Based Camp: Why Life Extension is Evil

Join us in today's thought-provoking conversation as we delve deep into the topics of life extension, mortality, immortality, and the interplay of these themes with societal progress. We discuss the importance of healthspan expansion and how it differs from life extension, as well as the potential implications of life extension on intergenerational dynamics. We also touch on the conflict within the tech accelerationist communities between life Extensionists and pro-natal factions and how this could shape the future of humanity. Tune in to hear our take on these complex topics and why we champion the cause of intergenerational improvement.

A terrible transcript:

Hello, Malcolm. Hello  

Simone. It is wonderful to be here with you today. What are we talking about?

On a scale of one to 10, how excited are you to die? 10. Same. The best. Today we will talk about life extension, mortality and immortality, and I think it's a uniquely fun conversation for both of us because we have a view that deviates from, the typical intuition that people have about mortality because we are genuinely not in favor of life extension. We're in favor of healthspan. Expansion. So we like the idea of having longer productive years, longer years when our bodies are fully functioning, both from a rep reproductive, but also mental standpoint.

We believe in longer periods when people are able to work and contribute to society. 100%. What we aren't in favor of is indefinite life, and there are some very concrete reasons why we hold that to you. I'm here

indefinite, let's say 500 years.

Yeah. Like we're okay. We're okay with. Some life extension, but living forever causes some serious problems.

And I think people don't realize

that. And I would also point out that we aren't against this at a government level. Like I would not promote anyone limiting access to this technology. We are against it at a family and cultural level. And I think we think that our family will always be better off if we focus.

On intergenerational improvement instead of intragenerational improvement.

Yeah, and I think you make a really important point here though, is that with this and pretty much every other stance on what people do with their bodies and a whole lot more for that matter, we may have our own stances on what we think is best for us.

But we think that any stance that is coercive or that would impose rules or restrictions on other people, especially against their will, that is the height of evil. Absolutely. The height of evil. One of the reasons actually why we don't. Like life extension, philosophically speaking, is that we actually think that it puts more people in positions where they will want to impose their will on others against their consent,

I, I would say that even goes to the core of why we don't like life extension. But go on.

There's a growing antagonism within the tech accelerationist communities between the life Extensionist and the pro natal faction. It, it surprises a lot of people that there is such the, such a level of antagonism, but it makes sense in that really only one of the factions can win.

At the end of the day, if all the technology that we both hope is realized, the life extension affection, there would just be too many people in the world if no one ever died. And so they think they can solve the problem of falling fertility rates by extending the lifespan of the existing people.

Whereas if you talk about prenatal as a philosophy is often predominated by the idea that it is the height of arrogance to think that you are the cumulative of all human, cultural and evolutionary improvement. That is to me to believe. That you are a superior race. Like you think that you can't do better than who you are .

And so we believe very strongly in okay, creating another generation. But the problem is there is always a. Vested advantage that people have if they have been in the system for longer. If you look at the world today, this is why you often have these old stogy people in positions of power. It's why when you look at the Congress of the Senate and the President, it's increasingly an aging demographic.

Do you really want these people living forever? Do you really want the boomers potentially control human civilization for the rest of human civilization? Now they might be doing that whether or not we have life extension if they screw up enough.

The way we view life extensionist versus non-life extensionist is that they are individuals. If their job is to maintain an ancient Athenian fleet, Their plan to do that is to take every board of the fleet, dip it in resin, have it stay exactly the way it is for 5,000 years.

Whereas the intergenerational improvement people, they see the job as to regularly replace the ships with new models and what that means is that when you go 500 years into the future, one is a fleet to Athenian warships and the other is a modern warley with submarines and aircraft carriers And, yep.

So what you're missing is what a life extensionist would say is, oh, you're implying that I who plans to live forever will not be iteratively improving myself. I will be improving my biology, I'll be improving my mind. But the problem with that kind of stance is ultimately if that's what you're doing, you are changing so much that ultimately biologically and mim medically, you will not be the same person We are not.

For the most part, the same people we were when we were five years old. That person is long gone. And so the idea that you wouldn't just follow a far more efficient pathway and have kids or, pass on your ideas to other people and let those ideas strengthen themselves through different perspectives and different bodies is ridiculous.

Like, why would you? Why would you undergo these crazy interventions to somehow iterably improve, technically in the same body or technically in a discontinued string when you could just do the system that has worked

for Millennium? I love that point so much. And so to use the analogy I was using before.

