I would say, rather, ”...to which we don’t differentially attribute causes other than the passage of time.”
The distinction is important to me, because it gets at what I expect progress in fighting “aging” to look like: as we understand more about the causes and characteristic properties of various physical and mental changes, we are less inclined to describe them as caused by “age” in some vague handwavy way, even if they normally come with the passage of time… we will think of them as caused by a wide range of mostly unrelated diseases and syndromes, all of which happen to become more likely as we age for various different reasons.
And as we learn to prevent or treat those changes, we won’t think of that as defeating “aging,” we will think of it as defeating those specific diseases and syndromes. After a few generations of this, we will not think of ourselves as having made any progress on defeating “aging”, even though most people will live longer healthier lives than their grandparents did.
I would say, rather, ”...to which we don’t differentially attribute causes other than the passage of time.”
OK, I’ll accept that. I see your point.
However such an approach would require flexibility with what you’d call “disease” or “normality”. For example, old people lose muscle mass and cannot acquire it as easily as young people. It it “normal”? It it a “disease”? If you develop a drug that you can take to fix that problem (but you’ll have to keep on taking it forever), will you describe it as having defeated a disease?
Well, I’m not exactly sure what we mean by requiring flexibility here, but I would certainly agree that our flexibility with respect to what’s a disease and what’s normal aging are related.
To put this another way, I would say “effects of disease D” and “natural effects of aging” are both social constructs, and that the psychological/cultural constraints that cause some pattern of observations X to get tagged with the first label also inhibit X from getting tagged with the second label.
None of which really has a damned thing to do with whether people live longer healthier lives, so to the extent that we care about that, we may do better to not get caught up in worrying about these categories.
There are a lot of diseases which are different enough from aging to make the distinction more than a social construct: infectious diseases, congenital abnormalities, etc.
But yes, you can say: this is the ideal stable state, I want to maintain it forever, whatever causes it break, be it disease or aging, is bad and we want to fix that. Sure.
I expect that approach to hit diminishing returns, i.e., each aditional year of expected lifespan will require solving a greater number of distinct deceases than the previous one.
Yes.
By aging I mean “changes in body and mind that normally come with passage of time”.
Then aging is not always a bad thing.
I would say, rather, ”...to which we don’t differentially attribute causes other than the passage of time.”
The distinction is important to me, because it gets at what I expect progress in fighting “aging” to look like: as we understand more about the causes and characteristic properties of various physical and mental changes, we are less inclined to describe them as caused by “age” in some vague handwavy way, even if they normally come with the passage of time… we will think of them as caused by a wide range of mostly unrelated diseases and syndromes, all of which happen to become more likely as we age for various different reasons.
And as we learn to prevent or treat those changes, we won’t think of that as defeating “aging,” we will think of it as defeating those specific diseases and syndromes. After a few generations of this, we will not think of ourselves as having made any progress on defeating “aging”, even though most people will live longer healthier lives than their grandparents did.
OK, I’ll accept that. I see your point.
However such an approach would require flexibility with what you’d call “disease” or “normality”. For example, old people lose muscle mass and cannot acquire it as easily as young people. It it “normal”? It it a “disease”? If you develop a drug that you can take to fix that problem (but you’ll have to keep on taking it forever), will you describe it as having defeated a disease?
Well, I’m not exactly sure what we mean by requiring flexibility here, but I would certainly agree that our flexibility with respect to what’s a disease and what’s normal aging are related.
To put this another way, I would say “effects of disease D” and “natural effects of aging” are both social constructs, and that the psychological/cultural constraints that cause some pattern of observations X to get tagged with the first label also inhibit X from getting tagged with the second label.
None of which really has a damned thing to do with whether people live longer healthier lives, so to the extent that we care about that, we may do better to not get caught up in worrying about these categories.
There are a lot of diseases which are different enough from aging to make the distinction more than a social construct: infectious diseases, congenital abnormalities, etc.
But yes, you can say: this is the ideal stable state, I want to maintain it forever, whatever causes it break, be it disease or aging, is bad and we want to fix that. Sure.
I expect that approach to hit diminishing returns, i.e., each aditional year of expected lifespan will require solving a greater number of distinct deceases than the previous one.
Yes, I agree.