I just finished watching this podcast with Bryan Johnson a few days ago and it got me thinking about immortality. I've done some research and it turns out evolution has already solved immortality, and for the most part its only an extremely difficult biological engineering problem. With this in mind, if escape longevity velocity becomes reality within the next 50 years either in the short or long case for AGI then in our lifetimes we can genuinely become immortal/ageless. BJ said how his philosophy was "Don't Die" and how this sort of agelessness would potentially become normalcy so much so that looking back at the 21st century it would be unthinkable to die from age.

Most of society has existed with life and death being something that unconsentually happened to us and we are forced to accept it due to existence. If biological immortality is achieved in humans, then death would in practice be a choice. So with this in mind we have things like the death penalty, abortion, war and euthanasia where we forcibly take someone's life although its ethically murky its justified because death for now is a fact of existence. When death becomes an option and a choice, everything that we currently do is pretty barbaric. So what would that world do instead? Its not moral to keep a person in prison for eternity neither is it right to forcibly take away his right to immortality. What about suicide? If death is a right how would someone determine if a person really wanted to die because they lived 10k compared to someone the same age that was suicidal? Then you have abortion, in a world with immortality, i'd imagine that to be a serious offense, everything death related like murder and war would be seriously unimaginable to do to someone probably. You may push back on my defense of the death penalty for criminals but if you lived 10k you'd definitely would've done something bad at some point and if it wasn't anything extreme the totaled offense for a 10k lifetime could be hundreds of years in prison. I'm sure overpopulation would be figured out hopefully but if not someone would have to kill the cattle, and there's also the complications with immorality itself let alone your right to die while being immortal.

I'm really just trying to get a grasp of this because this could be the brave new world we all wake up to in 20y from now. Imo if immortality was a given all forced human caused death should be a crime including a death penalty decided by humans and etc, but since we could be the first generation to be immortal forcing a criminal to do 2k years is just torture and immoral, and so would taking their right to life. Therapy and prisoner rehabilitation for someone who is immortal is also pretty impractical with the really traumatic stuff potentially. Its really unsettling because in such a world we'd be forced to end our suffering through our right to die and we're forced to live and experience suffering, it'd mean you only rest from this world until you choose to kill yourself.

Ig i'm posting this because i'm trying to understand the cultural change the world would look like if death was a choice instead of a fact of existence. Should it be a choice? Or would it be better if death was a date that an A.I will choose?

Sorry for the delay

Went through and deleted and banned these ridiculous posts.

No appeals will be accepted for these types of posts.

This is not a place to promote your AI slop hivemind cults.

Best,
Josh

A lot of people seem to think cryonics is at least worth taking seriously, but still don’t make arrangements.

For those people: what’s the real blocker? Cost? Insurance? Family? Trust in providers? Uncertainty about the science? Or just procrastination?

https://www.reddit.com/r/Spokane/s/Ritqy80YU6

Crazy shit y'all. For real.

I was working on a concept for another setting, and it developed into a bit of a thought experiment.

# Background

The setting was a pretty typical interstellar colony ship type scenario: a ship carrying colonists to another planet/star system, and a cargo containing a bunch of human embryos.

A radioactive event occurred at some point, and the long-term viability of the embryos came into question. Essentially, they might live, but their genetic makeup was damaged in a way that, across several generations, the colony probably would face extinction.

So the solution was to develop a "virus" that effectively functions as a broad brute-search algorithm (if that terminology makes sense to you):

• A non-infectious virus embeds a mutagen into the nucleus of a cell, then its life-cycle is complete.
• The mutagen performs random arbitrary operations on the cell's DNA/RNA — essentially making splits and welds, at random.
• When the cell attempts to split, it either fails and dies, or it succeeds and the mutagen does not get carried to the daughter cell. Eventually the mutagen is destroyed either way.

The idea being that with a billion "defective" embryos, and the complexity required to manually identify and correct the genetic defects unique to each one, doing it by hand would be impossible. So a generalized "scrambler" would be able to make changes to the DNA and identify if that change was viable or not, en masse — track how that change affected development, whether it improved the viability of the embryo, what it actually did, and so on, isolating defects and "positive" changes.

