Fairy tale immortality, whereby you drink an elixir and there, you’re indestructible, is a fool’s errand. It comes from a simplistic and sometimes anthropomorphic view of death: picturing it as a man who takes souls, who you can somehow evade and thus live forever, or as the lack of a vital force that can be taken or replenished. Death is not a specific thing, it’s the cessation of life, whichever way it happens, and so there are more ways to be dead than there are ways to be alive. It’s a consequence of the laws of thermodynamics: a system has more ways to be disorganized than ways to be organized. The amount of disorganization or chaos within a system is directly correlated with a physical quantity called entropy. Low entropy means high level of organization, whereas high entropy means the opposite.
And so maintaining yourself alive is about keeping disorder from creeping up into your system. And by extension, becoming immortal, in more realistic and practical terms, would mean having (the ability) to fight the countless agents of disorder constantly, thereby gaining some time (a few more years or decades, or more perhaps) until the next big entropy increasing agent comes in, while of course ensuring that simpler and quicker ones don’t take you by surprise. It’s also about anticipating those death agents in advance so their effect can be postponed or nullified.
We all fight entropy on a daily basis. When you eat food, you are giving your system the necessary building blocks to renew its components, repair damage, and perform other tasks to keep your entropy at a low level. When you take medications for some disease, you are providing your body with materials to destroy a foreign organism, that could wreak havoc in the structure of your system (and thus increase its entropy). When you look left and right before crossing a street, you are trying to prevent an external impact, strong enough to damage your system and thus, once again, increase your entropy. Nearly every action we perform is, directly or indirectly, about maintaining our entropy as low as possible.
Why then, despite this humongous effort exerted by all living organisms, humans included, to maintain their entropy very low, do they end up dying, i.e. reaching a state of high entropy? Well, our bodies are well equipped to maintain themselves, but they’re not perfect. They are only good enough to allow us to live for some time and have offspring, passing on our genes to them, and then once our children have grown enough to have their own offspring, as far as nature is concerned, we become obsolete. There are people of course who live long enough to see their grand-grand-children, or even their grand-grand-grand-children, but those are exceptions. In any case, if we don’t succumb earlier, we all grow old and eventually die. There are however exceptions to this rule in nature, most notably the hydra. These creatures are biologically immortal, as they can stay young indefinitely without ever growing old, and may die only due to a trauma or a disease. Scientists are currently studying these organisms to understand their ability, and possibly replicate it to prevent aging in humans.
Aging itself is conducive to an overall increase in entropy. At the cellular level, copying errors multiply, many processes are not as efficient as they used to be, leading to a deterioration of functions and tissues. We are thus easily exposed to a variety of diseases like cancers, strokes, dementia, etc. At some point, one or more of our vital systems is irreversibly damaged, leading to a sudden interruption of the maintenance systems in our bodies, and so entropy, having nothing to keep it in check anymore, shoots upwards abruptly. But is this process truly irreversible? Death after all has been constantly redefined, all through human history, depending on our level of knowledge and technological ability. In fact, the second law of thermodynamics, “the law of entropy”, implies that the natural process of entropy increase in a system can be reversed, if the right amount of energy and matter is introduced in the right way to recreate the former state of that system, or one that is close to it. “Reversing aging” and “reversing death” from a physical standpoint are therefore totally feasible, or at least they do not contradict any physical laws that we know of, as long as we have a sufficient amount of energy to reposition every molecule in the system where it was before the damage started.
Right now of course we don’t know how to cure cellular damage that causes aging and other age-related diseases, although much progress has been made in that department recently. But theoretically, since the human body is essentially a machine, albeit a very complex one, it’s possible to repair any damage by intervening in the processes and tweaking them, or simply by replacing the damaged tissues with new ones.
Cancer is now one of the biggest challenges we’re facing. But once cancer becomes curable or preventable in whichever form, we will certainly run into other agents of death eventually. We may speculate that if you could live to 300, your brain would hit its memory capacity limit, and you’d be unable to remember any further information (or you would start forgetting older vital ones). Studies have shown that Alzheimer’s cases have been climbing up in the last few years, and will continue to do so if no breakthroughs are made. So maybe after the cancer stage comes the generalized Alzheimer’s stage. It’s like playing a video game, except there’s no final level where you’d win against the final boss and save the princess. We’ll always run into more difficult problems to solve, and once they are solved, there will be even more difficult ones awaiting us still. Even the matter that makes us up and everything else around us has an expiry date. Protons for example have an estimated life of 1034 years, 1 followed by 34 zeros.
