Lego Millenium Falcon Stop Motion
Sometimes I long for these simple days…
The July 20, 2007 Future Salon meeting was titled, The Science and Ethics of Longevity Research. This is Part 1 of a summary of that presentation as well as commentary and supplemental information regarding the topics and concepts discussed. Commentary, of course, represents my own views and responses to the presenters’ points, not the views of the presenters.
When I entered the tidily furnished, modern cafeteria of Palo Alto’s SAP Labs facility, I still did not know what to expect beyond a talk between biologist Aubrey de Grey and bioethicist William Hurlburt. I did not know if the audience would consist primarily of life-extensionists, death apologists, or people who were simply curious, and I did not know what kind of dynamic would play out as the evening moved forward.
Attending “future-themed” events (for lack of a better term) is something I am fairly new to, and in general I tend to approach new places and experiences like a cat: inching about the perimeter of the area, trying to get a sense of the space at hand and the shapes within it, and eventually finding a quiet corner to settle into where I might observe the goings-on around me. I recognized a few of the other early arrivals and offered greetings to some of them, but mostly just looked around, took random photographs, and nibbled on raw vegetables from the refreshment table.
Eventually, I found myself a nice table by the window where I could set up my laptop and stayed there for practically the rest of the evening. On a whim I decided to see if there was any wi-fi in the area, and lo and behold, SAP had a “guest” network connection. This thrilled me more than it probably should have — for some reason, I get schoolgirl-excited at the mere prospect of being able to walk around with a portable computer and (where possible) simply turn it on and without so much as a wire, be connected to the most extensive information-transfer medium in known existence. There was a kind of crisp, flowing beauty in being able to log on, upload a photograph showing the very room I was actually in, and post it to the Web within the space of a mere few minutes.
Soon, the room filled up with more people than I’d expected to see at such an event. I was very impressed by the turnout, and the attendees were very civil and respectful of both the facility and the event itself (which is always nice to see, considering one of the reasons I generally avoid crowds is the fact that large groups of humans tend to generate unpleasant, loud, screamy, emergent properties).
An informal audience survey at the beginning of the event revealed what looked to be a slight preference for hearing more about the science side of things, but ethics ended up being the main focus of the evening anyway. This is by no means a complaint, though — while the dissemination of more good, solid, technical information about longevity science would indeed be welcome, the evening’s focus was quite appropriate given that the primary discussion was to occur between a biologist (with an understandable interest in bioethics), and a bioethicist. The meeting was framed as a “debate” of sorts, and (generally speaking) when it comes to science, you don’t debate it to prove that it works, you do it and see if it works.
Aubrey de Grey began by noting two mutually exclusive positions (associated with science and ethics) that tend to come into play when people state opposition to longevity research:
Position 1: “I refuse to think seriously about whether defeating aging is feasible, because it is clearly not desirable.”
Position 2: “I refuse to think seriously about whether defeating aging is desirable, because it is clearly not feasible.”
Two argumentative frameworks tend to be associated with the above two positions, according to de Grey: the “Argument from Superficial Authority”, and the “Argument from Personal Incredulity”.
My impression is that people taking Position 1 most often tend to argue from superficial authority. I would imagine that this includes people who invoke “Nature”, the words of conservative bioethicists, or possibly their deity of choice when attempting to explain why seeking to extend the healthy lifespan is a bad idea.
People taking Position 2, on the other hand, tend to argue from personal incredulity — that is, they consider it a foregone conclusion that human lifespan is basically fixed at a particular point, and that our chance of moving this point outward is so small as to be functionally negligible.
In order to at least begin to address the above positions and their supporting attitudes, de Grey suggests demystifying the task of actually achieving longevity medicine. This is where the majority of the “science talk” took place during de Grey’s presentation — the “simple logic” of Life Extension Escape Velocity (which is probably quite familiar by now to most who have been following longevity science for any length of time) implies that as time goes by, it will become possible to fix more and more of the damage that accumulates as a person ages. Simply put, fixing half the damage will allow a person to live to the point where it is possible to fix 3/4 of the damage, then 7/8 of the damage, and so on, and so forth.
