Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to Philosophy on the Fringes, a podcast that explores the philosophical dimensions of the strange and the mundane.
Speaker: We're your hosts, Megan Fritz and Frank Cabrera.
Speaker: On today's episode, we're talking about biohacking.
Speaker: Should biohackers fear death?
Speaker: Would immortality be desirable?
Speaker: And is the human condition worth preserving?
Speaker: Hi, and welcome back to Philosophy on the Fringes.
Speaker: Thanks for joining us for episode 17.
Speaker: Moving on to a new topic.
Speaker: We're talking today about biohacking.
Speaker: And this will probably be where after this, we're taking a short hiatus to have a baby.
Speaker: But we hope to be back probably near like the end of the summer, something like that.
Speaker: It's not going to be a huge hiatus, just a short one while we...
Speaker: you know, get our bearings and get more than two hours of sleep a day and stuff like that.
Speaker: But I'm excited to talk about biohacking, talk about the peaks of physical wellness that at this point in my physical existence, I can really only see as a very far off dream.
Speaker: If you follow Megan's Twitter, you'll know already that she's tweeted about this topic several times.
Speaker: So she's really excited to talk about this.
Speaker: I am.
Speaker: I'm really into this.
Speaker: I shouldn't say I'm into biohacking.
Speaker: In no sense am I into biohacking as like a personal thing that I do.
Speaker: I don't.
Speaker: I don't hack my biology pretty much in any way.
Speaker: But I am interested in this as a phenomenon.
Speaker: So I guess it gets a lot of media attention, but it's not like there's a ton of biohackers out there.
Speaker: So let's start by talking about what is biohacking.
Speaker: Biohacking is kind of what it sounds like.
Speaker: It's taking measures in some ways to improve yourself, your biology, your physical fitness, your physical well-being, I guess in ways that kind of resemble what we might call life hacks, things that make it easier to function better to some extent.
Speaker: There's a really helpful article that I'll link in the description.
Speaker: in the bibliography for this episode in Forbes on this, where they actually distinguish four different types of biohacking.
Speaker: So I'll talk about these really briefly, and then I'll say which ones we're mostly going to focus on.
Speaker: So they know that almost any tactic could be considered biohacking,
Speaker: If you're employing it with the goal of enhancing your biology in some way.
Speaker: But there's four distinct types that at least that they four categories that they name.
Speaker: I think they're useful.
Speaker: Lifestyle biohacking, which is just making positive health and behavior choices.
Speaker: So like maybe in that sense, I'm a biohacker.
Speaker: Yeah, I wonder like so like yesterday, you know, I had 100 grams of protein for lunch.
Speaker: Like what was I was I biohacking?
Speaker: Maybe lifestyle biohacking?
Speaker: Wow, it was lifestyle hacking.
Speaker: I didn't even know it.
Speaker: Yeah, Frank's also been going to the gym.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: That's like a lifestyle biohack.
Speaker: Hacking my muscles.
Speaker: Right, right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So it says dietary shifts, breath work, exercise.
Speaker: Molecular biohacking involves the use of natural and synthetic molecules that help shift one's biology.
Speaker: So, for instance, taking supplements.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So it's something that has like a biological effect at like...
Speaker: the molecular level.
Speaker: Biologics, which it says are cellular or biological products that are meant to improve or enhance biology.
Speaker: So like things that you ingest or inject like stem cells, things that are delivered intravenously like IVs.
Speaker: There's these like boutique IV infusion places that you can go that are popping up everywhere where you can get like immune system IV infusion.
Speaker: and just get all these things that are supposed to improve your immune system blasted into your veins.
Speaker: And then technology biohacking.
Speaker: So these involve wearables.
Speaker: So things like smartwatches that track all of these different markers of health or wearing blood sugar monitors, which normally is only done by people with diabetes, but is now being done by a lot of people who don't have diabetes to keep it at a level that they want, as well as using machines,
Speaker: like hyperbaric chambers or electromagnetic stimulators, or what we're going to talk a little bit more about later, using AI to actually craft a custom plan for your physical improvement based on just like unimaginable amounts of data.
Speaker: So those are the four kinds of biohacking.
Speaker: I think the one, probably the one we'll focus most on today is the technology biohacking.
Speaker: And maybe, maybe to some extent, the, I guess, molecular as well.
Speaker: Lifestyle biohacking, I kind of want to say, doesn't really count for what we're talking about.
Speaker: Because it doesn't seem that interesting because it seems too broad of a category, you think.
