One trend in longevity-enhanced cultures which I expect to become common, is for “old and worn-out souls” to trigger a kind of mental rejuvenation: Use some type of medicine/gene-activation/.. to trigger a softer version of what happens during childhood.
I see several reasons:
This would allow for a culturally-acceptable and powerful method for people to reinvent themselves and start anew (possibly with an agreement that the usual date is every 100th birthday), which would be a more important element to cultures suitable to longer life-spans.
Also (depending on how the immortality works), I would assume that people would wish to have the ability to reinvigorate their “passions of the past”. I think it is quite common that older people lose many of their interests and replace them with “their legacy” and “watching the young ones”.
If this isn’t directly inhibited by the life-extension, a method to reduce or revert this change would become important.
I don’t know enough about this to be sure, but I’d be surprised if our brains operate in a way that does not in some sense accumulate brittleness (weak enough that it typically isn’t important for current(/past?) lifespans). Finding a way to stabilise this would be important and “just hit restart” seems like a plausibly helpful and achievable approach.
I think that this would change the dynamics described in the OP quite a bit, as the cultural dynamics (exploration) could stay quite strong. Also, this might weaken the forces that create a gap between longevity-enhanced and normal-longevity people.
Mental rejuvenation would solve some of the issues. But what is this supposed to be specifically? Increased memory consolidation or some kind of amnesia? What about habits and motor memory? Without more elaboration, it amounts to hand-waving. Also, the body wouldn’t adapt to the environment, e.g. new foods. Positing additional drugs for ‘reprogramming the body’ might help but again what would they do? You can of course stack fixes on fixes with drugs. I’m not sure how this compares to regular evolution.
My estimate of what could plausibly be achieved in the near future is my model of “the thing that happens during childhood”, maybe with better control by the individuum. This would be some phases of heightened learning rate/‘priority’ for different parts of our mind (fear and recognizing safe/unsafe situations; calibrating and exploring perception and motion; status and norms; sexuality; sense of self and identity; …). I assume that this ‘emotional rejuvenation’ could work relatively well ‘for a few rounds’ even with relatively crude methods. As dkirmani notes, psychedelics do have effects that seem related. But for things like memory or systematically replacing old/mortal neurons, this would likely not suffice.
Interesting. It’s hard to imagine the new markets opened by anti-aging. That being said, if such a drug existed I would probably take it regularly even if I’m not immortal. Now I wonder if that would be possible to do without erasing your memories. Otherwise, it would defeat the point of immortality.
Thanks for writing!
One trend in longevity-enhanced cultures which I expect to become common, is for “old and worn-out souls” to trigger a kind of mental rejuvenation: Use some type of medicine/gene-activation/.. to trigger a softer version of what happens during childhood.
I see several reasons:
This would allow for a culturally-acceptable and powerful method for people to reinvent themselves and start anew (possibly with an agreement that the usual date is every 100th birthday), which would be a more important element to cultures suitable to longer life-spans.
Also (depending on how the immortality works), I would assume that people would wish to have the ability to reinvigorate their “passions of the past”. I think it is quite common that older people lose many of their interests and replace them with “their legacy” and “watching the young ones”. If this isn’t directly inhibited by the life-extension, a method to reduce or revert this change would become important.
I don’t know enough about this to be sure, but I’d be surprised if our brains operate in a way that does not in some sense accumulate brittleness (weak enough that it typically isn’t important for current(/past?) lifespans). Finding a way to stabilise this would be important and “just hit restart” seems like a plausibly helpful and achievable approach.
I think that this would change the dynamics described in the OP quite a bit, as the cultural dynamics (exploration) could stay quite strong. Also, this might weaken the forces that create a gap between longevity-enhanced and normal-longevity people.
This is what psychedelics do, especially high doses.
Mental rejuvenation would solve some of the issues. But what is this supposed to be specifically? Increased memory consolidation or some kind of amnesia? What about habits and motor memory? Without more elaboration, it amounts to hand-waving. Also, the body wouldn’t adapt to the environment, e.g. new foods. Positing additional drugs for ‘reprogramming the body’ might help but again what would they do? You can of course stack fixes on fixes with drugs. I’m not sure how this compares to regular evolution.
Good points!
My estimate of what could plausibly be achieved in the near future is my model of “the thing that happens during childhood”, maybe with better control by the individuum. This would be some phases of heightened learning rate/‘priority’ for different parts of our mind (fear and recognizing safe/unsafe situations; calibrating and exploring perception and motion; status and norms; sexuality; sense of self and identity; …). I assume that this ‘emotional rejuvenation’ could work relatively well ‘for a few rounds’ even with relatively crude methods. As dkirmani notes, psychedelics do have effects that seem related. But for things like memory or systematically replacing old/mortal neurons, this would likely not suffice.
Interesting. It’s hard to imagine the new markets opened by anti-aging. That being said, if such a drug existed I would probably take it regularly even if I’m not immortal. Now I wonder if that would be possible to do without erasing your memories. Otherwise, it would defeat the point of immortality.
See the story, “Good-bye, Robinson Crusoe”, by John Varley.