I’m hearing from this that it’s really terrible to go to the future as a refugee, severed from your community and family. I wholeheartedly agree. I think we can do better and make it not terrible or unfair, but an act of love.
There’s a story about Round Up, the weed killer, I don’t know where I heard it before but it’s been important for me. The chemical company produced a chemical that kills a lot of different plants. Some of them were plants that interfere with crops, some of them were pretty white flowers. They called that chemical a weed killer, painted pictures of all the plants it killed on the bottle, and confused the idea of a “weed” with “whatever this chemical kills” so they could sell more bottles of chemicals. But the flowers are still beautiful, and we wouldn’t consider them weeds if they weren’t on the bottle of weed killer.
I’ve made a chemical process that preserves some things and not others. I can capture the synaptic connections and proteins in a person’s brain and archive them for a century with no problem. There’s a temptation to say that I capture “everything” about a person with this method. Do I really preserve all the memories in a brain if I preserve all the synapses? It’s tempting to say yes and in many important senses I do capture “all the memories”.
But consider an old couple that’s been married for 50 years, talking about their lives.
One of them says “Oh yeah it was back in that small cabin with.. what was his name honey?...” And then the response comes back, as it has for the last 20 years, and repairs the gap. In which brain does the complete memory live, if it takes two together to recreate the story?
I would argue that as you become emmeshed in a community, you externalize your memories: sometimes to other people as a call-and-response. Sometimes through smells or your physical surroundings.
One of my friends who’s a student of Roman history tells me that Romans used their houses to remember important things in their life. Rearrange the house, damage the memories.
There’s a kind of glue that I used to play with as a kid, but they don’t make the glue anymore. I’m sure if I ever smelled it again, I’d remember something important. Lots of memories are tied strongly to smell. But if I’ll never experience that smell again, do I really have the memory still? The connections are there in my brain, but they are keyed to an event that will never happen again.
Aldehydes can preserve a person physically, but if you sever a person from their community, environment, family, for some of those memories it would be like encrypting a hard drive and throwing away the cryptographic key. It’s like the weed analogy—the things my chemicals preserve are not the final boundaries of what a person is, and it’s a mistake to confuse the two.
But the solution, I think, is not to despair. We know we will suffer a huge loss if we enter the future alone, so let’s just not go there alone! The more people we preserve from this era, the more context we archive, the more everyone will arrive to the future whole.
That’s why I’m going to fight to make this a new global tradition, as much as I can. I hope that we’ll preserve so many people that we look back to the 1940s and say “that was the beginning of a new era of human history: the era of Living Memory, where humanity finally started to remember in detail what it was like to be there, because it was finally able to keep those people and memories around.”
Finally, in terms of fairness, we already exist in a maximally unfair situation where every single person from earlier generations is gone, unable to participate in the future. That’s not fair to those generations at all. Going from that situation to a world where even a few people form earlier generations can participate makes the world more fair, not less, by my reckoning of things.
What do you think? If we could revive just one person from 20 generations ago, it seems to me that that would be a huge win for allowing that generation more presence in the world and be more fair on net. Do you agree? If not, why not?
How will you ensure that enough poor people are preserved that there doesn’t end up being a movement to destroy the preserved people? I expect this to require there to be many more people preserved who can’t afford it than people who can. If you skip this political cost calculation I expect you’ll end up losing the entire facility eventually due to reactive anger.
Our end goal is to make this become part of Medicare and have it be the default option for end of life care. In other countries, we hope it will become part of their standard healthcare offerings as appropriate. I hope the discussion about how to make preservation a reality for everyone (including many animals!) happens soon, and I think it will as more progress in uploading makes it clear that preservation is likely to work.
But I also want to really engage with your thoughts on this, so I’d love for you to respond to the following, which I think is a crux for me:
Suppose the worked the way you’re modeling it, with a high likelihood of my preservation facilities being destroyed because of reactive anger triggered by a top-heavy income ratio of preserved people. If that was true, I’d expect a lot of stories, today, about people storming and destroying various gated communities, graveyards with predominantly rich people buried in them, corporate headquarters, private hospitals, rich people’s yachts, etc. I don’t really see any stories about that happening. So I predict it wouldn’t be likely to happen for Nectome long-term care facilities, since there’s more obvious targets that would have been attacked first and haven’t.
I’m assuming people would be reacting to a belief that the tech mostly works, even if they disclaim that belief. The current equivalent is urinating on graves, which involves a revealed belief that the dead are actually dead.
I’m hopeful your plan for broad accessibility works out! I’m skeptical it will be possible in many countries due to the current structure of the network of “power” (agreements, enforceability, threats, laws, money, etc) of groups like insurers and militaries and etc folks who profit from death.
Generally I’m not optimistic that rule of law will be back any time soon or that people with lots of power are sufficiently reflective to notice and fix if they’re avoidant of working through how to turn their professed care for everyone into action on it; in some cases I think this may be because they are lying to others but not to themselves. Which I expect to turn into a general malaise of difficulty achieving your goals here.
For individuals longevity and immortality are great. If you can live without your time, friends and family and cope with that.