Speaker: Right, right, right.
Speaker: Like, I don't want to call it biohacking to be like, I'm going to start eating less sugar.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And only as like a joke, though.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: I'm hacking today.
Speaker: I'm eating less sugar.
Speaker: Right, right, right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So one question I have, Megan, it seems like you've studied this topic more than I have.
Speaker: How common is biohacking?
Speaker: Is it just a thing that millionaires and weird people do, or is it really becoming more common?
Speaker: So it's still really, as far as I can tell, it's really not common.
Speaker: And part of that is because like you just hinted at, really actually doing biohacking in the sense that I think is a meaningful way to talk about it is extremely expensive and very, very time consuming.
Speaker: You have to be spending...
Speaker: just loads of money on supplements.
Speaker: You have to be, you know, somehow gathering all of this biological data on yourself through tons and tons of testing in order to even have enough data to do biohacking, you know, right, quote unquote, that you need to be wealthy and you really need to have quite a lot of extra time.
Speaker: Now, I'm sure you can get someone out there to tell you, no, anyone can biohack.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So I think in some of the interviews I've watched of some of these biohackers.
Speaker: So Brian Johnston, is that the guy's name?
Speaker: Brian Johnson.
Speaker: Johnson.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Otherwise known as Zero.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: On Twitter.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: So I remember seeing an interview of his on ABC.
Speaker: He did he did say, well, I expect this to be more available to ordinary consumers soon.
Speaker: So that's sort of like the goal here.
Speaker: And I guess that does make sense.
Speaker: It does seem like there would be a big market for anti-aging technologies.
Speaker: I mean, just think of like, you know, the skincare market, how that's exploded.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: And all of that.
Speaker: Like, you always see advertisements and articles about anti-aging.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So, right.
Speaker: So as a general rule, technology gets cheaper over time.
Speaker: The problem with trying to just straightforwardly apply that to biohacking, though, is that biohacking, at least how the people are going to talk about are doing it, is not it's not just using particular medications, drugs, vitamins, technology is also a highly regimented schedule.
Speaker: So Brian Johnson has like a lifestyle, right?
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Calling it a lifestyle, I think, would even be like an understatement.
Speaker: So he is now the CEO of a company called Blueprint.
Speaker: And what this company does is for quite a large sum of money, they do take all of this biophysical data from you and use a particular algorithm to spit out a custom blueprint for improving your life.
Speaker: genetic age, as they call it, along all these different parameters.
Speaker: But what it requires of you is a kind of like day-to-day plan that like quite honestly looks insane.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Sleeping for like very weird amounts of times at weird hours, exercising, you know, really an amount that would be prohibitive for almost anyone, eating only between like two hours out of the day.
Speaker: Yeah, easy schedule to keep to when you don't really have a job.
Speaker: Exactly right.
Speaker: So there's not only the actual like monetary cost of the technology and the medication, but there's also just you just need to be only doing that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So, yeah, in your view, like what sort of philosophical questions does biohacking raise or what sort of philosophical implications can we derive from it?
Speaker: Like what is the new and burgeoning field of philosophy of biohacking look like?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So if you go and watch any interviews or read any interviews with these people who are doing biohacking, a very obvious and prominent theme emerges, which is that for a lot of these people doing this, they have one goal and that goal is to not die.
Speaker: And in fact, there is a interview with Brian Johnson, which I'll probably link in this bibliography as well, on YouTube where he just says this outright.
Speaker: He says, this is my goal.
Speaker: My goal is to not die.
Speaker: And he thinks that that's a good goal, that that should be everyone's goal, and that that is what justifies biohacking as a way of living.
Speaker: So the goal is to not die.
Speaker: So there's questions that it raises about the goodness of immortality, about the possibilities of immortality.
Speaker: Is this something that we should be aiming for?
Speaker: There's questions that it raises about the trade-off of quality versus quantity of life.
Speaker: And that's just the ones that immediately come to mind just when you ask people what they're up to.
Speaker: Because if you ask most people walking down the street, you know, what their main goal is in life, most of them are not going to say, don't die.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Interesting.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So in my class, in one of my classes recently, I didn't teach biohacking, but we did talk about anti-aging technologies.
Speaker: And that naturally led to a discussion of like the goodness and or badness of death, as you just mentioned.
Speaker: So this is actually a topic that I quite like.
Speaker: One of the first classes I ever taught in my career was the meaning of life.
Speaker: I taught this when I was 25.
Speaker: What does a 25-year-old know about the meaning of life?
