morality (we couldn't sacrifice our lives for something if we were immortal).

While it is true that some aspects of our present-day consensus morality do probably rest upon limited lifespan, the injustice of nonconsensual death far overwhelms the small portions of our morality which will be thrown off balance with the introduction of extreme life extension. In a society with longer lifespans and greater overall safety, mortality is playing a smaller and smaller part in the overall picture of morality, and the consensus view on morality has been incrementally changing to reflect this. The consensus view of morality will continue to change to accommodate these humanitarian advances. In almost every case, it's easier to do more good if one is able to live longer, than through sacrifice.

My conclusion is clear; the world needs more life, not less, in order to prosper. We need unbounded happiness and excitement, not grim waiting for a meaningless and preventable end. On the plus side, criticism from people like Kass shows that the prospect of immortality is being taken seriously. A few decades ago, the very notion of indefinite lifespan for humans, no matter what the enabling technology, was considered relatively crazy. So the situation is improving. Now that the mainstream of society is starting to consider the consequences of extended lifespan, immortalists should take the opportunity to speak out and affirm their rights to life, because these rights may be in immediate danger. The time of leverage is now: in the coming decade, many foundational decisions will be made which will lay the groundwork for the future context of the debate. The best way for one to extend their lifespan in today's world is not necessarily through diet, exercise, or supplements, but possibly through arguing the right ideas and actively navigating to the best of all possible futures.

Edited by MichaelAnissimov, 12 May 2008 - 01:44 AM.

Kass worries that life extension technologies will widen the gap between the rich and the poor, leading to greater social inequities and an overall regression in society’s well-being.

I'm surprised that someone who advises a Republican President would make this an objection to engineered negligible senescence (ENS). I don't know if Kass considers himself a Republican, but the party he's advising on bioethics goes out of its way to benefit the rich through tax cuts, special favors and the like, while arguing that helping the rich get richer is good for the whole society. To be consistent with their overall behavior, if Republicans thought that ENS would help their economic goals, they should logically be encouraging it.

Of course, as the technologies for ENS became available to the less well off, ordinary people will have much longer time horizons in which to make plans. In personal finance that means that, barring a catastrophe, they'll have many more years than they can currently expect to get compound interest working in their favor as they save, invest & build wealth. In a stable economic environment with sustainable growth, eventually you can save your way to a net worth equivalent to millions of dollars at today's purchasing power.

Even if only the super-rich could afford ENS at first, currently they don't seem to be clamoring for it with the vast claims on the resources of society they already have. In many ways the advantages of being super-rich are way overstated. (Warren Buffett sleeps on a mattress he bought at Sears, just like his middle-class Omaha neighbors.) You can buy the best healthcare, political power, unusual experiences and the like with your money. But you can't buy a 120+ year life expectancy no matter how big a check you can write. And you certainly can't make a doomsday asteroid or comet go away by threatening it with your attorneys.

Kass argues that we'd lose interest and engagement in life if it went on forever, a sort of “immortalists’ enuui” that postulates that life is only worth living if it is short.

Kass picked this argument out of the air. The socioeconomic objection above at least has some basis in reality, given our historical experience with the dynamics of wealth over time. But we have zero experience with people living for hundreds of years in good physical, emotional & cognitive health.

From what I've read, Kass seems to think that the experiment has already been run in fictional portrayals which show immortals as sad or miserable. All that demonstrates is that Kass should widen his range of reading and viewing. The televison series Stargate: SG-1 regularly portrays radically life-extended characters in a science-fictional setting. While many of them are malevolent, others clearly aren't, and moreover they don't suffer from emotional dysfunctions just because they've been alive for centuries or millennia. I could name numerous science fiction novels which likewise feature really old characters who don't fit the "unhappy immortal" stereotype. Basically Kass's taste in entertainment shouldn't become the basis for public policy regarding how long people will be "allowed" to live, as horrific as that sounds.

Edited by advancedatheist, 28 February 2003 - 04:37 AM.

Great article MA

I found this illogical nugget in one of the Council on Bioethics writings

"Age-Retardation: Scientific Possibilities and moral challenges"....

.....2. Innovation and change: The same glut would likely affect other institutions, private and public. From the small business to the city council, from the military to the Fortune 500 corporation, generational succession would be disrupted, as the rationale for retirement diminished. With the slowing of succession cycles might well also come the slowing of the cycles of innovation and adaptation in these institutions. Innovation is often the function of a new generation of leaders, with new ideas to try and a different sense of the institution’s mission and environment. Waiting decades for upper management to retire would surely stifle this renewing energy and slow the pace of innovation—with costs for the institutions in question and society as a whole.

