[chosen1111]

Has anyone done a really good analysis of how much money it would take to end biological aging? And then eventually buy time to develop immortalist technologies.

Something like a punchlist.

Do we need to solve mind uploading or AGI first?

What precursor technologies need to be available and what intellectual pursuits should people be pursuing and at what scale?

What political, legal and resource obstacles exist that might succeed in stopping the development of this technology?

Books like Singularity is Near are great but I wish someone would create something truly like a roadmap, with risks, prerequisites, decision-trees, capital needs and obstacles.

[ogennadi]

The blocker now is getting brain preservation equipment in every hospital; we already have techniques that will preserve brains for centuries until uploading tech is perfected.

See the BPF's article [1] or video series [2] if you prefer.

[1] https://www.brainpreservation.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2scSuw0om8

Disclosure: I volunteer for them.

[chosen1111]

I know Nectome is a YC company. Altman has signed up I believe.

Vitrification is better than cryo as a last resort as I understand it, due to market risk.

[idclip]

Read paychoanalysis - immortality is actually inherent to the system as the phenomenon of the self and the primordial ouroboric plemora.

However the “experiencer” as it arises in humans as the adjucant to consciousness isnt, and the problem is in the experiencer identifying itself with the past.

Immortality of experience is impossible, since by definition of the experiencer as memory, living forever requires an infinite amount of matter to preserve the memory (as the body grows older, it loses DNA structure, its cells decay in time, losing information at the molecular level. Keeping that process alive “forever” will need constant “regeneration” - and forever means infinite energy to do so, and we assume here that the universe has finite amount of matter and energy)

Immortality of the plemora also assumes a cyclical nature to the universe as it decays and rises again (big bang, big crunch, but in psychoanalysis the ouroborus is depicted in myth as simply a cyclical organism/structure which is developed into various mythologies and religions)

The larger “self” is infact immortal. Let that sink in.

[LeifCarrotson]

A goal of remembering absolutely everything using infinite matter and infinite energy, surviving big bang/big crunch events, feels like a bit of scope creep. Also, I don't particularly care about the primordial ouroboric plemora, or whether some theoretical larger self is immortal, I'm not and the people I love are not. Like the kid in this fable, I say "Death is bad! It took my granny away."

Let's first aim to give humans the option to not die after a mere 3 billion seconds. Let's aim to first increase that by a factor of 100 or more. If the heat death of the universe or which centuries to keep in memory look like they're going to be a problem, then I'll be happy devote a few millenia to the effort.

[idclip]

i get you, i am “human” too. The experiencer is one of the persistent thoughts we are having these days, and since we are one, i have an understanding and a certain sympathy towards your struggle.

im just arguing against the immortality of the experiencer.

I say give us longer lives, that may be possible.

An immortal experiencer for /everyone/ opens up the very troublesome issue of the quality of that experience. Actually the first consciousness who was close to what your describing, got really angry because creation allowed for more than one of it - the myth of the fall of the morning star - during that part of genesis consciousness was near immortal and it was happy. It does imply the nullification/sacrifice of all others to maintain that one experience - but thats an argument for murderous madness, essentially

[chosen1111]

Very interesting. You are right that true immortality is not possible as eventually the universe has an end, now if it crunches and repeats is another question.

If we solve biological aging we then would hopefully eventually be able to buy time before we can develop mind uploading, which brings forth more of the points you outlined.

I probably should have stated the roadmap to solving aging.

[idclip]

The pattern seems to repeat itself with variation, and information travels between bangs via gravity waves - i forgot who said that but it seems to be an idea at the top of the physics professors. Really too bad i cant pull up that citation.

You wanna know something funny? Immortality is actually an issue of how you look at things. Once you start seeing yourself as the “we” organism, as humanity itself and beyond it .. the sheer absurdity of it all overwhelms you, and a feeling of “i am infinite” fills you. Its sort of the feeling we get when we die, since the ego reveals its nature and yields to the self.

(I had sort of a near death experience, it was quiet eye opening)

So immortality - the one we can actually achieve is a shift in thinking. Non trivial yet trivial since its „the truth of what is“ as the tao would put it

[chosen1111]

Would have to agree. At the end of the day we return to a previous form.

If matter itself is conscious or not is hard to say, but I don't see why it isn't possible that it couldn't be.

Though then would that mean souls are the matter itself or outside of matter?, assuming the existence of souls

[idclip]

Yeah, soul is matter - and more accurately its field generated by the oscillation of matter. The oscillation itself is basic, its basically „spin“ in physics. Soul doesnt always mean awareness of experience - animals arent as dramatic about death as we are for example (in meditation, awakenning is synchronizing the awareness of experience again back with the body, or maybe its better to call it psycoanalytical process of individuation which integrated persona with self, as Carl Jung and Co put it)

It starts with the tiniest particle, and regenerates the whole tree. Memory and oscilation are even basic to rocks for example. They accumulate matter aswell, just no seeminhg „awareness of experience“ yet.)

