Researchers injected a chemical called nicotinamide adenine
dinucleotide, or NAD, which reduces in the body as we age.
The addition of this compound led to the radical reversal
in the ageing of the mice.
While this is pretty cool, it seems that the most immediate effect would be a higher availability of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), meaning more energy "currency" for the body's machinery to work with [1] [2] (someone please comment if my understanding is incomplete). Used as a general lifestyle drug †, grandma isn't suddenly going to look like a sorority girl, but she may feel like one - a scary thought indeed!
Anti-aging technologies are going to introduce many philosophical questions; although, that doesn't quite seem to be the case in this specific instance since this compound will probably just improve the quality of the last couple decades of a person's life rather than drastically extend it. What's the difference between curing disease/prolonging natural life vs unnatural "anti-aging" technologies? At what point do we start grappling with the issues of immortality? Personally, I believe that the mentally-deteriorating effects of everyday life, including what one may call "sin," will be too much for the modern human to retain his/her sanity after a certain point. I for one would rather face death.
† I say "lifestyle drug" here to denote elective treatment, although the effects of natural aging and death dying probably do not fit in the technical definition, which is to treat "non-life threatening and non-painful conditions such as baldness, impotence, wrinkles, erectile dysfunction, or acne"
“Personally, I’ve been hearing all my life about the Serious Philosophical Issues posed by life extension, and my attitude has always been that I’m willing to grapple with those issues for as many centuries as it takes.”
-Patrick Hayden
It's funny, I have a friend who is a full-time professional philosopher (teaches at a university) and you would not believe the amount of earnest essay writing there was in the philosophy community about Miley Cyrus's performance at the VMAs (something I've not actually seen myself). All sorts of theories about Freud and Hegel and this and that. Look Philos, I said to him, she got up on stage and did a little dance and that's really all there was to it.
The moral of this story is, serious philosophical issues have absolutely no bearing on real life. So full steam ahead says I! The longer we can prolong life, the greater leverage we can extract from experience, imagine being immersed in a subject for hundreds of years, what could you not do in a minute what would take someone with even decades of experience, years?
>Look Philos, I said to him, she got up on stage and did a little dance and that's really all there was to it.
The moral of this story is, serious philosophical issues have absolutely no bearing on real life.
You'd be surprised. A lot of pulp philosophy is indeed crap.
But most peoples lives, and the systems we structure our everyday and working lives on, are analysed, to a T, from various angles, and found lacking and wanting.
And when you find you are being crashed by those systems (as people eventually do), or that they don't work properly, there's a philosophical explanation of their workings written 100 or 2000 years ago that's perfectly logical.
To put it in another way, reading into (good) philosophy, is like reading the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programmers among Java people struggling with Java EE in early 2000, and understanding things from 10 levels higher and also that there are far better ways to go about it.
Oh, and no, good philosophy is not just about technicalities of reality and understanding, like Hume or Kant or Quine etc -- the only kind some geeks will accept. Regular moral, political, ontological, existencial etc philosophy, with seemingly "imprecise" language, is just as isnightful in other ways, if you spend the time to understand it.
I would just point out that most of modern philosophy is not really like this. I think most people think philosophers spend there time arguing about ethics, when this is only one tiny part of philosophy. A good chunk of the current discussion in philosophy of science, for example, centers around epistemology to varying degrees as it relates to current discoveries in genetics and neuroscience. The top philosophers in these fields are far from armchair scientists.
The overlap in philosophy of the mind and computer science is also particularly striking. I studied both in university and often found myself taking what amounted to the same class at the same time, but in two different departments. I work quite a bit with machine learning nowadays, and I learned 90% of the background I needed in my higher level philosophy courses, not my CS courses. I have often thought of CS as something along the lines of "applied philosophy".
Obviously, this is not meant to be disparaging towards CS. I love CS and it is what I have made a career in; I think they are different, but equally interesting and useful.