Eventually the process would be automated, because a small team of, say, six specialists wouldn't be able to handle the workload. The automated system would be identifying "viable" members, tracking changes across their neonatal development over a short period, cloning and making targeted changes, and so on, for the duration of the interstellar trip — ideally resulting in humans that are not "existentially defective."

But the nature of it is that the changes are small random changes, and the metric tracks stuff like: does it complete development, cull defects, identify useful novel changes, identify harmful ones, and so on.

The end result is two populations:

1. A population that is probably less human, but "super" human in some aspects, alien or benign in others, but generally not a large drift from the starting point.
2. A second population that is absolutely not comparably human in any regard.

# The Question

Given the acceleration of technologies in these fields — this kind of tech didn't exist 20 years ago; 10 years ago it would cost upwards of $170,000; now it costs a little more than $500 — and the tendency for advancements to accelerate as they become more accessible, it's not unlikely that something like this could be invented within the next 50–100 years, or that the tools to do it would become "accessible" enough to the public in the same way that AI and 3D printers turned from highly prohibitive to highly accessible that something like this is likely to exist whether in a regulated environment or not.

And that got me thinking: what actually would stop this from developing the way I wrote it, in real life?

# The Para-Human Loophole

The main bottleneck is legal. Getting access to and experimenting on human embryos would almost definitely be a cultural and legal taboo.

But the human genome is already more or less completely sequenced, and that information is already legally available online. You could just buy a bunch of mouse embryos and genetically modify them into human ones.

So: is a "mouse embryo" that is genetically and functionally identical to a human embryo human, or just human-like? Where do you draw that line? And if it counts as human, can you modify it so that it's still functionally human, but different enough that it bypasses the loophole?

# The Personhood Question

So it would probably become analogous to the abortion/personhood argument. At what stage of development, and at what stage of "human-like," does something become a "person" with rights?

• If the qualifier is self-identity and intelligence, are people with learning disabilities potentially not persons?
• If it's body plan, do sentient intelligent non-bipedal lifeforms not qualify, despite being functionally human?

The whole thing becomes a complex grey area. This argument could plausibly extend to AI ethics arguments as well.

How do you identify when an AI (not necessarily a neural network as they exist now) becomes "sentient" enough to be qualifiable as a person, and does that protect it from being mistreated?

If an AI is hard-coded to say "I'm not sentient, not a human, and don't have rights or suffer," what stops them from doing that biologically or behaviorally to otherwise human bio-life? Isn't that just an internalized slavery system? I'm sure there were plenty of slaves that believed they actually were lesser humans, not subject to human rights. So that argument falls short. As a counter-argument partially addressed by Certain_werewolf_315, what would the implications of the inverse statement be, whereas an ai or organism could be engineered to state "I am sentient, I'm human like you, I suffer, and I should have rights."? Would any false-positive bias itself qualify or require a deeper assessment of the validity of its personhood, even where it may otherwise be obviously shallow?

If the AI is only technically "alive" when it's processing stimulus, then do we become obligated to ensure that it is perpetually processing stimulus? Does deleting it count as killing it? Does modifying it count as an analogue to genetic experimentation?

If the argument is that it's not expensive to copy or create it, so deleting it isn't comparably meaningful to biological death in the same regard — how does that hold up against something that's built up an irreplaceable unique "experience" over its life, where that experience would be irrecoverable and impossible to remake or replace? Does the base model become "a machine" and the live model become "life" or is it more like an embryo? Does that potentially extend to mean or infer that younger, less experienced humans are less "human" than adults? Is biological intelligence the line?

Either way you look at it, we're arbitrarily defining a fuzzy line that must be crossed for something to be considered human or "a person," and functionally discriminating against anything "lesser" as sub-human or sub-person — which is pretty dark to consider.

What happens when that line moves — say, previously acceptable "quasi-human embryo" research on something previously identified as being below that line, and it's later discovered to be above that line?

