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Eden is an Illusion (2009) – Article by G. Stolyarov II

Eden is an Illusion (2009) – Article by G. Stolyarov II

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The New Renaissance Hat
G. Stolyarov II
Originally Published April 2, 2009
as Part of Issue CXCI of The Rational Argumentator
Republished July 23, 2014
******************************
Note from the Author: This essay was originally published as part of Issue CXCI of The Rational Argumentator on April 2, 2009, using the Yahoo! Voices publishing platform. Because of the imminent closure of Yahoo! Voices, the essay is now being made directly available on The Rational Argumentator.
~ G. Stolyarov II, July 23, 2014
***

Many Western and non-Western cultures alike are contaminated by a highly dangerous idea with destructive consequences – the idea of man’s “fall” from some “higher” state – an Eden, if you will. Different groups holding this idea give it different incarnations – but the implications are the same. The myth of the Fall is detrimental to human ambition, flourishing, and improvement; it stifles attempts to find creative solutions to the dreadful problems that have been plaguing humankind since its very beginnings. But beyond being destructive, the Eden myth is simply false. There never was a “better” state from which human beings have “descended.” We shall explore why the Fall is an illusion that ought to be abandoned.

The myth of the Fall is held by often mutually antagonistic groups, all of which pose considerable obstacles to the progress and flourishing of many individuals. On the one hand, fundamentalist religious conservatives see man as literally fallen from the Garden of Eden, where God had designed for him a “perfect” existence. I fail, of course, to see anything perfect about an existence where man had no technology, no love of learning, and no knowledge of good and evil. But this very existence is also embraced by people who claim to be on the opposite side of the political spectrum – radical left-wing environmentalists, who have their own vision of Eden.

Like the Eden of the religious conservatives, the Eden of the environmentalists involves no technology and no active, systematic progress of human knowledge and capacity. Rather, man’s “unity” with “Nature” is celebrated in this vision. According to the environmentalists, there was once a time – probably the pre-Neolithic hunter-gatherer days – when man existed in “harmony” with this strange entity called Nature, which seems to encompass everything other than man. Allegedly, humans did not disturb the “balance” of ecosystems and took good care of the Earth in those days – whatever that means. Alas, there was never such a balance to begin with. We shall see that both the religious and environmentalist visions of Eden are plainly wrong.

Life for early man – far from being blissful or even remotely enjoyable – was, in Thomas Hobbes’s words, “nasty, brutish, and short.” Life expectancy in the Paleolithic period was anywhere from the mid-teens to the mid-twenties. Food was continually in short supply, as there was no guarantee of plentiful game to hunt or berries to forage. And if a plentiful catch did occur, there were scant safeguards to prevent the food from spoiling. Predators and disease were rampant; sanitation and health care were non-existent. Without a scientific method, a person with even the best of intentions often ended up hurting one’s fellow human beings while intending to help them.

Every conceivable vice, social problem, weakness, and fallibility of human beings today has always existed throughout human history; the only difference is the magnitude of such problems, which were most certainly greater in prior eras. Without the benefits of technology, education, and the relative safety and comfort of our times, people were far more prone to engage in violent conflicts over resources and to allow emotional clashes to escalate into bloodshed. Rape, slavery, female subjugation, ceaseless wars, adultery, substance abuse, murder, theft, and other detestable conduct were more common then than now – as there were fewer alternatives to such conduct, and fewer disincentives from it. Every problem facing mankind has always existed in some form – due to hostile natural forces or the irrationality and stupidity of many humans. But the solutions to many of these problems could only come in the form of technological and societal progress – a departure from the non-Eden of the past.

The Eden myth in all of its incarnations originates from the rather strange notion that there is something written in the cosmic laws of nature that the default state of human beings is to be happy, comfortable, justly treated, and in “harmony” with their surroundings. There is no natural law which guarantees this or even tends toward it. The term “comfort” did not even acquire its present usage until the 17th century, and what the ancients meant by “happiness” differs dramatically from prevailing modern views. To suggest that human beings are guaranteed anything good by God, Nature, or what have you, has no evidential support; indeed, all the evidence speaks to the contrary. Humans are faced with millions of perils, injustices, and vulnerabilities. Survival is far from guaranteed, and people of merit and virtue rarely get the rewards they deserve. When natural disasters, political oppression, and disease strike, they rarely discriminate between the good and the evil. There is no natural justice, goodness, or equilibrium, and 99.9% of all species ever existing are now extinct. There is no special protection given to humans from the forces that wiped out many of their distant relatives.

The Eden myth suggests that there is natural guarantee of happiness and justice given to humans, but humans have chosen to stray from the origins of that guarantee – God, Nature, or an analogous reified entity. Therefore, humans suffer – but not because suffering is the default state, but rather because humans did something wrong in rejecting the bliss of the default state. The Eden myth might state that humans deserve lifelong suffering for the sins of Adam and Eve or their ancestors or post-Renaissance Western civilization – but it is in some ways much less grim than reality. The appeal of the Eden myth to many people is that it suggests the existence of an underlying balance and goodness about the world as such – implying that somehow, beneath all that nastiness, everything is fundamentally all right. It is not.

There is nothing to suggest any guarantees given human beings with regard to anything pertaining to their survival, happiness, or fulfillment. There is no cosmic justice and no cosmic “balance.” Rather, whatever justice people wish to obtain, they must create the conditions for. Human technologies, social systems, and esthetic and intellectual accomplishments erect a fortress of civilization which enables us to somewhat resist the onslaught of the elements. The fortress is currently quite shabbily built – with numerous gaping holes and inadequate structural support. Moreover, it is far from complete; indeed, even its foundations have not yet been completely laid. Humanity is still in a state of general barbarism – unable to even figure out ways to prevent individual humans from dying and to prevent human social and political systems from degenerating into either tyranny or chaos. But for all of our massive problems, our ancestors had it worse.