Turnover in a business can create innovation, but to say that innovation would not occur unless people die is preposterous. Death does not generate creativity and innovation - the human mind does.

Also it seems the writers are very concerned about innovation - except in the arena of life extension.

Edited by Mind, 19 March 2003 - 03:18 AM.

Turnover in a business can create innovation, but to say that innovation would not occur unless people die is preposterous. Death does not generate creativity and innovation - the human mind does.

Also it seems the writers are very concerned about innovation - except in the arena of life extension.

We are certainly receiving mixed messages from a bioethics commission appointed by a conservative administration. On the one hand Kass and his colleagues assume that there's an eternal wisdom about the nature, limitations and purpose of human life, assumptions which imply a static view of human potentials. Yet on the other hand they are worried that radical life extension would lead to a static social situation preventing innovation and change.

What they are really afraid of is that Transhumanism will demonstrate that their "wisdom," much of it derived from religious beliefs, reflects the ignorance and impotence of the childhood of the race. Maybe Transhumanists know something new and nonobvious that these wizened fellows weren't smart enough to figure out themselves.

Hey its a big bad world out there and from the moment your born life is trying to kill you. So its natures will that you die as soon as possible. So I believe that any one who thinks that god or nature has put a limit to your life span is probable right. Maybe they should go back to livng in cave with a hefty life span of 25 years for that is what nature intended. that would imply that the commision pontificators would all be dead by now .

How ironic , if I remember correctly our Vice President would be very dead without advance life extension techniques.

As poited out by Athiest there logic is quite circular

How ironic , if I remember correctly our Vice President would be very dead without advance life extension techniques.

Apparently it's okay to become a cyborg, especially if you're Republican. But any kind of engineering involving squishy biological stuff is taboo.

I don't really believe in what I'm about to say (I’m a Transhumanist and long to live forever), but just wanted to see what reactions I get:
1. Maybe Kass doesn’t really believe what he’s saying but wants people to oppose him so that he gets us to discuss the topic and, this way, be prepared for a better future. Maybe he wants to live forever but wants to make sure any dangers have already been discussed so we don’t get surprised when we get there. He’s just making sure the technology doesn’t get out of control and is used properly. Maybe the Pope is doing the same.
2. Maybe if we had invented immortality 200 years ago, most people alive today would think like Kass (not the way I imagine in point 1 above, but the way he really is !!). We can prevent this by implementing some kind of neural network evolution technology inside our own minds, making sure thoughts evolve inside of us with no need for us to die and new people to be born, for new thoughts to spring. This is already happening inside our biological brains I just think it’s not good enough for it to replace conservative thought with radically new ones. Very old people, I believe, are usually conservative.

Welcome Santiago,

Reply
1. (Kass doesn't really believe) - Hehe, interesting take you have there... but looking at his track record and cultural background, it's clear he's purely indoctrinated in deathist thinking… and probably lacks the tack to carry off this Oscar Winning anti-immortality performance simply to evoke the responses you allude to.

2. (invented immortality 200 years ago) There's a important moral question concerning the implementation of some kind of neural augmentation in order to seed thoughts for immortality... but, if there was such a system and it was ‘elective’, I would guess most humans would chose augmentations which leaned more toward rational goals.. such as greater intelligence, mathematical ability, memorization, etc.....And I would guess that as this happened, more people would inherently drift toward atheism and thus a pro immortalist mindset. So, there may be no need for a coercive system, just a more rational and moral system now, which would hopefully give rise to a pro immortalist society scenario.

But it doesn’t' hurt for us take an activist stance now

By the way.. you may wish to make a post to the Hispanica Forum to introduce the http://www.transhumanismo.org/.

... but, if there was such a system and it was ‘elective’, I would guess most humans would chose augmentations which leaned more toward rational goals.. such as greater intelligence, mathematical ability, memorization, etc.....And I would guess that as this happened, more people would inherently drift toward atheism and thus a pro immortalist mindset.  So, there may be no need for a coercive system, just a more rational and moral system now, which would hopefully give rise to a pro immortalist society scenario.

I'm sure this will be the case at the beginning when people start getting smarter and, therefore, as you say, pro immortality, but once everybody is immortal, how do you keep your mind evolving towards newer and better mindsets? Do you think upgrading will be enough or maybe we need some internal evolution to get rid of conservative ideas? Remember that we won't have younger people to tell us what we are doing wrong. Unless our extremely intelligent mind will realize on its own which thoughts to get rid of in a rational way, i.e., consciously, but that's not the way our mind works today.