It is worth noting here as a reminder that the notion of “escape velocity” is not new. A 1978 article in Future Magazine described the concept as follows:
…if you are in your 40s, you will probably not be hauled offstage by the Grim Reaper in 2008, as the insurance companies are betting. You will probably still be here in 2078. And if you are in your twenties or younger, you have a good chance of being around until 2098.
But if you will be around that long, what will happen in the meanwhile?
Even if the current predictions of such learned scientists as Dr. Segall, Dr. Prehoda and Dr. Komarov — projecting life spans of 400-1000 years — are a generation premature, two generations premature or even three or four generations premature, still, you have a good chance of being here when these dreams are achieved.
In short, even if we can only double lifespan in this generation, we will still be around when further breakthroughs will probably triple it, quadruple it or raise it into millenniums.
It is somewhat sobering (as it should be) to read articles like that quoted above now, nearly 30 years later, and realize that little progress of the sort imagined by 1970s futurists has come to pass. In some respects this is certainly a good thing — I mean, I don’t really see myself being happy in a silver unitard. But I don’t doubt that there are probably a fair number of “old school” cryonicists and other longevity-oriented folks out there who have been around to see a lot of change in the world, yet little in the directions that indicate the probable emergence of life extension medicine sooner rather than later.
However, the good news is that the Escape Velocity concept is now in a far better position to be realized than it was 30 years ago — for the simple reason that now, people are actually making tangible efforts toward achieving the first significant longevity milestones. People unfamiliar with the subject of life extension are likely to assume that what is being sought is a “magic bullet” approach, when this is not actually true at all — age-related health decline is an extremely complex phenomenon that will require complex, incrementally applied solutions. (On this subject, I was pleased to see a lovely color version of a particular graph that, if I recall correctly, was brainstormed into existence at the meeting I attended back in January with various members of the Methuselah Foundation and other interested parties.)
de Grey continued the science discussion by noting the fact that metabolism is the primary path by which damage occurs, and that this damage is what eventually leads to recognizable pathology. He also mentioned the possible utility of biological simulations in predicting the efficacy of treatments applied to restore various aspects of health to people of various projected ages.
After that, the more practical discussion gave way to the more philosophical (I am guessing that de Grey wanted to have at least some reasonable longevity justifications out on the table prior to Hurlburt’s speech). The Ethics portion of de Grey’s discussion began (at least according to my notes) with his noting of some of the key psychological challenges to longevity research:
- People tend to fear the unknown (and a world in which age-related death is no longer a certainty definitely qualifies as an “unknown”).
and,
- It used to make sense to engage in apologism for the nastier bits of the aging process (because we honestly didn’t have much hope of actually doing anything about it).
In response to these challenges, it was suggested that we ought to apply reflective equilibrium to the problem of ageism (which is really a large part of the root of opposition to longevity medicine), and that ethics ought to be revealed as a “people skill”. (I really appreciated the second point being made, because all too often it seems that very superficial criteria are used in order to determine “people skills”, sometimes at the expense of acknowledging the ethical aspects of a situation.)
de Grey also made the point that the job of a bioethicist is to “provide arguments that people in general, not just bioethicists, will find persuasive.” This was a good point to make, considering that it is very easy to become so immersed in one’s own professional jargon that one forgets that the result of ethical explorations must be, at some point, applied to and tested against the real world (in a manner that can, and will, affect real people).
The “wisdom of repugnance” argument was also invoked here, in the context of suggesting that visceral reactions sometimes do lead to preferential moral positions. After all, quite a few things that did not used to be considered “repugnant” now certainly are; examples given were slavery, mass murder of indigenous peoples, non-universal suffrage, and homophobia. All these things are now fairly widely condemned, when they used to be accepted as a matter of course. Applying the “wisdom of repugnance” to the subject of longevity, de Grey asks whether age-related death might perhaps become repugnant at some point.
The answer to this query depends on whether people are willing to engage in a general move toward valuing life more than they did in the past. Some trends do seem to point in this direction; de Grey cites the less-frequent incidence of war between developed nations in recent years as suggestive of greater valuation of life.