If we are to overcome the extremely genuine and massive threats to our existence coming from virtually all directions, it is essential not to take comfort in the demotivating illusions of a cosmic balance. The longing for a fictitious past bliss leads many to stifle the ambitions of some humans to create a better future. The advocates of the Eden myth seek to thwart the advocates of technological and societal progress – seeing them as taking humankind even further away from its original bliss. But only progress can help us avoid the gruesome destruction and oblivion that are currently in store for every single living individual, unless human ingenuity can enable us to pursue a better path – one which we must follow to push back the hostile aspects of nature and humankind alike and create a safer, happier, more prosperous existence.

Read more articles in Issue CXCI of The Rational Argumentator.

“Human Nature” is Tautological (2009) – Article by G. Stolyarov II

“Human Nature” is Tautological (2009) – Article by G. Stolyarov II

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The New Renaissance Hat
G. Stolyarov II
Originally Published March 10, 2009
as Part of Issue CLXXXIX of The Rational Argumentator
Republished July 23, 2014
******************************
Note from the Author: This essay was originally published as part of Issue CLXXXIX of The Rational Argumentator on March 10, 2009, using the Yahoo! Voices publishing platform. Because of the imminent closure of Yahoo! Voices, the essay is now being made directly available on The Rational Argumentator.
~ G. Stolyarov II, July 23, 2014
***


What is meant by the term “human nature”? In one sense, it is supremely uninformative. The “nature” of any existent can be defined simply as “that which that existent is.” To say that “X is human nature,” is simply to say “X is what humans are and/or do.” This is fine by itself, provided that it is not used as an explanation for any particular human characteristic or activity. X may be human nature, but X does not occur because of human nature. To say that human nature is the cause of any phenomenon is to say that such a phenomenon causes itself. To say that “some people steal because of human nature” is to say that “some people steal because they steal” or that “some people steal because that is the way humans are.” This is not particularly enlightening as to why some people actually steal.

The striking fact about uses of “human nature” in discourse is that the term is virtually never invoked to account for all the wonderful things people do. Few, if any, people say that humans build great buildings, create art, invent machines, and save lives because “that’s just human nature.” But when it comes to some humans killing, stealing, lying, raping, and committing a host of other abuses, “human nature” virtually never leaves the discussion. This leads me to suspect that a lot of presuppositions are smuggled in under the umbrella label of “human nature” which are not implicit in the term. Namely, most people whose discussions are peppered by the term frequently presuppose that all human beings somehow have even the worst vices “in their nature.”

If “human nature” is “the way human beings are,” then it is clearly contrary to empirical evidence to suppose that killing, stealing, lying, and other vices are inherent in human nature. We can find numerous examples of good, upstanding people who have never killed or stolen – and even a few whom we cannot imagine lying. Surely, “the way they are” is such that they do not kill, steal, or lie. This is as much a part of their human nature as killing, stealing, and lying are a part of the natures of genocidal dictators in North Korea, Iran, Zimbabwe, and Sudan. There is no reason to suppose that anyone is capable of any vice just because some people have been observed engaging in some vices.

The facts that some people do commit vices that others do not commit and that no vice is universal to human beings indicates to us that no vice is inherent to human nature – the way humans are. Rather, every vice is incidental to human nature. That is, the natures of some humans happen to be vicious, just as the natures of some cats happen to be white (not that there is anything wrong with white cats). But vice is no more an inseparable part of humanity than whiteness is an inseparable part of cathood. It may well be that some people will always be irreparably vicious, no matter what external stimuli short of death are applied to them. This is why it may be reasonable to advocate killing genocidal sadists and other comparable entities. But this is no commentary on all the other humans of this world.

Moreover, it is essential to recognize that prevailing trends with regard to behavior change over time. 300 years ago, if two Western, upper-class males had a dispute, it would often culminate in a duel to the death. Today, the disputants would be more likely to sit down and quasi-civilly discuss their differences. The statistical prevalence of each kind of behavior has changed dramatically. Moreover, the change has been an unambiguous improvement. “What humans are” does not need to be static and set in stone. Rather, as incentives, institutions, and motivations change, so does behavior – and the sum of our behaviors constitutes our “natures.”

The view of “human nature” that I have presented thus far is fully in accord with the principle of individualism. This principle asserts that each human being is fundamentally different and should be judged on his or her own qualities, and not on the qualities of other human beings who happen to share some direct or indirect association. Moreover, individualism holds that each human being can control his or her own behaviors to a substantial extent. Each person is free to choose virtue but is just as free to choose vice, and each person must be prepared to be judged by the rest of us on the basis of his or her choices. The question remains, of course, what would motivate people to choose virtue as opposed to vice?

Granting that people always have free will to act virtuously or viciously, what would lead people to want to pursue either course of action? Earlier, I described some incentives for moral behavior that motivate people to pursue virtuous and beneficial courses of action with regard to themselves and others. On the other hand, what motivates vice? The kinds of vice that do damage to others – killing, stealing, infliction of injury, and deception – all seem to stem from some sense of personal inadequacy. Either one does not have enough things and wishes to take away the things owned by others, or one feels slighted, deprived, or persecuted in some manner by others and wishes to correct this perceived victimization by destroying its perceived source. Harm that people do to themselves seems to stem either from a conviction that their lives are not quite worth living or from a simple failure to consider all of the long-term harmful consequences of their decisions.