Speaker: But yes, I taught this class.
Speaker: We talked about this question of whether and why death is bad.
Speaker: And the philosopher that's most famous for talking about this is Epicurus.
Speaker: So Epicurus has this
Speaker: famous argument, Epicurus the ancient philosopher, about why death is not bad.
Speaker: So here's what he says.
Speaker: So he says, Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that when we are, death is not come, and when death is come, we are not.
Speaker: It is nothing, then, either to the living or to the dead.
Speaker: For with the living, it is not, and the dead exist no longer.
Speaker: So Epicurus has this kind of comprehensive philosophy of life, and he wants to try to come up with a philosophy to help us deal with our fears.
Speaker: And in Epicurus's view, one of the biggest fears we have is fear of death.
Speaker: And the biohackers seem to have a fear of death.
Speaker: Epicurus would say, well, you're being irrational, actually, because death is not bad.
Speaker: So there's like a number of ways you might understand this argument, but I think the strongest way of understanding what Epicurus is up to here is saying basically that you don't exist when you're dead.
Speaker: In order for something to be bad for you, you need to exist.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And since you don't exist when you're dead, it can't be good.
Speaker: It can't be bad.
Speaker: It's just nothing to you.
Speaker: We can't ascribe any properties to you once you don't exist.
Speaker: So just it makes no sense to say that death is bad.
Speaker: So maybe the dying process you might fear that can sometimes be painful.
Speaker: But Epicurus doesn't think that means death is something that should be feared.
Speaker: So yeah, you're familiar with this argument, right, Megan?
Speaker: So what do you think about Epicurus' argument?
Speaker: Is this convincing?
Speaker: Like, would this convince the biohackers?
Speaker: Like, hey, you're making a huge rational mistake.
Speaker: Like, you fear this thing that is not bad for you.
Speaker: You're investing all this time and money into biohacking for no good reason because death, the thing you're trying to prevent, actually isn't bad.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So on this topic, I will let the biohackers speak for themselves because I think that I think I have an idea of the argument that they would give in response because this is the kind of thing that I've heard them say in interviews.
Speaker: So what how I take the argument of the biohackers for the badness of death is kind of similar to Mills proof of utilitarianism,
Speaker: where John Stuart Mill, he's trying to give a proof that utilitarianism is the correct moral philosophy, that hedonism is the correct value theory, that in fact, all that really is valuable is happiness.
Speaker: And to do that, he starts off by asking, what is the thing that everyone wants?
Speaker: And he says, well, you know, ultimately what everyone wants is happiness.
Speaker: You could name other things that
Speaker: that you might want or think are good, but you only want them or think they're good because they make you happy.
Speaker: So this is basically what the biohackers say.
Speaker: They say what everyone wants is not to die.
Speaker: Even if, say, you're really depressed, maybe you do feel like you want to die, that's like an aberrant state.
Speaker: That's like a kind of sickness.
Speaker: But when you're well, when you're thinking well, when you're your best self, what you want is not to die.
Speaker: And so this kind of functions as a way of proving like that is the human good or that's at least one of them because everyone wants it.
Speaker: So it's just like a matter of having our desires frustrated.
Speaker: So I have a desire.
Speaker: It's future directed.
Speaker: My desire is not to die.
Speaker: When I die, my desire is frustrated.
Speaker: Therefore, it's bad for me.
Speaker: That's how I understand their argument for it.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I guess this is similar to like a standard kind of response to Epicurus' so-called deprivation account of death's badness.
Speaker: So the philosopher...
Speaker: Contemporary philosopher Shelley Kagan writes about this.
Speaker: It's bad for you even though you're dead because you're missing out on goods you otherwise would have had had you not died.
Speaker: So it's a kind of comparative badness.
Speaker: You don't exist so nothing can hurt you, but in dying you miss out on things you would have had were you to remain alive.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But we run into some similar issues that one runs into within other facets of thinking about utilitarianism compared to utilitarianism again, which is that we can't actually like predict what someone who dies may have missed out on.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Maybe they miss out on experiencing the heat death of the universe.
Speaker: That seems good to me.
Speaker: I would want to miss out on that personally.
Speaker: So it kind of is based in this idea that you're missing out on – there's more of a sense that you're missing out on getting things you want than there is that you're missing out on things you would actually want to avoid.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So you mentioned earlier that these biohackers are using AI.
Speaker: So I'm sure there's more advanced things than chat GPT.
Speaker: I wouldn't trust chat GPT to create an exercise regimen and a dietary regimen for me.