Not the OP, but I have some interest in this too. Knowledge Engineering is so closely linked it's an obvious place to start (but in some ways Linguistics is even more interesting - and useful). But for Knowledge Engineering (from the philospipical side), start with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology
Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Metaphysics, Philosophy of Biology, and Symbolic Logic are all common Philosophy courses that have strong connections to CS, machine learning, and the biological models often behind (or inspiring at least) ML. Lower level Philosophy courses typically focus on the historical philosophy that most people think of as the entire discipline. It has been said that all philosophical debates go back to Plato or Aristotle, but this is hardly the case in these disciplines.
Philosophy of Mind probably has the closest connection to ML in particular though, as most of the course I took anyway was devoted to Turing Machines, neural networks, etc.
As far as general CS goes, Symbolic Logic is the most essential. Most CS programs cover this stuff, but subjects that might get a 1 week treatment in a typical Discrete Mathematics course would get a full semester in a typical Philosophy program.
As far as general scientific thought and skepticism go, Philosophy of Science, Metaphysics, and Biology are key. If you want to dip your toes in this sort of thing, check out Francis Bacon and the falsification principle, along with Thomas Kuhn and his theory of scientific revolutions and paradigms.
One last note: most people think about philosophy in terms of broad prescriptive pronouncements. Think Sartre, Plato, Nietzsche, Aquinas, Kant, etc. Most contemporary philosophers are more concerned with specific analysis of claims made by a paradigm, in which they explore whether or not these claims a) mean anything b) are internally consistent and c) lead to further implications. Coming out and making some completely new claim is exceedingly rare. An example of this (a bit contrived) in the context of ML and Biology would go something like:
1) Computer Scientists claim that neural network algorithms mimic biological brains.
2) What do we actually know about how biological neural networks work?
3) How do neural network algorithms typically mimic this?
4) Based on the current research, it turns out that neural networks in algorithms differ from their biological counterparts in X, Y, and Z ways.
5) Based on the efficacy these algorithms, how can we explain their ability to "walk like a duck and quack like a duck" without actually being ducks?
6) Assuming a reasonable advancement of this technology, is it reasonable to believe that we may reach a point when X, Y, and Z might be addressed?
TLDR: if you got bored reading what I wrote above, you will probably abhor the ridiculous density and verbosity of most contemporary philosophy. Hey, I tried :)
Many universities link these disciplines (and Psychology, and Linguistics) explicitly -- Its called Cognitive Science. I majored in it and couldn't imagine a better thing to have studied.
More accurately, professional philosophers don't have any particular standing to discuss "serious philosophical issues." At any point in the discussion on whether people have a right to die, or whether it was ok to use tissue from aborted fetuses for stem cell research or whether we need universal health care, has anyone ever asked, "Well, what do the philosophers think?"
(I have nothing against philosophers, btw. I have a degree in philosophy.)
>At any point in the discussion on whether people have a right to die, or whether it was ok to use tissue from aborted fetuses for stem cell research or whether we need universal health care, has anyone ever asked, "Well, what do the philosophers think?"
Yes, many people. In civilised countries that are not all about "pop culture" and where science is not supposed to be half about marketing stuff to people -- people very much care what philosophers think about those issues.
In fact, what people care is what THEY think about those issues (that is, they want to make up their mind).
In this context, philosophers are essentially just more devoted thinkers, with a better command of the history of ideas, so people use them as guides.
Now, in the US, it's mostly pop culture, low quality op-eds and marketing/advertising driving the popular understanding of such matters.
I guess the equivalent would be NYT best-seller non fiction books (still, quite a low standard).
"Philosophers" haven't had "serious philosophical issues" with this topic since Spinoza. Heck, even the Stoics. It's theology that has a problem, not philosophy, where theology crafts its ideas, very often, from the architectures of philosophical thought. Outside of a theological context, there isn't much of a debate anyway. Again: the Stoics.
We do ask philosophers about "right to die" and "permissibility of stem cell research from humans". Philosophers outline the conditions under which we rationally approach these things — they obviously do not license or themselves permit such behavior. No one asks a philosopher if that philosopher personally thinks some act is okay or not okay... I'm just not sure what to say here. That's not what philosophy is about, but I have a strange feeling that "it's all personal opinion anyway" really motivates this idea that philosophers do not contribute meaningfully to law and morality.