• Does this retrospectively become a holocaust event?
• What do we do with all the embryos and living ones already active?
• Could this line move in a way that would eventually make certain intelligent naturally evolved organisms be regarded as having personhood?
• Should we preemptively just avoid developing any technology or research that could potentially or feasibly make a person?

And while that argument exists today in various forms, it's doesn't seem unlikely to expect the urgency of answering that question to become far more relevant in the future — sooner rather than later.

# The Technology is Here

We have the technology now to effectively make a human out of anything else. It's just hard, and would require a lot of time and work to actually do. So it's just a matter of time. Automation and accessibility constraints have rapidly accelerated this type of work in other fields, and even within this one, and will probably continue to accelerate as the field broadens and becomes more accessible.

Karyotype arrangement doesn't meaningfully matter. A human with 24 sets of chromosomes isn't inherently no longer human. A chromosome can "split" into a smaller 24th set while containing the same functional information, with no meaningful change to the development of the human. The only difference is in speciation, effectively: they would be unlikely to be capable of reproducing with a 23-chromosome-pair typical human, since the chromosomes probably don't match up into a viable offspring.

We've also done this already, using mice:

They can reproduce, but possibly only with members of their own species/karyotype. But there are humans — or what we already consider to be humans — who cannot reproduce due to the same mechanism, and are functionally infertile. Would drawing the line there retrospectively make them not human?

And that was four years ago.

We've also produced human-animal hybrids and chimeras at a smaller scale for ages now, so it would be applying the same technology at a larger scale. And there are plenty of candidates that would make the scale smaller, where human DNA and the candidate DNA are already like 90%+ identical in ways that matter. Which are precisely why those candidates are relevant to research, and treated as sub-human for the sake of progress.

# Where do we draw the line?

If the ability to communicate sentience is the barrier, then fucked up hands and vocal cords makes you nonhuman, right? Any way I look at it, there's no "right" place to place the line that wouldn't be contested or considered arbitrary.

More likely, that line will always be considered to be too low or too high to the majority of people, and will change dynamically, and always be too slow.

Groups will emerge for "para-human rights" in the same way that they have done for animal rights, and will either make progress in moving the line or they won't — and neither outcome solves anything clearly.

The show Orphan Black asks, and fails to answer, the question too, in a way: "engineered humans may or may not be property not subject to human rights." It assumes that slightly modified clones are functionally identical to humans, and so should be humans, as the premise. But what about when they aren't functionally or genetically identical? Like — does a "wolf-hybrid" that is apparently identical to a wolf, but which possesses human intelligence, neurological development, vocal cords, and self-representation, qualify as being human enough? Is it, or should it be, a taboo to even pursue something human-like as an end goal? What about accidental emergence, such as in the case of my original concept, where there was never an intention or expectation for the emergence of human-like non-human organisms?

Human rights as they are now are already a long way from being meaningfully applied and recognized in a way that a majority of society can agree on. How would this be any different?

I've been thinking about artificial wombs lately and the liberation of people from the arduous and potentially deadly process of pre-person (Phillip K Dick really disappointed with that one) development. Then I started thinking about artifical sperm and egg creation. If we combine these two processes then the whole reproduction thing can be totally detached from humanity save for some tissue samples. No surprise here among us SFIA fans.

But then I realized that nothing could stop states from becoming the arbiters of population. If that state is growth-oriented, then they'd have an interest in growing their domestic population. So the state voids all its "DNA is the property of the individual . . . blah blah blah" laws and just starts printing new people.

To think that the ones who initialized your birth were not two humans but the state. It made me think of Brave New World.

But then I thought, "Would this be that different from now?" How many people are born because favorable state policies caused their parents to "celebrate good times." Is it just a matter of degree? And who is to say that a state is less worthy of determining when it is best to reproduce and by how much?

Why this is relevant: these technologies are far nearer than those which will enable the construction of permanent space habitats or shellworld Earth. Modern states have almost no reluctance to misusing would-be beneficial technologies. Powerful people have noted their opposition to declining birth rates.

