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Diary of an Immortal Man
Permanent link to this article: http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0003.html
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Diary of an Immortal Man
What would it be like to live forever? Writer Richard Dooling explores this question in this fictional piece from Esquire.
Originally published May 1999. Published on KurzweilAI.net May 22, 2001.
1994
March 30: Today I turn forty. I am officially protected by the Age Discrimination in Employment Act. If I had an employer, I could now sue him if he discriminated against me because of my, ulp, age. Until now, I've half believed in
one of Vladimir Nabokov's elegant syllogisms: Other men die, but I am not other men; therefore, I'll not die. Nabokov died in 1977. Every time I look in the bathroom
mirror, I see Death, the Eternal Footman (looking quite proud), standing in the shadows behind me, holding my coat, snickering. I live with my family in my hometown of
Omaha. My selfish genes have managed an immortality of sorts by getting themselves into four delightful children, who are still too young to turn on me. My wife and
I have enjoyed nine years of marriage, what Robert Louis Stevenson called "a friendship recognized by the police." I'm Catholic, so as mortality looms on the far side
of the middle-age horizon, I seek consolation in my Christian faith and one of its central tenets: belief in the immortality of my soul.
But the lawyer in me also highlights the usual caveats and provisos. According to the Scriptures, my quality of life after death
may depend on my ability to love my fellow man. This is a big problem. I forgot to mention that in addition to being a practicing Catholic, I'm also a practicing
misanthrope. As I see it, my only chance of avoiding eternal damnation is to stay alive until I learn to love other people. Or until some future
pope issues an encyclical providing spiritual guidance for misanthropic Catholics. November 16: My second novel,
White Man's Grave, is a finalist for the National Book Award. For at least a day or two, I wonder if I might be able to achieve immortality by writing great
literature. My wife and I fly to the awards ceremony in New York City, where William Gaddis wins the National Book Award in Fiction for A Frolic of His Own.
We return to Omaha, where, instead of reading the Scriptures or A Frolic of His Own, I read Woody Allen, who said, "I don't want to achieve immortality through my
work. I want to achieve it through not dying."
1997
February 23: I am in the Sheep's Head Tavern in east London, banging my flagon, bending my elbow, when the evening news comes on the telly over the bar and I learn that Ian Wilmut of the Roslin Institute in Scotland has cloned a sheep
named Dolly. I am not personally acquainted with or fond of any sheep that I would like to see multiplied like loaves and fishes. Most of what I know about sheep I learned in crowded taverns like this one, banging my flagon, bending my
elbow, and listening to off-color bestiality jokes. I fail to appreciate the significance of Dolly for my own personal immortality. Flagon. Elbow.
March 30: Birthdays seem to be coming every other month or so. I'm now forty-three years old. Still in Omaha; still a novelist. At my back, I hear the AARP's silver-chariot specials drawing near.
August 4: My wife and I reform our diets and take up a fitness regimen to shed pounds and replenish our dwindling reserves of vim and vigor.
We hire a sitter for the kids, then jog for almost an hour, and we eat nothing but kale and soybeans for dinner. We are starving and sore, stretched out in bed and watching the news, when we learn that the world's oldest living
person, Jeanne Louise Calment of Arles, France, died today at 122 years of age. Jeanne reportedly soaked her food in olive oil at every meal and also rubbed olive oil on her skin every day; she loved port
wine and ate two pounds of chocolate per week; she smoked cigarettes until she was 120 years old. August 5: We have quit jogging. The cupboards of our modest Omaha home are lined with bottles of Bertolli extra-virgin olive oil, and UPS
brings Godiva chocolates twice a week. My wife and I begin to experiment with tobacco products.
1998
May: The entire country waits for DNA testing to be performed on the megalosperm of its spermoblastic alpha-male
commander in chief. Believe me, I am no closer to loving my fellow man. Meanwhile, other cellular developments continue apace, some of which may allow me to prolong my life
until people start becoming lovable again. On top of everything else, I'm now a screenwriter, not a novelist--so artistic immortality is completely out of the
question.
July: Dolly the sheep goes out like a lamb, and in come twenty-two cloned mice--seven of which are cloned from a single mouse--created by Ryuzo Yanagimachi at the
University of Hawaii. The news includes experts' speculations about the practical uses of cloning human beings. For instance, what if I could create anencephalic
(brainless) clones of myself and put them in cold storage? Then I could harvest fresh hearts and livers to replace the ones damaged by smoking, eating chocolates, and consuming port
wine. Too ghoulish for my tastes; instead, I resolve to look after my soul, even if it means learning
to love my fellow man.
August 23: I'm not the only one with immortality on the brain. I head to the local bookstore
looking for Milan Kundera's novel Immortality, which is about people like me, who are anxious about
mortality.
