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moar ideas.
author Robert McIntyre <rlm@mit.edu>
date Thu, 04 Sep 2014 15:58:12 -0700
parents 35eb4c1a7bf7
children 04394e3857e2
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133:35eb4c1a7bf7 134:b6cbdd5a9547
28 28
29 #+begin_quote 29 #+begin_quote
30 There's no end to what a man can accomplish if he doesn't care about 30 There's no end to what a man can accomplish if he doesn't care about
31 getting credit. 31 getting credit.
32 #+end_quote 32 #+end_quote
33
34 - problem with Aubrey de Grey's ideas :: Aubrey de Grey says that we
35 might be able to live forever by continually repairing our bodies
36 at the cellular level -- he details 7 different mechanisms of
37 damage and says that if all of them are dealt with /together/
38 that it would stop aging. (You can't miss even one because
39 they're all fatal.) However, it doesn't take into account that
40 we are also beings of information and that there is a very real
41 software component to our existence. Even if our biological
42 chassies can be maintained forever, I think it is unlikely that
43 our minds will operate well far outside of the design constraints
44 that we've evolved to handle. Say I programmed a webserver with
45 the express goal of it being able to serve webpages for month on
46 some stock server. I'll do fairly rigorous testing to make sure
47 that it can handle the expected load then then some. Now say that
48 you want to keep a particular instance of this webserver running
49 indefinitely. (The program instance is like your mind and the
50 computer it's running on is like your body). You might very well
51 be able to keep the physical computer infrastructure running for
52 forever by replacing hard drives / ram / CPUs, etc. However,
53 since I designed the webserver to work for a month, it probably
54 has memory leaks, rare stochastic bugs, or other build in limits
55 / constraints (think log files or some date rollover shenanigans)
56 that will ultimately kill the webserver server even with eternally
57 perfect hardware. Do you really expect that a webserver
58 engineered to work for 1 month will run for 10 years? In fact, if
59 I put in the extreme effort to make it that robust, I've wasted
60 time that I could have spent on other projects by pursuing an
61 unnecessary engineering goal. Likewise, human minds have only
62 ever run for at most 122 years before they are destroyed due to
63 hardware degradation. Fixing the hardware doesn't change any
64 software bugs that are almost certainly present in the human
65 mind. Think of all the pathological things that can go wrong with
66 a webserver, multiply it by a million, and that likely how
67 evolution has designed our minds. For example, consider memory :
68 why should you expect that we have evolved the ability to
69 coherently organize memories past say 150 years? There's been
70 absolutely no selective pressure for this ability, so you can bet
71 that if there's any fitness to be gained from not having
72 unlimited memory potential (such as better metabolic efficiency),
73 we have it! You might think that maybe we would just forget
74 things the same way that we sort of forget things that happen
75 earlier in our lives, but complicated information processing
76 systems don't have to fail gracefully when they're pushed far
77 past their design constraints. A 150 year old person is just as
78 likely to suffer a catastrophic psychosis due to software
79 limitations associated with memory as he is to do something with
80 all those memories we might consider reasonable. More likely, in
81 fact, since there are so very many ways for a complicated
82 software system to break and so few ways for it to run
83 successfully. Therefore, I think Aubrey de Grey's "hardware-only"
84 approach is missing a very important component of longevity
85 science, and any successful effort to make people live orders of
86 magnitude longer than they do naturally will need to deal with
87 people's software as well as their hardware.
33 88
34 - validating neurocryopreservation :: Problem : you want to test 89 - validating neurocryopreservation :: Problem : you want to test
35 whether a brain is functionally preserved through vitrification, 90 whether a brain is functionally preserved through vitrification,
36 but you don't want to figure out how to preserve all the other 91 but you don't want to figure out how to preserve all the other
37 organs in the animal. It might be possible to keep the rest of 92 organs in the animal. It might be possible to keep the rest of