A Menagerie of Longevity

Ageless Animals is a research project devoted to investigating the most long-lived denizens of the animal kingdom. While humans certainly do boast impressive longevity in contrast to the many familiar species which live only a handful of years if they are lucky and well-kept (mice, other rodents, dogs, cats, etc.), we are by no means the longest-lived animal, or even the longest-lived mammal. Ageless Animals notes that "rockfish, turtles, and whales [are] all documented to live 200 years or longer without showing signs of aging."

By "signs of aging", the Ageless Animals folks are referring to the effects commonly associated with senescence and accumulated bodily damage of the sort that causes most animals to decline in health in their advancing years. It is not that these animals do not change at all as they age, but rather, that they do not tend to display some of the more pathological features seen in other animals at much younger ages. This is worth studying for the simple fact that it is very interesting to see how aging manifests in a cross-species context, but also because some of what we learn from our long-lived cousins could eventually be applied toward improving medicine for humans.

Human life expectancy worldwide more than doubled between 1900 and 1985 (from 30 to 62). This was not the effect of a sudden mutation or other drastic change in human biology, but rather, the effect of improvements in disease control, nutrition, and other socially mediated factors.

Nobody today knows for certain how far the current generation of available medical treatments can continue to increase the healthy lifespan, however, it is a common sentiment that we are probably approaching the limit of how effective our health care regimens are for the oldest old. Once the average human reaches 70 or 80 years or so, the body's protective and repair mechanisms become much less able to cope with the daily bombardment of damage from without (infections, general wear-and-tear) and within (metabolic byproducts, cell death). So even though people in their 80s and 90s can most certainly lead live rich, full lives, such persons remain far more vulnerable than younger people to death from acute illness as well as to cascading systemic breakdown. It is this vulnerability that proposed future medical regimens would like to address -- and it could very well be that some of these future regimens come into being through the study of very long-lived animals.

Perhaps one of the most impressive aspects of these "ageless animals" (and of certain other long-lived animals, such as elephants and some birds) is that they achieve their long, relatively healthy lives without any of the benefits that we humans have used to double our own average life expectancy over the past century. Turtles, rockfish, and whales do not visit doctors, or take antibiotics when ill, or depend on sewage plants and sanitary facilities to protect them from environmental ills. One almost has to wonder how long these creatures might live if they did have their own customized health programs; however, for the moment, it is sufficiently awe-inspiring to realize that these animals were living well into their second century back when we humans could barely expect to reach age 30!

Of the long-lived animals presently known, some appear to have a built in "negligible senescence" property. From the Ageless Animals site, we learn that:

Caleb Finch at USC coined the term "negligible senescence" to describe very slow or negligible aging (Finch 1990). He listed several animals with this characteristic, including rockfish, sturgeon, turtles, bivalves and possibly lobsters. Later in a paper from the first Symposium on Organisms with Slow Aging (which the Director of this project also spoke at), Finch further described criteria to test the occurrence of negligible aging. These include no observable age-related increase in mortality rate or decrease in reproduction rate after maturity, and no observable age-related decline in physiological capacity or disease resistance (Finch and Austad 2001).

This is a very important observation because it clearly indicates that the life of an animal is not necessarily inextricable from a fixed "expiration date" built into his or her deepest inner workings from the start. So while I do not deny the significance of the many human attempts over the years to garner meaning and poetic substance from reflecting upon the bodily breakdown that tends to eventually kill us all, it is well worth pointing out that some of this philosophizing is at least partially rooted in what appears to be a false belief -- that age-related decline of the sort experienced by humans is "inevitable" in all members of the animal kingdom, and that our own decline somehow "connects" us with everything else on Earth. Statistically, even the "ageless animals" will tend toward eventually being killed by accidents or other mishaps -- making it improper to describe them as "immortal" -- but there is no reason for any person to consider the mayfly more her spiritual kin than, say, the rockfish.

Rockfish studies have revealed a positive (though not absolute) correlation between longevity and depth, latitude, and maximum size. It is not currently known exactly what biological characteristics in turn correlate with these surface observations, but some data suggest that certain rockfish might be "trading off" in favor of slow growth (and therefore slower metabolism, which means less internally accumulated damage) as opposed to more rapid growth (which improves survival in predation-heavy environments, but which entails a faster, more damage-producing metabolic rate).

