Life Extension is Missing the Point
The idea of "curing death" is profoundly disgusting. And the glee with which techno-optimists anticipate it betrays a spiritual poverty born from a lifetime of comfortable bed-rot. I don't see technological Übermenschen bearing their might on history. I see eternal iPad babies who, unable to bear separation from their busyboxes, envision a future where they merge with them instead.
Ad hominem! Appeal to naturalistic fallacy! The gotchas ring out in a distinctly Reddit cadence. You only accept death because you've been socially conditioned to do so! But there is no magical man in the sky to send you to heaven or hell. If you're so in favor of death, why don't you die right now? The same arguments play out repeatedly in message boards and comment sections against people who are pretending to be wise, merely coping with a solvable technological problem.
Ironically, creating heaven on earth with GPT-5 fails to move past the Western eschatology these arguments so readily dismiss. It's the book of Revelations with a landlord-special paint job. But this failure of imagination is just another dance around a more important question: why the fuck are you alive in the first place?
Most of these arguments take life as an obvious good, but this is a tautology. Life is good because you're alive. And if living to 70 is good, then by induction it follows that living to 100 is also good. There's no point at which the utility sign flips. 200 years. 500 years. One thousand years of being a high-IQ special boy is what we should all strive for. Of course, being proper utilitarians, we don't want a millennium of suffering. See, life is about having fun, collecting happy moments like little marbles. Sometimes life is not fun but this should be avoided at all costs. When someone dies, they lose all their marbles and you can't play with them anymore. It's not fucking fair! Clearly this awful techno-capital vortex spinning up in the distance will take pity on us, and expend vital time and effort to solve this problem for humanity.
Bullshit. Life for its own sake is cancer. Let's take our simple moral philosophy, the one that takes the "least amount of bits to encode," and apply it at a different scale. Suppose a lump of tissue in your prostate decides to become "trans-prostate-ist." Programmed cell death is "cope," unnecessary for enlightened beings, and this lump grows and grows until a doctor rummages around in your asshole and tells you to start chemo ASAP. Ah, but. Well. See, we don't care about biology. We care about preserving human consciousness, that well-defined concept. It seems like when pressed, these discussions fall back on a form of closeted dualism. There is a human "soul" worth preserving, but it's not a soul. It's all very scientific, and over the heads of us simple-minded normies.
The reality is this: assigning a moral valence to life or death is a category error. Is it "bad" when a song ends? Is it "good" when lightning strikes? These are nonsense questions when you step out of the little humanist bubble we've constructed. When life was harder, people were thrown out of this bubble more often. They had to contend with serious questions of why they should endure living, and arrived at serious answers no matter how bitter. But wrapped in a blanket of material comforts, we can doze off with our toys and dream of an eternity of play waiting for us.
All the trouser-shitting over AI makes sense in this light. It's a fear of God, a vengeful God coming back from the dead to smite believers and nonbelievers alike. But humanity won't go down without a fight. As a rationalist, your chief imperative is to worry. To think really hard about everything that could go wrong and shriek about it. And to do your math homework so you can make sure that the bigger brains always listen to the smaller brains, a real and possible thing to want to achieve. You're the main character! You have to try, damn it! If you fail, the basilisk will torture a million copies of you for eternity. Rage! Rage against the dying of the light!
Hm.
I went to the beach today. Go find a beach and just watch. Don't start intellectualizing it, don't call the sand SiO2, just fucking sit there.
Look at the waves. That's water. How much water are you made of? That's right! 60%. We're all water here.
You can look at these waves and read, what? Yearning? The wave wants to surge forward, to crash against the rocks. It needs it. But look at that, it got pulled back into the ocean and died. Are we sad? Maybe someday the waves will invent a way to never go back to the ocean.
Ah, but they did. Those waves in the ocean came to life billions of years ago, didn't they? And then they grew legs and flopped onto the earth. How about that.
But did they ever stop being waves? When does a wave escape the ocean of non-being? When it can dream? When it can read and write? When it starts launching tin cans into the cosmos?
Any student of nature observes that she does not stay still. Systems oscillate, trading off kinetic and potential energy. And these oscillations superimpose, tiny ripples on the backs of larger waves, on the backs of even larger waves. At every scale, this dance reveals a stupendous complexity. More "bits of information" than could ever be recorded, except in the brute matter itself. What makes you think you stand outside of this? Where do you draw the line? And even if you can draw it, what makes you think you can hold it forever? What makes you think you should?
Life for its own sake is cancer. Do your work, then step back.
November 24, 2024