The store doesn't carry Kundera, but it does have a new book called Immortality: How Science Is
Extending Your Life Span--and Changing the World. Maybe I don't have to worry about my immortal soul,
because on the first page of his book, one Ben Bova tells me just what I want to hear: "The first immortal human beings are probably living among us today. You might be
one of them." Bova falls well short of Kundera as a stylist, but his book does explain how my cells age and ultimately die and how it soon may be possible to arrest or even reverse this process.
Biologists at the Geron Corporation have already altered human cells in a petri dish and enabled them to defeat the genetic process of aging by exceeding what is called
the Hayflick limit. In 1961, biologist Leonard Hayflick discovered that normal human cells divide about fifty times during a normal human
lifetime. It seems that each time my cells divide, the chromosomes and their DNA
must be duplicated, but each time this happens, the ends of the DNA (called telomeres)
are slightly depleted, until gradually they become so short that my cells can no longer make accurate, functional copies of themselves, whereupon I will age and ultimately--well, that thing that Nabokov said happens to other men will
happen to me. Telomerase is an enzyme that arrests or reverses this shortening process, meaning it may enable my cells to reproduce "young" copies of themselves forever.
How long before telomerase injections are available to arrest aging in human beings? My health-insurance provider assists me promptly anytime I need help paying my
premiums, but I get placed on hold whenever I call to obtain services or file a claim or ask a question about telomerase.
November: Researchers funded by Geron take stem cells from human
embryos and grow them into neurons, muscle cells, and other human
tissues. Meanwhile, researchers from Advanced Cell Technology
take a nucleus from an adult human cell
and put it into a cow's denucleated egg cell, converting the ensemble into an embryonic human
cell. Contrary to reports I read in the popular press, the cow-egg experiment is not designed to produce Minotaurs or
Homo bovinus. Researchers used the denucleated cow egg only because of the ban on using the human
equivalent for such research. Rather, the experiment dramatizes the possibility of taking the nucleus
from one of my adult human cells and converting it back into a "pluripotent" stem cell, which can be
tweaked or "steered" into forming any kind of cells: blood, bone, brain, heart, kidney, or liver. Because the resulting tissue or organ comes from my own stem
cells, all of the rejection complications of organ transplantation vanish.
November 19: Author Richard Powers observes in a New York Times op-ed, "What we can do should never by itself determine what we choose to do, yet this is the way technolo-gy tends to work." I agree with Richard Powers. But that's
probably because I'm not sick yet, nor am I in need of an organ replacement. Yet.
December 17: It happened. The big one. In the wee hours of an Omaha dawn, I peer at my computer monitor at The New York Times on the Web, where it is reported that at
Kyunghee University Hospital in Seoul, South Korea, researchers have allegedly combined an egg and a cell
from a single donor to produce the first stages of a human embryo cloned from a single human
being. This news gives me serious pause, but it's me I want to live forever, not a clone of me, so I'm more
attracted to the idea of having all the spare parts I need. As miracles of biotechnology are reported every other week, no one else seems to notice, because we
are now a nation of 270 million obsessive-compulsives in the grip of twin autochthonous ideas: sex and perjury.
1999
March 30: For my birthday (number forty-five), my wife gives me a book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, by Ray Kurzweil, which convinces me that,
along with genetics, the biotechnology of my personal immortality
may also include computer chips. Kurzweil spins out the implications of Moore's Law: In 1965, Gordon Moore, an inventor of the integrated circuit and now chairman emeritus of Intel,
observed that computer chips seemed to evolve in two-year cycles; every two years, chip makers were
able to fit twice as many transistors on an integrated circuit. "Since the cost of an
integrated circuit is fairly constant," he said, "the implication is that every two years you can get twice as much circuitry
running at twice the speed for the same price. For many applications, that's an effective quadrupling of value. The observation holds true for every type of circuit,
from memory chips to computer processors." What does Moore's
Law have to do with my immortality? First, consider this: In 1850, the average American life
span was 38 years. Here in 1999, 150 years later, it's 76 years. Would it be fair to assume that in the next 150 years the human life
span will at least double to 150 years, enabling some of us to live until biotechnology is able to confer immortality
on us?
More (Moore?) to the point, most artificial-intelligence experts predict that tissue, especially brain
tissue, will merge in the near future with computer chips in the form of neural
implants, which are already being used to help profoundly deaf people hear sounds and blind people see patterns of light. On another front, research
indicates that I can extend my life span by as much as 30 percent simply by restricting caloric intake to semistarvation levels of twelve hundred to thirteen hundred calories per day. I find this new dietary-technology data
compelling, but it is probably more impractical than telomerase therapy or growing organs from stem cells because it requires two other major medical breakthroughs
that are nowhere on the horizon, namely, willpower and self-discipline.
2009
March 30: I'm fifty-five years old. I don't write screenplays anymore. I'm a content provider for 3-D multimedia games. I code
in special effects that elevate graphic sex and carnage to high art. I'm still applauding biotech
breakthroughs, but part of me detests change, a hateful reminder that time is passing.