Moving into the realm of mammalian longevity, elephants and humans stand out as the most reliably long-lived land mammals. Looking at these two species in particular, it is quite interesting to note that while humans have a higher documented maximum lifespan (Jeanne Calment was the oldest verified supercentenarian by the time of her death at age 122), elephants can live to 60 - 70 years more reliably than humans "in the wild" probably could.

Additionally, it is suspected that if not for tooth wearout in around their seventh decade, elephants might live much longer (since the most common cause of death in older elephants is not heart disease or cancer as it is in humans, but starvation due to not being able to properly masticate food). Elephant longevity might regularly exceed that of humans if better dentistry services for pachyderms existed, probably in part owing to their large body mass (which is correlated positively with longevity within classes of animals).

The longest-lived mammals of all, however, are not land-based creatures but citizens of the sea. Bowhead whale lifespans have been calculated as exceeding 200 years in some cases using a method which extrapolates age from the ratio of left-handed to right-handed aspartic acid molecules in the whales' eye lenses. Multiple factors probably contribute toward whale longevity, including body mass, slow growth, low reproductive rates, and a cold-temperature habitat.

As far as applying rockfish and whale study results to human medicine, there do not seem to be any direct routes to this as of yet -- but the data does at least suggest that interventions which target the byproducts of metabolism may indeed be a step in the right direction. All the long-lived animals highlighted in this article have specific bodily features and/or behavioral tendencies (rockfish actually tend to seek out deeper, colder waters as they age) that serve to minimize metabolic damage. Conceivably, if metabolic damage can be addressed in humans, it might be that many of the health problems we currently associate with "old age" today will instead eventually be associated with a specific category of treatable conditions.

It is important to stress in such discussions as this that mitigating metabolic health conditions will certainly not mean that people will cease to get old, or that everyone will be granted comic-book-like superpowers once we find out how to stop oxidative (and other) damage from accumulating to the point where it destroys our organs. Longevity medicine proper is not to be found in the "fetishization of youth" or in fantasy, but in recognizing that getting old should not have to mean getting sick. It is one thing to say that people should be helped to "age gracefully" as opposed to "cling unreasonably to their youth"; it is quite another to extend this sentiment to the idea that life itself ought to remain the exclusive province of the young. Life is for everyone!

And it is also important to emphasize that longevity medicine is simply one essential component of health care as a whole, and working to help elderly people experience a less precarious existence (at least in my estimation) falls into the same ethical category as working to improve sanitation and nutrition throughout the world. In short, saving lives is about saving lives -- not about only saving certain people's lives based on their age, gender, nationality, or economic status. And projects like the Ageless Animals research program offer both a chance to learn fascinating facts about the Earth's biodiversity, and an opportunity to uniquely (and positively) impact emerging healthcare improvements.

Status Quo Bias and Typical Special Needs

An article on CNN entitled Pitfalls of Telecommuting caught my eye the other day.

I'm not personally a telecommuter -- under normal circumstances, every weekday (save for alternate Fridays, which I have off) I go duly to my little carpeted cubicle in a large, nondescript engineering office and spend the day there. It's not the best environment I can imagine, but it isn't the worst, either -- especially since I have my iPod and my trusty noise-cancelling earphones (the combination of which have enhanced my productivity and overall state of mind at work immensely). I can definitely see the appeal of telecommuting, though, and there have been times (particularly when I'm working on long documentation tasks) that I've mulled over the idea of asking about it.

The CNN article (which is actually a reprint of a 2005 article on CareerBuilder) first describes some of the potential advantages of telecommuting:

it. Freedom to set our own hours, raid the refrigerator ... even take early morning calls in our underwear. There are other conveniences as well: no more rush hour traffic and more time for family interaction.

...and then goes on to list several potential drawbacks.

The drawback description that stood out to me the most was the section on "Social Isolation". One former full-time telecommuter interviewed noted that:

[Once she began telecommuting], she no longer found her job satisfying; she missed the collegial atmosphere of her office and said her work suffered.