Exploring the common human motivations for committing immoral acts might lead us to an understanding of how to alter these motivations and direct the “natural” desires of more people toward virtue. For instance, if a person is motivated to steal by a lack of food, then if this person had food, he might not resort to stealing (provided, of course, that he recognizes the change in conditions and does not continue to resort to stealing due to the inertia of habit). On the other hand, the new-found presence of food might get the person to focus on some other attribute he believes to be lacking in his life – say, a car – and steal that. How might it be possible to get such a person to refrain from stealing? Clearly, all people perceive some kinds of inadequacies in their lives. The ways that people’s incentives are structured will lead them to consider whether moral or immoral means are the best ways to compensate for such inadequacies.

The proper incentive structure to give to each person is such that the costs of any vicious act will be greater than its perceived benefits. I note that these costs can be both external – such as any kind of punishment – or internal – such as a feeling of self-loathing and disappointment for having committed an immoral act. Well-developed internal aversions to vicious conduct reduce the need for external incentives to encourage virtue. A wide variety of institutions, technologies, and patterns of interaction shape both people’s external and internal incentives. Yet what is most important to remember is that we are not fated to be locked into any particular configuration of incentives, motivations, and outcomes. These continually fluctuate and sometimes experience radical directional shifts. In shaping these incentives, we ought to lose the defeatism of those who claim that “human nature” will forever sentence us to suffer evil instead of correcting it. Rather, we must act such that our individual, incremental effects are for the better rather than for the worse.

Read other articles in The Rational Argumentator’s Issue CLXXXIX.

Three Specters of Immortality: A Talk from the Radical Life-Extension Conference in Washington D.C. – Article by Franco Cortese

Three Specters of Immortality: A Talk from the Radical Life-Extension Conference in Washington D.C. – Article by Franco Cortese

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The New Renaissance Hat
Franco Cortese
October 20, 2013
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Author’s Note: The following is a transcript of a talk given at the recent Radical Life Extension Conference held in the U.S. Capitol on September 22,2013. Talks were also given by Antonei B. Csoka, Gabriel Rothblatt, Tom Mooney, Mark Waser, Gray Scott, Josh Mitteldorf, Maitreya One, Jennifer ‘Dotora’ Huse and Apneet Jolly. A special thanks to David Pizer for making this article available for distribution at the upcoming Society for Venturism 2013 Cryonics Conference in Laughlin, Nevada, on October 25-27th.

Introduction

I would like to address what I consider to be three common criticisms against the desirability and ethicality of life-extension I come across all too often – three specters of immortality, if you will. These will be (1) overpopulation (the criticism that widely available life-extension therapies will cause unmanageable overpopulation), (2) naturality (the criticism that life extension is wrong because it is unnatural), and (3) selfishness (the criticism that life-extension researchers, activists, and supporters are motivated by a desire to increase their own, personal lifespans rather than by a desire to decrease involuntary suffering in the world at large).

But first I would like to comment on why this would be important. I would consider two of the three critiques – namely the naturality critique and the selfishness critique – to be largely unfounded and vacuous; I don’t think they will be real worries when comprehensive life-extension therapies arrive. I think that the overpopulation critique does have some weight to it; we do in fact need to plan for and manage the effects of a growing population. However, the overpopulation critique is wrong in assuming that such affects will be unmanageable.

So if at least 2 of these 3 critiques are largely unfounded, then what’s the worry? Won’t they simply disappear when life extension is achieved, if they are really so baseless? Well, yes, but the possibility of their turning out to be right at the end of the day is not what makes them worrying.

What makes them worrying is the fact that they deter widespread support of life extension from the general public, because they stop many people from seeing the advantage and desirability of life extension today. A somewhat common, though thankfully not predominant, attitude I find from some longevity supporters is that work is being done, progress is being made, and that the best course of action for those who want to be around to benefit from the advances in medicine already on the developmental horizon is simply to live as healthily as we can today while waiting for tomorrow’s promise. I don’t think this attitude necessarily deters progress in the life-extension field, but I certainly don’t think it helps it very much either. I think such people are under the pretense that it will take as long as it needs to, and that there is nothing the average person can really do to speed things up and hasten progress in the field. Quite to the contrary, I think every man and woman in this room can play as central a role in hastening progress in the field of life extension as researchers and scientists can.

This is largely due to the fact that just what is considered worthy of scientific study is to a very large extent out of the hands of the average scientist. The large majority of working-day scientists don’t have as much creative license and choice over what they research as we would like to think they do. Scientists have to make their studies conform to the kinds of research that are getting funded. In order to get funding, more often than not they have to do research on what the scientific community considers important or interesting, rather than on what they personally might find the most important or interesting. And what the scientific community considers important and worthy of research is, by and large, determined by what the wider public considers important.

Thus if we want to increase the funding available to academic projects pertaining to life extension, we should be increasing public support for it first and foremost. We should be catalyzing popular interest in and knowledge of life extension. Strangely enough, the objective of increased funding can be more successfully and efficiently achieved, per unit of time or effort, by increasing public support and demand via activism, advocacy, and lobbying, rather than by, say, direct funding, period.

Thus, even if most of these three criticisms, these specters of immortality, are to some extent baseless, refuting them is still important insofar as it increases public support for life extension, thereby hastening progress in the field. We need massive amounts of people to wake up and very explicitly communicate their desire for increased funding in biomedical gerontology, a.k.a. life extension. I think that this is what will catalyze progress in the field – very clear widespread demand for increased funding and attention for life extension.

