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Language: en
so if you could live forever would you
live forever
forever i my my goal
with longevity research is to abolish
the plague of involuntary death i don't
think people should die unless they
choose to die
if i had to choose forced immortality
versus dying i would choose forced
immortality
on the other hand if i chose if i had
the choice of immortality with the
choice of suicide whenever i felt like
it of course i would take that instead
and that's the more realistic choice i
mean there's no reason you should have
forced immortality you should be able to
live
into until you get until you get sick of
living right i mean that's
and that will seem insanely obvious to
everyone 50 years from now and they will
be
so i mean people who thought death gives
meaning to life so we should all die
they will look at that 50 years from now
the way we now look at
the anabaptists in the year 1000 who
gave away all their positions went on
top of the mountain for jesus
for jesus to come and bring them to the
right to the ascension
i mean yeah it's ridiculous that people
think
death is is is good because it
because you gain more wisdom as you
approach dying i mean
of course it's true i mean i'm 53 and
you know the fact that i might have only
a few more decades left
it does make me reflect on on things
differently
it it it does give me a deeper
understanding of many things
but i mean so what you could get a deep
understanding in a lot of different ways
pain is the same way like we're going to
abolish pain
and that that's even more amazing than
abolishing death right i mean
once we get a little better at
neuroscience we'll be able to go in
and adjust the brain so that pain
doesn't hurt anymore right
and that you know people will say that's
bad because
there's so much beauty in overcoming
pain and suffering oh
sure and there's beauty in overcoming
torture too but
and some people like to cut themselves
but not not many right i mean
that's an interesting so but to push i
mean to push back again this the russian
side of me i do romanticize suffering
it's not obvious i mean the way you put
it it's
it seems very logical it's almost absurd
to romanticize suffering or pain or
death
but to me a world without
suffering without pain without death
it's non-obvious
well then you can stay in the people's
zoo people people
torturing each other no but what i'm
saying is
i don't well that's i guess what i'm
trying to say i don't know
if i was presented with that choice what
i would choose because
it to me this this is this is a subtler
it's a subtler matter and i've posed it
in this conversation in an unnecessarily
extreme way so i i think i think
the way you should think about it is
what if there's a little dial
on the side of your head and you could
turn
how much pain hurt turn it down to zero
turn up to 11 like in spinal tap if it
wants maybe through an actual spinal tap
right so
i mean would you opt to have that dial
there or not
that that's the question the question
isn't whether you would turn the pain
down to zero
all all the time would you opt to have
the dial or not my
my guess is that in some dark moment of
your life you would choose to have the
dial implanted
and then it would be there just to
confess a small thing
um don't ask me why but i'm i'm
doing this physical challenge currently
where i'm doing
680 push-ups and pull-ups a day yeah
yeah
and my shoulder is currently as we sit
here in a lot of pain
and uh i i don't know
i would certainly right now if you gave
me a dial i would turn that
sucker to zero as quickly as possible
but
i don't i think the whole point of this
journey
is i don't know well because you're
you're a twisted human being
i'm gonna twist it so the question is if
am i somehow twit
mine's twisted because i had i i created
some kind of narrative for myself
so that i can deal with the with the
injustice and the suffering in the world
uh or is this actually going to be a
source of happiness
well this is this is a to an extent
is a research question that humanity
will undertake right so
exactly human human beings do have a
particular
biological makeup which
sort of implies a certain probability
distribution over
motivational systems right so i mean we
we
and that that is there i'll put that is
there now the
the the question is how flexibly
can that morph as society and technology
change right
so if if we're given that dial and we're
given a society
in which say we don't have to we don't
have to work for a living
and in which there's an ambient
decentralized benevolent ai network that
will warn us when we're about
to hurt ourselves you know if we're in a
different context
can we consistently with
being genuinely and fully human can we
consistently get into a state of
consciousness
where we just want to keep the pen dial
turned
all the way down and yet we're leading
very rewarding and fulfilling lives
right now
i suspect the answer is yes we can do
that but i
i don't i don't know that it's a
researcher i don't know that said for
certain yeah no
i'm more confident that we could create
a non-human agi system
[Music]
which just didn't need an analog of
feeling pain
and i think that agi system will be
fundamentally
healthier and more benevolent than human
beings so i think
it might or might not be true that
humans need a certain element of
suffering to be satisfied humans
consistent with the human physiology if
it is true
that's one of the things that makes us
and disqualified
to be the be the supe the super agi
right i mean this is a the nature of the
human motivational system
is that we we seem to gravitate towards
situations where
the best thing in the large scale
is not the best thing in in the small
scale according to our subjective value
system
so we gravitate towards subjective value
judgments where
to gratify ourselves in the large we
have to ungratify ourselves
in the small and we do that in
you see that in in music there's a
theory of music
which says the key to musical aesthetics
is the surprising fulfillment of
expectations
like you you want something that will
fulfill the expectations are listed in
the prior part of the music
but in a way with a bit of a twist that
that surprises you and that
i mean that's true not only in out their
music like my own or that of zappa
or or s steve or buckethead or
christopher panderecki or something
it's even there in in mozart or
something it's not there in elevator
music too much but that's
that's that's what that's why it's
boring right but wrapped up in there
is you know we want to hurt a little bit
so that we can
we can feel the we can feel the pain go
away like we want to be a little
a little a little confused by what's
coming next
so then when the thing that comes next
actually makes sense it's so satisfying
right and
that's the surprising fulfillment of