"As an extrovert, I get energy from those around me," Irline reflects. "I thrive on social interaction... being able to wander down the hall and kick around ideas with my co-workers helps my creativity and keeps me charged."

The article then went on to say:

While some people can compensate by keeping in contact by phone or e-mail, others need social contact on a frequent basis in order to work productively.

Nowhere in the article is extroversion described as a "disability", and yet, clearly it is a trait that must be accommodated if some people are to do their jobs properly and maintain their mental and emotional health. Hmm...

As an introvert (albeit a rather chatty one when it comes to online interaction), the idea of needing "social contact on a frequent basis in order to work productively" seems downright bizarre to me. Not that I don't see the benefit of occasionally meeting with others, or bouncing ideas off of colleagues -- no man or woman is an island, and the work projects I am generally assigned to are of such complexity that it would be impossible for one person to deal with all aspects of the design and integration in the first place.

But I don't have the need to have "bodies nearby" as some seem to, and I definitely don't have the need for "chit-chat" that some seem to; I actually find it distracting and disconcerting if I go to ask someone about a work-related matter and they start inquiring about my weekend, etc. I don't mean to seem (and I hope I don't seem) "unfriendly" because of this, but small talk just isn't my strong point. However, another way of looking at it is that I'm not dependent on small talk. If I do engage in it (and my attempts tend to be clumsy and abbreviated at best; I much prefer just "jumping into" the meat of a topical discussion if at all possible), my doing so is largely an accommodation of someone else's special needs.

The same is true when I'm working with someone who doesn't write well, who can't type quickly, who has difficulty spelling, or who generally just prefers the phone to e-mail or instant messaging -- for me, the phone is a necessary evil at best, and I will always default to text if the other person is amenable to it (hence, my love for Internet communication -- I'm in my element here!).

Yep, that's right. Atypical people -- yes, even those of us who are technically classified as "disabled" -- frequently spend lots of energy every day attending to the special needs of others. Some of us don't even realize how much energy we are expending in this regard until we learn that certain things really are more challenging and exhausting for us than for most others -- our culture basically defines everything in terms of the ability set of the majority, meaning that some "accommodations" are taken for granted completely because most people need them.

This result in the curious phenomenon in which people who benefit from the dominant culture assume that they are "fully independent" and "have very few needs". At the same time, those of us who might not need typical accommodations (but who may very well need other accommodations) are in the difficult position of looking like we have more needs than average when that isn't actually necessarily the case. It's quite confounding!

I've found myself numerous times in situations where people keep offering me help over and over again with a task I actually find easy, or even apologizing for assigning me a particular kind of task when it's actually a task I like! I very much enjoy tasks most people seem to despise -- those involving lots of focused, mostly-solitary work. Documentation, "data-crunching", spreadsheet sorting, schematic capture, you name it -- if it means I get to sit in front of a computer for hours or days on end dealing with "nit-picky" details few would want to concern themselves with, I'll be a very happy camper (and by all accounts, I do a pretty good job at this sort of thing).

At the same time, I've also been in situations where someone is asking me to do something that I know seems trivially simple to them (like, "Make a quick phone call to so-and-so right now and ask them about X."), but that would require fairly extensive preparation on my part, and that might end up dampening my productivity for several hours afterward. It's as if I am expected to justify why I "can't do something" to a much greater extent than others would -- which is doubly difficult because society does not provide a ready nonpathological vocabulary for explaining the difficulties of atypical persons.

People who have difficulty with long hours of solitary detail work are practically never pathologized for expressing that they have this difficulty, because most others can relate to having difficulty with something like this -- but not so for the person who can't make a spontaneous phone call on request for reasons that have nothing to do with "anxiety". (I have intermittent difficulties forming coherent spontaneous speech that reflects what I actually know and think, which isn't anything I consider a deep tragedy -- I can communicate just fine in writing even when my mouth isn't expressing what's in my head, so my main strife in this regard consists solely of other people's pathologizing reactions).

Some might suggest that atypical people (introverts, autistics, etc.) simply need to "break out of [our] comfort zones" or "practice" the kinds of tasks that more typical folks find easy or trivial. This advice is quite common; I've received it myself on numerous occasions (and I dearly wish I could invite the folks who have given me that advice inside my head for a day, just so they could see how little time I actually spend in anything remotely resembling a "comfort zone"!).