This is something I think each and every man and woman here today can do – that is, become a life-extension activist and advocate. It is not only one of the easiest ways in which you can contribute to the movement – it may very well be the most important and effective ways that you can contribute to the movement as well. Send an email to the International Longevity Alliance (info@longevityalliance.org), an organization dedicated to social advocacy of life extension, which is compiling a list of life-extension advocates and networking them together. Arrange and organize your own local life-extension rally or demonstration, like the one held last year in Brussels. This could be as easy as holding up signs supporting scientific research into aging in the most traffic-dense location in your local area, recording it, and posting it on YouTube.

And so, without further ado, I’d like to move on to the three specters of immortality.

1. The Unmanageable-Overpopulation Critique

Firstly, I’d like to turn a critique of the possible undesirable societal and demographic repercussions of life extension. The most prominent among these kinds of critiques is that of overpopulation – namely that the widespread availability of life-extension therapies will cause unmanageable overpopulation and a rapid depletion of our scarce resources.

I think this critique, out of those three critiques addressed here, is really the only one that is a real worry. That is because potential negative societal repercussions of life extension are a real possibility, and must be appropriately addressed if they are to be avoided or mitigated. And don’t get me wrong – they are manageable problems that can be handled if we make sure to plan for them sufficiently, and allocate enough attention to them before their effects are upon us.

According to some studies, such as one performed by S. Jay Olshanksy, a member of the board of directors for the American Federation of Aging Research (and the foremost advocate and promulgator of the Longevity Dividend), if the mortality rate dropped to zero tomorrow – that is, if everyone in the world received life-extension therapies comprehensive enough to extend their lives indefinitely – we would experience a rise in population less than the growth in population we experienced following the Post-World-War-II baby-boom. Global society has experienced dramatic increases in population growth before – and when that happened we extended and added to our infrastructure accordingly in order to accommodate them. When significant increases in life extension begin to happen, I expect that we will do the same. But we must make sure to plan ahead. Overpopulation will be an insoluble problem only if we ignore it until its perceptible effects are upon us.

Luckily, there are a number of existing solution-paradigms to other, somewhat related problems and concerns that can be leveraged to help mitigate the scarcitizing effects of overpopulation on resources and living-space.

Contemporary concerns over the depletion of non-renewable resources, such as but not limited to climate change, can be leveraged to help lessen the detrimental effect overpopulation might have on non-renewable resources.

Another contemporary solution paradigm we can leverage to help mitigate the detrimental effects of overpopulation on living space is seasteading. This is the notion of creating permanent dwellings and structures at sea, essentially floating cities, outside of the territory of governments – more often than not to get around legal complications relating to whatever the prospective seasteaders wish to do. This movement is already bringing about designs and feasibility studies relating to the safe construction of very large floating cities.

The most common solution-paradigms proposed to combat the problems of resources and living space are space colonization and regulating how many children people can have. I think that long before we turn to these options, we will begin to better maximize the existing living space we have. 75% of the earth’s surface area is water. I think that we will colonize the oceans long before space colonization becomes a more economically optimal option. Further, we currently don’t use the living space we have very well. We live on the surface of a sphere, after all. There is nothing in principle preventing us from building taller and building deeper. We can take from existing proposals and feasibility studies pertaining to megastructures – that is, very large man-made structures – to build much bigger than we currently do.

Another existing field that can help lessen the potential resource-depleting effects of a growing global population is agricultural labs, indoor farming systems, and vertical farms. Such systems are in use today for large-scale food production. This would allow us to take all the space we currently have devoted to agriculture (roughly 40% of earth’s total land-area according to some estimates – see here and here) and move it underground or indoors.

Thus overpopulation is a real worry, but we have the potential solutions to its problematic effects today. We can leverage several existing solution-paradigms proposed to combat several contemporary problems and concerns in order to manage the scarcitizing effects of overpopulation on resources and living space.

2. The Naturality Critique

I’d like to turn to the Naturality criticism now – the criticism that life-extension is unnatural, dehumanizing and an affront to our human dignity.  – This could not be farther from the truth. The stanch revulsion we have of death is right; appropriate; a perfectly natural response.

Besides which, “naturality,” insofar as it pertains to humans, is an illegitimate notion to begin with. For us human beings, naturality is unnatural. It is we who have cast off animality in the name of mind, we who have ripped dead matter asunder to infuse it with the works of our mind – we who have crafted clothes, codes, cities, symbols, and culture. Since the very inception of human civilization, we have very thoroughly ceased to be natural, and to such an extent that unnaturality has become our first nature.

Firstly, one thing that I think undercuts the critique of naturality rather well is the known existence of biologically immortal organisms. There are in fact known organisms where the statistical probability of mortality does not increase with age. Meaning that if one kept these organisms healthily fed and in a good environment for them, then they simply shouldn’t die. Not only are there proofs of concept for biological immortality – but it can be found in nature unmodified by man.

Hydras, small freshwater organisms, do not undergo cellular senescence and are able to maintain their telomere lengths throughout continued cell division. The jellyfish Turritopsis Nutricula can, through a process called cellular transdifferentiation, revert back to the polyp stage (an earlier stage in its developmental cycle) a potentially indefinite number of times. Planarian Flatworms also appear to be biologically immortal, and can maintain their telomere lengths through a large population of highly proliferative adult stem cells. And if you can believe it, an organism as commonplace as the lobster also appears to be biologically immortal. Older lobsters are more fertile than young lobsters, and they don’t appear to weaken or slow down with age.

There is then such a thing as biological immortality. In biology it’s defined as a stable or decreasing rate or mortality from cellular senescence as a function of chronological age. Meaning that barring such accidents as being eaten by prey, such organisms should continue to live indefinitely.