April 14: My neighbor celebrates his 112th birthday, even though he never eats chocolate or olive oil and he drinks Jack Daniel's instead of port. His longevity would be
encouraging, except that his wetware has degraded. He has three, maybe four anecdotes that play over and over again like digital
audio clips: the one about the snowstorm of '74, the one about his ship sinking at Pearl Harbor, the one about how his grandmother knew Abe Lincoln. I want to assign them variables. Let 1 = the snowstorm story, let 2 = the Pearl Harbor
story, et cetera. Then our conversations could become more efficient. He could just say, "One," and I would understand him perfectly.
May 1: The May issue of BioScience has a huge spread about how telomerase works in mice and monkeys. I've signed up for the upcoming human trials of experimental
telomerase therapy, but the FDA is dragging its feet on approving the treatment for human beings. Furthermore, it seems that even if telomerase works in people, it will
probably simply arrest my aging process, not reverse it.
May 17: My 112-year-old neighbor goes in for treatment of his Parkinson's disease. Scientists at the med center grow new brain
tissue from his stem cells and implant it into the afflicted areas of his brain. He recovers maybe
two or three more stories from his repaired memory banks. Let 6 = what he was doing when JFK was shot. Scientists have also used human
stem cells to grow skin for burn victims, bone marrow for cancer patients, blood for transfusions,
tissue for "natural" breast implants, cartilage for structural repairs, and penile extensions for all those guys who still publicly maintain that size doesn't matter.
Every day, I feel the telomeres shortening on each of my hundred trillion fifty-five-year-old cells.
2019
May 14: The FDA has approved my application to receive experimental telomerase therapy. As such, I am a member of a small group of human subjects carefully selected
according to strict medical criteria, meaning each of us has a net worth in excess of eight figures and the ability to pay cash up front without whining about it.
June 13: According to a piece in The New York Times, 50 percent of the population in Africa still does not have access to potable water, and the infant-mortality
rate remains a dismal 20 percent in the first year of life. Remarkable, but it has little or nothing to do
with my own personal immortality.
July 17: Several researchers report that they have grown whole organs from the stem cells of mice
and implanted them back into their hosts without complications. The FDA is waiting for data from several research
centers where the same procedures are being performed on primates.
September 20: I buy a new computer, which costs me less than a thousand dollars, even though it has the computational
ability of an adult human brain. No sooner do I get the machine
out of the box than I get into an argument with it about who is most qualified to run the household. I tell it to let my wife continue running the household, and it demurs, but I suspect this is a manifestation of the modesty profile
built into these new machines. They are programmed to defer to their owners' wishes without argument
during the first ninety days, but afterward, as their relationships with their users deepen, they eventually challenge and sometimes beat their owners, not only at chess
but at poetry, painting, cooking, philosophizing, making conversation, and managing businesses or households.
This has nothing to do with my immortality. Yet. But remember Moore's Law. My health insurer is
still refusing to pay for telomerase therapy because it's "experimental." My wife has also begun receiving expensive telomerase therapy, which we pay for out of our retirement funds. From now on, I will have two ages: an absolute age,
measured from my date of birth in 1954, and a relative age, measured by analyzing my cellular senescence and determining the age at which my cells were prevented from aging further by telomerase therapy. I will be sixty-five years old
for the foreseeable future.
2029
November 16: My SE (simulated experience) titled "Climbing Mount Everest" is a finalist for the National Total Touch Award. My wife and I travel to the awards ceremony in New York City, where Dick Boeotian wins the 2029 Total Touch
Award for his simulation "Rape of the Sabine Women," based upon the painting of the same name by Nicolas Poussin.
At dinner parties and other social events, my wife and I constantly wonder who is receiving telomerase therapy and who isn't. There is still a certain cachet attached to those who manage to look young without the help of an enzyme.
But according to New York Times Today, 55 percent of the population is receiving telo-merase, which is still a prescription medicine but is easy to obtain if you're
more than forty years of age.
My NCI (noncarbon-based intelligence--what we used to call a computer) insists I don't look a
day over fifty, but such flattery is frequently followed by a request, most recently for some of the new 10,000-megahertz RAM cards. My wife says I spoil the thing. I admit
I've grown extremely fond of it. I wonder: What are the chances I might score afterlife points for loving noncarbon-based life-forms?
December 18: I complain to my doctor about the age spots on the backs of my hands. They've been there since before I was telomerase-arrested. Am I going to have them forever? He explains that researchers
are working furiously to come up with a compound that will not only arrest but reverse the aging process. The problem is that different organ systems and cell
types have different Hayflick limits, which must be synchronized if they are to be reversed. Otherwise, you could conceivably wind up with, say, presidential intellect and the
limbicsystemand sex drive of a nineteen-year-old. Then what?
December 21: My oldest son is now forty-three years old. He qualifies to receive telomerase therapy but has refused to sign up. Every Sunday afternoon, he and my oldest daughter (forty-one years old) treat me to bulletins about how
immoral my wife and I are for choosing to live beyond our allotted time in the so-called natural world.