They inform ultimately what becomes legislation. Bertrand Russell was all over popular science in the 20th century. So was Bernard Williams. Dworkin. HLA Hart. The countless articles on ethics on JSTOR. All the philosophical journals. Stacks and stacks on anthologies collecting debates on abortion. ExPhi puts current opinion in the context of great thinkers of the history of philosophy, and helps us understand why we have the opinions we do have.
We don't ask them to describe the scientific innerworkings of these techniques. We do ask them to explain these things in broader cultural terms, and in that case the Scientist often times plays Philosopher, where that person so too must pick up a great work of Philosophy.
Ethics Committees are real things. I'm not sure what you're talking about, but it's radically in error and shockingly misleading...
> No one asks a philosopher if that philosopher personally thinks some act is okay or not okay...
I've seen counter-examples of this in newspapers, where they have them weigh in with their opinion (on the news pages, not editorial), being quoted as an expert.
Like how the Daily Show calls its "news correspondants" "experts"?
Being an expert on ethics and describing one's stance is more than just opinion. It's a trade. We expect philosophers to have distinguished opinions, opinions they have defended and examined, partly inherited from history of philosophy itself. A philosopher can give its personal opinion, but usually they identify it as such. We do often want to know what the person thinks, in which case we're asking the person, not the philosopher. The person just so happens to talk like they do most of the time.
That's not what philosophy is about, but I have a strange feeling that "it's all personal opinion anyway" really motivates this idea that philosophers do not contribute meaningfully to law and morality.
A lot of it is American anti-intellectualism. We very strongly object to the idea that the challenges and struggles central to our lives are not unique but have actually been fully considered by others, maybe even centuries prior. That would mean we aren't the author and star of a uniquely great story.
Of course, if that person went to Orel Roberts University then we'll gladly listen and believe every dumb thing he has to say.
My only objection to life extension, philosophically speaking, is a political one. What if life extension becomes another tool of dominance for the rich and powerful? An eternal, dystopic corporatocracy sounds pretty damn horrible to me.
Yeah, and hence moral education(which imparts critical thinking and rational moral values) of next generation seems like the most important task to me. Why too much money and power are not the most important things in this world and showing them examples of how they can corrupt you. Learning, sharing and making the world a 'better' place is what should motivate next generation and we urgently need to find a way to bring about that motivation. Right now most of the behavior revolves around what was selected by natural selection and we need to find a way to overcome that(atleast see if it can be overcome).
But do we really know what we are supposed to teach them? Imagine this magic pill was available three hundred years ago. Imagine what the world would be like, if people who believed slavery was part of life, and that women were inherently inferior to men, were not only alive, but still calling the shots.
We are not sure what will work but thats why new models need to be experimented starting now. Coming up with tools for teaching critical thinking and morality should be on high priority in SV.
Yes, magic pill invented 300 yrs ago would have had devastating consequences. But I am not sure whether that sort of thing is practically possible. It seems there is somewhat direct correlation between scientific revolutions(like renaissance) and moral values of the society(dont have data to back that up, just using history as an example).
The flip side to that argument is that right now life is short, and so I try and fit as many wonderful experiences into it as I can. If life were long I could put everything off until tomorrow. And that doesn't sound good to me.
I've thought about this once or twice before. I wonder how we would view life if we didn't die from aging or disease, but only accidents, like a fire, car crash, gun shot, etc.
What would happen to religion? Do you choose to continue aging, die, and take your chances with the heaven you've been saying exists, or do you take the new pill, and live forever? If you take the pill, what does that say about your faith in the afterlife?
Do we fear death even more? If I'm going to die in a few decades of old age as my health deteriorates, I might as well enjoy my prime, and take some risks now. If I die, well, no big deal, I was going to die soon enough anyway. If I'm married, 60 years old, and my wife dies, that would be a sad day, but let's not kid ourselves, we're getting old. If your grandma passes away, well, it was her time, she lived a long life.
But, if we live forever, we fear those accidents. If your wife dies in a plane crash age 60, how does that affect you? You might have expected to spend the next ten thousand years together, and she's gone. Do we stop taking these risks? Do I step in a car, or on a plane? I'm willing to take that risk now, but if I knew I could potentially live forever, I wouldn't want to risk dying with so much time still remaining.