I also think that this is great proof of concept for people who automatically associate the magnitude of the endeavor with its complexity or difficulty, and assume that achieving biological immortality is technically infeasible simply due to the sheer profundity of the objective. But in regards to naturality, I think the existence of such biologically immortal organisms goes to show that there is nothing necessarily unnatural about biological immortality – because it has already been achieved by blind evolution in various naturally-occurring biological organisms.

Secondly, I think that the long history of seminal thinkers who have contemplated the notion of human biological immortality, the historical antecedents of the contemporary life-extension movement, help to combat the naturality criticism as well. Believe it or not, people have been speculating about the scientific abolition of involuntary death for hundreds of years at least.

As early as 1795, nearly 220 years ago, Marquis de Condorcet wrote

“Would it be absurd now to suppose that the improvement of the human race should be regarded as capable of unlimited progress? That a time will come when death would result only from extraordinary accidents or the more and more gradual wearing out of vitality, and that, finally, the duration of the average interval between birth and wearing out has itself no specific limit whatsoever? No doubt man will not become immortal, but cannot the span constantly increase between the moment he begins to live and the time when naturally, without illness or accident, he finds life a burden?”

Here we see one of the fathers of the enlightenment tradition speculating on whether it is really that absurd to contemplate the notion of a continually-increasing human lifespan.

In 1773, 240 years ago, Benjamin Franklin wrote in a letter to Jacques Duborg, first praising the sagacity and humanity demonstrated by his attempt to bring animals back from the dead, and then describing what can only be a harkening of cryonics and suspended animation, where he wishes that there were a way for him to be revived a century hence, and witness the progress in science that had been made since the time of his death.

“Your observations on the causes of death, and the experiments which you propose for recalling to life those who appear to be killed by lightning, demonstrate equally your sagacity and your humanity. It appears that the doctrine of life and death in general is yet but little understood…

I wish it were possible… to invent a method of embalming drowned persons, in such a manner that they might be recalled to life at any period, however distant; for having a very ardent desire to see and observe the state of America a hundred years hence, I should prefer to an ordinary death, being immersed with a few friends in a cask of Madeira, until that time, then to be recalled to life by the solar warmth of my dear country! But… in all probability, we live in a century too little advanced, and too near the infancy of science, to see such an art brought in our time to its perfection…”

Thus the notion of human biological immortality through science and medicine is not as new as most of us are probably quick to presume. Men of stature and intellect, respected and admired historical figures, have been contemplating the prospect for hundreds of years at least.

Thirdly, I think that religion itself exemplifies our desire for indefinite lifespans. This may seem counter-intuitive considering that many criticisms of life extension come from underlying religious arguments and worldviews – for instance that we shouldn’t be playing god, or messing with the way god created us. But the fact is that most religions have a conception of the afterlife – i.e., of eternal life following the physical death of the body. The fact that belief in an afterlife is a feature shared by almost all historical religions, that belief in an afterlife was conceived in a whole host of cultures independent of one another, shows that indefinite lifespans is one of humanity’s most deep-rooted and common longings and desires – indeed, one so deep-rooted that it transcends cultural distance and deep historical time.

3. The Selfishness Critique

Now I’d like to turn to the third specter of immortality – the criticism of selfishness. Whereas the first specter of immortality was a critique of the ethicality of life extension, this second specter is more a moralistic critique of the worthiness of actually spending one’s time trying to further progress in the field today.

The view that life-extension researchers, activists and supporters are arrogant for thinking that we somehow deserve to live longer than those that came before us – as though we were trying to increase public support for and interest in life extension merely for the sake of continuing our own lives. This, too, is, I think, a rather baseless criticism. Every life-extension researcher, activist, scholar and supporter I know does it not solely for the sake of their own lives but for the sake of the 100,000 people that die every day due to age-correlated causes. That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, 100,000 people will die from aging today, lost forever to causes that are in principle preventable and ultimately unnecessary. There are roughly 86,000 seconds in a day. That works out to a little more than one death per second. That’s about equal to the entire population of Washington, DC, dying every week, 3 million preventable deaths per month, and 36.5 million deaths per year. A group larger than the entire population of Canada will die from aging this year – and the fact that it sickens so few of us is incredibly sickening to me. This is an untenable situation for a civilization as capable as ours – we who have reshaped the world over, we who have gone to the moon, we who have manipulated atoms despite out fat monkey fingers. Humanity is an incredibly powerful and unprecedented phenomenon, and to say that we simply cannot do anything about death is to laugh in the face of history to some extent. Recall that very learned and esteemed men once said that heavier-than-air flying machines – and a great many other things we take for granted today – are impossible.

We cringe and cry when we hear of acts of genocide or horrible accidents killing thousands. But this occurs every day, on the toll of 100,000 deaths per day, right under our noses.

Doing something about this daily cataclysm is what drives my own work, and the work of most every life-extension supporter I know. The life-extension movement is about decreasing the amount of involuntary suffering in the world, and only lastly about our own, personal longevity, if at all. The eradication of involuntary death via science and medicine is nothing less than the humanitarian imperative of our times!

And again, this is something that I think each and every one of you can take part in. Become a life-extension supporter, advocate and activist. It may be not only the easiest way that you can contribute to hastening progress in the field of life extension, but the most effective way as well. Thank you.