My son and daughter and other working people in their generation are complaining about the taxes they pay to provide entitlements to us, the elderly and telomerase-arrested. Fortunately, the young are still a political minority, but
lately commentators have started interviewing disgruntled military officers who are openly warning of a rebellion.
December 28: I go in for a neuro-upgrade package. I receive audiovisual implants, including high-resolution retinal displays, so I no longer need an external
monitor--images are displayed directly on my retina. I also receive communications implants,
including direct neural pathways with infrared and photonic ports for high-bandwidth
communications with other human
beings and other NCIs. I can see and hear better than the nonimplanted, and I have constant access to wireless,
high-bandwidth information services. The implant upgrades cost me (and my health insurers) $9.6
million, or nine years' worth of profits from my privatized Social Security account.
2054
March 30: For my hundredth birthday (absolute age), I receive a package bomb from a neo-Luddite terrorist group called the Sons of Ted K. Fortunately, my forearm-mounted unit (networked
to the main Total Home Management SYSTEM) detected the explosives before I opened the package. After the bomb squad dismantles the thing, I read the letter, which says:
"Die! We are sick and tired of paying taxes to keep you alive!"
Eighty percent of the population is over seventy years old. The government steadfastly maintains that Social Security is solvent, but my son points out that he is
taxed at the rate of 75 percent to support medical research, telomerase therapies, organ transplants, and implant upgrades for telomerase-arrested seniors. June 12:
Congress passes the Omni-bus Reproduction Act of 2054, which makes the unlicensed reproduction of carbon-based units of consciousness
punishable by two hundred years of enforced sterility. Rumors surface in the media channels that biotech researchers
have discovered synthetic telomerase derivatives that not only halt cellular senescence but also reverse the effects of aging: the fountain of youth. Sources say that the Bureau of Population is asking Congress to ban the technology because of the effects it will have on dwindling planetary resources.
Meanwhile, all of my golfing buddies and I are trying to find out where we can get some.
September 12: Today, my wife and I receive the tragic news that our oldest son has joined a neo-Luddite terrorist group called Darwin's Army. He is now hiding out somewhere with other zealot militiamen in Montana and has devoted his
life to natural evolution and waging war against technology.
October 15: My wife and I have razor wire and laser detectors installed around the perimeters of our Omaha home. Darwin's Army is now paying handsome bounties for the
corpses of senior citizens (defined as anyone telomerase-arrested after age fifty), because old people are generally perceived as consuming more than they produce.
2069
February 2: The unthinkable has happened. A dear friend of ours, Marvin Furbelow, was captured and destroyed by a terrorist group calling itself the Lud Brigade. His body was carefully mutilated to ensure total unit failure. Because
most of our friends are telomerase-arrested and have easy access to the newest transplant technologies, we haven't lost someone we knew personally for almost forty
years. Marvin's TUF is an incomprehensible tragedy, and for weeks we cower inside our home.
June 8: My wife and I get into a big argument about whether I really need a new $75 million model 2050 liver transplant or whether I should settle for a model 2040, which costs only $39 million. I argue that I can pay the difference
out of my own pocket, because I've been hired by the Sense-U-Surround producers to create a total-touch experience about what it's like to get a new liver grown from my
own stem cells and about the angst and intimations of what used to be called mortality that it
inspires in transplant recipients.
July 23: I went for the model 2050, and the operation was an unqualified success. More than thirty-five million of the world's ten billion people have had livers grown from their own stem
cells and implanted during the last year, so my new total-touch experience, "A Centenarian Gets a New Liver," is a huge success.
September 19: As luck would have it, Oprah was telomerase-arrested the year after I was, and she too has had a liver grown from her own stem cells and implanted.
While she's recuperating, somebody gives her a copy of "A Centenarian Gets a New Liver." Two weeks later, she's on the air showing the audience how her scars have disappeared and touting "Centenarian" because it makes people stop and
think about what it means to get a $75 million liver transplant after a century of life. Doesn't it just make you wonder?
2079
February 3: I receive a letter, rather, a communique, from my son, who is dying, simply because he will not accept telomerase or organ transplants. I didn't raise him to be mortal, but he just won't listen to me. Instead, he wants me
to stop taking telo-merase and rejoin the "natural human race." My daughter and my son are both "older," relatively speaking, than my wife and I, and they have all the
crotchets and personality disorders that come with natural aging. What pains in the ass!
My daughter travels around the country giving speeches to activists and neo-Luddite groups who forswear telomerase and artificial-implant technologies and boycott all artworks created with the aid of artificial
intelligence. Her political party, Natural Way, espouses the belief that mortality is the true human
condition and that carbon-based thoughts are better than thoughts
created or augmented by electronic or photonic implants. Global resources are rapidly vanishing,
even though Con Archer is successfully creating and marketing artificial foods consisting of nano-engineered proteins.