The reason why curing aging is such a crucial issue, is that aging itself, according to some studies, is a major factor in the aforementioned maladies; and understanding aging, itself a process of degeneration, progressive damage, and error accumulation may shed light on such diseases. Curing aging on its own would therefore eliminate many potential cases of cancer or Alzheimer’s, just as an example, with the obvious bonus of adding many more years to our healthy lifespan.
One of the main objectives of the longevity movement is to find cures to aging symptoms, and to reverse the aging process itself. In a post-aging era people would more likely succumb to faster ways of death, involving strong physical impacts for instance, rather than slow and painful ones, and would also have the choice to die in their own dignified way once they decide they no longer want to live. And of course those among us who still want to live longer, in order to have more experiences or because they have a life mission they would like to fulfill, would be able to do so.
There are many reasons why each one of us may need to live multiple lifetimes or even indefinitely. The number of possible experiences for an individual human is almost infinite, and the same could be said of our individual creative potential. And when we stop restricting our imagination and our possibilities, we find many practical justifications for life extension. Let us think of our existence beyond our daily routines, beyond the few places that we frequently visit, and the few experiences that we have made and will ever make as non-extended non-augmented humans. The realization of how little of the world we experience can make us feel small, but it should also motivate us to try to become bigger. Let us think beyond our blue planet, and ponder how little we have explored so far even in our own Solar System, and how googolly vast the expanse that remains to be explored is. Traversing the unimaginably huge distances that separate planets, star systems and galaxies, limited by the speed of light, is an endeavor that will require several lifetimes if not several geological times. Compared to this vastness, we human beings are quite helpless, limited, and fragile. And this is the very reason why we should expand the scope of what we, as individuals and also as a species, can do. Life extension is one way we can expand that scope, by giving more time to all of us, especially the restless explorers whose appetite for more knowledge, more experiences, and more accomplishments, cannot be satiated by the scantily protracted amount of time, frugally bestowed upon us by Mother Nature.
May 4, 2015 at 7:57 am
A very nice discourse. Well-written and easily read.
May 5, 2015 at 2:22 pm
“Traversing the unimaginably huge distances that separate planets, star systems and galaxies, limited by the speed of light, is an endeavor that will require several lifetimes if not several geological times.”
And that’s only one example of a huge and as yet unimagined arena of “multi-lifetime” endeavors people might engage in if give the chance.
May 7, 2015 at 9:41 am
“Death is not a specific thing, it’s the cessation of life.”
Which makes it a specific thing!
“…there are more ways to be dead than there are ways to be alive.”
That which was never alive is not dead, so logic dictates that there are precisely ONLY as many ways to die as there are ways to be alive.
“It’s a consequence of the laws of thermodynamics: a system has more ways to be disorganized than ways to be organized.”
Again, unless something was organized in the first place, then it cannot be considered “disorganized.” (A better term might be “random.”) Chaos theory also shows that organization can be spontaneous.
“And so maintaining yourself alive is about keeping disorder from creeping up into your system.”
This is simplistic thinking. Life copes with disorder by constant replacement; your body has totally replaced itself, cell by cell, once every seven years or so. In short, you’re not the same person you were eight years ago. Yet you are. The problem with our biology is that this process gets interrupted by flaws other than entropy. The syatem, having been designed by no one, is faulty. We can see this by contrasting different creatures; fruit flies with lives measured in days (sometimes hours); our favorite pets, dogs and cats, whose lives run shy of two decades; our own lives running between eight and ten decades; Galapagos turtles that live some 200 years; some trees/plants with lifespans in excess of 1,000 years… yet at the cellular level, the biology is the same. It is therefore not unreasonable to assume that lifespans are a variable and that any upward limit is also set only by flaws in our cellular biology.
Cancer cells are effectively immortal.
Our human/mammalian biology may well not be the only game in town either. It can either be improved upon on purpose, where we could then start to see where the actual limits, then, might be, OR we could replace unlimited cell replication with another type of scheme, such as the idea of downloading our minds into computers, as some have suggested. It’s a short hop from there to androids.