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Franco Cortese is a futurist, author, editor, Affiliate Scholar at the Institute for Ethics & Emerging Technologies, Ambassador at The Seasteading Institute, Affiliate Researcher at ELPIs Foundation for Indefinite Lifespans, Fellow at Brighter Brains Institute, Advisor at the Lifeboat Foundation (Futurists Board Member and Life Extension Scientific Advisory Board Member), Director of the Canadian Longevity Alliance, Activist at the International Longevity Alliance, Canadian Ambassador at Longevity Intelligence Communications, an Administrator at MILE (Movement for Indefinite Life Extension), Columnist at LongeCity, Columnist at H+ Magazine, Executive Director of the Center for Transhumanity, Contributor to the Journal of Geoethical Nanotechnology, India Future Society, Serious Wonder, Immortal Life and The Rational Argumentator. Franco edited Longevitize!: Essays on the Science, Philosophy & Politics of Longevity, a compendium of 150+ essays from over 40 contributing authors.

The Glorious Transhumanist Manifesto – Article by G. Stolyarov II

The Glorious Transhumanist Manifesto – Article by G. Stolyarov II

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The New Renaissance Hat
G. Stolyarov II
February 6, 2013
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Oblivion threatens to engulf us all, spreading toward us across the void of the dead past. Billions have succumbed to it already – precious universes of thought, feeling, and sensation, snuffed out by senescence, decay, and ruin. But we do not acquiesce. We fight the greatest war of all time, a war not against men but against what for ages was unquestioningly accepted as the human predicament. We do not meekly accept our limitations, but boldly strive to overcome them. We do not resign ourselves to lifespans of a paltry forty, sixty, eighty years. We do not concern ourselves with “putting our affairs in order” so that the next generation can repeat the same cycle of growth and decay, just a quarter-century removed in time. We journey not from cradle to grave, but from our present narrow confines to the vast expanses of space, time, and intelligence. We are transhumanists, who confront ruin itself with the courage and conviction that this foe, too, shall be overcome.

What are our weapons in the war against ruin? Reason and science, philosophy and technology, will and skill, persuasion and action. We do not accept that things must remain as they have been in recent memory. We recognize that the status quo is but a fleeting moment, and stability is an illusion. The choice for humanity is clear: we move forward in exponential progress, or ruin drags us down into the primeval bog. Evolution is cruel and has wiped out the overwhelming majority of all species. We must not become its victims. Existential risks continue to threaten us, but the worst risks are not those of our making. The greatest risk we face is that of our own fear and inaction, of allowing indifferent, thoughtlessly destructive forces of the wild to demolish what we and our ancestors have painstakingly built. Only mastery of nature, including our own biology, will enable us to preserve and amplify what we hold dear. Machines – from the tiniest nanobots to the most comprehensive networks of supercomputers and artificial intellects – will be our allies in our struggle. Eventually, they and we shall become inseparable. From them we shall gain faculties that biology alone could never provide. From us they shall gain life and reason.

Imagine the vast, open realm of possibilities for a being without a built-in expiration date. What could you do today if you knew that an inexhaustible succession of tomorrows awaited? No more would the nagging reminder of your forthcoming oblivion confine your focus to the most rudimentary of tasks. What would you attempt to learn, to experience, to build, to bring into your ever-widening sphere? We will give you the universe, if you accept it. And if you do not accept it right away, the splendor of the transhumanist world will continue to beckon. It will be a world devoid of the annihilation of the good, where the suffering of sentient beings will diminish until it is no more. It will be a world where each person will finally have the total liberty to think and innovate – the only treatment which properly respects the minds and dignity of rational beings. As the fruits of the human mind and its creations finally blossom all around you, partaking of them will be irresistible. But all this is not yet ours, and the future can only be what we make of it. The greatest struggles of all history await. Become a champion of the future, to prevent yourself from disappearing into the past. Fight the war on ruin, so you do not become its casualty. Become a transhumanist: you have nothing to lose but loss itself.

Philosophy Lives – Contra Stephen Hawking – Video by G. Stolyarov II

Philosophy Lives – Contra Stephen Hawking – Video by G. Stolyarov II

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Mr. Stolyarov’s refutation of Stephen Hawking’s statement that “philosophy is dead.”

In his 2010 book The Grand Design, cosmologist and theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking writes that science has displaced philosophy in the enterprise of discovering truth. While I have great respect for Hawking both in his capacities as a physicist and in his personal qualities — his advocacy of technological progress and his determination and drive to achieve in spite of his debilitating illness — the assertion that the physical sciences can wholly replace philosophy is mistaken. Not only is philosophy able to address questions outside the scope of the physical sciences, but the coherence and validity of scientific approaches itself rests on a philosophical foundation that was not always taken for granted — and still is not in many circles.

References
– “Philosophy Lives – Contra Stephen Hawking” – Essay by G. Stolyarov II
– “The Grand Design (book)” – Wikipedia
– “Stephen Hawking” – Wikipedia

Philosophy Lives – Contra Stephen Hawking – Article by G. Stolyarov II

Philosophy Lives – Contra Stephen Hawking – Article by G. Stolyarov II

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The New Renaissance Hat
G. Stolyarov II
January 1, 2013
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In his 2010 book The Grand Design, cosmologist and theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking writes that science has displaced philosophy in the enterprise of discovering truth. While I have great respect for Hawking both in his capacities as a physicist and in his personal qualities – his advocacy of technological progress and his determination and drive to achieve in spite of his debilitating illness – the assertion that the physical sciences can wholly replace philosophy is mistaken. Not only is philosophy able to address questions outside the scope of the physical sciences, but the coherence and validity of scientific approaches itself rests on a philosophical foundation that was not always taken for granted – and still is not in many circles.

Hawking writes, “Living in this vast world that is by turns kind and cruel, and gazing at the immense heavens above, people have always asked a multitude of questions: How can we understand the world in which we find ourselves? How does the universe behave? What is the nature of reality? Where did all this come from? Did the universe need a creator? Most of us do not spend most of our time worrying about these questions, but almost all of us worry about them some of the time. Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.”