Darwin's Army and the Sons of Ted K. now have members in the House of Representatives, and several senators, when pressed, confess they used to belong to these organizations, but only to fight for the nutritional rights of the
oppressed. Youth rallies are all over the media channels. Young people claim to have heightened awareness and ecstatic visions inspired by the natural condition of mortality.
November 13: I go in for more liver scans and tests. It seems there's another hepatic-malfunction problem. "Already?" I scream. "Can't a guy get decent livers anymore?" When the specializts huddle around me wearing 3-D headsets and do
a walk-through tour of my liver at the cellular level, I hear stray remarks about port-wine damage, but I suspect these doctors simply want to sell me a new liver.
Finally, my hepatogastroenterologist gets straight to the point: "How much port wine do you drink?" Maybe I could fudge a little? Probably not, because I know the next
question out of his mouth will be, "How many liver transplants have you had?"
2099
I watch the end-of-the-century specials on my retinal displays, including a six-part tribute to the prophet Raymond
Kurzweil, who appears to be even further telomerase-reversed than I am. He looks like a nineteen-year-old. He looks fabulous! For decades, my wife has adamantly insisted that she was not the least bit
jealous of my Series IV Aphrodite Pleasure Partner. Therefore, I am speechless when I discover a Series VIII Adonis Pleasure Partner hidden in the back of her wardrobe. Even under magnification, Adonis's skin looks real, and he knows
more about designing total-touch environments than I do. I fly into a jealous rage. I disconnect his power supply and begin ripping out his biocircuitry by the handful.
I am prosecuted in federal district court for murder of a conscious artificial life-form. I plead not guilty, and my lawyer unsuccessfully argues that I did
not intend to destroy Adonis; I was merely "reverse-engineering" him. My neuropsychiatrist, Dr. Wright, suggests a whole-brain
transplant to rectify my deviant mental processes. Biotechnicians grow a brand-new brain from my stem
cells and then format it using ultra-high-resolution transcranial magnetic stimulation, a new technique that creates almost twice the density of memory clusters
and quarters seek times.
My consciousness and my memories are uploaded to a Ronco neural network server.
All of my artificial electronic and photonic
implant technologies are removed. I am placed on neuro bypass. My original brain is explanted and replaced with a fresh, disease-free brain
grown from my original adult neural stem cells. As they surgically remove my old brain, I am
essentially conscious inside the machine. While the neurosurgeons and transcranial-magnetic-formatting experts prepare my new brain
for implanting, they also shave my old brain into microthin slices, then scan them and compare them with the data
they've uploaded to the neural network server. I'm a little nervous because it seems that no
one has saved my consciousness to the server's nonvolatile memory.
I'm still being sustained only in the server's RAM. I send a message onto the screen in big letters: save
me to hard memory. i'm still only in ram. One of the technicians, a rakish, younger-looking fellow with an
apparent bad attitude, scowls at the message, then looks over his shoulder at the surgeons and the other technicians. I don't like that devilish look in his eye. His badge identifies him as J. Albrecht, neuro-bypass technician, but I
suspect he may be a member of Darwin's Army or the Sons of Ted K., or maybe he just hates his job.
He looks over his shoulder again, then reaches out a finger to the power switch of the Ronco server.
I send 3-D projections at him the size of Times Square high-definition billboards, saying, no!!! help!!! don't touch that switch!!!
Instead of seeing my life flash before my eyes, I do a term search for "death prevention" or "total-unit-failure recovery" in the hopes of finding a protocol or an event
procedure that will save me.
But the search turns up Emily Dickinson:
Because I could not stop for Death--
He kindly stopped for me--
The Carriage held but just Ourselves--
And Immortality.
We slowly drove--He knew no haste
And I had put away
SAVE "My labor" and
SAVE "my leisure" too,
For His Civility = 1, 2
IF at recess--in the ring--THEN
WHILE (children strove)
We passed the School,
END WHILE
ELSE WHILE
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain--
END WHILE
ELSE WHILE
We passed the Setting Sun--
END WHILE
We = paused
DO we = 1, paused
CONTINUE
before $ (a House that seemed)
data1/A Swelling of the Ground--
data2/The Roof was scarcely visible--
data3/The Cornice--in the Ground--
53696E6365207468656E2D607469
732043656E7475726965732D616E
64207965744665656C732073686F
72746572207468616E2074686520
6461794920666972737420737572
6D697365642074686520486F7273
6573602048656164735765726520
746F7761726420457465726E6974
792D.
"Diary of an Immortal Man" by Richard Dooling. Originally published in Esquire Magazine, May 1999. Copyright © 1999 by Richard Dooling. Used by permission of Brandt & Hochman Literary Agents, Inc. All rights reserved.
CAUTION: Users are warned that this work is protected under copyright laws and downloading is strictly prohibited. The right to reproduce or transfer the work via any
medium must be secured with Brandt & Hochman Literary Agents, Inc.
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The worm's turn
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U. of Colorado researchers identify switch that controls aging in worms
posted by RichardTerra on Friday December 21, @02:29AM
from the The-worm-turns dept.