However, I am personally a bit more torn on whether most people are actually moving more toward valuing life than away from this position — sometimes it seems as if the opposite is actually true, particularly in the cases of elderly and disabled persons. Certainly, it is possible that a majority of persons will come to the position of always giving the lives of existing persons the benefit of the doubt, but I think we’ve got a long road ahead in this regard.
de Grey also brought up the commonly-cited point that “there is no difference between saving lives and extending lives”. I will not summarize this point here again, since I have covered it in the past.
Overall, de Grey’s opening statement, while it seemed slightly hurried (understandable, given the time constraints), did manage to portray longevity research as nothing more than the logical extension of medicine to persons of all ages, not just the young. I did not really learn anything I didn’t already know, or hear any pro-longevity arguments I’d not encountered in the past — but I certainly enjoyed seeing a room full of people (there must have been close to, if not slightly more than, 100 in attendance) who appeared to mostly support the pro-longevity position. As such, I figured that the next presenter, William Hurlburt, would have a very tough time defending his more conservative position to such a crowd.
The July 20, 2007 Future Salon meeting was titled, The Science and Ethics of Longevity Research. This is Part 2 of a summary of that presentation as well as commentary and supplemental information regarding the topics and concepts discussed. Commentary, of course, represents my own views and responses to the presenters’ points, not the views of the presenters.
Hurlburt went straight into ethics and philosophy, asking first of all, “Is more always better?” (particularly when it comes to “life itself”), and then invoking notions of balance, wholeness, and coherence as applied to life (and death’s role in shaping it). He brought up the potential social impacts of life extension by lightly pointing out that phrases like “life sentence” and “until death do us part” would take on very different gravity in a society of very long-lived individuals.
He then tried to make a poetic point about life as analogous to a symphony, and asserted that perhaps extending life (any part of life) would disrupt this symphony or somehow make it less meaningful than it would have been otherwise. I tried my best to take this argument seriously and consider it from an ethical and philosophical standpoint, but in all honesty (and no disrespect to Dr. Hurlburt here), all I could think was, “Wow, he’s using the Depressed Buffy Argument!”
(If you haven’t seen the Buffy The Vampire Slayer TV series through the sixth season, you might want to skip over the next few paragraphs, if you plant to watch the series and you’re the sort to care about spoilers. Consider this fair warning!)
See, right at the end of Season 5, Buffy (the title character and hero of the series), dies as a result of leaping into a mystical portal while in the process of saving the world from a chaotic dimensional rupture. She is brought back to life at the beginning of Season 6 by her well-meaning friends, who feared that she might have been trapped in a “hell dimension”. However, it turns out that Buffy was not in a terrible place at all, but in a place where she felt “warm, loved, and complete”. Being torn from this place of completeness and certainty sends her into a deep depression. She feels as if her life is now meaningless, that she is simply going through the motions of her daily activities. And she resents her friends for bringing her back to such a life — Buffy feels that the “song” that should have comprised her life has been taken from her and left her with nothing but confusion and emptiness.
This is what Hurlburt’s “symphony” argument reminded me of; he seemed to be making a very similar assertion about the effect that very long lives might have on people. But, like “Depressed Buffy”, Hurlburt fails to acknowledge that life is not about some grand story arc imposed upon you from the outside so much as what you choose to make of it, and find within it. At one point during the musical episode of Buffy (which isn’t nearly as ridiculous as the premise may sound), another character sings the following in response to Buffy’s lament about the disruption of her “song”:
Given the existentialist leanings of series creator Joss Whedon, it seems very likely that these few simple words are actually intended to express a very powerful truth about existence: that life is not a song, but something else — something that is, rather, an end unto itself. Buffy did eventually come to terms with this truth and begin to appreciate the world once more — perhaps even more deeply than she did prior to her death, because her viewpoint was less naive and better informed regarding the true lack of absolute certainty in the universe. When even death cannot be relied upon as either certain or final, a person is thrust into a position of having to engage in some of the most difficult philosophical explorations known to humanity.