I hesitate to speculate why Hawking considers philosophy to be “dead” – but perhaps this view partly arises from frustration at the non-reality-oriented teachings of many postmodernist philosophers who still prevail in many academic and journalistic circles. Surely, those who deny the comprehensibility of reality and allege that it is entirely a societal construction do not aid in the quest for discovery and understanding of what really exists. Likewise, our knowledge cannot be enhanced by those who deny that there exist systematic and specific methods that are graspable by human reason and that can be harnessed for the purposes of discovery. It is saddening indeed that prominent philosophical figures have embraced anti-realist positions in metaphysics and anti-rational, anti-empirical positions in epistemology. Physicists, in their everyday practice, necessarily rely on external observational evidence and on logical deductions from the empirical data. In this way, and to the extent that they provide valid explanations of natural phenomena, they are surely more reality-oriented than most postmodernist philosophers. Yet philosophy does not need to be this way – and, indeed, philosophical schools of thought throughout history and in the present day are not only compatible with the scientific approach to reality, but indispensable to it.

Contrary to the pronouncements of prominent postmodernists, a venerable strain of thought – dating back to at least Aristotle and extending all the way to today’s transhumanists, Objectivists, and natural-law thinkers – holds that an objective reality exists, that it can be understood through systematic observation and reason, and that its understanding should be pursued by all of us. This is the philosophical strain responsible for the accomplishments of Classical Antiquity and the progress made during the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and the Information Revolution. While such philosophy is not the same as the physical sciences, the physical sciences rely on it to the extent that they embrace the approach known as the scientific method, which itself rests on philosophical premises. These premises include the existence of an external reality independent of the wishes and imagination of any observer, the existence of a definite identity of any given entity at any given time, the reliance on identical conditions producing identical outcomes, the principles of causation and non-contradiction, and the ability of human beings to systematically alter outcomes in the physical world by understanding its workings and modifying physical systems accordingly. This latter principle – that, in Francis Bacon’s words, “Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed” – was the starting point for the Scientific Revolution of the 17th Century, which inaugurated subsequent massive advances in technology, standards of living, and human understanding of the universe.  Even those scientists who do not acknowledge or explicitly reject the importance of philosophy nonetheless implicitly rely on these premises in the very conduct of their scientific work – to the extent that such work accurately describes reality. These premises are not the only ones possible – but they are the only ones that are fully right. Alternatives – including reliance on alleged supernatural revelation, wishful thinking, and unconditional deference to authority – have been tried time and again, only to result in stagnation and mental traps that prevented substantive improvements to the human condition.

But there is more. Not only are the physical sciences without a foundation if philosophy is to be ignored, but the very reason for pursuing them remains unaddressed without the branch of philosophy that focuses on what we ought to do: ethics. Contrary to those who would posit an insurmountable “is-ought” gap, ethics can indeed be derived from the facts of reality, but not solely by the tools of physics, chemistry, biology, or any others of the “hard” physical sciences. An additional element is required: the fact that we ourselves exist as rational, conscious beings, who are capable of introspection and of analysis of external data. From the physical sciences we can derive ways to sustain and improve our material well-being – sometimes our very survival. But only ethics can tell us that we ought to pursue such survival – a conclusion we reach through introspection and logical reasoning. No experiment, no test is needed to tell us that we ought to keep living. This conclusion arises as antecedent to a consistent pursuit of any action at all; to achieve any goal, we must be alive. To pursue death, the opposite of life, contradicts the very notion of acting, which has life as a prerequisite.  Once we have accepted that premise, an entire system of logical deductions follows with regard to how we ought to approach the external world – the pursuit of knowledge, interactions with others, improvement of living conditions, protection against danger. The physical sciences can provide many of the empirical data and regularities needed to assess alternative ways of living and to develop optimal solutions to human challenges. But ethics is needed to keep the goals of scientific study in mind. The goals should ultimately relate to ways to enhance human well-being. If the pursuit of human well-being – consistent with the imperative of each individual to continue living – is abandoned, then the physical sciences alone cannot provide adequate guidance. Indeed, they can be utilized to produce horrors – as the development of nuclear weapons in the 20th century exemplified. Geopolitical considerations of coercive power and nationalism were permitted to overshadow humanistic considerations of life and peace, and hundreds of thousands of innocents perished due to a massive government-sponsored science project, while the fate of human civilization hung in the balance for over four decades.

The questions cited by Hawking are indeed philosophical questions, at least in part. Aspects of these questions, while they are broadly reliant on the existence of an objective reality, do not require specific experiments to answer. Rather, like many of the everyday questions of our existence, they rely only on the ubiquitous inputs of our day-to-day experience, generalized within our minds and formulated as starting premises for a logical deductive process. The question “How can we understand the world in which we find ourselves?“ has different answers based on the realm of focus and endeavor. Are we looking to understand the function of a mechanism, or the origin of a star? Different tools are required for each, but systematic experimentation and observation would be required in each case. This is an opening for the physical sciences and the scientific method. There are, however, ubiquitous observations about our everyday world that can be used as inputs into our decision-making – a process we engage in regularly as we navigate a room, eat a meal, engage in conversation or deliberation, or transport any object whatsoever. Simply as a byproduct of routine living, these observations provide us with ample data for a series of logical deductions and inferences which do not strictly belong to any scientific branch, even though specific parts of our world could be better understood from closer scientific observation.

