Debating Immortality

I found this excellent and thought-provoking transcript of a debate between Aubrey de Grey and William B. Hurlbut on Future Current. Excerpts:

Aubrey:

Persuading people that we can actually get somewhere in this is hard, because people tend to start out with what philosophers have called the argument for personal incredulity–which means, I can’t believe that this is possible, and therefore it’s impossible. And also the argument from selective, superficial, self-serving authority, which is that such and such a person who appears to be respectable says it is not true, and therefore it’s not true.

Now the ways I feel are effective in getting around these problems are first of all to make it difficult to maintain incredulity, simply by showing that it’s common sense. And the second thing is to show results, the progress that’s being made in the first steps of achieving the overall goal, and thereby also undermining the incredulity aspect.

This is the sort of thing that gets me into an enormous amount of trouble. I tend to go around the world saying this sort of thing. If we were able to implement Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence we might be able to achieve what I have called longevity escape velocity, which I will get into in a moment. The bottom line can be described by the fact that if we get to the point where we can extend people’s lives in something in the region of thirty years with interventions that are initiated when people are already in middle age, then it will be all downhill from there. It will get easier after that. We will be able to extend people’s healthy, and therefore useful, lifespan indefinitely, essentially. So, that means the first 1,000 year-old may not be that much younger than the first 150 year-old.

William:

What is this thing called aging? Do we have a clear understanding of what it is? And is it something indeed that is worthy of the word “cure?” That’s a very loaded word. Galen, the 1st century Roman physician, said that the physician is nature’s assistant. That goal was the one I was trained around, to restore the patient so that the natural life processes could be optimalized. But now there is a new paradigm in medicine: technological transformation in the quest for happiness and human perfection. Increasingly we’ve come to expect from medicine not just freedom from disease, but freedom from distress, struggle, and even the constraints of life’s natural processes. All that’s unattractive, imperfect, or just inconvenient. This is the medicalization of natural life. Biomedical technology gives not just new powers of comprehension and control but a transformation in our conceptual and ethical outlook, a vision of nature and human nature and the role of human desires, transformed and inflated by new powers and new possibilities.

The hegemony of this is the dominance of technology over our traditions–what we might call our spiritual, cultural, and aesthetic traditions. I guess the first thing I would say about this is, to put it simply, “Mother Nature always bats in the bottom of the ninth.” There is a lot to be said about this from a physical, medical, biological standpoint. The main points I want to make are there’s a relationship between mechanism and meaning. Our minds do not somehow hover over our bodily being. We are our bodies. What we do to our bodies will affect the entire psycho-physical unity that we are. But is it not our nature, part of who we are, to intervene in nature? Are we not the creature who is also a creator?

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