Do we enter the world of virtual reality? Why leave my home, I could get hit by lightning, I could get shot walking down the street, hit by a car, or attacked by animals. Why don't I lock myself in an underground bunker facility, and connect to the world through virtual reality? I toss on the goggles, and I enter the VR world where I meet with friends and family, and go on wild adventures, because I can take these risks in the VR world. If I die, I respawn. My body is safe in the bunker, while I pretend to be outside.
I am assuming in the very far future even if you die of an accident/gun shot etc they should be able to resurrect you as-is, like you are with all your memory. It will be like you fell asleep and just woke up!
If anything, I vote for the simulated reality thing. Its like once you are dead, they should be able to take your brain out and connect it to a simulated paradise which would run forever.
Are you really saying that you'd prefer to DIE in order to incent yourself to do exciting things sooner? Erm. Well, I guess that's one set of preferences.
There's a classic A Softer World comic that's been turned into a t-shirt that says "I would rather die screaming than live forever." There are downsides to the kind of extreme prudence that planning to be around for centuries would imply.
Also, there's a fantastic novel from Bruce Sterling called Holy Fire that is devoted to exploring the tension between living to continue living and living in the moment.
Among other things, a commitment to "live forever" is a statement about acceptable risk tolerance. Ever wanted to climb mountains? Take up skydiving? Drink too much sometimes? Eat foods that are bad for you? If your goal really is to live forever, the risk profile of doing anything that doesn't minimize the expected value of the long-term risk to your person is probably unacceptable.
You personally might rather live a vastly extended span than spend the time you do have skydiving, parasailing, climbing mountains, and doing whatever it is that allows you to enjoy your life to its fullest for however long you have. But that's a real, legitimate choice, and choosing to take risks and experience everything you can is a perfectly valid choice -- even if there's a very real risk that something will go wrong at some point and you will indeed "die screaming."
I never said a thing about not taking risks or having fun but those are my choices. I'd rather not be forced to die from some sort of disease, or just old age completely outside of my control.
Well, there are obvious limits to that argument. Even a hundred years ago, it was common to die in your 60s. Taking on a new career or new relationship at the age of 60 would be ridiculous. Today, it's still a bit unusual but not unheard of.
Given a longer life, I think we would come up with new ways to motivate ourselves, and new challenges. This isn't an insoluble problem, it's a business opportunity for Tony Robbins.
That said I'm not sure a human being could ever fully escape ennui, so maybe there is some upper limit. I don't think 80 years is even close though.
I'm full steam ahead myself. I am fascinated by the idea of Open Aging.
But anti-intellectualism is not cool. Saying "she did a little dance and that's all there is to it" or even "she's just being young" is more obnoxious than the fact that she did it.
There are cultural analyses to be made, if not merely to gain an understanding of how activities like this will affect culture and influence opinion.
Cultural nihilism and cultural solipsism are less sophisticated than cultural relativism, and these probably do more harm than good. No one should really critique from cultural apathy — I mean, just, why? "I don't care, so you shouldn't either"? Really? That's just picking your nose at the Weird Kids table.
> But anti-intellectualism is not cool. Saying "she did a little dance and that's all there is to it" or even "she's just being young" is more obnoxious than the fact that she did it.
It isn't anti-intellectual to question the validity of any analysis. Your argument, taken to its conclusion, provides as much protection for the previously mentioned analysis of Miley Cyrus's dance being a grounded argument to make, as it does for my claim that she was subconsciously invoking the goddess Kali.
This post fills me with questions. Foremost: What makes anti-aging technology unnatural compared to other medical treatments? To take one example, the smallpox vaccine was initially considered unnatural, and an affront to God[1].
I think it's fair to call most medical treatments unnatural. That doesn't make them bad, but it should make us thoughtful and careful. Natural systems are often, thanks to evolution and adaptation, complicated and delicately balanced.
I think reflexive appeals to tradition and novelty are both kind of dumb. But if people are going to err, I'd rather they erred on the side of tradition: at least that shit has been demonstrated to work in one fashion or another. I always try to keep in mind examples like Eben Byers [1], the THERAC 25 [2], and rabbits in Australia [3]. All sorts of stupid ideas look appealing at first.