expectations that we said
yeah yeah so beautifully put is there
we've been skirting around a little bit
but if i were to ask you the most
ridiculous big question of
what is the meaning of life uh what
would your answer be
three values joy growth and choice
i'm i i think you you need joy i mean
that that's the basis of everything if
you want the number one value
on the other hand i'm unsatisfied
with a static joy that doesn't progress
perhaps because of some
elemental element of human perversity
but the idea of
something that grows and becomes more
and more and better and better in some
sense
appeals to me but i also sort of like
the idea of individuality that as a
distinct system
i have some agency so there's some nexus
of causality
within within this system rather than
the causality being
wholly evenly distributed over the
joyous growing mass so
you start with joy growth and and choice
as three basic values
those three things could continue
indefinitely
that's not that's something they yeah
that can last forever is there
is there some aspect of something you
called the shell like
super longevity that
quite exciting that what is there
research-wise is there ideas in that
space that
i mean i think yeah in terms of the
meaning of life this really ties into
that because
for us as humans probably the way to get
the most
joy growth and choice is
transhumanism and to go beyond the human
form that
that that we have right now right i mean
i think human body is great and
by no means to any of us maximize the
potential for joy growth and choice
imminent in our human bodies on the
other hand it's clear that other
configurations of matter
could manifest even greater amounts of
joy growth and choice
than than than humans do maybe even
finding ways to go beyond
the realm of matter that as we
understand it right now so i think
in a practical sense much of the meaning
i see in human life
is to create something better than
humans and and go beyond human life
but certainly that's not all of it for
me in a practical sense right like i
have four kids and and a granddaughter
and
many friends and parents and family and
just
enjoying everyday human human social
existence but we can do even better yeah
yeah
and i mean i i love i've always when i
could
live near nature i spend a bunch of time
out in nature in the forest and
on the water every day and so forth so i
mean
enjoying the pleasant moment is is part
of it but the
you know the growth and choice aspect
are severely limited by our human
biology
in particular dying seems to inhibit
your potential for personal growth
considerably as as far as we know i mean
there's some element of life after death
perhaps but
even if there is why not also continue
going in in in this in this biological
realm right
and and so in super longevity i mean
you know we haven't yet cured aging we
haven't yet
cured death certainly
there's very interesting progress all
around i mean crispr and gene editing
can be can be an an incredible tool
and i mean right now stem stem cells
could potentially prolong life a lot
like if you got stem cell injections
of of uh just stem cells for every
tissue of your body injected into every
tissue
and you can just have replacement
of your old cells with new cells
produced by those stem cells i mean that
that could be highly impactful at
prolonging life now we just need
slightly better technology for
for having them grow right so you using
machine learning
to guide procedures for stem cell
differentiation and trans
transdifferentiation it's kind of
nitty-gritty but i mean
that's that that's quite interesting so
i think there's
there's a lot of different things being
done to help with with prolongation
of of human life but we could do a
do a lot better so for example the
extracellular matrix which is the bunch
of proteins in between
the cells in your body they get stiffer
and stiffer
as you get older and the extracellular
matrix
transmits information both electrically
mechanically and to some extent
biophotonically so there's
all this transmission through the parts
of the body but the stiffer the
extracellular matrix gets
the less the transmission happens which
makes your body get
worse coordinated between the different
organs as you get older so my friend
christian schaffmeister
at my alumnus organization the great my
alma mater the great temple university
christian schaffmeister has a potential
solution to this
where he has these novel molecules
called spiral ligaments
which are like polymers that are not
organic they're specially
specially designed polymers so that you
can algorithmically predict exactly how
they'll fold very simply
so he designed the molecular scissors
that have spiroligamers
that you could eat and would then would
then cut through
all the glucose pain and other
cross-linked proteins in your
extracellular matrix right
but to make that technology really work
and be mature as several years of work
as far as i know
no one's funding it at the moment but
there so there's
so many different ways that technology
could be used to prolong
longevity what we really need we need an
integrated database of all biological
knowledge about human beings and model
organisms
like base hopefully a massively
distributed open cog bio atom space but
it can exist in other
forms too we need that data to be
opened up in a suitably privacy
protecting way we need massive funding
into machine learning
agi proto-agi statistical research
aimed at solving biology both molecular
biology and human biology
based on this massive massive data set
right and
and and then we need regulators not to
stop people from trying radical
therapies
on themselves if they so so wish to as
as well as better cloud-based platforms
for like automated experimentation on
microorganisms
flies and mice and so forth and we could
do all this you look
after the last financial crisis obama
who i generally like
pretty well but he gave four trillion
dollars to large banks and insurance
companies
you know now in this covid crisis
trillions are being spent to help
everyday people in small businesses
in the end we'll probably will find many
more trillions of being given to large
banks and insurance companies
anyway like could the world put 10
trillion dollars
into making a massive holistic bio ai
and bio simulation and experimental
biology infrastructure
we could we could put 10 trillion
dollars into that without even screwing
us up too badly just as in the end covid
and the last financial crisis
won't screw up the world economy so
badly we're not putting 10 trillion
dollars into that
instead all this research is siloed
inside
a few big companies and and and
government agencies and
most of the data that comes from our
individual bodies
personally that could feed this ai to
solve aging and death
most of that data is sitting in some
some hospitals database doing nothing
right
you