But -- you practically never (if at all) hear of people trying to counsel extroverts to "practice going without frequent social contact", just as you rarely hear chronic multitaskers being counseled to just work on one thing before moving onto the next. Apparently it's okay for those folks to operate in their "comfort zones" all the time! Why the double standard?

Well, I suspect the double standard in this case has something to do with status quo bias. Status quo bias basically describes the cognitive tendency for people to wish for things to stay the same in particular ways. That is, many people would probably balk at the notion of establishing a work culture more friendly to introverts (e.g., offering more private/quiet work areas, offering break rooms stocked with books as well as foosball tables, etc.), and might even feel resentful toward the folks for whom these culture changes were intended to assist.

My advice to such people is: get over it! Not everyone is the same -- and having a different temperament or ability set from the norm does not mean a person is categorically sick or defective. Work and public environments that allow more different kinds of people to participate help boost overall social morale (by reducing "us versus them" sentiments, by exposing people to a wider range of other kinds of people, etc.), and also boost the financial, intellectual, and creative economy via allowing more people to work, educate themselves, and receive enriching experiences offered by their local communities.

There are a lot of people who I believe go "untapped" throughout their entire lives because of the expectation that they either emulate "normal", or else (if possible) alter themselves internally to move more in alignment with the ability set that current fads and cultural conventions favor. And I'm not talking about elitism here, nor am I suggesting that anyone who has difficulty in the standard office culture is some kind of "misunderstood genius" who shouldn't even be expected to flush the toilet -- I'm just talking about the probably-huge number of persons who don't even know what their strengths are because nobody will give them the chance to find out in the midst of the frantic struggle to have them "get the basics down".

So, while I have stated on numerous occasions that I believe people should be able to modify themselves as they see fit in the service of self-expression and goal-seeking, it is important to avoid letting status quo bias effectively stifle the potentially vast range of forms and functionalities people might choose in the least coercive, most flexible culture. What kind of world do you want to live in?

Magazine Archeology

I've posted some images from old issues of Science Digest I rescued from my great-grandmother's basement "bomb shelter" room about 10 years ago.

I don't have everything scanned in yet, but there's some good stuff in this set, ranging from creepy ("Breeding Human Beings to Order") to Just Plain Interesting ("Space Navigators - Not Needed").



Bonus for AI folks: check out Norbert Wiener's "Thinking Machines may Peril Mankind" warning here:

"It is quite in the cards that learning machines may be used to program the pushing of the button in a new pushbutton war."

(Hint: don't let the robots near the punchcard stack!)

All There Is Is Everything

There are many reasons I'm a shameless Joss Whedon fangirl. Quotes like this (from the series Angel) are one such reason:

If nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do. Because that's all there is.

(I don't usually post random quotes without much in the way of context around them, but this one in particular just came to mind and I figured it was worth sharing on Existence is Wonderful. It very much expresses why I feel such a sense of awe at the fact of existence and the potential it provides for finding our own sources of meaning. Which is something I highly recommend over waiting for meaning to fall into your lap and then feeling all shortchanged and nihilistic when it doesn't. :P)

SENS 3 Media For Your Edification

The SENS 3 conference was held from 6 - 10 September, 2007, at Queens' College, Cambridge, England. The third in a series of informational meetings (involving numerous biologists, gerontologists, and medical professionals) to discuss the technical aspects behind the Strategies for Engineerered Negligible Senescence, I've only just started poking at the media from this conference.

Anyone who wants to get a sense of what sorts of things are being discussed by longevity-oriented scientists these days might be interested in downloading the audio (or watching available video if that's your thing) of the SENS 3 talks.

I'm going to be monitoring a test setup tomorrow for work (as an electromagnetics engineer, sometimes I get to quite literally stare at a screen for hours on end to make sure nothing goes funny on the product when it is exposed to prescribed levels of radiation), and believe me, I will be very grateful for my iPod during this testing!

