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Concepts for Functional Replication of Biological Neurons – Article by Franco Cortese

Concepts for Functional Replication of Biological Neurons – Article by Franco Cortese

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The New Renaissance Hat
Franco Cortese
May 18, 2013
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This essay is the third chapter in Franco Cortese’s forthcoming e-book, I Shall Not Go Quietly Into That Good Night!: My Quest to Cure Death, published by the Center for Transhumanity. The first two chapters were previously published on The Rational Argumentator as “The Moral Imperative and Technical Feasibility of Defeating Death” and “Immortality: Material or Ethereal? Nanotech Does Both!“.
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The simplest approach to the functional replication of biological neurons I conceived of during this period involved what is normally called a “black-box” model of a neuron. This was already a concept in the wider brain-emulation community, but I was yet to find out about it. This is even simpler than the mathematically weighted Artificial Neurons discussed in the previous chapter. Rather than emulating or simulating the behavior of a neuron, (i.e, using actual computational—or more generally signal—processing) we (1) determine the range of input values that a neuron responds to, (2) stimulate the neuron at each interval (the number of intervals depending on the precision of the stimulus) within that input-range, and (3) record the corresponding range of outputs.

This reduces the neuron to essentially a look-up-table (or, more formally, an associative array). The input ranges I originally considered (in 2007) consisted of a range of electrical potentials, but later (in 2008) were developed to include different cumulative organizations of specific voltage values (i.e., some inputs activated and others not) and finally the chemical input and outputs of neurons. The black-box approach was eventually seen as being applied to the sub-neuron scale—e.g., to sections of the cellular membrane. This creates a greater degree of functional precision, bringing the functional modality of the black-box NRU-class in greater accordance with the functional modality of biological neurons. (I.e., it is closer to biological neurons because they do in fact process multiple inputs separately, rather than singular cumulative sums at once, as in the previous versions of the black-box approach.) We would also have a higher degree of variability for a given quantity of inputs.

I soon chanced upon literature dealing with MEMS (micro-electro-mechanical systems) and NEMS (nano-electro-mechanical systems), which eventually led me to nanotechnology and its use in nanosurgery in particular. I saw nanotechnology as the preferred technological infrastructure regardless of the approach used; its physical nature (i.e., operational and functional modalities) could facilitate the electrical and chemical processes of the neuron if the physicalist-functionalist (i.e., physically embodied or ‘prosthetic’) approach proved either preferable or required, while the computation required for its normative functioning (regardless of its particular application) assured that it could facilitate the informationalist-functionalist (i.e., computational emulation or simulation) of neurons if that approach proved preferable. This was true of MEMS as well, with the sole exception of not being able to directly synthesize neurotransmitters via mechanosynthesis, instead being limited in this regard to the release of pre-synthesized biochemical inventories. Thus I felt that I was able to work on conceptual development of the methodological and technological infrastructure underlying both (or at least variations to the existing operational modalities of MEMS and NEMS so as to make them suitable for their intended use), without having to definitively choose one technological/methodological infrastructure over the other. Moreover, there could be processes that are reducible to computation, yet still fail to be included in a computational emulation due to our simply failing to discover the principles underlying them. The prosthetic approach had the potential of replicating this aspect by integrating such a process, as it exists in the biological environment, into its own physical operation, and perform iterative maintenance or replacement of the biological process, until such a time as to be able to discover the underlying principles of those processes (which is a prerequisite for discovering how they contribute to the emergent computation occurring in the neuron) and thus for their inclusion in the informationalist-functionalist approach.

Also, I had by this time come across the existing approaches to Mind-Uploading and Whole-Brain Emulation (WBE), including Randal Koene’s minduploading.org, and realized that the notion of immortality through gradually replacing biological neurons with functional equivalents wasn’t strictly my own. I hadn’t yet come across Kurzweil’s thinking in regard to gradual uploading described in The Singularity is Near (where he suggests a similarly nanotechnological approach), and so felt that there was a gap in the extant literature in regard to how the emulated neurons or neural networks were to communicate with existing biological neurons (which is an essential requirement of gradual uploading and thus of any approach meant to facilitate subjective-continuity through substrate replacement). Thus my perceived role changed from the father of this concept to filling in the gaps and inconsistencies in the already-extant approach and in further developing it past its present state. This is another aspect informing my choice to work on and further varietize both the computational and physical-prosthetic approach—because this, along with the artificial-biological neural communication problem, was what I perceived as remaining to be done after discovering WBE.

The anticipated use of MEMS and NEMS in emulating the physical processes of the neurons included first simply electrical potentials, but eventually developed to include the chemical aspects of the neuron as well, in tandem with my increasing understanding of neuroscience. I had by this time come across Drexler’s Engines of Creation, which was my first introduction to antecedent proposals for immortality—specifically his notion of iterative cellular upkeep and repair performed by nanobots. I applied his concept of mechanosynthesis to the NRUs to facilitate the artificial synthesis of neurotransmitters. I eventually realized that the use of pre-synthesized chemical stores of neurotransmitters was a simpler approach that could be implemented via MEMS, thus being more inclusive for not necessitating nanotechnology as a required technological infrastructure. I also soon realized that we could eliminate the need for neurotransmitters completely by recording how specific neurotransmitters affect the nature of membrane-depolarization at the post-synaptic membrane and subsequently encoding this into the post-synaptic NRU (i.e., length and degree of depolarization or hyperpolarization, and possibly the diameter of ion-channels or differential opening of ion-channels—that is, some and not others) and assigning a discrete voltage to each possible neurotransmitter (or emergent pattern of neurotransmitters; salient variables include type, quantity and relative location) such that transmitting that voltage makes the post-synaptic NRU’s controlling-circuit implement the membrane-polarization changes (via changing the number of open artificial-ion-channels, or how long they remain open or closed, or their diameter/porosity) corresponding to the changes in biological post-synaptic membrane depolarization normally caused by that neurotransmitter.

In terms of the enhancement/self-modification side of things, I also realized during this period that mental augmentation (particularly the intensive integration of artificial-neural-networks with the existing brain) increases the efficacy of gradual uploading by decreasing the total portion of your brain occupied by the biological region being replaced—thus effectively making that portion’s temporary operational disconnection from the rest of the brain more negligible to concerns of subjective-continuity.

While I was thinking of the societal implications of self-modification and self-modulation in general, I wasn’t really consciously trying to do active conceptual work (e.g., working on designs for pragmatic technologies and methodologies as I was with limitless-longevity) on this side of the project due to seeing the end of death as being a much more pressing moral imperative than increasing our degree of self-determination. The 100,000 unprecedented calamities that befall humanity every day cannot wait; for these dying fires it is now or neverness.

Virtual Verification Experiments

The various alternative approaches to gradual substrate-replacement were meant to be alternative designs contingent upon various premises for what was needed to replicate functionality while retaining subjective-continuity through gradual replacement. I saw the various embodiments as being narrowed down through empirical validation prior to any whole-brain replication experiments. However, I now see that multiple alternative approaches—based, for example, on computational emulation (informationalist-functionalist) and physical replication (physicalist-functionalist) (these are the two main approaches thus far discussed) would have concurrent appeal to different segments of the population. The physicalist-functionalist approach might appeal to wide numbers of people who, for one metaphysical prescription or another, don’t believe enough in the computational reducibility of mind to bet their lives on it.

These experiments originally consisted of applying sensors to a given biological neuron, and constructing NRUs based on a series of variations on the two main approaches, running each and looking for any functional divergence over time. This is essentially the same approach outlined in the WBE Roadmap, which I was yet to discover at this point, that suggests a validation approach involving experiments done on single neurons before moving on to the organismal emulation of increasingly complex species up to and including the human. My thinking in regard to these experiments evolved over the next few years to also include the some novel approaches that I don’t think have yet been discussed in communities interested in brain-emulation.