May 18, 2016 at 4:03 pm
What I meant was that “while life corresponds to a delicate balance and narrow number of possibilities for atomic combinations, death does not”. There are basically vastly more atomic combinations where you’d be dead, than ones where you’d be alive. I think I mis-expressed myself.
June 24, 2015 at 7:45 pm
I do not think that our “appetite for more knowledge, more experiences, and more accomplishments” is really endless by itself, without any other goal. That’s why, in my view, the ethics of immortality (and of transhumanism in general) does not have a valid philosophical foundation. Why would people want to live forever if their life is terrible? Why should humanity develop the respective technology if it will be available for TPTB only or if it will be dangerous? And, finally, why do people want to live forever if every kind of pleasure will sooner or later become tasteless (and people now do not have other goals than pleasure)?
Some philosophers base the ethics of immortality on evolution (see, for example The Cybernetic Manifesto http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/manifesto.html). But if the goal of biological evolution is survival, what goals will be available to us when our biological death is defeated? The goal of “well-being” makes eternal life meaningless.
Meanwhile, Universal (or Cosmic) Evolution may still have an explanation to the ethical basis of this wish. Let’s see the above Cybernetic Manifesto. It obviously treats “higher values” in a contradictory way. It states at the beginning (item 3) that “freedom is a fundamental property of things”, then (12) that “The supreme goals, or values, of human life are […] set by an individual in an act of free choice” and finally (16) that “The immortality of human beings is on the agenda of Cosmic Evolution”.
The authors started with freedom but finished by choosing the values for all people! It would be much more logical to assume that freedom is not only the “higher” but also “objective” value. What is more, analysis shows that the movement toward greater freedom is the essence of Cosmic Evolution: every new level of complexity in the organization of matter has greater freedom as compare with the old. If we base our approach to ethics on freedom (see “Cult of Freedom & Ethics of Public Sphere”), it would morally justify the integration of mankind and would also point out the morally correct ways to do it – namely, to reject all kinds of violence / to overcome all forms of determinism and, specifically, death. It would also resolve the question “should humanity develop this technology?” In the end, it also points out the ultimate goal of existance: even immortal beings will still have to make the world better, that is more free! This may be the basis for our “appetite for more knowledge, more experiences, and more accomplishments”. Will it be endless? I think so, because freedom is such.
June 24, 2015 at 8:11 pm
can you explain how the goal of “well-being” is defeated by eternal life? “well-being” by definition would imply the need for eternal life?
June 26, 2015 at 1:11 am
1) Well-being is a state. In that case, after it is achieved you will need something else to live for.
2) Well-being is a process. In that case, it is even more meaningless: to live well in order to live well?!
June 26, 2015 at 2:05 am
Why must it be one of those two options? why not:
3) Well-being is the state of being in a process of eternal betterment?
or 3500 other possibilities.
Personally I would like the option to define my own values and make my own mind in terms of living forever. To me it is an moral imperative to work towards living forever because of how I place value on things.
June 26, 2015 at 7:47 pm
>> 3) Well-being is the state of being in a process of eternal betterment?
In that case you need a criterion of “betterment” and you do not (cannot) have it because your personal “betterment’ is defined by your biological constitution (and you have killed by immortality).
>> Personally I would like the option to define my own values and make my own mind in terms of living forever.
This option is called “freedom” and its value is obviously a basis for all other values. That is what I am talking about (“This may be the basis for our “appetite for more knowledge, more experiences, and more accomplishments”.) In short, the ethics of immortality is based on freedom: freedom (provided by society) makes immortality possible, therefore immortality should “work” for more freedom (again, available to society as a whole). It’s not about somebody’s personal well-being.
June 26, 2015 at 11:00 pm
But it is based on my wellbeing. It is a moral imperative for me to try to preserve my life forever as a matter of personal wellbeing. It seems to be that we might be have a bit of a differential in terms of taxonomy…
So from my standpoint let’s start with this questions…
What is the most important thing in existence?
On the surface this seems a very existential question but in truth there is a simple and elegant answer; that is to say intelligence, and like unto it knowledge, are the most important things in existence. But you might ask why? Why is intelligence and knowledge so important as to be the most important thing in existence?