Eben Byers was a victim of quack medicine, much like people nowadays who try to use magnets and sugar water to cure cancer. Bringing him up in a discussion of real medicine is frankly an insult to the researchers who do this stuff.
Once you're done stroking your outrage gland, you might note that I didn't suggest an equivalence between these researchers and, well, anybody. I was talking about ideas made appealing by ignorance, ones that are dumb only in retrospect.
The patent medicine Byers took was legal. Indeed his doctor recommended it to him. Unsurprising given that its seller, William J. A. Bailey, offered doctors a 17% kickback to prescribe the stuff. Even after this product was banned (because it finally killed a rich guy?), Bailey was never prosecuted, and continued to sell radium-related products after this. He died wealthy and free at the age of 64, nearly 14 years after killing Byers, and who knows how many other people.
It's a fine example of what I was talking about, where erring on the side of the shiny and new was not a good heuristic; the people who stuck with the traditional and natural did better for themselves despite Bailey and Byers surely scoffing at them.
One of the Therac-25 victims died 3 months later from cancer. Presumably the same cancer they were trying to treat, and thus avoided needing a hip replacement for the radiation damage. If your life is in such extreme danger from the disease itself, it can be worth taking risks with novel treatments. I'm sure some very old people with nothing to lose will be willing to try anti-aging, no matter how risky.
The supposedly good idea I'm referring to for the Therac-25 isn't radiation therapy. It was using software to make something snazzily digital, but in a way that ignored the novel safety issues with digital devices.
With your attitude I don't think we would ever invent or discover any medicine or treatment. Agreed, natural systems are complicated and delicately balanced, but we have Physics, Math, Chemistry and Computer Science to help us understand those delicately balanced and complicated systems. Please give some credit to Human Intelligence that itself is a product of millions of years of evolution.
I often hear people saying "X can't be done because evolution perfected it". I call it bullshit. Evolutionary systems are not perfect and can be improved with right tools and we do have the tools.
You seem to be arguing with a bunch of things I didn't say, while ignoring the things I did.
I'm a giant fan of technology, and there are many amazing advances in medical tech. But I'm not a fan of thoughtless adoption of something just because it a) sounds good and b) is shiny and new.
Sorry, I fat-fingered on the downvote button with my iDevice, I meant to vote you up (because of the first paragraph specifically, not so much the rest).
Wouldn't this treatment system create an immense selection pressure against irrational belief?
So kids born to families who think its an affront to god would not have the social / cultural / monetary resources to even begin to compete with kids born to more rational families?
Not that I'm saying a selection pressure against irrational belief would be a negative or a problem, I'm just saying it would be strongly selected against?
I was thinking more in terms of reproductive success of kids who have enormous very old and presumably wise family members to act as mentors and advisors.
I had a grandfather who rose to pretty high levels in the Army and executive level in a major national railroad, he could provide some advice about management. A G-Grandfather who was a good enough CPA to never end up unemployed in the great depression, he presumably could teach me a thing or two about accounting. A grandpa-in-law who was a successful combat medic, after treating combat injuries normal lifestyle trauma would make him handy to have around (edited to add, patching up blown off limbs made him a peace activist type in his later years, another good reason to keep him around). One of my grandma was one of those flapper / womens suffrage / womens lib radical types and she'd be a good influence on my daughter. If we extend life over 200 years, I have a Harvard lit prof in my ancestry who would be a handy tutor for my kids, and a civil war era land surveyor who could probably teach even me a thing or two about wilderness hiking and survival, etc.
If you do enough genealogy, everyone's got enough "cool" in their ancestry, that if those ancestors were still alive, kids lifestyle would be radically improved compared to folks with dead ancestors.
Of course human nature being what it is, the 10% of cool would come with 90% of hatred, bigotry, ignorance, blah blah, so you'd have to take it all with a grain of salt. (edited to add, and learning the critical thinking skills to take it all with a grain of salt, would overall be one of the most valuable skills...)
Ageing is a genetic disease. It has to be cured. We evolved to adapt to specific environment. Now that we are changing this environment we must change ourselves as well. Everyone should be given an option to die but it should be just one of a few options.
Not as long as religious fanatics, anti gay (shame on you, Uganda), anti abortion and other zealots, dumbasses who have 10 kids and nothing to feed them with and other kinds of people still exist.