An equivalent physical or computational simulation of the biological neuron’s environment is required to verify functional equivalence, as otherwise we wouldn’t be able to distinguish between functional divergence due to an insufficient replication-approach/NRU-design and functional divergence due to difference in either input or operation between the model and the original (caused by insufficiently synchronizing the environmental parameters of the NRU and its corresponding original). Isolating these neurons from their organismal environment allows the necessary fidelity (and thus computational intensity) of the simulation to be minimized by reducing the number of environmental variables affecting the biological neuron during the span of the initial experiments. Moreover, even if this doesn’t give us a perfectly reliable model of the efficacy of functional replication given the amount of environmental variables one expects a neuron belonging to a full brain to have, it is a fair approximator. Some NRU designs might fail in a relatively simple neuronal environment and thus testing all NRU designs using a number of environmental variables similar to the biological brain might be unnecessary (and thus economically prohibitive) given its cost-benefit ratio. And since we need to isolate the neuron to perform any early non-whole-organism experiments (i.e., on individual neurons) at all, having precise control over the number and nature of environmental variables would be relatively easy, as this is already an important part of the methodology used for normative biological experimentation anyways—because lack of control over environmental variables makes for an inconsistent methodology and thus for unreliable data.

And as we increase to the whole-network and eventually organismal level, a similar reduction of the computational requirements of the NRU’s environmental simulation is possible by replacing the inputs or sensory mechanisms (from single photocell to whole organs) with VR-modulated input. The required complexity and thus computational intensity of a sensorially mediated environment can be vastly minimized if the normative sensory environment of the organism is supplanted with a much-simplified VR simulation.

Note that the efficacy of this approach in comparison with the first (reducing actual environmental variables) is hypothetically greater because going from simplified VR version to the original sensorial environment is a difference, not of category, but of degree. Thus a potentially fruitful variation on the first experiment (physical reduction of a biological neuron’s environmental variables) would be not the complete elimination of environmental variables, but rather decreasing the range or degree of deviation in each variable, including all the categories and just reducing their degree.

Anecdotally, one novel modification conceived during this period involves distributing sensors (operatively connected to the sensory areas of the CNS) in the brain itself, so that we can viscerally sense ourselves thinking—the notion of metasensation: a sensorial infinite regress caused by having sensors in the sensory modules of the CNS, essentially allowing one to sense oneself sensing oneself sensing.

Another is a seeming refigurement of David Pearce’s Hedonistic Imperative—namely, the use of active NRU modulation to negate the effects of cell (or, more generally, stimulus-response) desensitization—the fact that the more times we experience something, or indeed even think something, the more it decreases in intensity. I felt that this was what made some of us lose interest in our lovers and become bored by things we once enjoyed. If we were able to stop cell desensitization, we wouldn’t have to needlessly lose experiential amplitude for the things we love.

In the next chapter I will describe the work I did in the first months of 2008, during which I worked almost wholly on conceptual varieties of the physically embodied prosthetic (i.e., physical-functionalist) approach (particularly in gradually replacing subsections of individual neurons to increase how gradual the cumulative procedure is) for several reasons:

The original utility of ‘hedging our bets’ as discussed earlier—developing multiple approaches increases evolutionary diversity; thus, if one approach fails, we have other approaches to try.

I felt the computational side was already largely developed in the work done by others in Whole-Brain Emulation, and thus that I would be benefiting the larger objective of indefinite longevity more by focusing on those areas that were then comparatively less developed.

The perceived benefit of a new approach to subjective-continuity through a substrate-replacement procedure aiming to increase the likelihood of gradual uploading’s success by increasing the procedure’s cumulative degree of graduality. The approach was called Iterative Gradual Replacement and consisted of undergoing several gradual-replacement procedures, wherein the class of NRU used becomes progressively less similar to the operational modality of the original, biological neurons with each iteration; the greater the number of iterations used, the less discontinuous each replacement-phase is in relation to its preceding and succeeding phases. The most basic embodiment of this approach would involve gradual replacement with physical-functionalist (prosthetic) NRUs that in turn are then gradually replaced with informational-physicalist (computational/emulatory) NRUs. My qualms with this approach today stem from the observation that the operational modalities of the physically embodied NRUs seem as discontinuous in relation to the operational modalities of the computational NRUs as the operational modalities of the biological neurons does. The problem seems to result from the lack of an intermediary stage between physical embodiment and computational (or second-order) embodiment.

Franco Cortese is an editor for Transhumanity.net, as well as one of its most frequent contributors.  He has also published articles and essays on Immortal Life and The Rational Argumentator. He contributed 4 essays and 7 debate responses to the digital anthology Human Destiny is to Eliminate Death: Essays, Rants and Arguments About Immortality.

Franco is an Advisor for Lifeboat Foundation (on its Futurists Board and its Life Extension Board) and contributes regularly to its blog.

Bibliography

Embedded Processor. (2013). In Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved from http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/185535/embedded-processor

Jerome, P. (1980). Recording action potentials from cultured neurons with extracellular microcircuit electrodes. Journal or Neuroscience Methods, 2 (1), 19-31.

Wolf, W. & (March 2009). Cyber-physical Systems. In Embedded Computing. Retrieved February 28, 2013 from http://www.jiafuwan.net/download/cyber_physical_systems.pdf

The Moral Imperative and Technical Feasibility of Defeating Death – Article by Franco Cortese

The Moral Imperative and Technical Feasibility of Defeating Death – Article by Franco Cortese

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The New Renaissance Hat
Franco Cortese
May 5, 2013
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Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enameling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

~ W. B. Yeats

“The original is unfaithful to the translation.“

~ Jorge Luis Borges

“Whatever can be repaired gradually without destroying the original whole is, like the vestal fire, potentially eternal.“

~ Francis Bacon, A History of Life and Death, 1638

I became both Immortalist and Transhumanist long before I knew such designations existed. In 2006, at age 14, I conceived of both the extreme desirability and technical feasibility of ending death, without any knowledge of the proposals for immortality already extant. I thought I was the only one in the world who saw both the utter, belligerent waste of death, and our ability to technologically defeat it. I was dumbfounded that humanity wasn’t attacking the problem like any other preventable source of widespread suffering. I saw that the end of death was not only desirable but a moral imperative.
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If we have the power to make it happen, or have even a chance at doing so, yet fail to even try for reasons of inertia, incredulity, or indifference, then we are condemning massive amounts of real people to unnecessary death by our inaction. I felt a moral obligation to work on conceptual development of the various pragmatic aspects required  to physically realize indefinite longevity until I was old enough to physically put these developments into practice – i.e., do experiments and design physical systems. I worked on my grand project, as I thought of it, from August 2006 until May 2010, at which time I discovered multiple other approaches to indefinite longevity being actively developed (initially through Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near), and even multiple antecedents of my own approach, I felt less of an imperative to continue active conceptual development on these procedures. I was happy to find the existing Immortalist movement, of course; I stopped not out of resentment for having been anteceded, but rather out of newfound assurance that the defeat of death didn’t lay solely in my hands.

I had worked for 4 years on conceptual designs and approaches to indefinite life extension – designs that I was planning on building and experimentally verifying in my young adulthood, whether through normative medical research and academia or through a privately funded venture, thinking that I would have more of a success than if I came to the world as a teenager with these ideas, as they were. By 2010, 4 years into the project, I discovered that others were seeking the defeat of death through technological intervention as well, and that many of the specific ideas I had come up with were already out and in the world.

My original approach involved transplanting the organic brain into a full cybernetic body. Over the next few months I collected research on experiments in organic brain transplantation done with salamanders, dogs, and monkeys , on maintaining the brain’s homeostatic and regulatory mechanisms outside the body and on a host of prosthetic and robotic technologies which I saw as developmentally converging to allow the creation of a fully cybernetic body. I soon realized that this approach was problematic; while the brain typically dies as a consequence of its homeostatic and regulatory mechanisms (i.e. heart and lungs failing), it would still fall prey to cell death if it remained organic, even if such regulatory mechanisms were maintained technologically.

This obstacle led to my conceiving the essential gestalt of uploading – the gradual replacement of neurons with functional equivalents that preserve each original neuron’s relative location and connection – three months later. Although my original approach was prosthetic (i.e., physically embodied functional equivalents of neurons), I eventually saw computational models as being preferable for their comparatively higher speed and ease of modification and/or modulation.