First, let us acquire some context by defining what intelligence is in this context. There are, in fact, a lot of definitions for intelligence as can be seen by its definition on wiki:
“Intelligence has been defined in many different ways including, but not limited to, abstract thought, understanding, self-awareness, communication, reasoning, learning, having emotional knowledge, retaining, planning, and problem solving.”
As you can see there are a lot of the ways the term can be understood but here ‘Intelligence’ is defined as the measured ability to understand, use and generate knowledge, or information, independently.
It is important to note that this definition is different from the meaning we are assigning to Sapience, which is what a lot of people really mean when they use the often misunderstood term sentience. Sapience (from wiki):
“Wisdom (Sapience) is the judicious application of knowledge. It is a deep understanding and realization of people, things, events or situations, resulting in the ability to apply perceptions, judgments and actions in keeping with this understanding. It often requires control of one’s emotional reactions (the “passions“) so that universal principles, reason and knowledge prevail to determine one’s actions. Wisdom is also the comprehension of what is true coupled with optimum judgment as to action. Synonyms include: sagacity, discernment, or insight.”
As opposed to Sentience which is (wiki):
“Sentience is the ability to feel, perceive, or be conscious, or to have subjective experiences. Eighteenth century philosophers used the concept to distinguish the ability to think (“reason”) from the ability to feel (“sentience”). In modern western philosophy, sentience is the ability to have sensations or experiences (described by some thinkers as “qualia”). For Eastern philosophy, sentience is a metaphysical quality of all things that requires respect and care. The concept is central to the philosophy of animal rights, because sentience is necessary for the ability to suffer, which is held to entail certain rights.”
Which based on this definition we in fact see the difference with the term Sapience which is more closely aligned with the intent of what I am driving at here.
In our case, we will apply Sapience to refer specifically to the ability to understand one’s self in every aspect; through the application of knowledge, information and independent analysis, and to have subjective experiences. Although Sapience is dependent on intelligence, or rather the degree of Sapience is dependent on the degree of intelligence, they are in fact different. The premise that intelligence is important, and in fact the most important thing in existence, is better stated as sapient intelligence is of primary importance but intelligence less than truly sentient intelligence is relatively unimportant in comparison. For it can’t progress independently.
This brings us back to the point about “Why?” Why is intelligence so important?
The reason is: without intelligence there would be no witness to creation, no appreciation for anything of beauty, no love, no kindness and for all intents and purposes no creation. Without an “Intelligence” there would be no point to anything; therefore, intelligence is not just the most important thing but the most sacred quality. If there is a God, this is his chief quality: intelligence and knowledge.
Certainly this is no proof of God, but it is proof of the sacredness of intelligence; and if this is true we can say, “Intelligence is the Glory of God” whether we believe or not. Because of this, I believe Intelligence and knowledge are sacred and that we should make every effort to preserve both.
Through this line of thought we also conclude that intelligence being important is not connected with being Human nor is it related to biology; which itself is to a degree sacred, but the main point is intelligence, regardless of form, is sacred.
And it is therefore my moral and ethical imperative to maintain my own intelligence forever as a function of personal well being.
June 28, 2015 at 4:33 pm
>> It is a moral imperative for me to try to preserve my life forever as a matter of personal wellbeing
This imperative is given to us by our egoistic nature. Morality may easily require us to sacrifice our lives for the higher good. This is the difference between our biological nature and morality.
>> What is the most important thing in existence? […] without intelligence there would be no witness to creation, no appreciation for anything of beauty, no love, no kindness and for all intents and purposes no creation
Thanks for explaining, but why you need all this? Just to witness and appreciate? For what? What is the higher purpose? Even more important is that without freedom (to think and to act) we cannot have intelligence. We acquire intelligence and knowledge in society, and society accumulates knowledge – so we are becoming more and more intelligent. It is not difficult to see that intelligence is a tool, a means and not the end. We (as a society) use all our intelligence and knowledge for one thing – to make our world better, to improve it. That is the higher good. But the problem is we cannot figure out what this “good” is and why we do this. Objective ethics helps explain this. We are created by evolution, and freedom being the objective property of matter is the driving “force” behind the evolution. Freedom is “imposed” on us, we are free to acquire intelligence and use it. (As a proof of this concept – we, with all our intelligence, knowledge and science, are not able to figure out what is freedom, how it is possible in deterministic world.)