It would be like the person who's no, I'm not dipping all the board in resin. What I'm doing is like technologically upgrading the ships and everything like that. So in 500 years the ship that used to be a trireme will now be a modern submarine or an aircraft carrier. Exactly. And your point being, so you've functionally done nothing.

You haven't preserved anything. So why are you so afraid to give another generation a shot? And I think the answer is transparent. The answer is that they don't really plan to change that much. They want to maintain some level of continuity with who they are today. And if we look historically, generations just don't do that.

People very rarely after, and I don't expect to myself, after I am 50 or 60, do I really expect myself to change or update my beliefs that much? No, hold

on. We actually, we have plans for that. Like we plan, for example, when we feel like we are starting to. Mim medically and mentally ossify, that's when we go hard on psychedelics.

Because that's when the gullibility versus open-mindedness trade off starts to be worth it for us, and when in which we're okay with being a little bit more gullible in exchange for responsibility.

Absolutely. And I think. There are ways around this, and this is one of the things that Life Extensionist will say.

They'll say if you extend young age until later in life, people's mental ossification won't happen in the way it happens with existing people today. And I think that is a hypothesis, but I think we will find that hypothesis is wrong as soon as life extension is invented. And I'd actually love it if life Extensionist could take a stand if it turns out that people don't actually update their beliefs that much when they're able to stay young for longer.

Do you then say, okay, in that scenario, life extension is bad and we should stop it. And the answer is no, you don't because you don't really

believe that. But Malcolm, you're focusing on the wrong thing completely. This is not about mental ossification. This is about adverse incentives. The primary reason why life extension is non-beneficial to populations is the cumulative power, wealth, and advantages that someone gains with time.

So the more you are alive, the longer you are alive, especially if you're successful and wealthy enough to afford life extension. Which let's be clear, this is something that only the wealthy you're going to be able to afford. We're seeing in the United States, we're seeing earth and

false

dichotomy.

I don't think no. Wealthy we're seeing lifespan fall down. Right now, I think only if you are wealthy and educated, let's the benefit of the doubt, let's say. Okay, let's say that anyone's able to do it, but the longer you are living, the more you have to defend. The more stuff you have, the more incentive you have to take what you've built and keep it.

So now it's you versus a bunch of other people who might supplant you, who might take you know things you want, who might use up resources that you want access to, who might take attention that you want. . Who might erode your political influence? What are you going to do? You are going to try to shut them out.

The reason why we have a gerontocracy now is that the people who are in power now have been defending their positions of power. They're not letting new people come in and take their place. And when you have life extension, you have people who are very strongly incentivized. To prevent younger generations.

New ideas, new perspectives. People also who very importantly, have grown up in the new modern world of that time and know better than those who grew up in a different world. What that new world needs. Those people are being kept out of positions of power and influence. They're being prevented from building new solutions, and that is extremely dangerous to human society.

So as much as I am against coercive measures to stop people from doing what they want to with their bodies, I do think that society on the whole is made much weaker If you have a ruling class of very old people.

I think that's a really excellent point, and I want to expand on it because I think a lot of people can look at this and they're like that's not intrinsically true.

But it is intrinsically true. If you have built your power within an existing social or economic system. If you've built your wealth within an existing social or economic system, you lose. If that system changes, you are. Always and intrinsically, or almost always and intrinsically motivated to prevent improvement of the social and economic systems within which you reside.

Whereas the youth are always motivated to change those systems because they benefit most from those changes, and that is what allows for civilizational advancement. In addition, when people say you'll be able to stay mentally younger forever. That is true. But to Simone's point, you never get to grow up again within the new iterative social system that has been built.

You can really only have one set of formative years, one set of five to the age of 15. You might be able to stay 20 forever. But you're not gonna want to increasingly revert to the age of five and then start over again. I don't think that's a society that any life extensionist is looking to create.

When

we see the way that our kids are engaging with technology like ai, it gives them a perspective of AI that we could never replicate in ourselves.

Even if I was able to stay 20 forever, a five-year-old growing up alongside AI is going to have an understanding for how that technology can change our society. That a permanent 20 year old vampire person is never going to. And when you prevent this intergenerational baton passing of power, what you're really preventing is societal advancement and social experimentation and the motivation for those things at the structural level of society.

Yeah. And what we've seen a lot of people say on the life extension side, because I'm trying to present their arguments as best I can, it's not fair for us to just strawman them. Yeah. Is okay. I will admit that maybe we're not gonna completely memt and biologically replace ourselves. The whole point of life extension is we wanna keep some element of ourselves is continuous.