Speaker: But maybe there's more advanced chatbots out there that are better at this stuff.
Speaker: So they have a great optimism in AI and also like an optimism about the future too, right?
Speaker: Because you wouldn't want to live for a really long time unless you thought the future that you would be living in would be worthwhile.
Speaker: So there's a kind of like a really, really...
Speaker: kind of utopianism almost, a kind of almost like a 19th century notion of progress.
Speaker: I feel like we're seeing this 19th century notion of the we're progressing, things are getting better.
Speaker: And so we should want to be around for that.
Speaker: So it seems like the biohackers are very optimistic about technology and the future.
Speaker: Yeah, a thousand percent.
Speaker: And they're very, very aware of this.
Speaker: In fact, in that YouTube interview that I mentioned with Brian Johnson, he says this exact thing.
Speaker: He says, look, the reason that this is rational now is only because of the place in history we're at.
Speaker: He says that the question that we should be thinking of, not as humans, but as a specific generation, is what he says, what to do on the eve of super intelligence.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And that is the question that should drive us, again, not qua human, but qua this very particular 21st century generation.
Speaker: Because he thinks, you know, if we were a century ago, this wouldn't make sense at all.
Speaker: But yeah, you're right.
Speaker: It requires this optimism and this idea that really within the next decade or two, we're going to like figure out artificial intelligence to the point where like maybe our physical bodies aren't necessary for continued consciousness, continued existence at all.
Speaker: I suppose that's what they would say then about the interesting fact that in the ancient world, a lot of the philosophers converged on this view that death isn't bad.
Speaker: Socrates says the same thing in the Apology.
Speaker: Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher, thinks that death isn't bad either.
Speaker: So they might say, well, yeah, those guys thought that because they lived in a terrible world.
Speaker: They lived in the pre-modern world before all the great technology.
Speaker: But now we're different.
Speaker: We should want to remain around.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: And that's exactly what they say, that almost all of, you know, world philosophies, world religions are concerned with the same thing they're concerned with, which is how to deal with mortality, given that it's so terrible, but that biohackers, rather than, you know, these other philosophies or religions, not only have something actually like positive to do about it, but also don't need to, you know, bother themselves with like delusions or things like that.
Speaker: So let's say that like the, you know, majority view of death is right, that it's bad.
Speaker: I think that's probably right.
Speaker: Like if you polled everyone on Earth, they're not probably going to say death is good, right?
Speaker: Without qualification.
Speaker: I mean, maybe like I think people would distinguish between like an untimely death versus a timely death.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: The untimely deaths are bad.
Speaker: The timely deaths are at least not bad or something like that.
Speaker: Or they're not as bad, I guess.
Speaker: I mean, Simone de Beauvoir is well known for talking about how there is no timely, there's no point at which death becomes good.
Speaker: But right.
Speaker: So let's say that that's right, that there's at least some sense in which death is bad.
Speaker: Does that mean that immortality would be good?
Speaker: That seems to be the assumption.
Speaker: Death is bad, so immortality would be good.
Speaker: I'm not convinced by this, though.
Speaker: A lot of other philosophers, more contemporary ones even, have diverged on this question.
Speaker: It's not obvious to me that just because death is bad, immortality would be good.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, there's another topic that I talked about in my Meaning of Life class way back in the day.
Speaker: I wish I could teach this class again.
Speaker: I feel like I would do a much better job with some wisdom under my belt.
Speaker: Nine years of wisdom.
Speaker: Nine years of wisdom.
Speaker: But one topic we talked about in this class was, yeah, whether is immortality desirable?
Speaker: And this is this pretty well-known paper in academic philosophy by the mid 20th century philosopher Bernard Williams.
Speaker: He was primarily a moral philosopher.
Speaker: He wrote a paper called The Macropolis Case, Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality.
Speaker: And in this paper, a very complex paper, he talks about different ways in which immortality might be realized.
Speaker: But the main argument is that just immortality is not desirable.
Speaker: We should not want to live an eternal human life.
Speaker: So here's Bernard Williams on this question.
Speaker: He says, it is not possible to find an unending, supposedly satisfying state or activity that
Speaker: which would not rightly prove boring to anyone who remained conscious of himself and who had acquired character, interests, tastes, and impatiences in the course of living already a finite life.
Speaker: He says later on the paper that an endless life would be a meaningless one.
Speaker: The reason why this is for Williams is that it's very difficult to imagine an immortal human existence that meets two conditions.