I discovered that Brain-Emulation and Connectomics (or Mind-Uploading more informally) was an existing discipline not long after conceiving of the idea, but at the time thought that various aspects required for gradual replacement (and thus for real immortality, and not the creation of an immortal double, were undeveloped in regard to how the computational models would communicate and maintain functional equilibrium with the existing biological neurons. If we seek to replace biological neurons with artificial equivalents, once we have a simulation of a given neuron in a computer outside the body, how is that simulated neuron to communicate with the biological neurons still inside that biological body, and vice versa? My solution was the use of initially MEMS (micro-electro-mechanical systems) but later NEMS (nano-electro-mechanical-systems) to detect biophysical properties via sensors and translate them into computational inputs, and likewise to translate computational output into biophysical properties via electrical actuators and the programmed release of chemical stores (essentially stored quantities of indexed chemicals to be released upon command). While the computational hardware could hypothetically be located outside the body, communicating wirelessly to corresponding in-vivo sensors and actuators, I saw the replacement of neurons with enclosed in-vivo computational hardware in direct operative connection with its corresponding sensors and actuators as preferable. I didn’t realize until 2010 that this approach—the use of NEMS to computationally model the neurons, to integrate (i.e., construct and place) the artificial neurons and translate to biophysical signals into computational signals and vice versa—was already suggested by Kurzweil and conceptually developed more formally by Robert Freitas, and when I did, I felt that I didn’t really have much to present that hadn’t already been conceived and developed.

However, since then I’ve come to realize some significant distinctions between my approach and Brain-Emulation, and that besides being an interesting story that helps validate the naturality of Immortalism’s premises (that indefinite longevity is a physically realizable state, and thus technologically realizable –  and what can be considered the “strong Immortalist” claim: that providing people the choice of indefinite longevity if it were realizable is a moral imperative), I had several novel notions and conceptions which might prove useful to the larger community working and thinking on these topics.

While this project began as a means of indefinite longevity, it took on Transhumanist concerns within days of its conception. A cybernetic body not only frees one from the strictures of death, but also from the limitations of a static body designed for a static environment. Freed from our flesh, we could comfortably bear any extremes of Earth or beyond; interchange our bodily designs with the nonchalance of attire; and continuously, on a daily basis, take charge of what it means for us to be. I envisioned extreme phenotypic diversity as undermining racism and prejudices, an explosion of intelligence and happiness consequent of finally taking the stuff of our being into our own hands, the newfound availability of heretofore unrealized modalities of being, experience, thought, morality, and abilities realized through the technological extension and enhancement of the mind.

By 2007, I was calling this philosophy “Enhancism”, which I designated as the thesis that enhancement is the principal underlying both human nature and evolutionary nature. Regardless of what constitutes an “enhancement”, the fact that we strive to reach idealized objectives and grow toward what we envision as better versions of our selves and our world exemplifies enhancement as the underlying driver and primal force that makes up Mind, Man, and Humanity. The objective or “optimization target” isn’t important – what is important is the act of designating an objective as better, and then striving in a fit of fiery thrusts toward it.

I never saw this imperative of improving ourselves using all available means as a move away from humanity, but rather as a natural extension and continuation of what has always best designated us as human. I realized that self-directed modification of both body and mind were not only both possible and desirable, but a natural extension of what humanity has been doing since long before the very concept of “humanity” existed. I had arrived at the essential premises and conclusions of both Immortalism and Transhumanism without exposure to existing forms of either. Indeed, this was even before I started reading science fiction!

I think this observation undermines what I feel to be a common misconception of outside of Transhumanist circles – that Transhumanism and Immortalism are fringe movements for statistical outliers with idiosyncratic interests. I think that this rather adds credence to rebuttal that Transhumanism and Immortalism exemplify the modern embodiment of all we’ve ever been; that they are not founded upon grandiose and overly contingent axioms, but rather on the respective premises that life is good and so should be extended for as long as possible and that we are more likely to create a better world and better selves than we are to find them already given.

If the underlying logic behind Immortalism and Transhumanism can be independently arrived at by a 14-year-old without any knowledge of historical or extant forms of either, then how removed from the human concerns of the majority can they really be? If they relied on a host of contingent hopes and deviant memetic baggage – if their claims or conclusions were overly complicated in any way – how could they be arrived at so readily and fluidly by an adolescent?

I also unwittingly recapitulated many specific Transhumanist objectives throughout the course of my “grand project”, as I had thought of it at the time. My approach of gradually replacing the neurons in the brain with functional equivalents would necessitate control over the processes exhibited by the replacements. This would allow us to actively and consciously control the variables and metrics determining neuronal behavior, not only modifying ourselves through the integration of additional NRUs (neuron-replication-units) or NRU-networks, but also through active modification and real-time modulation of the NRUs that would by then underlie our existing mental and experiential modalities, having replaced our existing biological neurons.

Within the first year of the project, I had conceived of using these new capabilities to make ourselves smarter (an unwitting recapitulation of intelligence-amplification), of making ourselves more ethical (an unwitting recapitulation of moral engineering, explored by such thinkers as James Hughes, Julian Savulescu and Asher Seidel, among others), and of actively making ourselves happier, or rather of eliminating those normative biological aspects that bias us needlessly towards unhappiness (an unwitting variant of David Pearce’s hedonistic imperative), and the exchange of real-time perception and memory deeper and of higher fidelity than sensory memories, essentially extending to thoughts, emotions, and indeed all experiential modalities available to us.

One could imagine my surprise upon finding Transhumanism and Immortalism as existing disciplines and movements; I felt as though I had borne a son and gone away for a day only to return and find him grown up – and that I was never his biological father to begin with.

The fact that both Transhumanist (i.e., enhancement, self-modification and self-modulation) and Immortalist concerns and conceptions developed concurrently throughout my work also reifies their having a shared gestalt. While they are not mutually inclusive (you can be one without being the other), they do share some strong similarities. They both eschew biological and naturalistic limitations, exalt autonomy and the provision of rights, and spring from a legitimate glorification of life and self.

The last point I would like to make here is one that I think helps subvert the superficial claim that Transhumanist or Immortalist objectives are essentially selfish concerns. At 14 I had no personal stake in trying to end death as fast as possible; both ending death and increasing our ability to better determine who we are and what we can do were from day one for the world and for broader humanity – particularly for those who didn’t have the majority of the rest of their lives to live: the 100,000 people who succumb to bitter finitude each day. I think most other Transhumanist and Immortalist thinkers would agree that any positive future involves broad access to both longevity treatments and to the latest means of improving and realizing ourselves.

None of these naïve misinterpretations are real concerns to Transhumanist and Immortalist communities, except in regards to the degree with which they prevent people from digging deep enough to discover their stark insubstantiality. While they may be so off-base as to make their fallaciousness readily obvious to members of either community, and thus a seeming non-issue, I think the way in which they engender public misconceptions about Transhumanism and Immortalism validates our need to dispel them. Transhumanism is the only humanism; it exemplifies the very heart of what makes us human. The “trans” and the “human” in Transhumanism can only signify each other, for to be human is to strive to become more than human. I’ve thought this from the beginning, and this is a direction that my thinking – while having developed significantly since the practical work described here – is still oriented toward.

I wonder how many others there are out there like me, yet to approach the world with their vast extrapersonal visions of self-directed self-realization, yet to find the daring to throw their raucous good works in the face of this world that deserves better than to simply die quietly and unquestioningly, without revolt; others who, like me, saw that to try and change the world for the better is the very namesake of Man; who’ve crafted star-spangled dreams as large and as belligerently righteous as ending death and taking definite control of our ever-indefinite and indefinitive selves.

To every riled child who has ever had a vision larger than himself but that he has been too afraid to reveal, who has ever dreamt of bounding past the boundaries of present and toward the real prize, who has ever felt a dire need to make Man more than he is: I call thee out of the whorlworks and into the world! Come, show us what you’ve done!

What follows in my subsequent essays is first a broad overview of my work in this area from 2006 to 2010 (at which time I had discovered enough Immortalist antecedents to stop actively working on conceptual varieties of techno-immortality), first in terms of my methodology for achieving indefinite longevity (i.e., my work in uploading or brain-emulation proper), and then in terms of the enhancement and modification side, focusing on similarities and differences between my vision and those developed in Transhumanism and Immortalism.

While this essay is largely personal and introductory, I think the fact of my independently arriving at many of the conceptual premises and conclusions of Transhumanism and Immortalism, and under different terms, also reifies the more substantial claim that Transhumanism isn’t as far-out as is normatively presumed—or perhaps rather that the “human” isn’t as right-here as is commonly supposed. For that curious creature of clamorous self-determination called Man is most familiar with unfamiliarity, and most at home in alien dendritic jungles, for having gone so far out as to come back around again.