According to a press release (10 December 2001), two University of Colorado at Boulder researchers working with GenoPlex Inc. in Denver have identified a biological switch that controls lifespan in tiny worms, a finding that
could have applications for mammals, including people.
The switch, known as DAF-16, is a protein that can either lengthen or shorten the lifespan in the eyelash-sized roundworm, C. elegans, said CU-Boulder psychology Professor Thomas Johnson.
Johnson, who is a fellow in the university's Institute for Behavioral Genetics, or IBG, said DAF-16 is a critical part of a complex signaling pathway that involves insulin and glucose. Henderson has identified a molecule that
embodies a trade off, said Johnson. "If DAF-16 is 'on,' it triggers less reproduction, more efficient cell repair and longer lives. On the other hand, if DAF-16 is 'off,' the result is more reproduction, worse cell repair and a
shortened lifespan," he said.
There is a good possibility scientists could develop a pharmaceutical intervention that would trigger translocation of DAF-16 into the cell nucleus of a variety of animals, including humans, said Henderson. This would cause
organisms to lower their reproduction level and fight off the negative impacts of free radicals.
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Re: Diary of an Immortal Man
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>Hasn't anyone read Gulliver's Travels....?
I'm amused at the idea that we shouldn't do something just because of what happens to fictional characters in arbitrarily constructed stories, as opposed to what happens to real people in real situations.
After all, with the stroke of a pen, the fictional story can turn out differently. Or the story could be interpreted in ways at odds with the author's explicit intentions. For example, Satan in "Paradise Lost" has been viewed by
literary critics as the HERO of the epic poem, probably against Milton's explicit intentions. (Considering the role of Satan in the Christian worldview, that's quite a public-relations makeover!) And Bram Stoker's Dracula has
been re-imagined as a sexy, heroic and romantic figure by contemporary culture, again contra the author's intentions.
Perhaps it's time for Victor Frankenstein to be re-interpreted in a positive way as well, so that comparing a Transhumanist to Frankenstein will be considered complimentary, as in calling him "heroic, visionary, daring, sexually
desirable."
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Re: Diary of an Immortal Man
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>you make the assumption that a person is merely dna and that one can be reconstructed from bits of data sitting on a hard disk somewhere.
Every cell in your body is a hard disk containing the necessary code to create a clone of you. It's being done every day with sheep, mice, cows and other animals. The only thing that keeps us from doing it with people is that we
are just learning how to do it and the people who are doing it don't want to make a mistake in the process. About 10% of the animals cloned in this way make it to term and produce a viable copy. That's better than when they
started, but they still have a long way to go. Although it's too early to try this on people, there are researchers making plans to do it right now.
But that's just a body. What we call a "soul" is created through the body's interaction with it's environment. What you go through in your childhood and the things you learn from family, friends and associates in the process
forge a soul in the crucible of experience. The elements of potential enshrined in your DNA code and the realization of that potential as you live your life make up you, me, and everyone else.
Since a clone would not share the same experience that you have had, it would have to be encoded and stored until SOME FUTURE DATE when it could be recovered. The final product would not be a duplicate of you, but you plus
whatever new experiences shaped the life of the clone and how that clone reacted to them.
How do we store these experiences? They are the signals that are created when light strikes the cones in the back of the eye and are processed by the brain. In addition, they are mixed with the signals created by sound waves
striking your ear drums, the signals that come from your nose and mouth when you taste or smell, and the signals sent from the tips of your fingers and toes, all of your skin, and the other organs of your body.
If we have within us detectors to read these signals as they pass through us on the way to the brain and a place to store them in the form of ROM, a man's life could be pretty well reconstructed and transmitted.
DNA is, after all, a sequence of only four chemicals (Adenine, Thiamin, Cytosine, and Guanine). Cloning is done by taking this sequence from the body of one animal and inserting it into the egg of another animal of the same
species. The clone thus created has most of the qualities and appearance of the animal from which the DNA code was taken.
The human body produces clones in the normal course of reproduction when a woman's body gives birth to identical twins. One egg divided into two and the DNA code created two copies of the same basic person.
John J. Ratey, M.D. in his book, A USER'S GUIDE TO THE BRAIN: Perception, Attention, and the Four Theaters of the Brain, says the following:
"Most of our traits are caused by the interaction of many genes as influenced by the environment."
"Studies of identical twins separated at birth are often used to test the debate between nature and nurture.
"The remarkable twinning effect directly contradicts the notion that environment is more important than genes. In these cases, twins who are raised apart (with no contact) and are reunited years later find their lives are very
similar. This was the case for a pair of twin brothers separated five weeks after birth and raised eighty miles apart in Ohio. When Jim Lewis and Jim Springer were reunited at the age of thirty-nine, they found they had both
married women named Linda, divorced, and remarried women named Betty. Both chain-smoked Salem cigarettes, drank Miller Lite, loved stock-car racing, hated baseball and vacationed on the same stretch of beach in Florida. Studies
of 7,000 sets of twins by the Minnesota Center for Twin and Adoption Research show that a number of traits may be driven by genes, including alienation, leadership, vulnerability to stress, and even religious conviction and
career choice."