Speaker: One is the identity condition.
Speaker: We have to remain ourselves over time.
Speaker: So if, like, we become someone entirely different or some creature entirely different, we don't retain our personal identity over time.
Speaker: It can't be good for us.
Speaker: So a kind of immortal existence where you, your body is like a vessel for a series of different reincarnated souls, that's not going to satisfy the identity condition.
Speaker: That's not you.
Speaker: That's a new soul.
Speaker: And then...
Speaker: Second condition is, it has to be attractive, right?
Speaker: It has to be good, the attractiveness condition.
Speaker: What he thinks, there's a kind of dilemma here.
Speaker: You can't meet both conditions, right?
Speaker: Either your character, your interests, your life goals, your personality, desires, values, dispositions is going to stay the same or it changes.
Speaker: If it stays the same, you will eventually become bored.
Speaker: And not like bored in the sort of ordinary sense where you're like, oh, I don't know what to do today.
Speaker: I'm kind of bored.
Speaker: You're bored in this deep, chronic, terrible, existentially awful way.
Speaker: Like you're sitting in a prison cell and you have nothing to do.
Speaker: That's the kind of thing he's talking about.
Speaker: So either you'll become bored or you won't be identical to the person or have no reason to care about the future state because you'll be so different.
Speaker: So imagine every like thousand years in order to prevent the boredom problem, we like we wipe your mind so that you're fresh.
Speaker: You have amnesia.
Speaker: There Williams is going to say the identity condition is not met.
Speaker: I have no reason to care about future Frank in a thousand years who is completely disconnected to me.
Speaker: No desires, interest, character in common with me right now.
Speaker: So this is kind of dilemma.
Speaker: Either you'll be bored or you won't be you.
Speaker: And there's no way there's no way around this kind of dilemma.
Speaker: That's that's Williams's argument.
Speaker: So, yeah, interesting argument.
Speaker: There's been responses to it.
Speaker: What are your thoughts here, Megan?
Speaker: Yeah, so I really like every single thing that Williams writes.
Speaker: I think this is a fascinating argument.
Speaker: I do think that there is a weak point in here or at least something that needs worked out, though.
Speaker: So you can tell me what you think of this.
Speaker: I've always found this to be like a little bit of a weak point of this argument.
Speaker: It seems to me like boredom.
Speaker: is in some, not in a very deep way, but there's a sense in which it's a character flaw.
Speaker: Because if we find something valuable and enjoyable, that we cease to find it that way, you know, after experiencing it a thousand times, shows that like we have become less receptive to real properties it has.
Speaker: When ideally we wouldn't.
Speaker: We would keep accurately perceiving its qualities for like as long as we were engaging with it.
Speaker: Yeah, right.
Speaker: So one might wonder, what does Williams think is good?
Speaker: Well, I don't really know much about Williams' comprehensive philosophy.
Speaker: I guess he didn't really have a comprehensive philosophy.
Speaker: I think he's been called an anti-theorist or whatever, right?
Speaker: But he talks about, he makes a distinction between conditional desires and categorical desires in the paper, right?
Speaker: The conditional desires are the ones we have that are conditioned on our
Speaker: desiring to live.
Speaker: So I desire to eat eggs this morning because I have a pre-existing desire to keep going on.
Speaker: I wouldn't have the desire to eat eggs if I didn't have the pre-existing desire to keep living.
Speaker: And then we have these categorical desires, these desires that propel us forward in the future.
Speaker: They give us a reason to live.
Speaker: So one way of interpreting what you said is that, well, maybe I've lived so long that I lack categorical desires, but maybe I'm mistaken.
Speaker: I'm missing out on good things.
Speaker: I should have these categorical desires, but I don't because I have a character flaw.
Speaker: I should work to cultivate those categorical desires.
Speaker: I should work to cultivate continuing to have reasons to live, even though I've lived a thousand years.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Someone who talks about this is the, I guess he's like, he's like a Catholic theologian and like a fiction writer, G.K.
Speaker: Chesterton.
Speaker: But he writes about how like this seeming inability in young children to like get bored with things.
Speaker: They'll ask you to do something.
Speaker: We have a two-year-old, so we're very familiar with this.
Speaker: Ask her, she'll ask us to do things like 100 times and we just cannot believe that she wants to do it again.
Speaker: But like maybe that's because of a kind of lack of a certain vice that we have that she has not developed yet.
Speaker: Certainly she will, but she hasn't developed it yet.
Speaker: She can still get the same enjoyment because she's perceiving the same qualities in this activity over and over and over again.