While in 2010 I thought most of my ideas in regards to practical approaches to immortality as already conceived, I now see some differences between my approach and other conceptions of brain-emulation. One is the conceptual development of physical/prosthetic approaches to neuron replication and replacement (i.e., prosthetics on the cellular scale) in addition to strictly computational approaches. Another is several novel approaches to preserving both immediate subjective-continuity (that is, the ability to have subjective experience, sometimes called sentience – as opposed to sapience, which denotes our higher cognitive capacities like abstract thinking, thus humans have sentience and sapience while most non-mammals are thought to lack sapience but possess sentience) and temporal subjective-continuity (the property of feeling like the same subjective person as you did yesterday, or a week ago, or 10 years ago – despite the fact that all of the molecules constituting your brain are gone, having been replaced with identical molecules through metabolism – via molecular turnover rather than full-cell replacement – over the course of a seven-year period) through a gradual (neuron) replacement procedure that are to my knowledge yet to be explored by the wider techno-immortalist community and brain-emulation discipline, respectively.

Franco Cortese is an editor for Transhumanity.net, as well as one of its most frequent contributors.  He has also published articles and essays on Immortal Life and The Rational Argumentator. He contributed 4 essays and 7 debate responses to the digital anthology Human Destiny is to Eliminate Death: Essays, Rants and Arguments About Immortality.

Franco is an Advisor for Lifeboat Foundation (on its Futurists Board and its Life Extension Board) and contributes regularly to its blog.

Bibliography

(June 2012). International Journal of Machine Consciousness, 4 (1).

Browne, M. W. (2011). From science fiction to science: ‘the whole body transplant’. Retrieved February 28, 2013 from http://www.nytimes.com/1998/05/05/science/essay-from-science-fiction-to-science-the-whole-body-transplant.html

Demikhov, V. P. & (1962).Experimental transplantation of vital organs. Basil Haigh, transl. New York: Consultant’s Bureau Enterprises, Inc.

Grabianowski (2007). How Brain-computer Interfaces Work. Retrieved February 28, 2013 from http://computer.howstuffworks.com/brain-computer-interface.htm

Hickey, L. P. (2011). The brain in a vat argument. Internet encyclopedia of philosophy, 2011. Retrieved February 28, 2013 from http://www.iep.utm.edu/brainvat/

Kurzweil, R. (2005). The Singularity is Near. Penguin Books, p. 63-67.

Martins, N. R., Erlhagen, W. & Freitas Jr., R. A. (2012). Non-destructive whole-brain monitoring using nanorobots: Neural electrical data rate requirements. International Journal of Machine Consciousness, 2011 .Retrieved February 28, 2013 from http://www.nanomedicine.com/Papers/NanoroboticBrainMonitoring2012.pdf (URL).

Narayan, A. (2004). Computational Methods for NEMS.Retrieved February 28, 2013 from http://nanohub.org/resources/407.

Pietsch, P. & Schneider, C. W. (1969). Brain transplantation in salamanders: an approach to memory transfer . Brain Research, Aug;14 (3), 705-715. PMID: 5822440

Stoney, W. S. (1962). Evolution of cardiopulmonary bypass. Experimental transplantation of vital organs. Circulation, 2009 (119), 2844-53.

Vagaš, M. (2012). To view the current state of robotic technologies. Advanced Materials Research. Circulation, 2012 , 436-464, 1711.

What is MEMS Technology? (2011). Retrieved February 28, 2013 from https://www.memsnet.org/about/what-is.html

Morality Needs Immortality to Live – Article by Franco Cortese

Morality Needs Immortality to Live – Article by Franco Cortese

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“In Order to be Go(o)d, We Can’t Die!” Says Kant

The New Renaissance Hat
Franco Cortese
May 2, 2013
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Dead Immortalist Sequence –  #1: Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

Kant is often misconstrued as advocating radical conformity amongst people, a common misconception drawn from his Categorical Imperative, which states that each should act as though the rules underlying his actions can be made a universal moral maxim. The extent of this universality, however, stops at the notion that each man should act as though the aspiration towards morality were a universal maxim. All Kant meant, I argue, was that each man should act as though the aspiration toward greater morality were able to be willed as a universal moral maxim.

This common misconception serves to illustrate another common and illegitimate portrayal of the Enlightenment tradition. Too often is the Enlightenment libeled for its failure to realize the ideal society. Too often is it characterized most essentially by its glorification of strict rationality, which engenders invalid connotations of stagnant, statuesque perfection – a connotation perhaps aided by the Enlightenment’s valorization of the scientific method, and its connotations of stringent and unvarying procedure and methodology in turn. This takes the prized heart of the Enlightenment tradition and flips it on its capsized ass. This conception of the Enlightenment tradition is not only wrong, but antithetical to the true organizing gestalt and prime impetus underlying the Age of the Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment wasn’t about realizing the perfect society but rather about idealizing the perfect society – the striving towards an ever-inactualized ideal which, once realized, would cease to be ideal for that very reason. The Enlightenment was about unending progress towards that ideal state – for both Man as society and man as singular splinter – of an infinite forward march towards perfection, which, upon definitively reaching perfection, will have failed to achieve its first-sought prize. The virtue of the Enlightenment lies in the virtual, and its perfection in the infinite perfectibility inherent in imperfection.

This truer, though admittedly less normative, interpretation of the Enlightenment tradition, taking into account its underlying motivations and projected utilities – rather than simply taking flittered glints from the fallacious surface and holding them up for solid, tangible truth – also serves to show the parallels between the Enlightenment gestalt and Transhumanism. James Hughes, for one, characterizes Transhumanism as a child of the Enlightenment Tradition [1].

One can see with intuitive lucidity that characterizing the Enlightenment’s valorization of rationality goes against the very underlying driver of that valorization. Rationality was exalted during the Age of Enlightenment for its potential to aid in skepticism toward tradition. Leave the chiseled and unmoving, petty perfection of the statue for the religious traditions the Enlightenment was rebelling against – the inviolable God with preordained plan, perfect for his completion and wielding total authority over the static substance of Man; give the Enlightenment rather the starmolten fire-afury and undulate aspiration toward ever-forth-becoming highers that it sprang from in the first place. The very aspects which cause us to characterize the enlightenment as limiting, rigid, and unmolten are those very ideals that, if never realized definitively – if instead made to form an ongoing indefinite infinity – would thereby characterize the Enlightenment tradition as a righteous roiling rebellion against limitation and rigour – as a flighty dive into the molten maelstrom of continuing mentation toward better and truer versions of ourselves and society that was its real underlying impetus from the beginning.

This truer gestalt of the Enlightenment impinges fittingly upon the present study. Kant is often considered one of the fathers of the Enlightenment. In a short essay entitled “What is the Enlightenment?” [2], Kant characterizes the essential archetype of Man (as seen through the lens of the Enlightenment) in a way wholly in opposition to the illegitimate conceptions of the Enlightenment described above – and in vehement agreement with the less-normative interpretation of the Enlightenment that followed. It is often assumed, much in line with such misconceptions, that the archetype of Man during the Age of the Enlightenment was characterized by rational rigour and scientific stringency. However, this archetype of the mindless, mechanical automaton was the antithesis of Man’s then-contemporary archetype; the automaton was considered rather the archetype of animality – which can be seen as antithetical to the Enlightenment’s take on Man’s essence, with its heady rationality and lofty grasping towards higher ideals. In his essay, Kant characterizes the Enlightenment’s archetype of Man as the rebellious schoolboy who cannot and shall not be disciplined into sordid subservience by his schoolmasters. Here Kant concurs gravely from beyond the grave that Man’s sole central and incessant essence is his ongoing self-dissent, his eschewing of perverse obligation, his disleashing the weathered tethers of limitation, and his ongoing battle with himself for his own self-creation.

It is this very notion of infinite progress towards endlessly perfectable states of projected perfection that, too, underlies his ties to Immortalism. Indeed, his claim that to retain morality we must have comprehensively unending lives – that is, we must never ever die – rests crucially on this premise.