Hurlburt made much of the notion that to seek life extension is to express a kind of “spiritual immaturity” — as if somehow, those who advocate for effective longevity medicine simply have not “faced” their mortality and its implications. While I can see how he might think this, given the fact that most human myths and archetypes involving longevity end with a moralizing lesson about being careful what you wish for, I would venture to suggest that not being able to conceive of a meaningful life without age-related death is actually more indicative of “spiritual immaturity” than actually being able to do so.
Overall, it seems that Hurlburt confuses the naive “immortality quest” (characterized by an outright fear of death, and little reflective content) popularized in myth and legend with the more serious, pragmatic, deeply-thought-out desire for longevity medicine shared by the majority of the healthy life extension community. I haven’t taken a survey, but I would imagine that most longevity advocates have, in fact, “faced death”, stared into the void, meditated to the point of ego-dissolution, or done any number of other things that have allowed us to observe the starkness and majesty of existence and our own frail, vulnerable presence within the context of the whole.
When I was about 20 years old, the notion of mortality actually hit me quite abruptly — I was reading a book at the time that claimed that humans find it impossible to imagine their own non-existence, and because I like a challenge, I attempted to imagine just that. I’ve learned subsequently that this sort of exercise is similar to some Buddhist practices, but I am not a Buddhist nor am I particularly well-versed in that system, so whatever I did seems to have been purely the result of experiment and chance. But regardless of how I did it, I was actually able to (briefly) “peer into the void”.
I do not assign any supernatural significance to this experience, but it was quite personally significant, because from that point onward I have been acutely conscious of the fragility and beauty of life. For several months after that experience I had to deal with sorting through a wellspring of new emotions, realizations, and philosophical points that had simply never occurred to me before. I remember going to my parents in tears and explaining to them that I’d just become viscerally aware of the relative brevity of life, and I will never forget what my stepmother told me at that point:
“So, what now? Are you just going to go hide in a cave and wait to die?”
I thought about that, and while I still had to go through a few more months of sorting out my new perspective (which made me extremely moody) after this, those words stuck with me and I kept coming back to them whenever the sense-memory of that brief moment of utter transparency and smallness struck me. Yes, humans are tiny. Yes, reality is vast and unforgiving. Yes, we are tremendously, almost poignantly vulnerable. Yes, we are at the mercy of many, many forces utterly beyond our control. But none of that means that the right way to go about things is to simply sit back and try to force-fit our imaginations, aspirations, and ability to appreciate beauty and complexity into a structure imposed upon us by culture, tradition, and lack of good sound medical care for people of all ages.
Life has a pervasive depth to it that exists at all scales and across all structures, and there is absolutely no reason to assert that this depth would somehow go away if people didn’t need to worry so much about dying of old age anymore. In short, I don’t think anyone, Hurlburt or otherwise, has the right to tell anyone else what makes their life meaningful. When people impose their paternalistic “life’s a song, and I get to tell you what that song should sound like” attitudes on others, the result is no less than insulting. I’ve seen this in autistic advocacy as well: I don’t like people insisting my life will be “meaningless” or “incoherent” if life extension becomes a reality any more than I like them insisting that my existence is somehow only a pale shadow of what it “could be” if I were neurotypical.
Hurlburt asserted that he had personally “faced his frailty”, but he did not seem to allow for the fact that a person can simultaneously face their own frailty and advocate for longevity research at the same time. I have no illusions that any length of life in particular is assured; my intent in living, and doing the things I do while living, is to live a life that is worthwhile regardless of length. It is a terrible oversimplification to assert that life extension advocacy must come from a place of naivete, or to assume that longevity advocates get some kind of comfort from the mere fact of being advocates. We all have to face our own frailty, and the potential for our own eventual nonexistence, regardless of what scientific endeavors we prefer to promote — no rational person anywhere is spared the necessity of this.
In the midst of all the talk of symphonies and coherence and balance and structure, Hurlburt revealed at least some of his views to be somewhat strangely reactionary. I’m not sure if anyone who isn’t female can relate to this, but there’s a certain mode of expression that some people have that can make you feel uncomfortably aware of your gender, and simultaneously invisible because of it. I half expected him to start complaining about how women being able to work outside the home (and vote, even!) was “destabilizing society”. He seemed somewhat fixated on reproduction and referred to the stages of life as “childhood, parenthood, and grandparenthood”. He remarked on how unfortunate it was that some women “wait too long to have children” and then have problems when they attempt to use techniques like in-vitro fertilization.