Okay? Grant that, and we also admit that being very old will lead to some adverse incentives that people will be incentivized to accumulate power, accumulate influence, and entrench themselves in these strongholds of power and prevent new generations from coming into influence things.

But don't worry. Will just create laws that force essentially term limits and positions of power, or after a certain number of years, you have to give all your wealth to the next generation. And I think it's very naive to hold those views because when has that ever worked? When has power ever been passed to people and those people promise?

Oh yeah. No. We promise. Yeah. This is just temporary. Maybe there's some precedent for it, but

yeah. It's really hard to imagine. I am even trying to think of maybe there's some kind of blockchain.

Connected to whatever, like life extension biology they have where if literally their wealth doesn't transfer out of a certain account by a certain age, then like their biological anti-aging thing turns off. But they would find a way around that, they would find a way to create shell companies that hold the money.

I I just, it's the incentives are too strong and, that, that's the, those are the only arguments that I've seen that come close to defending this position.

And also, I just can't understand how somebody could think it's better than the system we have now, especially with the genetic changes that are happening in that system.

So when you have a kid, you know a lot of that kid sociological profiles influenced by your genetic makeup, but you're getting to choose. Anyone you want in a world to, because unless you think you're perfect, which I don't, I chose a partner based on somebody who filled the flaws that I felt in myself.

So I get to one, mix my DNA with anyone I was able to convince to marry me in the world. The person who I think is infinitely better than me. And then I get to have this next iteration of myself, give them any childhood I want to give them. Hopefully give them access to a better education than I had access to prevent them from having any of the hangups that I may have developed in my own childhood by giving them this better childhood and then better than all that, throughout their childhood, they get the chance to say, Hey dad, this thing that you've come to believe is wrong.

They are not affected by my biases. And one of the great things about research into biases that you see over and over again is knowing that you have biases does not prevent them from affecting you. Knowing that something is like a psychological trick in your brain doesn't make you immune to it.

And see you have all these rationalists in AA people who are like, oh, I've studied all the way. People come up with biases. And it's yeah, but did you also study that knowledge doesn't protect you from those biases? Hardly at all, because that's in the research as well. What protects you from them is the intergenerational way that we transfer identity, which is to say you're not classing too hard to identity

and I, I think this is another really important thing that you are not afraid of death. You understand that your life is to build a better future for the next and for future generation. That you have a purpose with this life to prepare the future generations to be better than you and, and to understand and have the humility to understand that I will never be able to improve on myself as much as my kids can because I can't see my own flaws in the same way that someone you tried to raise can see your flaws and my God, we all see our parents' flaws.

Yeah.

We also see ourselves becoming our parents, which is terrifying. So I dunno. But I think a lot of it comes down to how we perceive the concept of self. And when you choose to define yourself more broadly by your. Your family or your community or your children, whatever it might be that is where you become less afraid of death.

And I wonder if we were to pull, and I'm sure people have actually, it'd be fun to look at this research communities that are more family oriented, like in the Latin America. There's so much more identification with family. I am my family. We are, we are together. If you were to compare.

Interest in life extension across those cultures. I think you would see especially very atomized cultures that are highly individualistic as being the most interested in life extension because they don't see their descendants as them, they don't see their family members as them, they don't see their cultures as them, they don't see their religions as that well, if they have religions at all.

So the only thing they can clinging to is themselves. And so I think in the end, life extension is more it reveals more about how someone views themselves than it reveals about like their interest in technology or their interest in the future, or their interest even in being in the future.

I think what you and I yeah, feel just as connected to the future and just as excited about the future a thousand years on. As someone in the life extension to community who genuinely believes that they, the continuous they will exist in that future. Yeah.

The great thing about, the advancement in AI and stuff like that is our descendants.

It doesn't mean that we really totally die when we die. If our descendants really wanted to ask for any sort of advice we had to give them, they could just ask an AI model trained on our books, or depending on how people end up getting digitized with computers and stuff in the future.

You don't lose really information when people die. You lose this like broad sense of information and broad sense of perspective. But hopefully if they had something useful to say and they were smart, they found a way to condense that information to something that could be passed forward into future generations.

But I think realistically, but we have to say probably won't matter to future generations that much. How much do you care to ask your great-great grandparents about what you should do today or where society should go? Their world perspective was so different from ours. Why are we trying to ossify that?