In his Theory of Ethics [3] under “Part III: The Summum Bonum, God and Immortality” [4], Kant argues that his theory of ethics necessitates the immortality of the soul in order to remain valid according to the axioms it adheres to. This is nothing less than a legitimation of the desirability of personal immortality from a 1700’s-era philosophical rockstar. It is important to note that the aspects making it so crucial in concern to Kant’s ethical system have to do with immortality in general, and indeed would have been satisfied according to non-metaphysical (i.e. physical and technological) means – having more to do with the end of continued life and indefinite longevity or Superlongevity in particular, than with the particular means used to get there, which in his case is a metaphysical means. Karl Ameriks writes in reference to Kant here: “… the question of immortality is to be understood as being about a continued temporal existence of the mind. The question is not whether we belong to the realm beyond time but whether we will persist through all time…Kant also requires this state to involve personal identity.” [5]. While Kant did make some metaphysical claims tied to immortality – namely the association of degradation and deterioration with physicality, which when combined with the association of time with physicality may have led to his characterization of the noumenal realm (being the antithesis of the phenomenal realm) as timeless and free from causal determination – these claims are beyond the purview of this essay, and will only be touched upon briefly. What is important to take away is that the metaphysical and non-metaphysical justifications are equally suitable vehicles for Kant’s destination.

Note that any italics appearing within direct quotations are not my own and are recorded as they appeared in the original. All italics external to direct quotations are my own. In  the 4th Section, The immortality of the soul as a postulate of pure practical reason, of the 3rd Part of Theory of Ethics, Kant writes: “Pure  practical reason postulates the immortality of the soul, for reason in the pure and practical sense aims at the perfect good (Summum Bonum), and this perfect good is only possible on the supposition of the soul’s immortality.” [5]

Kant is claiming here that reason (in both senses with which they are taken into account in his system – that is, as pure reason and practical reason) is aimed at perfection, which he defines as continual progress towards the perfect good – rather than the attainment of any such state of perfection, and that as finite beings we can only achieve such perfect good through an unending striving towards it.

In a later section, “The Antinomy of Practical Reason (and its Critical Solution)” [6], he describes the Summum Bonum as “the supreme end of a will morally determined”. In an earlier section, The Concept of the Summum Bonum [7], Kant distinguishes between two possible meanings for Summum; it can mean supreme in the sense of absolute (not contingent on anything outside itself), and perfect (not being part to a larger whole). I take him to claim that it means both.

He also claims personal immortality is a necessary condition for the possibility of the perfect good. In the same section he describes the Summum Bonum as the combination of two distinct features: happiness and virtue (defining virtue as worthiness of being happy, and in this section synonymizing it with morality). Both happiness and virtue are analytic and thus derivable from empirical observation.

However, their combination in the Summum Bonum does not follow from either on its own and so must be synthetic, or reliant upon a priori cognitive principles, Kant reasons. I interpret this as Kant’s claiming that the possibility of the Summum Bonum requires God and the Immortality of the Soul because this is where Kant grounds his a priori, synthetic, noumenal world – i.e. the domain where those a priori principles exist (in/as the mind of God, for Kant).

Kant continues:

“It is the moral law which determines the will, and in this will the perfect harmony of the mind with the moral law is the supreme condition of the summum bonum… the perfect accordance of the will with the moral law is holiness, a perfection of which no rational being of the sensible world is capable at any moment of his existence. Since, nevertheless, it is required as practically necessary, it can only be found in a progress in infinitum towards that perfect accordance, and on the principles of pure practical reason is nonetheless necessary to assume such a practical progress as the real object of our will.” [8]

Thus not only does Kant argue for the necessitated personal immortality of the soul by virtue of the fact that perfection is unattainable while constrained by time, he argues along an alternate line of reasoning that such perfection is nonetheless necessary for our morality, happiness and virtue, and that we must thus therefore progress infinitely toward it without ever definitively reaching it if the Summum Bonum is to remain valid according to its own defining attributes and categorical-qualifiers as-such.

Kant decants:

“Now, this endless progress is only possible on the supposition of an endless duration of existence and personality of the same rational being (which is called the immorality of the soul). The Summum Bonum, then, practically is only possible on the supposition of the immortality of the soul; consequently this immortality, being inseparably connected with the moral law, is a postulate of pure practical reason (by which I mean a theoretical proposition, not demonstrable as such, but which is an inseparable result of an unconditional a priori practical law). This principle of the moral destination of our nature, namely, that it is only in an endless progress that we can attain perfect accordance with the moral law… For a rational but finite being, the only thing possible is an endless progress from the lower to higher degrees of moral perfection. In Infinite Being, to whom the condition of time is nothing… is to be found in a single intellectual intuition of the whole existence of rational beings. All that can be expected of the creature in respect of the hope of this participation would be the consciousness of his tried character, by which, from the progress he has hitherto made from the worse to the morally better, and the immutability of purpose which has thus become known to him, he may hope for a further unbroken continuance of the same, however long his existence may last, even beyond this life, and thus may hope, not indeed here, nor in any imaginable point of his future existence, but only in the endlessness of his duration (which God alone can survey) to be perfectly adequate to his will.” [9]

So, Kant first argues that the existence of the Summum Bonum requires the immorality of the soul both a.) because finite beings conditioned by time by definition cannot achieve the absolute perfection of the Summum Bonum, and can only embody it through perpetual progress towards it, and b.) because the components of the Summum Bonum (both of which must be co-present for it to qualify as such) are unitable only synthetically through a priori cognitive principals, which he has argued elsewhere must exist in a domain unconditioned by time (which is synonymous with his conception of the noumenal realm) and which must thus be perpetual for such an extraphysical realm to be considered unconditioned by time and thus noumenal. The first would correspond to Kant’s strict immortalist underpinnings, and the second to the alternate (though not necessarily contradictory) metaphysical justification alluded to earlier.

Once arguing that the possibility of the Summum Bonum requires personal immortality, he argues that our freedom/autonomy, which he locates as the will (and further locates the will as being determined by the moral law) also necessitates the Summum Bonum. This would correspond to his more embryonically Transhumanist inclinations. In the first section (“The Concept of Summum Bonum”) he writes, “It is a priori (morally) necessary to produce the summum bonum by freedom of will…” I interpret this statement in the following manner. He sees morality as a priori and synthetic, and the determining principle which allows us to cause in the world without being caused by it – i.e., for Kant our freedom (i.e., the quality of not being externally determined) requires the noumenal realm because otherwise we are trapped in the freedom-determinism paradox. Thus the Summum Bonum also vicariously necessitates the existence of God, because this is necessary for the existence of a noumenal realm unaffected by physical causation (note that Kant calls physicality ‘the sensible world’). Such a God could be (and indeed has been described by Kant in terms which would favor this interpretation) synonymous with the entire noumenal realm, with every mind forming but an atom as it were in the larger metaorganismal mind of a sort of meta-pantheistic, quasi-Spinozian conception of God – in other words, one quite dissimilar to the anthropomorphic connotations usually invoked by the word.

Others have drawn similar conclusions and made similar interpretations. Karl Ameriks summarizes Kant’s reasoning here thusly:

“All other discussions of immortality in the critical period are dominated by the moral argument that Kant sets out in the second critique. The argument is that morality obligates us to seek holiness (perfect virtue), which therefore must be possible, and can only be so if God grants us an endless afterlife in which we can continually progress… As a finite creature man is incapable of ever achieving holiness, but on – and only in – an endless time could we supposedly approximate to it (in the eyes of God) as fully as could be expected… Kant is saying not that real holiness is ever a human objective, but rather that complete striving for it can be, and this could constitute for man a state of ‘perfect virtue’…” [10]

The emphasis on indefinity is also present in the secondary literature; Ameriks remarks that Kant ”…makes clear that the ‘continual progress’ he speaks of can ultimately have a ‘non-temporal’ nature in that it is neither momentary nor of definitive duration nor actually endless”. Only through never quite reaching our perfected state can we retain the perfection of lawless flawedness.