As someone who is not only female but who has also chosen not to reproduce (since there are a near-infinite number of things I would rather do with my time than bear and raise my own young), I felt simultaneously left out and liberated by Hurlburt’s proclamations. It didn’t seem like he was speaking to me, or anyone like me, at all. In light of this, I alternated between thinking, “Oh, PLEASE!” and figuring that his statements had so little to do with me that I was under no obligation to take them seriously in the first place.
Nevertheless, despite the other (possibly innumerable) rants I might be able to base off of many of Hurlburt’s statements, I do have to give credit where credit is due. Hurlburt may have a tendency to oversimplify, and he may have displayed a confounding lack of apparent imagination at times, but he was obviously not someone who had never at least tried to think seriously about pertinent bioethical issues. He made some good points about the far-reaching ramifications of altering one gene, or one “aspect” or a person or a population. He rightfully pointed out that “cure” was a loaded word (I could not have agreed more on that point), and suggested that the over-medicalization of human existence was perhaps not the best way to go about progressing into the future.
So, I agree fully that there is far too much medicalization of variation going on, but I draw a very clear line between variations and things that actually kill people. If aging kills people, then why not medicalize the parts of it that tend to be fatal? Of course, simply being old is not a medical condition in and of itself, and should not be portrayed as such — but think for a moment about what tends to kill people who are old.
Elderly people are not simply spirited away on an angel-drawn pillow surrounded by loving friends and family when they die — rather, they usually experience immune collapse, cancer, heart failure, atherosclerosis, strokes, pneumonia, or any number of other undeniable nasties. It isn’t the “being old” part of being old that ought to be medicalized — it’s the “being so sick that all your organs shut down and you die” part. If we wouldn’t want this to happen to a younger person, then we shouldn’t tolerate it when it happens to older people either — unless we are prepared to assert that a person’s life stops being valuable once they reach a certain “expiration date”. And that assertion is something I would find tremendously repugnant.
Another positive point for Hurlburt was the fact that he brought up the notion of whether a brain might even be capable of “storing” experiences and personal identity over a period of time far longer than today’s lifespans. This is almost certain to become an issue if we do achieve longevity medicine — I do imagine that we have yet to see the outer bounds of what an “unaugmented” brain can possibly do, but eventually, it does seem likely that a person will need to undergo some kind of cognitive modification in order to keep track of his/her experiences. Trying to postulate how those modifications might be achieved, or how they might be implemented, goes to a place of speculation I am not fully equipped to discuss at this time but it is definitely something I will be watching as the future unfolds. And while Hurlburt might have brought up this point as a reason for why we should be wary of extending lives, I think that postulating “death” as the only solution to this potential problem reveals nothing more than lack of imagination.
All that said, at times it almost seemed as if Hurlburt was not actually as opposed to the idea of superlongevity as his official position seemed to imply. He acknowledged that he was there to present certain arguments in favor of a particular position, and did so accordingly, but not without what almost seemed like hesitation at times. He even suggested that some longevity interventions might be acceptable in his estimation; he eagerly cited a research program involving hamsters and stem cells (that supposedly resulted in 30% longer lives for the hamsters). And during the “audience participation” session at the end, he seemed somewhat taken aback by some of the questions from various persons in attendance; there was one man in particular who made such a poignant statement about the reasoning behind “wanting more years” that I am not entirely sure anyone with even a modicum of empathy would have been able to dismiss that statement.
Overall, I reached the end of the presentation with a few new thoughts and things to ponder, but mainly a conviction that we definitely ought to at least run the longevity experiment. Whatever uncertainties, resource distribution challenges, population issues, or social unrest that could occur in a “worst case” longevity scenario are still better off occurring in a world where people are not simply expected (and even encouraged) to stop “presumptuously” existing once they reach a certain age. Rather than assuming the potential challenges of a very long-lived society will be insurmountable, why not at least put ourselves in the position to face them head-on?
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