Then again, I'm all for it if we can colonize space sooner...
One "philosophical question" which we already know the answer to, is at least in the short term and as a rare tool its not going to change much of anything. For example according to key metrics blah blah my grandmother's bypass surgery restored her circulation to that of a young woman blah blah but it hardly turned her into a sorority girl or whatever sociological blather. Ditto my grandfathers gallbladder removal.
To some extent an old dude with no medical conditions to complain about is just going to be an old dude with no medical conditions to complain about. You'll get to hear more Fox News talking points instead of medical symptoms.
I can't recall the source (probably a special on the Science channel or somesuch), but I heard that if we "cured" aging and no one died from getting old, that the average lifespan would be between 1.5k and 2.5k years where one would die of an accident or disease. I'd take my chances with that :)
Curing cellular aging would not, as far as I know, have any effect on cancer. Whether it would have any effect on other problems like decreasing bone density, I'm not sure. So even if you sweep one cause of death completely off the table, it stands to reason that whatever you would have died from next will still be around to do the job until it, too, is cured.
Much like when you add more of the limiting reagent to a chemical reaction, it just means that some other reagent will now be the limiting reagent.
If you take other leading causes out (accidents 120k, diabetes 70k, influenza 50k, suicide 40k), it still leaves about 2M deaths related to ageing: heart, cancer, chronic respiratory, stroke, alzheimers.
Cancer is a big treatment problem. Well here I am a tired old 95 year old cancer cell, too tired and sore to start reproducing madly and my hosts blood chemistry is too F'ed up anyway for me to grow, so I'll just sit here in my lung cell sized recliner and watch Fox News with my host... Ah I see now after some treatment I feel I'm in the body of a healthy 25 year old and I'm absolutely bursting with energy... lets get fissioning boys, there's a new sheriff in town and we're takin' this here place over.
And this particular anti-aging therapy, if it works, will only treat a subset of those age-related diseases. There are many different mechanisms of aging, and each therapy we develop will only incrementally improve things.
In that light, philosophical discussions about anti-aging therapies are somewhat doomed to only have a specific context such as "what's wrong with curing alzheimer's?"
You may have a strong attachment to mortality, but I personally don't. I strongly believe I would be able to cope with immortality, and I think it would very much be worth it for a chance to see more of the universe and the future of humanity. Please keep that in mind when you consider the morality of these issues. Although you personally would rather face death, I personally would not - and I don't think anyone else has the right to determine whether someone else should die.
On a side note, I think it's quite sad that you think every day life is mentally deteriorating, especially because of "sin". Personally I'm pretty much at peace, and doing my best to live a good life and change to be a better person.
> it seems that the most immediate effect would be a higher availability of adenosine triphosphate (ATP)
This study goes way over my head, but if the goal is to boost ATP isn't creatine monohydrate supplementation a cheap and effective way to do so currently?
Inhibiting or preventing dementia isn't a "lifestyle drug". It would solve a very serious issue we have with aging populations, or indeed any population, where we have a huge number of people who are very much alive but incapable of managing basic life functions.
Why do you believe that improving the quality of the decades that are now the last won't prolong peoples lives? Personally, I'd expect the result to be pretty drastic.
Anti-aging technologies are going to introduce many philosophical questions; although, that doesn't quite seem to be the case in this specific instance since this compound will probably just improve the quality of the last couple decades of a person's life rather than drastically extend it. What's the difference between curing disease/prolonging natural life vs unnatural "anti-aging" technologies? At what point do we start grappling with the issues of immortality? Personally, I believe that the mentally-deteriorating effects of everyday life, including what one may call "sin," will be too much for the modern human to retain his/her sanity after a certain point. I for one would rather face death.
[1] http://www.genome.jp/dbget-bin/www_bget?C00003
[2] http://www.genome.jp/kegg-bin/show_pathway?map00190+C00003
† I say "lifestyle drug" here to denote elective treatment, although the effects of natural aging and death dying probably do not fit in the technical definition, which is to treat "non-life threatening and non-painful conditions such as baldness, impotence, wrinkles, erectile dysfunction, or acne"