These SENS talks are a great example of longevity medicine as healthcare that will hopefully come to benefit everyone at some point. I'm quite interested in learning more about things like:

- The efficacy of cancer vaccines to prevent cancer in the elderly

- The potential for virus modulation of cell death pathways

- Immunological approaches for amyloid beta clearance toward Alzheimer's disease treatment

As you can see...no mooning over mythological notions of "fountains of youth" here. Just good, solid investigative science geared toward helping mitigate problems like cancer in the elderly, cell death leading to other health issues, and Alzheimer's. And you definitely don't need to be a biologist in order to appreciate media like this -- all you really need is to be interested in the subject matter. Even if you don't know what the speakers are talking about at first, you will likely start catching on after hearing a few presentations, at least enough to get the gist of what they are saying.

I'm just really pleased to see decent science media being offered -- thanks very much to the SENS 3 presenters who have allowed their talks to be posted online. With all the "anti-aging fluff" making the rounds these days, it's nice to know that some people at least realize how complex (and important) the task of helping expand truly effective medicine to the elderly is.

Superlativity and the Misframing of "Progress"

Rhetoric professor Dale Carrico has of late been devoting considerable attention to a rather involved critique of what he calls Superlative Technology Discourse. As near as I can tell, "superlative technology discourse" refers to the ongoing (and often self-affirming) discussion and advocacy among those who would likely describe themselves as "pro-technology", and who are perhaps overfocused on narrowly-defined omni-outcomes of present-day technodevelopmental efforts.

I've been following this critique (and the various debates it seems to have prompted) with great interest.

You see, when I first began to transition from being someone who mainly reads online to someone who also interacts online, one of the first groups/subcultures I encountered was that consisting of self-described "transhumanists".

Upon encountering these folks, I was mightily intrigued -- here, at long last, seemed to be a congenial community of science geeks who were all interested in many of the same things I was: life extension, robots, neurology, etc.

Additionally, many of the transhumanists I encountered seemed considerably more positive and appreciative of the sheer grandeur of existence than average -- that is, after years of thinking that I might very well be a rarity in my general tendency toward exuberance, here were a whole slew of other folks that saw conscious awareness and its interaction with the myriad patterns of reality as a good thing.

That was my first impression.

And -- it was a decent first impression, to be sure. I started communicating with people who seemed to have interests very similar to my own, and I really enjoyed the discussions I ended up in.

It wasn't anything I saw as a Really Big Deal. It certainly wasn't a "turning point in self-discovery" or some kind of grand identity revelation. It was more that I'd simply discovered that there were others who shared with me a particular set of interests and concerns. So I stuck around.

And now? Well, lately I've been doing a major round of mental housecleaning with regard to how I think about ethics, politics, and what it means to associate with a group.

I generally align myself only uneasily and tentatively with "subcultures" that aren't directly and concretely tied to something I'm a fan of (e.g., science fiction or Buffy), because part of me always feels like I'm "lying" if I call myself X, without truly understanding what X stands for.

Additionally, if I find a particular position to be consistent with the principles I hold, I don't bother running it through a "subcultural filter" before adopting it. Nor do I hesitate to reject things I'm told are consistent with my supposed affiliations if I don't happen to agree with those things.

I used to think this was "normal", but I'm beginning to suspect it's actually quite rare. One of the things I'm finding difficult to deal with in some of the discussions I tend to end up in is the apparent tendency on the part of many others to cling to rigid, abstract ideologies.

Basically, it seems sometimes like everyone is looking for a proper "ism" to adhere to and execute in their navigation of reality and of the various ethical dilemmas and decision cases it presents.

And -- I can't do that.

Literally can't.

Not because I've got some kind of elitist, "I'm above all that" attitude, but because my brain simply doesn't work that way. What understanding I currently have of the few "isms" I'm somewhat familiar with has not come from reading books or articles that introduce and explain the tenets of those "isms", but from first looking directly at the world and its patterns, and at how people behave in certain situations, and then (often by chance) recognizing some occasional correlation between a pattern I've observed, and something I read about in a philosophy article on Wikipedia, or on someone's blog.

This is not "anti-intellectualism" on my part (per my understanding of "intellectualism", which is probably limited to begin with) -- it's just that I think it's perfectly possible to process information in an intellectually robust manner without obsessing over what predetermined system one's ethical and rational tendencies adhere to.

