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July 16, 2005
Now, Their Bellies Full, It's Time to Look for a Mate
That line just floated out of the NPR from a documentary about penguins. I thought it would make a cool blog headline.
I'm sorry I haven't written... I've been really, really busy between work and the lunch of a lifetime auction! Luckily, MR had some comments he couldn't figure out how to post without destroying the format, so I've agreed to post them in their very own entry. He's responded to some of the questions posed by Dan in his last comment.
MR says:
All:
First, April: GREAT entry: funny & dead-on. What an amazing woman you are.
Dan:
Did I really say "Dying is not healthy?" Or did you mean a
different Dan?
I believe that April is actually remembering me quoting Al P. in the
midst of a response to a comment from you in The Rant. I quoted it just after another Al P. zinger: "Reclusive? Show me the one who is on the wrong side of the sod, and I will show a recluse."
I'm not afraid of death, I'm afraid of getting old.
That's probably the one thing that makes me different from you and all the other people who read this blog. At this point in my life at least, living a really long time just doesn't feel like a priority to me. What is a priority is not losing the ability to do the things I like to do.
If you're dead, you have lost the ability to do the things that you like to do ;).
Look, when I say I want to live forever, it's not because I seriously
envision the alternative being subjectively like being locked in a box
forever: I understand that oblivion is, er, painless.
Like you, I certainly am more afraid of sensescence than of death per
se. Aging means slowly losing the health and vigor of body and brain -
becoming more and more disabled, wracked with pain, dulled of sense,
and weak of wit, with every passing day. So of course, everyone reacts
to it with horror, unless s/he is intentionally putting it out of hir
mind -- just as one would react with nausea, fear, pity, and rage to a
teh suffering and physical pathology of a person with advanced cancer.
But suppose that aging were abolished, in favor of the famous "one hoss shay:" everything would be in perfect working order for threescore and ten, and then one day you would simply keel over. Life have been as good in every day between tomorrow and the day of your death as it is today.
Dan, it sounds like you're happy with life, and the health that CR (and exercise) brings you. So would you want to die tomorrow? Would you even be simply resigned to it? If not, then why would you want to die two days from now? Three? Four? Eleventy-twelve? What makes you think that there is going to be a day when you're going to be ready to just give up on the simple, overwhelming privilege of being a conscious being in healthy flesh?
I am very confident that no such day is coming. I'm alive, and I'm
young, and oh, God, I'm happy. Why would I want to give that up? Ergo,
by default, I want to live forever. That seems like a self-evident
conclusion to me.
If I were whisked off this earth right now, I just don't believe I'd be aware of the fact that I had died--I just wouldn't be around any more.
Yes -- exactly. What a tragedy! What a senseless loss for you, and for
the universe: an unique point of view, a conscious mind -- obliterated.
I wouldn't regret all the things I didn't get to do, nor would I
celebrate the things I had achieved.
No, because dead people don't do any of that. But if you were given a
choice, today, about whether you would live or die tomorrow, wouldn't
you choose life? Even if it came at substantial cost? Indeed, you make
that choice every day. Staying alive is expensive, in dollars and in
every other way. You could save yourself enormous trouble by just ending it -- a task you could achieve without suffering anything, with a simple case purchase of NyQuil. But you choose to struggle on, because your life is precious. And hell: people will do this when the cost is enormous: when keeping body and soul together requires enormous, back-breaking labor, or when every day is a struggle with pain and disability.
The "immortalist" just sees that the same will always be true. I want to live forever in a young body, full of life. And just as you give up some of your time every day to keep alive in the short term (purchase of food, shelter, etc), I project that investment into the future, when such efforts will not be enough, because my body will be rotting at the molecular level, my youth and health sliding away.
Maybe you guys who are into life extension can help me out with this
question: How can you dedicate so much of your energy to living as long as possible without developing a debilitating fear of death?
I think that everyone has a debilitating fear of death, which s/he then displaces into other, ineffective pursuits, from fame to grand causes to religion to having children. I simply face the fear consciously and take action.
Usually, when you put a lot of energy into something, to have it
completely not work would be pretty devestating.
But I don't intend for it not to work :D. ANYTHING you might do could
fail: that doesn't, normally, lead people to simply not try to
accomplish anything; indeed, we rightly think that people who take this tack have impoverished lives.