Speaker: So like, I mean, maybe that's not right.
Speaker: Maybe there's some other reason that we start to feel boredom at these things, but it's at least a possibility.
Speaker: Yeah, right.
Speaker: The cynical explanation is, well, yeah, she's a baby.
Speaker: That's why she doesn't get bored.
Speaker: But maybe she's right.
Speaker: Maybe we should be enthralled by building that tower with the blocks for the thousands time.
Speaker: Maybe we should continue to feel thrilled by that the way she does.
Speaker: So this kind of reminds me of one response to Williams.
Speaker: So the philosopher John Martin Fisher, who we talked a lot about on the near-death experiences episode, he wrote a response to Williams called Why Immortality is Not So Bad.
Speaker: And part of his response hinges on this distinction he makes between what he calls repeatable pleasures and self-exhausting pleasures.
Speaker: So I might want to climb Mount Everest.
Speaker: If I do it, I probably only want to do it one time.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: I get a lot of thrill out of it.
Speaker: I don't want to do it again.
Speaker: That's a self-exhausting pleasure.
Speaker: But then there's things that you want to do multiple times.
Speaker: Go to the art museum.
Speaker: Listen to that song you like.
Speaker: Eat Thai food.
Speaker: These are repeatable pleasures.
Speaker: So Fisher says, hey, look, maybe Williams is wrong.
Speaker: Maybe we wouldn't get bored.
Speaker: There are these repeatable pleasures.
Speaker: We can vary up the pleasures.
Speaker: There's a lot to do.
Speaker: in life.
Speaker: And so maybe immortality wouldn't be bad.
Speaker: So he's putting the point in terms of pleasures.
Speaker: I think you'd want to put it a little bit differently.
Speaker: But it's a similar sort of idea.
Speaker: Yeah, one could say that, like, well, with enough time, I can make more and more things into repeatable pleasures by just, like, really, you know, focusing on on, like, the good in them, like I should be doing.
Speaker: Yeah, so I always thought that that was kind of a weak spot with this argument, but I think it's certainly a very compelling argument nevertheless.
Speaker: And certainly this idea that immortality would be bad for people is not just constrained to Williams.
Speaker: So, like, I mean, think about...
Speaker: the picture of Dorian Gray.
Speaker: There's this character, Dorian Gray, who he doesn't want to die.
Speaker: And he, I mean, long story short, gets this opportunity to not do so.
Speaker: He has a portrait painted of him.
Speaker: And lo and behold, his portrait ages and becomes decrepit.
Speaker: But he is allowed to stay youthful and vital.
Speaker: And the result of this, though, is that his
Speaker: his actual life that he's living gets worse and worse and worse.
Speaker: There's not this kind of reminder of his imminent demise there to keep his virtue in check, to make sure that he is walking the straight and narrow or trying to be a good person.
Speaker: He can just do whatever he wants because his portrait suffers and not him.
Speaker: And so the result of immortality for Dorian Gray is that it brings out the worst in him.
Speaker: It leads him to, I guess, not value the life he has,
Speaker: And this is something that, this is a theme that J.R.R.
Speaker: Tolkien, the author of The Lord of the Rings, also is a big theme in Tolkien's universe and his mythos.
Speaker: So specifically in his book, The Silmarillion, there's a concept in The Silmarillion called the gift of Yuvatar, which is something that humans possess as the younger children of Yuvatar.
Speaker: And also the favorite of the children.
Speaker: They're given this gift.
Speaker: And part of the gift, part of the inheritance that these children receive, the humans receive, is death, is the ability to die.
Speaker: And it's a strange gift to give someone.
Speaker: You think that's not a very good gift.
Speaker: But it ends up being a gift because it prevents them from decaying both externally and in a more meaningful sense internally from
Speaker: from the kind of like monstrous vices that they would accrue as a being over like millions of years.
Speaker: Yes, so we just talked about the boredom objection to immortality and now Megan's hinting at like another kind of objection, different one.
Speaker: When I used to teach this, I called this the loss of values objection.
Speaker: And I attributed it to the contemporary philosopher Martha Nussbaum.
Speaker: The basic idea is like human finitude, human vulnerability, right?
Speaker: Our ability to suffer, our ability to die.
Speaker: That is kind of like the precondition, the necessary condition for everything that we find valuable in life.
Speaker: You can think of like the virtues.
Speaker: So why is courage a virtue?
Speaker: Well, it's because we can suffer bodily damage and we can die.