I've found something useful in most of the philosophy I've read, though most of the usefulness has been uncovered after the fact of coming up with some observations about The Universe And How It Works. For instance, I was practically bowled over when I discovered the concept of "existentialism" at around age 20, because some of what I read in that literature so keenly seemed to reflect the sudden sense of transparency, vulnerability, and ephemerality I fell into at that age (the usual postadolescent "Wait, you mean I'm not invincible?!" stuff).

But: I simply cannot start with a description of some philosophy or abstract way of representing people as "resources" or "data points", or of representing reality as something to be fed into a "utility maximizing function", and figure out how to make decisions or behave from that point.

My friend Amanda wrote an article a while back entitled, Politics, Ethics, and Mental Widgets. This article expresses very neatly some of the cognitive aspects of understanding and discussing politics and ethics that can make certain kinds of discourse inacessible to some of us.

Amanda writes:

I have a confession to make that might startle some people: I’m not capable of holding a complex ideology — what I call a set of abstract mental widgets all connected to each other in the sky — in my head. If I try, it falls apart rapidly. I can’t sustain it, I can’t even fully build it, and I certainly can’t believe in it. I used to try, because I thought that it was a measure of my stupidity or something that I couldn’t. And my brain turned to mush every time and I got really frustrated and miserable. I’ve since learned that that’s simply not my strong point and there’s no way on earth I could do it and would be better off putting my cognitive resources somewhere more useful.

My experience is very similar to hers -- I do not, and cannot, hold "complex ideologies" in my head, at least not under the heading of "complex ideology". Sometimes I end up coming up with something that turns out to resemble an existing complex ideology or "mental widget set", which makes me compelled to occasionally try and identify with that existing ideology (for the sake of having common terminology with which to discuss certain ideas I've never before been able to put in terms anyone else can relate to).

But really, I think this might tend to mislead people at times into thinking that I'm much more capable of grokking abstract widget-systems from the "top down" than I actually am. I know that there have also been times when I've misled myself via sloppy pattern-matching of things I think to ideological constructs that look like they're similar to what I think.

Amanda continues:

It seems, though, that for some people it’s either easier or preferred (it’s hard to tell which) to memorize all the proper mental widgets, and to violently force the world (or at least make a serious attempt) to bend to the shape of the widgets.

This doesn’t mean that people who apply mental widgets this way always get things wrong, or that I and others like me always get things right, or that I always disagree with people who use mental widgets (whether both of us are right or both wrong). We’re all fallible human beings, and sometimes mental widgets can provide a shortcut to the right answer. But overall the mental-widget approach to ethics and politics strikes me as far more violent, hateful, impractical, disconnected, and damaging, even if it’s also aesthetically pretty from a certain standpoint and fits very well into academia.

In many respects, I see Amanda's point regarding the "violent, hateful, impractical, disconnected, and damaging" nature of the "mental widget" approach to politics and ethics as very pertinent to something in one of Dale Carrico's latest posts -- something that very nearly made me exclaim aloud, "Yes, that's exactly it!" Dale writes:

it actually seems to me that what little general public traction bioconservative discourse actually gets (since the fact is that almost everybody actually champions healthcare in the service of longer healthier lives, and since most people who live in secular multicultures actually prefer them to police states) derives from its appeal to people's very sensible anti-corporatist and anti-militarist attitudes. Bioconservatives commandeer what should be a technoprogressive critique in the service of their own actually socioculturally reactionary aspirations. Since my own critique of Superlative Technology Discourses foregrounds this very connection of so much prevailing "pro-technology discourse" with elitism, reductionism, indifference, and exploitation it seems to me it actually functions to deprive bioconservative rhetoric of its one current advantage as a technocentric analytic framework.

Superlative technocentrics themselves typically respond to bioconservative formulations instead by misframing all of this as what amounts to a battle between Science and Religion, in which they cast themselves in the role of the Champions of (a reductively and monolithically misconstrued) Science and all of their foes as champions of a fundamentalist or New Age religiosity (misconstrued as a matter of epistemology when fundamentalism is more usually and more crucially a matter of politics) -- all of which has the misfortune of being both mostly wrong and also completely stupid.