Yeah. And there's a, there's another part of it too, which I think is how we perceive our lives now. Yeah. Like I see every day as a different existence and we've talked about this before, like I sort of see every iteration of myself as a standalone, extremely ephemeral blip of consciousness that is going to disappear and be replaced with time and every new experience.

Every, cell that is sloughed off and a new one that is regenerated, that is a death and a new beginning. And the person that I was even five years ago, like I, we can go back and look at all the YouTube videos of us talking and I feel like I'm looking at a complete stranger. Yeah. I am definitely not the same person.

And so to me, I. Even if I didn't have this view about being part of a long, unbroken chain of ancestors and descendants that I'm excited to be a part of, I think I would still see life extension as a bit of a farce because even within a normal human's lifespan, totally in the absence of any technological intervention, There is constant death and rebirth and we are definitely not the same people.

We are definitely not an unbroken chain. So this idea that somehow we ever could be, it's chasing after something entirely impossible.

When this comes to how you see continuation or the existence of a thing and the ship is easiest example is one we always used to love to use here, which is you have this old wooden tri room, traveling around the Mediterranean and boards keep rotting and it keeps replacing them with new boards.

And then people ask, okay, at the end of the journey, it's all new boards, it's at the same ship. And then they ask okay, suppose somebody had been following the ship of Cs and taking all the boards that were thrown overboard and then rebuilt an exact copy of that ship. With those boards now, which is the real ship.

And your body is doing this with memories, with cells, with perceptions. The real answer is it depends on which definition you've used for continuation, which is the real ship. And to some extent, it doesn't matter which is the quote unquote real ship, right?

If things change iteratively over time. Yeah. So then the question becomes, okay. How do you really define the ship of cis? The ship of FES is defined by its purpose. Why it exists a thing to move people in the same way that fleet was defined by its purpose, and that the person who decided to preserve every aspect of the fleet instead of iteratively improve it over generations, defeated the purpose of the fleet by trying to maintain a sense of continuity within it, and it's the same as identity.

Why do you exist? You exist. To create a more prosperous future for our species. Your existence is defined not by your ability to indulge in the self, but by your ability to contribute to the collective human tradition and identity.

And that is always best done through intergenerational improvement in the same way that the sis, as soon as you let go of the idea that who you are as a continuous entity really exists in any meaningful context to begin with. Then you can say, oh, then what I am is my purpose, and if what I am is my purpose, do I better serve that purpose by living for a really long time?

Or do I better serve that purpose through intergenerational identity transfer? Yeah.

Or through creating a new culture or through creating a business or fueling a political movement.

If what we're describing doesn't feel intuitive to you at all.

What I would encourage you to do if you're watching this or listening to this, is write yourself a letter in the future or leave yourself a voice memo for the future. So this all the time, I do this all the time. It's really fun. I think the whole, like my sense of continuous identity fell apart the first time I did this to myself.

And it was a school exercise in our freshman year. Of oh, now actually it was in middle school, it's like when I was 13 years old, we were supposed to write a letter to ourselves that we would open just as we were about to graduate from high school and either enter the career world or go to college.

And reading, a letter from myself around 10 years in the past made me realize just how much I really wasn't the same person anymore. And I could understand. The interest to that person. I could understand that we were both in the same kind of boat and interested in a lot of the same aims which of course, was selfish betterment, right?

Oh, I hope these things for myself and I hope those things for myself, we just weren't the same person. So try doing that. Like honestly, a voice memo, a letter a video you'll find that. This may change the way that you view life extension. And I honestly wish I could model the other side better.

I don't like when we, have just a sort of one-sided.

It's more they think that they can always do better for themselves. I can continue to improve and the more time I have, the better I can make things. And also free humans from the suffering of death, death to, I, I think people with a limited perspective is the worst thing that can happen to a human.

And I think that the forgoing of sort of self-identity as something that's meaningful was a really big shift for me that I didn't make fully until meeting you, Simone. And it was one of the big changes that you had on me. I completely shed my identity when we married, and that gave me the opportunity to really redefine for myself and my family what identity means and the way that we see it culturally, our family, the way we raise our kids, seeing it the way that we see it ourselves.

Is that when you are young, you are at the lowest level of identity, which is to be an individual, and that is the weakest, most pathetic form of identity. Then as you get older, you get married and you become something more, you become a partnership and your identity combines with another person. And I think this is something that people, we, in emails, we often get each other's emails and we interchangeably use each other's names.

And it's the same with our Twitter account and the same with our authorship, and the same as the way we do CEO EShip, because we really consider ourselves as two faces of the same identity. In a very meaningful sense that I think other people may underestimate. And then you become a family, which is a different form of identity.