Paul Guyer corroborates my claim that the determining factor is not the claim that mind is an extramaterial entity or substance, but because if morality requires infinite good and if we are finite beings, then we must be finite beings along an infinite stretch of time in order to satisfy the categorical requirements of possessing such an infinity. He writes that ”..the possibility of the perfection of our virtuous disposition requires our actual immortality…” [11] and that ”…God and immortality are conditions specifically of the possibility of the ultimate object of virtue, the highest good – immortality is the condition for the perfection of virtue and God that for the realization of happiness…[12]

In summary, it doesn’t matter that Kant’s platform was metaphysical rather than technological, because the salient point and determining factors were not the specific operation or underlying principles (or the “means”) used to achieve immortality, but rather the very ends themselves. Being able to both live and progress in(de)finitely was the loophole that provided, for Kant, both our freedom and our morality. Kant said we can’t die if we want to be moral, that we can’t die if we want to gain virtue, and that we can’t die if we want to remain free.

Franco Cortese is an editor for Transhumanity.net, as well as one of its most frequent contributors.  He has also published articles and essays on Immortal Life and The Rational Argumentator. He contributed 4 essays and 7 debate responses to the digital anthology Human Destiny is to Eliminate Death: Essays, Rants and Arguments About Immortality.

Franco is an Advisor for Lifeboat Foundation (on their Futurists Board and their Life Extension Board) and contributes regularly to their blog.

References:

[1] Hughes, J. J. (2001). The Future of Death: Cryonics and the Telos of Liberal Individualism. Journal of Evolution &  Technology, 6 .

[2] Kant, I. (1996). In M.J. Gregor Practical Philosophy, Cambridge University Press.

[3] Kant, I. (1957). In T. M. Greene Kant selections, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

[4] Ibid,. p. 350.

[5] Ameriks, K. (2000). Kant’s  Theory of Mind: An Analysis of the Paralogisms of Pure Reason: Oxford University Press.

[6] Ibid., p. 352.

[7] Ibid., p. 350.

[8] Ibid,. p. 358.

[9] Ibid,. p. 359.

[10] Ameriks, K. (2000). Kant’s Theory of Mind: An Analysis of the Paralogisms of Pure Reason: Oxford University Press.

[11] Freydberg, B. (2005). Imagination of  Kant’s critique of practical reason: Indiana University Press.

[12] Guyer, P. (2000). Kant on Freedom, Law,  and Happiness: Cambridge University Press.

This TRA feature has been edited in accordance with TRA’s Statement of Policy.

Life Extension and the Significance of Death – Article by Gyreck

Life Extension and the Significance of Death – Article by Gyreck

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The New Renaissance Hat
Gyreck
May 1, 2013
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Some people say that death is what gives life significance, but then people often parrot nonsense they haven’t given any real thought to.

150,000 people die on Earth every day, on average, and people rarely give it much or any thought. That doesn’t sound much like significance or meaning to me, in terms of either life or death. Even just the magnitude of the statement, that 150,000 people die every day, is just lost on people.

Every few days or so, the same number of people die as had died in the entire American Civil War.

Every single year, about the same number of people die as had died in the whole of World War II.

If that sounds too big to grasp (which, of course, it is), just imagine, if you can, a group of just over a hundred people, about the number of people in four full classrooms.  Imagine that group of people crowding into a room with you and then dying right in front of you, from a whole range of causes and within the span of just a single minute. Then, a whole new group of over a hundred comes in, of all ages and backgrounds, and then they, too, all die right in front of you, many in pain and terror, many of them dying horrifically, over the span of the next single minute…. and then over another hundred come in again and start dying over the next minute, and again, and again, over and over, minute after minute…. 1,440 times in a row. Then, you will have the number of people who die over a span of just a single day – the same as 50 World Trade Center attacks. Every day.

The magnitude of it, along with the absolute helplessness of doing anything about it and the knowledge of the absolute certainty that you will be part of one of those groups to die, is just staggering. No small wonder that culture has largely stupefied people to the idea, and has scared and deluded them into all manner of denial over it. This has been such a severe form of trauma to the public’s consciousness that the majority of people actually cling cultishly to the absurd idea that this process is actually a good thing. It’s amazing and shameful to consider how detached someone would have to be from the sheer horror of this thing in order to suggest that it is in any way “good”. Even now, in typing this, I can just hear the voices of protest out there with their excuses and rationalizations about why all this misery and suffering “needs” to happen. We’re all lined up in the concentration camps, and the people in line around you are talking about how it’s a “good” thing and how we “need” to be put into the ovens.

It seems like most of humanity’s problems stem from acquiring absurd beliefs, and then clinging to them with a deaf ear to anything of the contrary. I think that’s really one of the greatest and most disastrous problems the human race needs to overcome.

On the life and death thing…

Putting everything else aside, I think people don’t give life enough value partly because they know they’ll die no matter what they do.

We’re basically all rental cars, and no matter how well we take care of ourselves, we’re going to be taken back in the end, while at the same time no matter how reckless we are with ourselves, we’ll never have to pay for it after the fact. In that situation it’s kind of hard to avoid some form of the attitude “Well f*** it, we’re just going to die anyway”. The effect of this way of thinking is not to give life value. In fact, this does the exact opposite. In principle we like to think this should make us treasure our every moment, given how few and fleeting these moments are, but unless we’re really concentrating and making a point to focus on that idea, that’s not what we really do. For example, we don’t put a lot of value in perishable goods, in rotting houses, or in failing businesses. We do tend to value and invest ourselves in things that have longevity, strength, stability and durability.

Here’s the reality of the situation…

We’re not going to consider death significant until it’s a rare occurrence.

Imagine going for a hundred years without anyone you know dying. How much bigger of a deal is it all of a sudden when somebody does die? Think about how any event involving younger people dying today is always talked about as being a bigger deal than when older people die, how people seem to always bring up how much life the younger ones had left to live.  It’s the amount of life left unlived that ends up getting the focus.  The fact of someone dying at age sixty isn’t seen as being as bad as someone dying at age fifteen.  Now imagine if people were living for over seven hundred years, and then someone dies at only age sixty. How much bigger of a deal has that suddenly become? At the same time, imagine a seven-hundred-year-old dying. How much life, history, and experience has just been lost to the world? Doesn’t that suddenly seem more significant?

In reality, a short expiration date doesn’t make anything more valuable; it just makes it more disposable. The inevitable and very near-future extension of our lifespans is not going to make life less valuable, and death is absolutely not what gives our lives meaning. This is a delusion that most of us are trapped in, and we really need to grow up and do a better job of getting over it.

Gyreck is an artist, philosopher, poet, roboticist, humanist, and rational materialist. You can view some of his art here.

This TRA feature has been edited in accordance with TRA’s Statement of Policy.

Life Extension and Risk Aversion – Video by G. Stolyarov II

Life Extension and Risk Aversion – Video by G. Stolyarov II

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Mr. Stolyarov explains that living longer renders people more hesitant to risk their lives, for the simple reason that they have many more years to lose than their less technologically endowed ancestors.

References
– “Life Extension and Risk Aversion” – Essay by G. Stolyarov II
– “Life expectancy variation over time” – Wikipedia
– Life Expectancy Graphs – University of Oregon
– History of Life Expectancy – WorldLifeExpectancy.com
– “Steven Pinker” – Wikipedia
– “The Better Angels of Our Nature” – Wikipedia
– “FBI Statistics Show Major Reduction in Violent Crime Rates” – WanttoKnow.info
– “List of motor vehicle deaths in U.S. by year” – Wikipedia
– “Prevalence of tobacco consumption” – Wikipedia
– “Human error accounts for 90% of road accidents” – Olivia Olarte – AlertDriving.com
– “Autonomous car” – Wikipedia
– “Iterative Learning versus the Student-Debt Trap” – Essay and Video by G. Stolyarov II

Life Extension and Risk Aversion – Article by G. Stolyarov II

Life Extension and Risk Aversion – Article by G. Stolyarov II

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The New Renaissance Hat
G. Stolyarov II
April 28, 2013
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A major benefit of longer lifespans is the cultivation of a wide array of virtues. Prudence and forethought are among the salutary attributes that the lengthening of human life expectancies – hopefully to the point of eliminating any fixed upper bound – would bring about.

Living longer renders people more hesitant to risk their lives, for the simple reason that they have many more years to lose than their less technologically endowed ancestors.