If you raise your expectations of living a long time to such a high level, make it such a priority in your life, become impassioned about it, how would you deal with it if you found out you only had a month left to live because you, say, contracted some rare disease?
I will likely be all the more pissed because of apparently wasted
effort, of course. But the point is, again, that I intend and expect to buy more youth and health for my labors, so it really doesn't make much sense as a question. I am precisely putting off the time when that reality comes.
Maybe it would help if I turned the question around. You are asking why I am so desperately trying to avoid "death." Perhaps I'm not. Perhaps I am actually struggling with all of my strength to extend Life.
-MR
Posted by april at July 16, 2005 4:55 AM
Comments
I'd say "I'll live forever or die trying". Bit of tongue-in-cheek of course but there is a point to it.
Regards
Curious
Posted by: Curious at July 16, 2005 9:29 AM
Well said. I'd like to live forever in young body too, but alas I'm already a few decades past that point. Still, I'm grateful for every day full of health and life.
Now, my belly's full, it's time to go take a nap. ;-)
-Liz
Posted by: Elizabeth at July 16, 2005 12:26 PM
Hi M!
Great piece of writing. I think April's going to fall in love with you all over again now :) She may even name it Rant II or something. Nonetheless, I do have some things to say in response. [Your words in quotes]
"If you're dead, you have lost the ability to do the things that you like to do ;)"
Yes, but you've already agreed that, if I were dead, I wouldn't care.
"What a tragedy! What a senseless loss for you, and for the universe: an unique point of view, a conscious mind -- obliterated."
Okay, two things: 1) As far as I can tell, zero loss for me: if I'm not aware of the loss, there's effectively no loss. 2) As for the "universe," there would be some sort of loss, yes, but whether it would be a tragedy is not for me to say.
"What makes you think that there is going to be a day when you're going to be ready to just give up on the simple, overwhelming privilege of being a conscious being in healthy flesh?"
This is of course the critical question. And one that's hard to answer because it's one that most people never think to worry about. Why? It's instilled in us from birth: nature will decide on that day, and that will be that.
Clearly, however, your goal is to change all that by eliminating aging. If we don't age, then the decision to die becomes our own, right?
Well, not quite. There are still lots of other ways to die. Accidents, food poisoning, natural disasters (tsunamis, hurricanes, earthquakes, global warming), diseases and epidemics (black plague, AIDS), terrorist attacks, full-scale nuclear war. This list goes on.
That said, while I don’t see the world becoming a safer or more stable place, I’ll indulge you and assume that these will continue to be low probability events, at least for an individual living in the western world.
So, assuming aging has been cured, and assuming I’m fortunate enough not to end up a victim of any of the other umpteen potential causes of death, then it may actually become entirely up to me whether to live for another day.
Before I go on, though, I suppose I should also assume that my loved ones are equally lucky and are still alive and healthy, that I’m not destitute, that my brain doesn’t fill up with so much information that it can’t hold anymore, that I don’t get so incredibly good at things that I lose interest in them (practice makes perfect, right?), that I still have my freedom, that I am still able to come up with new ideas, that traveling the world doesn’t get old, that the idea of a 10th career still sounds good, that I don’t get sick of all the museums, that I don’t become so complacent about my potentially endless life that I end up lazy, depressed, or utterly bored…
With those pesky things out of the way, then yes, I suppose it’s hard to imagine reaching a day where I would just say, “Okay. I’ve had enough.” But to be honest, it’s hard for me to envision any one of those things coming true. I wish you all the luck in the world in your quest to cure aging, and if anyone can pull it off, it would be you, but I can’t help but to remain a skeptic.
Finally, crazy as I’m sure this sounds to you, I take comfort in knowing that there’s a forseeable end to my journey. In fact, for me, life seems to take on much its meaning--it’s urgency and intensity--because I know it’s limited.
Posted by: Dan at July 16, 2005 9:23 PM
I take comfort in knowing that I'm not the only one who has misspelled foreseeable.
Aubrey de Grey is always correcting my spelling. If this whole anti-aging thing doesn't work out, he's going to become an English teacher.
Meanwhile, thanks for your comments Dan! I look foward to continuing the conversation when I'm awake!
Back to sleep now...
a
Posted by: april at July 17, 2005 12:40 AM