You move away from even the idea of a partnership and you become a guide to something bigger, but without controlling or directly influencing that thing. And then you pass on to the highest form of identity. Which is to be a memory and the impact you had on your family and society. So life is a transition away from being trapped in the singular meat shell to being a more expansive concept.

And it is almost like a being floridly trapped at a early stage of development from the perspective of our family culture . To genuinely fear your own death, outside of your own death happening before you can complete what you wanted to complete in life.

And that is something I fear constantly but that fear goes away with everything I complete, every kid I have, every time I put together some aspect of their education system so it could function even after I die. Another one of our books that we put together so that they would have some guidance if we died, I see it as a list of tasks I have to do before I am free to die without consequences.

Yeah. It's, but it's also very, I think, very comforting. I think it's difficult. Yeah. And scary to be afraid of death I wouldn't even say it's like an important ending. I would just say it's almost ridiculous. It's a transition in a cycle. It's not even that much of a transition.

It's just it's, it's irrelevant. Um, It is just, it is something, but I, I think that's also folds into our mechanistic view of the universe that everything that will happen has already happened and everything that has happened is happening. Would that be a fun one

to talk about in a video in the near future?

Determinism? Yeah. With that kind of view. It's weird to be afraid of any single moment that may have happened or that has happened. And I guess that view combined with our sense of self makes us very unafraid of that fleeting nature of life. But what I think is also interesting is that despite that you very much struggle, like many ambitious people do with.

What you've accomplished so far in your life. Like I think you are very, it's a tick clock. You're very, yeah. You're very aware of your mortality. I'm very aware of my mortality. I'm more concerned about,

but if I need to play with cheat codes to complete the things that I want to complete, then maybe I'm not good enough to properly judge what needs to be completed.

Yeah. Yeah. But so you think you like the artificial we don't have to say artificial, but you like, The constraint. You think that it's useful because you find it motivating? I guess there is that, studies have found that when people are given a deadline, when people, every person

could enact everything they wanted to upon the world, there's a bunch of people with different hypotheses about what's best for the future of our species and everything like that.

If everyone could just enact whatever they wanted to there, there would be a lot of conflicting things. So to an extent, it's a competition of ideas and cultures to say that you get this sort of limited time here, very limited time here. And if your ideas are good, presumably you will be more effective at seeing them enacted on the world or within your family in the same way that.

If we aren't creating a good culture for our kids, they can leave it. And that's a beautiful thing. That's a great thing about intergenerational.

Yeah. I also think that studies have shown that when you give someone two weeks to complete a project, they complete it in two weeks. When you give them two years to complete the exactly the same project.

They take two years, so yeah. Yeah. Having infinite time doesn't necessarily help you. If anything, it delays society's receipt of your hardware. That's a

really interesting point. I just noticed all of my friends who are life extensionist after they became Art at Life Extensionist, they have achieved almost nothing in

their lives.

Oh no. Interesting. Oh, I wonder if that's a number

of them were successful CEOs before they jumped on the life extension train, but after they jumped on the life extension train, very few of them have started successful companies or movements or ideologies.

Do you think the assumption is I'll just create that after I've figured out life extension?

It's like that thing with Genie my first wish Yeah. Is to get infinite more wishes.

Yeah. And then your wishes get terrible.

Yeah. Cuz when you only have three wishes, you've gotta make 'em count. If.

Interesting. Well, I love chatting with you Simone, and I love that you have enlightened me so much on this topic cuz this is one of the areas where you have really influenced my world perspective.

And it was not like this before. I was very much a life extensionist sort of person before meeting you and I pulled

you into the death cult.

You uplifted me into the death cult um, wonder. But the death one hope will win because these crusty, I mean if it's mortals versus Immortals, we're not the mortals.

The mortals will always win cuz we're not afraid of change, we're not afraid of death. And they are, and it's fundamentally, they're fears that limit them. I love that. Um, and, and, And I mean, it's also fundamental until the supremacist movements always fail. They think they're better than anything that they could create.

Mm-hmm. And to me that is the, the height of arrogance. Um, and, and, and, And it is that arrogance that will blind them in why the mortals will always crush them.

Then may we burn bright and die young but live to speak another day. Malcolm,

the flame that burns half as bright burns half as long, twice as bright burns.

The flame that burns twice as bright burns half as long.

Beautiful.

That's Blade Runner. He says that in the, anyway,

I love you on that note. You're amazing. I love you too. I love you too.

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