Not sure if it help to explain further, but just in case you are interested, here is a little more on this topic: http://ethical-liberty.com/evolution-objective-ethics.htm
June 28, 2015 at 5:30 pm
>> This imperative is given to us by our egoistic nature.
that only matters if you have the intelligence ‘first’ and intelligence only matters when you meet the minimum bar for being fully sapient and sentient.
>>but why you need all this?
w/o that requisite intelligence the rest of the discussion is irrelevant. you have to have that intelligence to even have the debate in the first place or you couldn’t articulate the argument one way or the other therefore is the primary requisite.
>>Even more important is that without freedom (to think and to act) we cannot have intelligence
I don’t accept this, you have to have the intelligence first or the freedom to act has no meaning.
>>freedom being the objective property of matter is the driving “force” behind the evolution
? freedom is nothing to do with evolution? evolution meaning the evolution by the electro bio chemical cellular systems that make up life is driven by the biochemistry and evolutionary biology in an environment or set of factors effecting replication?
I would be interested in your definition of freedom because as I understand it, real freedom requires intelligence to make a choice and I see no relationship between freedom and matter.
March 19, 2016 at 10:25 pm
To start with i am a molecular biologist by training(no PhD yet)
Well according to my theory immortality is a natural inevitable consequence of evolution. And according to me cancer is not a disease, it is evolution in process. The cell (which will later extend to organism level) is “searching” the “mutational-space” (i.e. space representing all possible mutations in humans) for the right combinations of mutations under different aspects like telomere-lengthening, apoptosis, tumour-suppressor, metabolism etc. which will make the cell grow forever in a controlled manner rather than the uncontrollable form we see now as the cancer disease. We are directing our own evolution and speeding it with anti-cancer drugs. Cancer develops resistance thereby taking another path in the mutational space. The longevity will result in brain size development and opening up other higher level functioning phenomenon of the brain. (Lot of my theory matches with Dr. Kyriazis’ as well). Coalescing of consciousness will take place. We will have hive mind. One knows and every one else will know immediately. Renewable energy resource and technology like mnemonics and the likes will help advance our species in leaps and bounds. Knowledge based society will prevail. We would have moved by the time our sun becomes a red giant., maybe to Mars first and then rest of the galaxy, universe. All this will take millions of years, ofcourse. We will know everthing there is to know. And we will realize that sum of all knowledge – EVERYTHING and NOTHING is the same!….and then the cycle starts all over again. Like in Isaac Asimov’s The last question. Try to read the Vedas if you can. Get hold of Sir Penrose’s Cycles of time and Endless Universe by Steinhardt and Turok. You will see a lot of things matches. The ancient vedic texts even have quantum physics and string theory described in them. Even the noble laureate Schrödinger acknowledged the fact that the ancient Indians knew about Quantum physics and that we are just re-discovering it.
Coming back to cancer. You could argue that cancer is somatic and not a germline affecting disease which is passed on to the offsprings. Well. I have searched through literature and i have it in my hard disk (data which i searched through from countless entries from Sanger Research Institute’s database) that some oncogenes (cancer causing genes) are selected in the germline! Now why would nature select these terrible mutations to be passed on. if it is detrimental to the population, how is it selected in the germline??!!! nobody, no colleagues ofmine who i know are able to come up with a convincing answer.
So basically we are headed there – immortality i mean, slowly but steadily. And i don’t think future posthuman species will look anything like us.
it might sound like science fiction now but i thorougly believe that this is what is going to happen. today’s science fiction is tomorrow’s science. based on all the physics, biology, natural philosophy, sci&tech etc. i have come to this conclusion about life. I don’t mind people plagiarizing me, i just wanted this cancer/evolution idea to be “out there” so that people can think about it, know about it, spread the knowledge. I have searched for many people who have ideas like me and have come across a few people like Dr. Kyriazis. I have done a lot of thought experiments in physics and biology and philosophy and develop theory and then i check if anybody else have come up with it. lots of it have already been published by other people. so i pat myself in the back saying “well if they came up with a accepted theory, your thinking is on the right track”…so with similar belief i have confidence on the theory how human life is going to develop in the future.
Thank you for giving me an opportunity to put my idea out there and thank you for your article.