Speaker: If we couldn't, then courage really wouldn't make a lot of sense.
Speaker: Why is temperance a virtue?
Speaker: Well, we are susceptible.
Speaker: We are vulnerable to overindulgence and whatever.
Speaker: We have to work
Speaker: to manage that sort of thing.
Speaker: Temperance only makes sense for beings that have these vulnerabilities.
Speaker: So Nussbaum says, yeah, it would be bad for us to be immortal because we would lose all these values, all our human values, all our virtues.
Speaker: They would really make no sense.
Speaker: So in effect, to want an immortal, eternal human life is to have a kind of impossible wish.
Speaker: It just makes literally no sense.
Speaker: We want to
Speaker: have a life where all the recognizably human values that we have persist and it never ends.
Speaker: But that is just something that cannot be.
Speaker: So at a slogan, I called this vulnerability vouchsafes value.
Speaker: Do you like my alliteration?
Speaker: Yeah, I do.
Speaker: That's really nice.
Speaker: Yeah, I love that work of Nest Bombs as well.
Speaker: This is from a chapter of her book, The Therapy of Desire, called Immortal Immortals.
Speaker: No surprise is William's student that she would have really similar outlook as him.
Speaker: Not to talk about mythology again, but she does see this as, I know we talked about mythology for like three hours the last two episodes, but she does see this as a theme in Greek mythology.
Speaker: And there's a sense in which the humans are better off than the gods.
Speaker: The gods live these kinds of unheroic, you know, lax, dejected lives.
Speaker: They're always engaged in trivial things.
Speaker: The humans can be heroic because they can die.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, right.
Speaker: The clock is ticking for them.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: Nevertheless, I don't think any of this is going to convince the biohackers.
Speaker: Oh, no.
Speaker: And yeah, right.
Speaker: Do you know what I'm going to say?
Speaker: I think they're going to say because who cares about being human?
Speaker: Who cares about being human?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That is what they say.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, the biohackers have no special reverence for humanness as such.
Speaker: They think, in fact, if pushed on this, they'll say, well, when people revere humanity or things that are unique to humans, what they're really doing is just kind of like pacifying themselves with what they take to be like a, you know, unchangeable condition by lifting up problems as good things.
Speaker: Yeah, the kids, I got here, the kids, they call this a cope.
Speaker: It's a cope.
Speaker: It's a cope.
Speaker: It's absolutely a cope.
Speaker: That's what they're going to say.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: You're coping with what you think is unchangeable by saying, well, because, you know, this is just what it means to be human.
Speaker: But what if you didn't have to be human?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: If we really are on the brink of super intelligence, as they think that we are.
Speaker: In fact, they think that the next stages of a great ape evolution is just around the corner, literally in the next couple of centuries, which I find interesting.
Speaker: Um, then, then we should be, you know, just planning to kind of jump off the human ship into this other ship that there's nothing special about humanity such that we should try to preserve it in ourselves.
Speaker: We should just aim for what's good, even if, even if those good things are, are not human at all.
Speaker: Yeah, so most of these people are transhumanists, right?
Speaker: They believe that we ought to transcend humanity through the use of pharmaceuticals, technology, and whatever, right?
Speaker: Humanity is not something to be preserved or revered.
Speaker: It's something to be transcended.
Speaker: Right, exactly.
Speaker: Yeah, so this leads to another kind of interesting objection that I found in the immortality literature.
Speaker: So this is kind of like a metaphysical objection.
Speaker: The basic idea is that we are humans.
Speaker: Start with that.
Speaker: We are humans.
Speaker: That's the kind of being we are.
Speaker: We're a different kind of being than like a turtle, right?
Speaker: A turtle is a kind of thing.
Speaker: You could find multiple turtles out in the wild.
Speaker: You could find multiple humans out in the world.
Speaker: Those two humans are both instances of the same kind.
Speaker: So we are a member of a specific kind.
Speaker: And because we are a member of a specific kind, like what's good for us is tethered to that kind.
Speaker: Things that are good for us are human goods because we are human.
Speaker: Because of that, it can't really be desirable for us to become something else.
Speaker: It can't be desirable for us to become a different kind of thing.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Because if you are to become a different kind of thing, in effect, you go out of existence.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: You are a human if in some sense you become a god or you become a transhuman.
Speaker: You are no longer you.
Speaker: You don't survive that transition.
Speaker: So in effect, like there's a kind of deep conceptual problem with the idea of saying immortality or eternal life or transcending human existence is good for us.