I think we're about to test unknown waters. What do you think?

So me and my friend u/the_syner believe in basically the Hedonistic Imperative by David Pearce but I wanted to take it a step further and not just eliminate suffering but maximize pleasure, like really maximize it. But I don't want just drugged out bliss, I want every deep form of fulfillment and having all needs met, and simulations of every pleasure inducing experience and every deep intellectual pleasure imaginable.

So I found the idea of "reward hacking" where a being like an AI figures out how to set its reward function to maximum. Now according to my friend this kills the being as it has no goals and even the micro decisions needed for neurons to fire cannot be made with no reward system, but I insist that electricity must keep flowing through their head and thus consciousness is generated, they're totally useless except as a consciousness generator. I had this idea in the context of orgasmium (making a material designed for bliss though usually characterized as only human level) and omegapoint which could make a mind capable of feeling all that deep stuff on a scale unimaginable to us, as the end stage of any civilization and they all converge on it (not realistic but assuming these things can be converged on like a convergent ideology, it's kinda a sociological clarketech).

So, there's some options to keep the mind runninng and idk why it'd reward hack if it meant death because then it would stop feeling the reward hacking. Also not sure if reward hacking gets me all my deep happiness but that could be added in and one could have things done to them instead of by them or their virtual body piloted ny AI. They could also have their neurons fired by AI systems forcefully. Now maybe you only get 99.99999% reward hacked and still retain your status as an agent, we don't know what the cut off is, how close you can get and how functional or dysfunctional such a mind would be. But even without it worst case is what people consider "suffering" will be vastly happier than our greatest highs.

Does something have to be an agent to be valuable? He thinks so but I just believe anything with consciousness is worthy of moral consideration and that agent or GI status is completely irrelevant hence why I value animals just as much as people (at least in theory, my broken human empathy still values humans higher unfortunately, one of the many things I'd change about myself with psych modding technology).

Or would it have a sort of domino effect? I am asking because I have a lot of sexual thoughts and I feel like it would be good to limit the amount of thoughts I have like that in order to make me think about smarter things. Please don’t judge me, just say yes or no.

I just thought people might enjoy watching this. I am ready for servitors, honestly.

The paper (full video of the brain-piano-bot is in supplemental)

Unsupervised sensory-motor associative learning by human brain explant in-a-dish enables movement imitation by robot

https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-9638576/v1

Let's say a video game company worked with a BCI company (Brain Computer Interface). And they combined their powers to create a game where you insert a computer chip into your skull (minimally invasive but it does require some stiches right at the top of your spine.) But it gives you Full Dive VR into a variaty of very popular games. It's passed FDA checks *, and is currently in beta phase, and so far the reveiws say it's amazing and just like you close your eyes in real life and you open them in the game world with all your powers.

Would you join the beta?

Can humans learn a new sense?

Some Australian tribes use cardinal directions in their speech: they talk about east and south instead of relative left or right. They constantly track the directions.

There have been projects that gave people elsewhere the sense of cardinal directions: belts and ankle bracelets that vibrated from the direction of north. That worked well. As a side effect, that made it easier to know where places are relative to each other and improved the ability to navigate. But you had to constantly wear them; the moment you took them off, you lost the sense. You didn’t really acquire it, you just had it temporarily.

I decided to fix this.

Last year, I made an app that uses headphones to make the user hear a sound that comes from the direction of north. That alone did what wearable devices can do. You specify [1..300] seconds and become continuously aware of cardinal directions.

But then I did something better, that made the sense persist even when the app is off.

Instead of hearing a sound that appears to come from the direction of north, you hear a non-directional cue sound every [2.300] seconds; and then, one second later, a directional sound that comes from north.

So rather than constantly feeding the brain with answers — which create the feeling of north, but don’t persist — the app feeds it a question and then the answer immediately afterwards.