This is not science fiction or mere speculation; we see it already. In the Western world, average life expectancies increased from the twenties and thirties in the Middle Ages to the early thirties circa 1800 to the late forties circa 1900 to the late seventies and early eighties in our time. As Steven Pinker writes in his magnum opus, The Better Angels of Our Nature, the overall trend in the Western world (in spite of temporary spikes of conflict, such as the World Wars) has been toward greater peace and increased reluctance of individuals to throw their lives away in armed struggles for geopolitical gain. Long-term declines in crime rates, automobile fatalities, and even smoking have accompanied (and contributed to) rises in life expectancy. Economic growth and improvements in the technologies of production help as well. If a person has not only life but material comfort to lose, this amplifies the reluctance to undertake physical risks even further.

Yet, with today’s finite lifespans, most individuals still find a non-negligible degree of life-threatening risk in their day-to-day endeavors to be an unavoidable necessity. Most people in the United States need to drive automobiles to get to work – in spite of the risk of sharing the road with incompetent, intoxicated, or intimidating other drivers. Over 30,000 people perish every year in the United States alone as a result of that decision. While the probability for any given individual of dying in an automobile accident is around 11 in 100,000 (0.011%) per year, this is still unacceptably high. How would a person with several centuries, several millennia, or all time ahead of him feel about this probability? Over a very long time, the probability of not encountering such a relatively rare event asymptotically approaches zero. For instance, at today’s rate of US automobile fatalities, a person living 10000 years would have a probability of (1 – 0.00011)^10000 = 0.3329 – a mere 33.29% likelihood – of not dying in an automobile accident! If you knew that a problem in this world had a two-thirds probability of killing you eventually, would you not want to do something about it?

Of course, the probabilities of tragic events are not fixed or immutable. They can be greatly affected by individual choices – our first line of defense against life-threatening risks. Well-known risk-management strategies for reducing the likelihood of any damaging event include (1) avoidance (not pursuing the activity that could cause the loss – e.g., not driving on a rugged mountain road – but this is not an option in many cases), (2) loss prevention (undertaking measures, such as driving defensively, that allow one to engage in the activity while lowering the likelihood of catastrophic failure), and (3) loss reduction (undertaking measures, such as wearing seat belts or driving in safer vehicles, that would lower the amount of harm in the event of a damaging incident). Individual choices, of course, cannot prevent all harms. The more fundamental defense against life-threatening accidents is technology. Driving itself could be made safer by replacing human operators, whose poor decisions cause over 90% of all accidents, with autonomous vehicles – early versions of which are currently being tested by multiple companies worldwide and have not caused a single accident to date when not manually driven.

Today, forward-thinking technology companies such as Google are driving the autonomous-vehicle revolution ahead. There is, unfortunately, no large clamor by the public for these life-saving cars yet. However, as life expectancies lengthen, that clamor will surely be heard. When we live for centuries and then for millennia, we will view as barbarous the age when people were expected to take frightening risks with their irreplaceable existences, just to make it to the office every morning. We will see the attempt to manually operate a vehicle as a foolish and reckless gamble with one’s life – unless one is a professional stunt driver who would earn millions in whatever future currency will then exist.

But living longer will accomplish more than just a changed perspective toward the risks presently within our awareness. Because of our expanded scope of personal interest, we will begin to be increasingly aware of catastrophes that occur at much longer intervals than human lifespans have occupied to date. The impacts of major earthquakes and volcano eruptions, recurring ice ages, meteor strikes, and continental drift will begin to become everyday concerns, with far more individuals devoting their time, money, and attention to developing technological solutions to these hitherto larger-than-human-scale catastrophes. With even more radically lengthened lifespans, humans will be motivated to direct their efforts, including the full thrust of scientific research, toward overcoming the demise of entire solar systems. In the meantime, there would be less tolerance for any pollution that could undermine life expectancies or the long-term sustainability of a technological infrastructure (which, of course, would be necessary for life-extension treatments to continue keeping senescence at bay). Thus, a society of radical life extension will embrace market-generated environmentally friendly technologies, including cleaner energy sources, reuse of raw materials (for instance, as base matter for 3D printing and nanoscale fabrication), and efficient targeting of resources toward their intended purposes (e.g., avoidance of wasted water in sprinkler systems or wasted paper in the office).

When life is long and good, humans move up on the hierarchy of needs. Not starving today ceases to be a worry, as does not getting murdered tomorrow. The true creativity of human faculties can then be directed toward addressing the grand, far more interesting and technologically demanding, challenges of our existence on this Earth.

Some might worry that increased aversion to physical risk would dampen human creativity and discourage people from undertaking the kinds of ambitious and audacious projects that are needed for technological breakthroughs to emerge and spread. However, aversion to physical risk does not entail aversion to other kinds of risk – social, economic, or political. Indeed, social rejection or financial ruin are not nearly as damaging to a person with millennia ahead of him as they are to a person with just a few decades of life left. A person who tries to run an innovative business and fails can spend a few decades earning back the capital needed to start again. Today, few entrepreneurs have that second chance. Most do not even have a first chance, as the initial capital needed for a groundbreaking enterprise is often colossal. Promising ideas and a meritorious character do not guarantee one a wealthy birth, and thus even the best innovators must often start with borrowed funds – a situation that gives them little room to explore the possibilities and amplifies their ruin if they fail.  The long-lived entrepreneurs in a world of indefinite life extension would tend to earn their own money upfront and gradually go into business for themselves as they obtain the personal resources to do so. This kind of steady, sustainable entry into a line of work allows for a multitude of iterations and experiments that maximize the probability of a breakthrough.

Alongside the direct benefits of living longer and the indirect benefits of the virtues cultivated thereby, indefinite life extension will also produce less stressful lives for most. The less probability there is of dying or becoming seriously injured or ill, the easier one can breathe as one pursues day-to-day endeavors of self-improvement, enjoyment, and productive work. The less likely a failure is to rob one of opportunities forever, the more likely humans will be to pursue the method of iterative learning and to discover new insights and improved techniques through a beneficent trial-and-error process, whose worst downsides will have been curtailed through technology and ethics. Life extension will lead us to avoid and eliminate the risks that should not exist, while enabling us to safely pursue the risks that could benefit us if approached properly.

Liberty Through Long Life – Video by G. Stolyarov II

Liberty Through Long Life – Video by G. Stolyarov II

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To maximize their hopes of personally experiencing an amount of personal freedom even approaching that of the libertarian ideal, all libertarians should support radical life extension.

References
– “Liberty Through Long Life” – Essay by G. Stolyarov II –
– Resources on Indefinite Life Extension (RILE) –
– “Libertarian Life-Extension Reforms” – Video Series – G. Stolyarov II –
– “Massive open online course” – Wikipedia
– Mozilla’s Open Badges
– “Open Badges and Proficiency-Based Education: A Path to a New Age of Enlightenment” – Essay by G. Stolyarov II
– “Deep Space Industries” – Wikipedia
– “Planetary Resources” – Wikipedia
– The Seasteading Institute
– “Seasteading’s Potential and Challenges: An Overview” — Essay by G. Stolyarov II
– “Seasteading’s Potential and Challenges: An Overview” — Video by G. Stolyarov II
– “Bitcoin” – Wikipedia
– “Benjamin Franklin and the Early Scientific Vision – 1780” – Foundation for Infinite Survival
– “Revisiting the proto-transhumanists: Diderot and Condorcet” – George Dvorsky – Sentient Developments
– “Marquis de Condorcet, Enlightenment proto-transhumanist” – George Dvorsky – IEET
– SENS Research Foundation
– “Ray Kurzweil” – Wikipedia

Liberty Through Long Life – Article by G. Stolyarov II

Liberty Through Long Life – Article by G. Stolyarov II

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The New Renaissance Hat
G. Stolyarov II
April 14, 2013
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            It is commonly recognized among libertarians (and some others) that the freedom of individuals to innovate will result in a more rapid rate of technological progress. In “Six Libertarian Reforms to Accelerate Life Extension” I described six liberty-enhancing political changes that would more swiftly bring about the arrival of indefinite human longevity. But, as is less often understood, the converse of this truth also holds. Technological progress in general improves the prospects for liberty and its actual exercise in everyday life. One of the most promising keys to achieving liberty in our lifetimes is to live longer so that we can personally witness and benefit from accelerating technological progress.