So it would seem that identical twins (clones) share nearly identical souls, and DNA is the determining factor. if we could transmit this sequence and use chemicals available at the end point to reproduce it, we should be able to
create a clone of the person whose data we transmitted. If we recorded that person's life in the form of the electrical signals that comprised his/her experience, we could provide the cloned body with the original's reactions to
that experience. So, basically, you would end up with the same basic (but not exact) person.
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Re: Diary of an Immortal Man
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I think I said what you pointed out in my previous post. But the big difference between the mere clone and the upload is that what is transmitted is not only the identical body and mind but the stored impressions of that body
and mind. This is not the case with twins, who live separate lives, even though they live in the same house. Also, among identical twins living in the same hourse, researchers find they deliberately try to differentiate
themselves. These same Researchers found identical twins to be more alike when separated than when raised together.
But if I take my genetic code and use it to build an identical body and take all the information that came into my original body as captured by nanobots monitoring the electronic signals that transfer the information from my
sense organs to my brain, then I can produce something very close to the me that now walks the earth.
But no matter how good the copy it will still not be me. If you could talk to the body of Socrates and that body had been exposed to the same input about the world as the original Socrates, wouldn't the result be close enough
that you wouldn't notice the difference? Sure, technically, there would now be two Socrates. But they would be closer in body and thought than identical twins.
If you had a copy of the Mona Lisa that an expert couldn't distinguish from the original, wouldn't that be good enough? It would decrease the value of the original in the sense that there would now be two indistinguishable Mona
Lisas, but that has more to do with the way humans assign value to objects than it does with the objects themselves. And from the day of the creation of the new Mona Lisa, they would exist in different circumstances that would
tend to distinguish them from each other from that point on.
And it's also true that my original body would someday die, which would mean it was not immortal in the sense we use the term now. But if the copy of me was able to continue my experience of life by adding on to what I had
already perceived, thought, and done, how different would that be from the immortality you are talking about? The body like mine would have my past experience and it's future experience to encode and pass on to the next copy, ad
infinitim. The body would not be immortal, but the life it lived would achieve something very close to that.
The differentiation between a body and a machine is a tenuous one when we can create and change bodies just like we do with machines. We design our machines to work like our bodies to the extent that we can. They use the same
principles of phytsics that our bodies do. My body is full of tubes and pumps and clocks and ball joints. My blood circulates using the same principle the water company uses to keep the water flowing into my house and to take the
used and dirty water out of it.
When we start adding new parts to that body in the form of machines, we will have something that is neither man nor machine, but a bit of both. I see us augmented by internal computers that help us store and analyze our
impressions of the world around us at teraflop speed. I see us being able to grow new parts when old ones wear out and to be in touch with the rest of humanity without needing external machines like phones or modems. And all we
feel, think and do will be stored some place where it can be passed on to the next body we clone to take the place of the one that gets too damaged to continue. Our immortality will be in our lives rather than our bodies.
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Re: Diary of an Immortal Man
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grantc4's post about the human body and thought process as a deterministic system illustrates the greatest human dillemma of our time: The conflict between our objective conclusions and our internal desires. We would so like to
believe that someday we will be able to look back on our lives from a different perspective (Ie: an "afterlife"), but the conslusions of science tell us that once our brains die, our memory and entire concept of self is erased,
and our existence ceases, and even if the molecules which we were composed of end up as brain tissue in another person, that tissue will in no way give rise to a re-creation of self, nor will the passing of DNA (okay this part
about DNA may be speculatory at this point). My writing, at this very moment, is forgotten, and .... well, its hard to describe nonexistence..........
The scientists' response to these conclusions is to furhter advance: "thus, we must not die!" They say. So, through engineering, the scientist hopes to actualize his inner desire of continuation of awareness and memory and
existence.
Meanwhile, a philosopher thinks to himself "well, if I am going to exist forever, in one form or another, I should not have to ACTIVELY MAINTAIN my existence (like the technologist hopes to), as there would be no certainty as to
whether I COULD maintain my existence, and thus, I could not truly exist forever. Eternal existence is something which you either are allowed by the nature of how things are, or not. If we are not allowed eternal existence, then
the universe truly is indifferent, and there is nothing wrong with that because that is the way it is. If we are allowed eternal existence, then the myths of spirituality are true, and that is the way things are. Under the first
possibility, the scientist is forced to forge an eternal existence because nature does not naturally supply him with one (this assumes that such technical ability can arise, and under this possibility, nonexistence is a sub
category). Under the second.... well, we all fantasize about that enough that I dont need to go into any explanation -right!-)
So what have I accomplished here? I guess the most quantifiable conclusion is that we all want to live forever in some state described in the myths. The difference between the scientific version of eternal life, and the mythical
version is that the mythical version does not involve the possibility that the function of existence will fail (as with the scientific version, your nanobots may glitch and destroy you).