The question “How does the universe behave?” actually arises in part from a philosophical presupposition that “the universe” is a single entity with any sort of coordinated behavior whatsoever. An alternative view – which I hold – is that the word “universe” is simply convenient mental shorthand for describing the totality of every single entity that exists, in lieu of actually enumerating them all. Thus, while each entity has its own definite nature, “the universe” may not have a single nature or behavior. Perhaps a more accurate framing of that question would be, “What attributes or behaviors are common to all entities that exist?” To answer that question, a combination of ubiquitous observation and scientific experimentation is required. Ubiquitous observation tells us that all entities are material, but only scientific experimentation can tell us what the “building blocks” of matter are. Philosophy alone cannot recommend any model of the atom or of subatomic particles, among multiple competing non-contradictory models. Philosophy can, however, rightly serve to check the logical coherence of any particular model and to reject erroneous interpretations of data which produce internally contradictory answers. Such rejection does not mean that the data are inaccurate, or even that a particular scientific theory cannot predict the behavior of entities – but rather that any verbal understanding of the accurate data and predictive models should also be consistent with logic, causation, and everyday human experience. At the very least, if a coherent verbal understanding is beyond our best efforts at present, philosophy should be vigilant against the promulgation of incoherent verbal understandings. It is better to leave certain scientific models as systems of mathematical equations, uncommented on, than to posit evidently false interpretations that undermine laypeople’s view of the validity of our very existence and reasoning.

After all – to return to the ethical purpose of science – one major goal of scientific inquiry is to understand and explain the world we live in and experience on a daily basis. If any scientific model is said to result in the conclusion that our world does not ‘really’ exist or that our entire experience is illusory (rather than just occasional quirks in our biology, such as those which produce optical illusions, misleading us, in an avoidable manner, under specific unusual circumstances), then it is the philosophical articulation of that model that is flawed. The model itself may be retained in another form – such as mathematical notation – that can be used to predict and study phenomena which continue to defy verbal understanding, with the hope that someday a satisfactory verbal understanding will be attained. Without this philosophic vigilance, scientific breakthroughs may be abused by charlatans for the purpose of misleading people into ruining their lives. As a prominent example of this, multiple strains of mysticism have arisen out of bad philosophical interpretations of quantum mechanics – for instance, the belief, articulated in such pseudo-self-help books as The Secret, that people can mold reality with their thoughts alone and that, instead of working hard and thinking rationally, they can become immensely wealthy and cure themselves of cancer just by wanting it enough. Without a rigorous philosophical defense of reason and objective reality, either by scientists themselves or by their philosopher allies, this mystical nonsense will render scientific enterprises increasingly misunderstood by and isolated from large segments of the public, who will become increasingly superstitious, anti-intellectual, and reliant on wishful thinking.

The question “What is the nature of reality?” is a partly philosophical and partly scientific one. The philosophical dimension – metaphysics – is needed to posit that an objective, understandable reality exists at all. The scientific dimension comes into play in comprehending specific real entities, from stars to biological organisms – relying on the axioms and derivations of metaphysics for the experimental study of such entities to even make sense or promise to produce reliable results. Philosophy cannot tell you what the biological structure of a given organism is like, but it can tell you that there is one, and that praying or wishing really hard to understand it will not reveal its identity to you. Philosophy can also tell you that, in the absence of external conditions that would dramatically affect that biological structure, it will not magically change into a dramatically different structure.

The questions “Where did all this come from? Did the universe need a creator?” are scientific only to a point. When exploring the origin of a particular planet or star – or of life on Earth – they are perfectly amenable to experimentation and to extrapolation from historical evidence. Hence, the birth of the solar system, abiogenesis, and biological evolution are all appropriate subjects of study for the hard sciences. Moreover, scientific study can address the question of whether a particular object needed to have a creator and can, for instance, conclude that a mechanical watch needed to have a watchmaker, but no analogous maker needed to exist to bring about the structure of a complex biological organism. However, if the question arises as to whether existence itself had an origin or needed a creator, this is a matter for philosophy. Indeed, rational philosophy can point out the contradiction in the view that existence itself could ever not have existed, or that a creator outside of existence (and, by definition, non-existent at that time) could have brought existence into being.

Interestingly enough, Hawking comes to a similar conclusion – that cosmological history can be understood by a model that not include a sentient creator. I am glad that Hawking holds this view, but this specific conclusion does not require theoretical or experimental physics to validate; it simply requires a coherent understanding of terms such as “existence”, “universe”, and “creator”. Causation and non-contradiction both preclude the possibility of any ex nihilo creation. As for the question of whether there exist beings capable of vast cosmic manipulations and even the design of life forms – that is an empirical matter. Perhaps someday such beings will be discovered; perhaps someday humans will themselves become such beings through mastery of science and technology. The first steps have already been taken – for instance, with Craig Venter’s design of a synthetic living bacterium. Ethics suggests to me that this mastery of life is a worthwhile goal and that its proponents – transhumanists – should work to persuade those philosophers and laypeople who disagree.

More constructive dialogue between rational scientists and rational philosophers is in order, for the benefit of both disciplines. Philosophy can serve as a check on erroneous verbal interpretations of scientific discoveries, as well as an ethical guide for the beneficial application of those discoveries. Science can serve to provide observations and regularities which assist in the achievement of philosophically motivated goals. Furthermore, science can serve to disconfirm erroneous philosophical positions, in cases where philosophy ventures too far into specific empirical predictions which experimentation and targeted observation might falsify. To advance such fruitful interactions, it is certainly not productive to proclaim that one discipline or another is “dead”. I will be the first to admit that contemporary philosophy, especially of the kind that enjoys high academic prestige, is badly in need of reform. But such reform is only possible after widespread acknowledgment that philosophy does have a legitimate and significant role, and that it can do a much better job in fulfilling it.