            Consider, for example, what the Internet has achieved with respect to expanding the practical exercise of individual freedom of speech. It has become virtually impossible for regimes, including their nominally private “gatekeepers” of information in the mass media and established publishing houses, to control the dissemination of information and the expression of individual opinion. In prior eras, even in countries where freedom of speech was the law of the land, affiliations of the media, by which speech was disseminated, with the ruling elite would serve as a practical barrier for the discussion of views that were deemed particularly threatening to the status quo. In the United States, effective dissent from the established two-party political system was difficult to maintain in the era of the “big three” television channels and a print and broadcast media industry tightly controlled by a few politically connected conglomerates. Now expressing an unpopular opinion is easier and less expensive than ever – as is voting with one’s money for an ever-expanding array of products and services online. The ability of individuals to videotape public events and the behavior of law-enforcement officers has similarly served as a check on abusive behavior by those in power. Emerging online education and credentialing options, such as massive open online courses and Mozilla’s Open Badges, have the power to motivate a widespread self-driven enlightenment which would bring about an increased appreciation for rational thinking and individual autonomy.

            Many other technological advances are on the horizon. The private space race is in full swing, with companies such as SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, Deep Space Industries, and Planetary Resources embarking on ever more ambitious projects. Eventually, these pioneering efforts may enable humans to colonize new planets and build permanent habitats in space, expanding jurisdictional competition and opening new frontiers where free societies could be established. Seasteading, an idea only five years in development, is a concept for building modular ocean platforms where political experimentation could occur and, through competitive pressure, catalyze liberty-friendly innovations on land. (I outlined the potential and the challenges of this approach in an earlier essay.) The coming decades could see the emergence of actual seasteads of increasing sophistication, safety, and political autonomy. Another great potential for increasing liberty comes from the emerging digital-currency movement, of which Bitcoin has been the most prominent exemplar to date. While Bitcoin has been plagued with recent extreme exchange-rate volatility and vulnerability to manipulation and theft by criminal hackers, it can still provide some refuge from the damaging effects of inflationary and redistributive central-bank monetary policy. With enough time and enough development of the appropriate technological infrastructure, either Bitcoin or one of its successor currencies might be able to obtain sufficient stability and reliability to become a widespread apolitical medium of exchange.

            But there is a common requirement for one to enjoy all of these potential breakthroughs, along with many others that may be wholly impossible to anticipate: one has to remain alive for a long time. The longer one remains alive, the greater the probability that one’s personal sphere of liberty would be expanded by these innovations. Living longer can also buy one time for libertarian arguments to gain clout in the political sphere and in broader public opinion. Technological progress and pro-liberty activism can reinforce one another in a virtuous cycle.

            To maximize their hopes of personally experiencing an amount of personal freedom even approaching that of the libertarian ideal, all libertarians should support radical life extension. This sought-after goal of some ancient philosophers, medieval alchemists, Enlightenment thinkers (notably Franklin, Diderot, and Condorcet), and medical researchers from the past two centuries, is finally within reach of many alive today. Biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey of the SENS Research Foundation gives humankind a 50 percent likelihood of reaching “longevity escape velocity” – a condition where increases in life expectancy outpace the rate of human senescence – within 25 years. Inventor, futurist, and artificial-intelligence researcher Ray Kurzweil predicts a radical increase in life expectancy in the 2020s, made possible by advances in biotechnology and nanotechnology, aided by exponentially growing computing power. But, like de Grey and perhaps somewhat unlike Kurzweil, I hold the view that these advances are not inevitable; they rely on deliberate, sustained, and well-funded efforts to achieve them. They rely on support by the general public to facilitate donations, positive publicity, and a lack of political obstacles placed in their way. All libertarians should become familiar with both the technical feasibility and the philosophical desirability of a dramatic, hopefully indefinite, extension of human life expectancies. My compilation of Resources on Indefinite Life Extension (RILE) is a good starting point for studying this subject by engaging with a wide variety of sources, perspectives, and ongoing developments in science, technology, and activism.

            We have only this one life to live. If we fail to accomplish our most cherished goals and our irreplaceable individual universes disappear into oblivion, then, to us, it will be as if those goals were never accomplished. If we want liberty, we should strive to attain it in our lifetimes. We should therefore want those lifetimes to be lengthened beyond any set limit, not just for the sake of experiencing a far more complete liberty, but also for the sake of life itself and all of the opportunities it opens before us.

Join the Movement for Indefinite Life Extension: The Most Forward-Thinking Minds Are Not Alone – Video by G. Stolyarov II

Join the Movement for Indefinite Life Extension: The Most Forward-Thinking Minds Are Not Alone – Video by G. Stolyarov II

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​Help humankind defeat senescence and death by joining the Movement for Indefinite Life Extension (MILE). The MILE offers a way to gauge awareness of and support for indefinite life extension. One of the easiest and most important ways you can begin to make a difference in helping bring indefinite life extension about is to (1) go to the MILE Facebook page, (2) like the MILE on Facebook, (3) read and share the many informational, scientific, and philosophical pieces made available daily on the MILE page, and (4) spread the word to your friends and acquaintances who are already sympathetic to indefinite life extension.

References

– The MILE Facebook Page or http://themile.info

– “Join the Movement for Indefinite Life Extension: The Most Forward-Thinking Minds Are Not Alone” – Essay by G. Stolyarov II

– Supporter of Indefinite Life Extension Open Badge

– Open Badges on Indefinite Life Extension

– Resources on Indefinite Life Extension (RILE)

– Rosetta@home

– Folding@home

– World Community Grid

On Costs and Opportunity Costs of Aging – Article by Reason

On Costs and Opportunity Costs of Aging – Article by Reason

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The New Renaissance Hat
Reason
April 7, 2013
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Originally published on the Fight Aging! website.

Few people seem terribly interested in noting the opportunity costs of aging, for all that a great deal of work goes into trying to build models for the direct costs. Insurers, government program administrators, and so forth, are all eager to put numbers to their potential future outlays – but they have fewer incentives to work on better numbers for the lost ability to earn that comes with advancing age. Here are some figures from a recent paper on dementia in the US, for example:

“The estimated prevalence of dementia among persons older than 70 years of age in the United States in 2010 was 14.7%. The yearly monetary cost per person that was attributable to dementia was either $56,290 (95% confidence interval [CI], $42,746 to $69,834) or $41,689 (95% CI, $31,017 to $52,362), depending on the method used to value informal care. These individual costs suggest that the total monetary cost of dementia in 2010 was between $157 billion and $215 billion. Dementia represents a substantial financial burden on society, one that is similar to the financial burden of heart disease and cancer.“

If you go digging around in US census data on income, or the quick summaries thereof, you’ll see that median income sits somewhere a little under $40,000/year in the prime earning years of life. It tapers off to a little more than half of that for surviving members of the 75 and older demographic. So while one of seven completely median older people incurs costs of roughly $40,000/year for dementia, all seven completely median older people suffer an opportunity cost of roughly $20,000/year as a result of becoming old. A range of income that might have been earned if still healthy and vigorous is no longer within reach.

These are very rough and ready comparisons, but you can see that even piling in a bunch of other direct medical costs for the rest of the population – cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and the other common foes – the opportunity costs of being old still look sizable in comparison. In another study that gives average medical costs over time for people in Japan aged between 40 and 80 followed over 13 years, the average yearly expenditure was in the ~$3,500 range, rising to more like ~$25,000 in the last year prior to death. The error bars for casual use of any of the numbers mentioned in this post are large – probably a factor of two, given all of the oddities and politics that goes into medical expenditures and recording of income, and especially when comparing data between different regions on the world. But you can still draw very rough conclusions about relative sizes.

Lastly, I should note that all of the above only considers the living. Once you get to the age 75 demographic in the US, half of the original population is dead, give or take. The dead accrue even higher opportunity costs than those mentioned above, as they have (for the most part) lost all ability to earn or contribute to building new things.

So aging causes a largely unseen cost to go along with what is seen, the cost of what might have been but for disability and death. As is often the case, the cost of research and development to build the means of rejuvenation is small in comparison to what is lost to aging – and also in comparison to what is spent in coping with the aftermath of loss rather than trying to prevent it.

Reason is the founder of The Longevity Meme (now Fight Aging!). He saw the need for The Longevity Meme in late 2000, after spending a number of years searching for the most useful contribution he could make to the future of healthy life extension. When not advancing the Longevity Meme or Fight Aging!, Reason works as a technologist in a variety of industries.  

This work is reproduced here in accord with a Creative Commons Attribution license.  It was originally published on FightAging.org.