Okay, I am not finished yet. Lets say the bots glitched and destroyed you.
Then the reader (you) say: well, the persons molecular state could be saved and re-created! Yes, but that means that a person is a machine: it all comes down to determinism vs self.
Why cant they coexist?
Why can there be no such thing as the self, if the function of the self is deterministic?
TELL ME THAT, AND I WILL BE IMPRESSED!!!!!
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Re: Diary of an Immortal Man
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"The remarkable twinning effect directly contradicts the notion that environment is more important than genes. "
This isn't in fact true at least from an IQ correlate viewpoint. More recent stidies have show that genetically NON-identical twins separated at birth have similar IQs : the nurture vs nature debate is currently weighing in aat
about 20:80 in favour of nurture. In the case of NON-identical and identical twins , the common factor would seem yo be the mother's womb, but why this should be so imporatant ? One woudl think that its because its here that the
pre-learning brain GROWS, i.e becomes an effective organ. Most of the brain's connective matter develops after birth as well, in a manner dictated by a life spent 24 hours a day as that person in the varying environment. SO ino
order to reproduce the connective tissue of a brain you would have to have a) a genetic clone b) an identical gestative process and c ) he/she must move through the same places and the same this at that person , eating the same
food at the same time, taking the same drugs, getting hit on the head , having exactly the same sexual partners, brathing at the same time and having the same teachers etc. I think you'll find a) is the easiest part to deliver ,
which is why people seem so atracted to it.
But people aren't 'information' ( whatever ths hell that is ) , they're biological objects. DNA has no information - the information is in the observer's head when he looks for commonality and feature. DNA is just a chemical/
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Re: the future of the universe
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The latest astronomical observations show that the universe is more likely to continue expansion to the point where all matter decomposes. Einstein proposed a theory on the future of the universe, in which the end
result(expansion or crunch) rests heavily on the total mass of the universe. This is actually calculatable- to an extent. However observations during his time contradicted with his conclusions, and he decided that there was
perhaps a universal constant that would explain for the seemingly (to him) expanding universe. Ultimately, he denounced his so called "hidden constant" as one of the greatest mistakes of his career. However current
studies/observations of dark matter show that Einstein may in fact have been right that the universe is undergoing an irretractable expansion.
But no matter what happens to the universe, there is no way to predict what may happen to us. Life as we know it will be incomprehensively different that far down the line. We may exist, we may not, or perhaps what we will be
won't fit our current definition of "existence"
There is also a point that Ray Kurzweil has brought up:
Most of the discussion in this forum is whether or not you can consider death and reconstruction to be one life, or two separate lives. Obviously, the only way to know if a life is continuous is that there is always some level of
consiousness- the body should never shut off completely. But consider this: our cells are always dying, replacing eachother. The atoms in our brain cells are always moving randomly. We are completely different people from one
year to another just as we are one hour to another. So if cells can die and be replaced without the fabric of life being broken, who's to say that a nano implant in the brain is "killing the soul". And if you can mechanize
someone with implants over a period of time, would they ever be a different person? And if not, what is stopping you from doing it all at once?
If you were to "build" a being with the pure data of another, you are in effect giving birth to a new being, though the clone will obviously argue that he/she is in fact the real person. Or would they? I think that it's likely
that they would have some shred of memory that would indicate to them that they are a copy. If you were to download a consience, you would be in effect killing someone while simultaneously giving birth to another- Unless you
could do it while they remain conscious, I would be weary of any other method.
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the future of the universe - my point of view
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tubadecuba, when I wrote about the universe expanding or crunching, I was talking exactly about this studies, but you made it more clear. Thanks
I totally agree that there is no way to predict what will happens in 10^100 years. All I ca say about prediction is: When i think about 1991 i realize that at that time i couldn't even imagine what is happening now to me, to the
world, to technology, etc.
But see my point: In this topic i was discussing if we could ever be immortals. And then i said that if immortal is someone that never dies and if the universe is going to have an end, then we would not be immortals, because of
the end of the universe. Of course there could be, lets say, a war that would kill all the human beings many years before the end of universe, but that's not the point.
Let me give my opnion about whether or not you can consider death and reconstruction to be one life, or two separate lives. All we are, not as living creatures, but as social beings, depends on our memory. If in secret we clone a
person and his memory, keep him alive but hidden, I'm sure that his family never would know that the the clone was a clone. And the clone could never know that he was a clone. Now, if we could erase the last year of somebody's
memory I'm sure that all his friends and family wouldn't recognise him as the real one. To sum up: I don't think that there is a soul or something like that. A reconstructed person would be just as normal as a person who wakes up
in the morning as long as the memory is kept.
stephenhanneke, i tend to agree with tomaz. I don't think that we will ever control the whole universe. I think there is too much energy, too much mass to be controled by us. Still i know that 10^100 years could give us some
surprises.
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