It's quite difficult to predict the future... especially after we have access to our own code and the ability to recurssivlely 'improve' at the speed of light... I think this is the classic Singularity scenario.. It seems we're currently limited by our language to even put into words the possibilities after after such a scenario.. especially if one believes in a hard take off... there will be little time between ability and event.

Remember that we won't have younger people to tell us what we are doing wrong.

Why not BJ? Are you suggesting an end to reproduction?

We could be a million years old and still birth a new generation. Regulating birthing to adjust for environment doesn't mean eliminating it. This is why we are able to claim some levels of ZPG even among poorer less developed Nations and it appears the education and empowerment of women was the most crucial issue.

We are, from the theist perspective "The Children of God" and we have been bitching at the "Father, the Mother, and the Great Spirit" ever since we learned how to talk. Did you ever wonder that if there was a God maybe it was listening, learning and evolving too?

The limits of language are more important at present and something I think we can address. Speculation on a "Post Sing Reality", is just that speculation and very limited by a severely distorted current perspective.

We could for example limit child rearing to a fixed quantity every fifty or a hundred years and adjust the offspring's characteristics to reflect the demands of environment and "improvements" to our genetics.

Oh well this is beginning to sound strangely like the Räelian doctrine so I better quit while I am ahead [alien]

Edited by Lazarus Long, 08 April 2003 - 09:30 PM.

Lazarus,
That quote was mine. Maybe we will reproduce, but I doubt we would want to. If I create a new living form I would prefer to make it part of me and not a new separate being. Since I will live forever there is no need to leave descendants. Maybe different parts of me will be roaming different places but they will all be me and will every now and then merge together and join their experiences into one being: me.

Right, I wouldn't suggest any impositions or restrictions on biological procreation.. there will likely be those among us who wish to do so out of nostalgia, etc... however, I think for most of us it will become obvious after we create the suggested tech alluded to by Santiago.. our options will expand and the limitations of natural procreation and future tech copying will seem like the difference between riding a mule and flying in a jet.

I just started a topic thread where I would like to pick up on this issue (biological procreation) and other aspects of behavior with regard to aging. I made a comment there which I think is germane to our discussion. Could we all pick this up in the other room please?

http://www.imminst.o...st=0

Resources are becoming more limited in the world, and will be more so in the future. To have a race of immortals bring up more children seems to be a bad idea, unless we had the space for it. What purpose would more humans serve?

You could breed more in case of accidental death. In a world with more surface area, you may want to breed more to increase technological development. Perhaps breed just for companionship. The problem is that many of these reasons could become obsolete because of certian mental advancements.

In the future I have no doubt the nuclear family structure will fall. If immortallity is reached there will be no need for a family structure. The idea of family will be obsolete. We no longer need a mother or father to take care of us in the future. The system would provide. We will most definately become some sort of hive mind, like a computer network.

Ever since I've heard of the idea of the Singularity I have only thought of the great divide that will exist. The jealousy of those denied their continued lives. We will have set a new standard for death, "Death is not necessary." Now we have an entire world without a hope of life, because of the economic system. Would masses fall into chaotic factions? Perhaps on the worst-case scenario. Will they accept the idea that there are people out there who have become like gods? I don't think so. Something will happen, and it won't be "Justice for all."

Dear Ken-Lazarus,

Very interesting point, including the Räelian comments and the language precisions:-)

By the way, and talking about language limits, was BJ the name of BJKlein or a short form of a non-reproductive technique? Will we need those in the future?

/me forces a laugh lol

Since the focus of this forum is generally monopole male perhaps someone (preferably female) could suggest an egalitarian "cunningly linguistic" equivalent for the female variant of this nonproductive "technique” that makes for a popular slang meme name.

Most of the common lexicon does little justice to the deed and is much too cumbersome for informal dialect. We need more of those concise and efficient acronyms to lend simplicity to common discourse. But perhaps we as males are simply not privy to the secret tongue of Maenads and this is simply a question of getting those that have this common desire to share their definitions and educate us as to their more secretive mode of intercourse.

One caveat however, maybe the problem is that common male desires are satisfied so quickly that such abbreviated acronyms appropriately apply and the reason no such shortened definition exists for female focused acts is that the other gender prefers a languid and more extended commitment to the deed not satisfied by such short terms.

Hah, Leon Kass will be invited to debate the con side of A.I, at Convergence--would be quite interesting if he comes. Michael Crichton, will be invited as well and Francis Fukuyama--so within a month or so, we'll know for sure what big names we have for our Plenary debates, but it is looking like it will be quite a cutting edge conference.