With some caution, I really recommend the book „ The Origins and History of Consciousness“ by Erich Neumann. Also meditation is great to move individuation forward.

its truly mind boggling to understand all this, and its a shame this stuff isnt mainstream knowledge. Though i do admit it can get u labeled and make you feel as an outsider as most of us arent aware, and might actively reject the discussion. Like the othet poster said, „scope creep“ - then again, i truly think immortality of experience is impossible. Matter will always re-transform into energy, and viceversa. This is what we essentially are. And the fear of death is why we are violent about it all.

[nvader]

GPT-3, is that you?

[nefitty]

There’s a lot of weird, abstract metaphysical comments popping up and I’m starting to lose the thread.

[chosen1111]

I have no issue with it. Though I may just go ahead and start working on a punch-list style life-extensionist work. Even if it is nothing more than a fun exercise.

Seriously though, if I was bin Salman for example I would make something like this a personal priority.

[idclip]

just „The Origins and History of Consciousness“ by Erich Neumann and lots of meditation. i say go fo it =]

also man LOL .. i got it =D yeah it was too much. but it got to a few people. =]

made me smile. thank you!

[reasonattlm]

We don't need to end biological aging, just control it. Let aging run, producing molecular damage in tissues, and periodically repair and reverse that damage such that people don't become physically old.

The SENS Research Foundation folk have on occasion talked about what they think is the most funding that can be run through the research community to produce progress. Something like $100m/yr for each of the seven areas of interest would be a ballpark upper limit before you start to run out of competent research groups to fund productively.

Once you have a candidate therapy, expect $150M to get it through trials. It is very challenging to guess at how many different therapies are needed. It might be a hundred different forms of treatment in the case of cleaning up persistent metabolic waste. Even in the case of single target problems such as senescent cell accumulation (just selectively destroy those cells), it may still be the case that ten or twenty different therapies are funded to take a run at that grail.

(Then for every therapy approved, budget the usual industry size for providing a service to 3 billion people once every few years. Most such treatments will be biologic and small molecule drugs that can be mass produced, and the ballpark for infrequent treatments that are well into their mature, cost-optimized stage of manufacturing seems to top out at $10k or so - but that may well get crushed down lower by the economies of scale in providing to the world at large, rather than to the less than 1% who have a specific condition. But this is a whole other analysis).

Any attempt to say too much more than I have above about the control of aging approach is challenging at this stage. Too much variance.

[chosen1111]

I personally think WAY more money would be needed.

[chosen1111]

I'm thinking in terms of money, we are talking well into the trillions of dollars. And probably having to develop AGI.

[garmaine]

What does AGI have to do with anything?

[Nasrudith]

Perhaps essentially the implied framework needed to model "an intelligence" as a prerequisite to encode a human general intelligence.

Of course I would expect a "chemical emulation or decoding" to be needed for that approach as a minimium requirement as physical brains aren't in a vacuum and have all sorts of hormonal influnces. And emulation is tricky even when dealing with simpler things like computers or Hawking's Voice emulator where the original worked based upon the assumption of transistor noise.

Even if we could get every last neuron modeled accurately without the hormonal issues there would be major emotional differences from things like not having any fear or dopamine and a configuration that expects them.

[chosen1111]

Yes. And furthermore to your point regarding emulation...if it was required to get to quantum level accuracy it might not be possible, at least according to Sandberg in his brain emulation opinion.

And even furthermore, things like the microbiome's influence on the brain are not yet well understood.

[garmaine]

But why do you need any of that to solve biological aging? It's like, step 1: boil the ocean.

[chosen1111]

Hopefully we don't. But we need to solve dementia which might require a deeper understanding of the connectome. And furthermore, the longer we age the more new diseases we will discover.

By the time we have multi-centenarians there might be whole new types of dementia that could arise.

Perhaps a better question than (do we need AGI) might be, do we need to solve protein folding before we can make meaningful progress. ie should protein folding be considered an ancillary problem or a perquisite for other solutions that must developed on the technology stack to make progress in age research

[garmaine]

Protein folding is pretty nearly solved in the last few years, as demonstrated by AlphaFold.

[chosen1111]

Ability to invent things that narrow AI might not be able to very well.

If, as Thiel and others have pointed out, ingenuity is slowing down, then in order to solve aging it might be necessary to have AGI invent the things for us to solve aging.

Would be curious if someone was of the opinion that we can invent the tech to solving aging ourselves and what resources would be needed to do so or if that process requires AGI first due to the barriers of solving aging being too great for us considering the resources required.