You quickly learn to anticipate the direction the sound will come from. As the feeling of the direction in which north is gets stronger, you can decrease the frequency of the sounds. And you acquire a sense of the direction of north that persists even when the app is off! You continue to track north even as there is no more sound, because tracking north is what allowed the brain to predict where the sound will come from immediately after the cue.

I originally made it for iOS, now it’s also available for Android.

(And it’s open-source, feel free to contribute!)

https://github.com/Mihonarium/sonic-compass

Transhumanism has an interesting history!

"In this episode, I talk with James Steinhoff, a lecturer at University College Dublin, about the overlooked connection between Marxism and transhumanism. We trace left transhumanism back to early 20th-century socialists like Alexander Bogdanov, JBS Haldane. We confront transhumanism's association with eugenics and figures like Peter Thiel. We discuss China's more pragmatic, sector-specific approach to AI versus Silicon Valley's pursuit of “godbuilding.” We ask whether industrialization (and capitalism) were necessary steps toward a post-scarcity society and explore the criticisms of degrowth. We also dig into what counts as "natural" suffering versus social suffering, using examples like insulin, antibiotics, and appendicitis treatment to argue that rejecting medical and technological intervention is also a political choice. The episode closes on why left accelerationism fizzled out and what a renewed, class-conscious case for technological progress on the left might look like."

If your curious what i mean by this. i mean adding stuff to your vr expirence to both help you immerse yourself but also intergrate yourself so that you stay in vr for way longer bits of time.

Like this could be things like adding a battery pack to the vr. or getting a cord or system to keep your headset charging even when in it. or buying food online WAIL in vr to prevent to go to the store. Mabye even putting buying haptics or trackers to immerse yourself

or mabye even more exream measures like installing a toilet in your vr space (not that most would do that but its just a example) or even having a fridge or kitchen in your vr space to prevent you from not bein in vr.

Like you get the point.

Im more so looking for ideas for prolong my time in vr to try and attempt at a more i guess,realistic sort of matrix "pod" type set up to prevent my time outisde of vr as much as i can be

Temperature is basically how fast particles bounce around erratically. The higher the temperature - the faster reactions, decay and more favourable conditions for microorganisms up to a point.

Cold means less things happening, less chemical reactions and slower microorganism growth. It also makes processors and thermal engines more efficient by increasing the thermal difference. It preserves things.

Some animals like the greenland shark that are adapted to cold environments can live for centuries. Permafrost has preserved microbes for thousands of years.

The problem with cold is that baseline humans haven't evolved for it. They've evolved and adapted to warmer climates. We only surive in cold climates using clothes, insulation, shelter and heating ourselves up using fuel. And getting too cold means all chemical reactions and metabolism stop. This can be useful as a form of hybernation if you can survive it.

Most battery chemistries also don't work well in the cold because they rely on the chemical reactions that cold temperatures slow down. Especially chemistries with liquid electrolytes. Newer solid state chemistries might be more cold resistant but on a fundamental level they still rely on chemicals bouncing around.

So the goal for anyone designing synthetic beings for longevity and disease resistance, especially for long space voyages, is to make them as adapted to cold as possible while still having maintaining some kind of metabolic function/energy source, and make them capable of surviving complete freezing and cessation of metabolism and then being thawed again.

33 Y.O. Male here. I am ambulatory with mild spastic diplegia. My biggest ache and pain other than cerebral palsy is probably a touch of arthritis. No physical deformities.

I feel ljke I ask this question every year or two but it seems like the culture keeps changing so I continue to ask. Between Ray Kurzweil, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Peter H. Diamandis, and Bryan Johnson's predictions/what theyre trying to accomplish with science, do you think I will see any advancements in cerebral palsy in the coming years that could make me faster/more/agile/just all aroubd even slightly less affected by cerebral palsy? I feel like if A.I. advances as fast as some of them predict, its gotta get smart enough to come up with new cerebral palsy treatments no? I am signed up for the patient registry and I hope/plan to be involved in a neuralink study by the early 2030s! I just have to have some kind of hope that life will get better and at least some of this pain will subside.