The way I interpret Dale's observation here, and relate it to Amanda's observation noted above, is that "superlativity" discourse in many ways represents a grand Battle of the Widgets. In the misframing of technodevelopmental discourse as an episetmological argument between the self-proclaimed defenders of rationality and their perceived opponents (who are assumed entrenched in backwater dogmatism and the rudest of intellectual poverties), real people stand to get hurt, or neglected, or simply disregarded.

I am, like Dale, quite concerned about the "elitism, reductionism, indifference, and exploitation" that exists in some ostensibly "pro-technology discourse" -- even though I've long considered myself an enthusiast when it comes to neat gadgets and nifty machines. And it's not devices I take issue with, but the conclusions about reality (and people) that are sometimes drawn from their existence and how these conclusions are applied to individuals.

For instance, if you consider IQ tests to be a kind of technology, the manner in which many such tests are administered and interpreted can quite literally decide the course of a person's future -- there are, for instance, people living in squalid and/or abusive institutional conditions right now on the basis of a test score. This is preposterous. But no matter how preposterous, our present culture functionally enables it through defining, in the form of a grand tapestry of mental widgets, some persons as nonpersons (or sub-persons, or "persons with low mental age") via a number on a test that supposedly indicates their level of awareness or capacity for complex thought, or something.

This is only one example of what I see as a damaging form of reductionism. And it is only one symptom of a problem I've had for a long time with transhumanism, though I realize it is not a problem unique to transhumanism. I've actually seen more frightening and hateful and fearful statements coming from more mainstream sources than from nominally "transhumanist" or "futurist" sources -- but, and this might be an aspect of the superlativity critique that some are missing -- for a movement that wants to consider itself at the forefront of radical positive change, transhumanism isn't doing enough (in my estimation) to avoid slipping into stodgy parochialism.

The way I see it, anyone who can't tolerate a world in which Deaf, autistic, or otherwise-atypical persons continue to exist is not prepared to deal with a world in which forms and functions vary beyond the dreams of generations of sci-fi and fantasy authors. Anyone who cannot see anything other than the standard set of normative human abilities as a means to a "good start" in life is going to have a seriously hard time with a world of prostheticized and implanted and exuberantly decorated beings such as the very technologies they claim to encourage may bring.

I've at times been horrified to see important issues like disability rights (which are really very much civil rights, and strongly tied to concepts of morphological liberty) being framed by some as a battle between the "progressives" (who, for some reason, are expected to agree with Peter Singer on how to deal with disabled children), and the "disability activists" (who, for some reason, are often considered "reactionary" without anyone really bothering to consider what they are actually saying.). Can't one be a progressive disability activist? And can't one discuss the ethics of a very difficult dilemma without being relegated to the "extremist" camp for merely raising questions like, "Well, how valid are concepts like 'mental age'?" I should certainly hope so!

Per my own philosophical tendencies, I'm much more about people choosing for themselves which of their "limits" they'd like to push or overcome via modification than about some grand council ("We") deciding which factors constitute unacceptable "inequalities" and working to systematically eliminate them. Too many people in general seem to lack the ability to tell the difference between equality and sameness. As a result, even very well-meaning folks can end up overly dazzled by ideas like "maximizing the utility function of the universe" in ways that ignore and harm individuals who might, you know, have a different take on matters, or who are simply not in much of a position to have their thoughts heard.

The post of Dale's I quoted above describes precisely the weird sense I've gotten at times, wherein I've found myself dissatisfied with the dismissal of certain important concerns as "luddite". I've found myself seriously pondering at times where, if anywhere, I "belong" on the philosophical spectrum as someone who supports "weird" ideas like cryonics and consensual self-modification (to the point of someday finding it commonplace for people to replace functioning natural parts with mechanical ones if they happen to like the mechanical ones better), but who also finds it abhorrent that potential parents might ever be coerced or pressured into using genetic techniques to assure a nondisabled neurotypical child. And at this point I'm at the stage of realizing that it doesn't matter whether there's a word to describe where I sit in relation to anything or anyone else. I don't need a widget to tell me I can't support X so long as I support Y, or that in order to be a "real X" I need to support Z, even if Z conflicts with my principles.