For civilizations and in terms of fairness, this is probably terrible.
I’m hearing from this that it’s really terrible to go to the future as a refugee, severed from your community and family. I wholeheartedly agree. I think we can do better and make it not terrible or unfair, but an act of love.
There’s a story about Round Up, the weed killer, I don’t know where I heard it before but it’s been important for me. The chemical company produced a chemical that kills a lot of different plants. Some of them were plants that interfere with crops, some of them were pretty white flowers. They called that chemical a weed killer, painted pictures of all the plants it killed on the bottle, and confused the idea of a “weed” with “whatever this chemical kills” so they could sell more bottles of chemicals. But the flowers are still beautiful, and we wouldn’t consider them weeds if they weren’t on the bottle of weed killer.
I’ve made a chemical process that preserves some things and not others. I can capture the synaptic connections and proteins in a person’s brain and archive them for a century with no problem. There’s a temptation to say that I capture “everything” about a person with this method. Do I really preserve all the memories in a brain if I preserve all the synapses? It’s tempting to say yes and in many important senses I do capture “all the memories”.
But consider an old couple that’s been married for 50 years, talking about their lives.
One of them says “Oh yeah it was back in that small cabin with.. what was his name honey?...” And then the response comes back, as it has for the last 20 years, and repairs the gap. In which brain does the complete memory live, if it takes two together to recreate the story?
I would argue that as you become emmeshed in a community, you externalize your memories: sometimes to other people as a call-and-response. Sometimes through smells or your physical surroundings.
One of my friends who’s a student of Roman history tells me that Romans used their houses to remember important things in their life. Rearrange the house, damage the memories.
There’s a kind of glue that I used to play with as a kid, but they don’t make the glue anymore. I’m sure if I ever smelled it again, I’d remember something important. Lots of memories are tied strongly to smell. But if I’ll never experience that smell again, do I really have the memory still? The connections are there in my brain, but they are keyed to an event that will never happen again.
Aldehydes can preserve a person physically, but if you sever a person from their community, environment, family, for some of those memories it would be like encrypting a hard drive and throwing away the cryptographic key. It’s like the weed analogy—the things my chemicals preserve are not the final boundaries of what a person is, and it’s a mistake to confuse the two.
But the solution, I think, is not to despair. We know we will suffer a huge loss if we enter the future alone, so let’s just not go there alone! The more people we preserve from this era, the more context we archive, the more everyone will arrive to the future whole.
That’s why I’m going to fight to make this a new global tradition, as much as I can. I hope that we’ll preserve so many people that we look back to the 1940s and say “that was the beginning of a new era of human history: the era of Living Memory, where humanity finally started to remember in detail what it was like to be there, because it was finally able to keep those people and memories around.”
Finally, in terms of fairness, we already exist in a maximally unfair situation where every single person from earlier generations is gone, unable to participate in the future. That’s not fair to those generations at all. Going from that situation to a world where even a few people form earlier generations can participate makes the world more fair, not less, by my reckoning of things.
What do you think? If we could revive just one person from 20 generations ago, it seems to me that that would be a huge win for allowing that generation more presence in the world and be more fair on net. Do you agree? If not, why not?
How will you ensure that enough poor people are preserved that there doesn’t end up being a movement to destroy the preserved people? I expect this to require there to be many more people preserved who can’t afford it than people who can. If you skip this political cost calculation I expect you’ll end up losing the entire facility eventually due to reactive anger.
Our end goal is to make this become part of Medicare and have it be the default option for end of life care. In other countries, we hope it will become part of their standard healthcare offerings as appropriate. I hope the discussion about how to make preservation a reality for everyone (including many animals!) happens soon, and I think it will as more progress in uploading makes it clear that preservation is likely to work.
But I also want to really engage with your thoughts on this, so I’d love for you to respond to the following, which I think is a crux for me:
Suppose the worked the way you’re modeling it, with a high likelihood of my preservation facilities being destroyed because of reactive anger triggered by a top-heavy income ratio of preserved people. If that was true, I’d expect a lot of stories, today, about people storming and destroying various gated communities, graveyards with predominantly rich people buried in them, corporate headquarters, private hospitals, rich people’s yachts, etc. I don’t really see any stories about that happening. So I predict it wouldn’t be likely to happen for Nectome long-term care facilities, since there’s more obvious targets that would have been attacked first and haven’t.
I’m assuming people would be reacting to a belief that the tech mostly works, even if they disclaim that belief. The current equivalent is urinating on graves, which involves a revealed belief that the dead are actually dead.
I’m hopeful your plan for broad accessibility works out! I’m skeptical it will be possible in many countries due to the current structure of the network of “power” (agreements, enforceability, threats, laws, money, etc) of groups like insurers and militaries and etc folks who profit from death.
Generally I’m not optimistic that rule of law will be back any time soon or that people with lots of power are sufficiently reflective to notice and fix if they’re avoidant of working through how to turn their professed care for everyone into action on it; in some cases I think this may be because they are lying to others but not to themselves. Which I expect to turn into a general malaise of difficulty achieving your goals here.