"Progress", in my mind, is not something that can be found in imagining a world full of shiny, normal-plus people running around enjoying shiny superlative luxuries that everyone will somehow magically have access to once the "anti-technology" folks see the light. Rather, "progress" consists in the making of consistent, simultaneous improvements in scientific understanding, innovation, and ethical reasoning. Progress is only partly about building objects; it is also about cultural self-examination of the sort that enables people and groups to see how their apparent "objectivity" is often grounded not in revolutionary vision, but in status-quo-supporting theories about people and reality.

Therefore, I would hope that any group expressing a desire to seek and enable extreme levels of morphological freedom (as well as opportunities to self-modify or keep non-normative forms) would naturally understand that a proliferation of mutually exclusive, yet equally rich and valid, life paths -- not a race of superlative superpersons all meeting 2007 fashionability criteria -- ought to be the direction of thrust into the future. And I wouldn't say that transhumanism (at least in its usual formulations) can't stand for some critique in this regard.

Rethinking Longevity Discourse - Yes, The Politics Do Matter

As much time as I've spent arguing against what I perceive as "death apologism", I'm beginning to wonder if that kind of argumentation represents so much noise blowing in the wrong direction.

It would be one thing if this line of argument actually helped save people's lives, but at this point I'm not convinced of its practical efficacy nor the accuracy with which it chooses its "targets".

Most people (unless they're Christian Scientists or similar) don't oppose medicine in principle. This is important. Even though we've seen a few rather bizarre arguments from some supposed death apologists (e.g., "But people are going to get so bored if they live longer!"), it doesn't seem that there are enough such people making those kinds of arguments in positions of power so as to make rebutting those arguments of any real use.

But there are clearly barriers to getting longevity medicine off the ground. What are they really, if they aren't actually coming from the "but we'll get bored!" or the "your children are entitled to an inheritance, so just die already!" folks?

I'm beginning to wonder, quite seriously, whether perhaps what (a fair number of) people do oppose is not longevity medicine at all, but "medicine for people who can't function easily within the status-quo economic system".

That is, if there were effective longevity treatments available, it seems a fairly safe bet that (so long as they didn't entail embryonic stem cell research) they wouldn't be banned by a bioconservative congress. You wouldn't have world leaders debating over whether anyone should be "allowed" to seek such treatments, any more than we have people debating over the use of modern sanitation to reduce infant mortality, or over (per the familiar example) hypertension medication.

But you would likely still have people arguing against ideas like universal healthcare. And you'd also still have folks claiming that we live in an "everyone for him/herself" world in which you only get to live so long as you can "earn" your right to do so, or so long as you have enough powerful cronies backing you up.

It makes plenty of sense that a lot of what manifests as "ageism" is actually a kind of economic phobia -- non-wealthy older people are considered (like disabled people, regardless of whether or not they would classify themselves as "disabled") to be "bad investments" with regard to employment, medical care, other forms of support, etc. This, combined with the independence myth can lead to particularly pernicious conditions for many.

This is not, of course, to say that rapid technological development cannot sometimes occur in contexts other than the very large, very bureaucratic, and very mainstream. As someone who still often struggles to function optimally in a culture that wasn't designed primarily by or for people with cognitive/sensory differences like mine, I can fully appreciate the attraction of working outside systems and processes that seem bloated, stifling, and unaccommodating.

And certainly, some such systems fit that description -- suggesting that every problem must be solved through the same exact process, regardless of its nature, (and that no process revisions or reviews are ever appropriate) would be very silly indeed. But it would be foolish to suppose that by circumventing bureaucratic bloat in one's endeavors, that one is somehow "operating outside culture" or "operating outside politics." In that sense, longevity (and all associated research and advocacy) is a class struggle.

This is not just some flowery, abstract, "nontechnical" point, but one that is of direct concern to anyone who figures they'd like to support better outcomes for older people now and in the coming decades. As an engineer, an unabashed nerd, and a lifelong science enthusiast who has only very recently (and rather grudgingly) come to see that no, progress cannot occur in an insular vacuum of well-practiced technological experts, this is not something I would have imagined myself ever saying in public even a year ago.

It's just that it's becoming more and more clear to me that, for instance, biogerontology is not likely to get much further unless great strides are made socially to affirm the value of older people and not push them to the corners, marginalize, or warehouse them by default.