Speaker: It can't be good for us because we are human.
Speaker: It can't be good for anything to become a different kind of thing.
Speaker: That doesn't make any sense.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So this is premised on a very like virtue theoretic account of goodness.
Speaker: And like Aristotelian idea of like you have an essence.
Speaker: That essence is humanity.
Speaker: It can't be good for you to become a god.
Speaker: There's no concept of goodness that isn't attached to a particular essence, particular like category.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Thing.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's like saying like, oh, it'd be good for a turtle to become a tree.
Speaker: Like that doesn't make any sense.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Like it can't be good for a thing to become something else.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Trees are good.
Speaker: So it'd be good if a turtle became a tree.
Speaker: And of course, like the idea of a kind is very, very robust.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So becoming a kind isn't becoming a different kind is not the same thing as becoming, you know, more, more muscular or something like that.
Speaker: I don't want to become a different kind of being when I
Speaker: go to the gym a lot.
Speaker: But the transhumanists and the biohackers, it seems like they take this idea literally that we could become something else and that would be better for us, but it seems like there might be a deep problem here.
Speaker: It can't be good for us because we are human.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So what they would have to do is have some way of grounding one's personal identity or personal essence in something that wasn't their type of thing.
Speaker: I think they probably just say, I don't like this idea of types and kinds.
Speaker: Like you'll get more pleasure, you get more happiness if you become a transhumanist, if you become a robot or something.
Speaker: Yeah, maybe they wouldn't want to care about like objective goodness at all.
Speaker: Just be like, no, you want this, though.
Speaker: So I guess this does raise that point that Williams talked about in his discussion of mortality, the question of identity.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: When we're talking about these sorts of issues, things get a little tricky.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Can I become a robot?
Speaker: Like, I don't think so.
Speaker: So this leads into a really, what I think is an interesting comparison between biohacking and alchemy.
Speaker: I was actually kind of inspired to write something, not inspired to the point of actually succeeding in writing it yet, but inspired to maybe in the future write something comparing alchemy to biohacking after we recorded our alchemy episode.
Speaker: You wrote an abstract though, which is for an academic, that's a big deal.
Speaker: It was an extended abstract.
Speaker: You wrote an abstract.
Speaker: An extended abstract.
Speaker: That's basically a paper.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So there's a few ways that I think biohacking is really interestingly related to alchemy.
Speaker: So alchemy, we have this sort of like highly mythologized.
Speaker: So alchemy was a real pursuit, but it didn't have the characteristics that...
Speaker: You were most interested in like the 19th century, like spiritualist gloss on alchemy.
Speaker: So if you recall from the alchemy episode, the primary goal of alchemy was to come up with the philosopher's stone.
Speaker: It was kind of a proto-chemistry, but the philosopher's stone was supposed to be a material object, a material substance.
Speaker: But in the 19th century, there were these folks that gave a kind of spiritualist gloss on alchemy where they said, no, no, no, alchemy is more about the transformation of the human being, the transformation of the human soul or something like that.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So I do ultimately think that that's where the closest similarities lie, that there's like this interest in at this very, very deep level changing, pursuing immortality in both alchemy and biohacking.
Speaker: But I even think like at the more practical level, people engaged in alchemy for just sort of, you know, the boring alchemy reasons.
Speaker: I want to turn brass into gold.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: through chemistry are making a similar error that the biohackers are making, which is that they're taking things that, you know, we've already established we could do in chemistry or in biology, say improving our health through fitness and better nutrition and stuff like that.
Speaker: And they think that, you know, all of these things incrementally can add up to eventuate in what is really a change in essence from human to human.
Speaker: thing advanced beyond human or from brass into gold but in fact that that final step will never be achieved with alchemy with metals because of what we now know which is that gold is an element right you can't yeah you can yeah we talked about in the episode you can't you can't turn lead into gold through chemical means you need to like get a particle accelerator and you mess with the sum atomic particles but yeah yeah
Speaker: Right, right.
Speaker: So there's this really similar error happening.
Speaker: And I think that it's at least potentially like both these movements are largely driven by the place in history as well.
Speaker: So in time of alchemy, we have all these huge scientific advancements that are making people really optimistic about pursuits in chemistry, right?
Speaker: We're able to make a lot of things, do a lot of things with new metal mixtures and infusions.
Speaker: And that's really exciting.
Speaker: Why can't we aim for the highest of them all?
Speaker: Similarly with biohacking, we feel like we're really on the precipice of this huge world-changing paradigm-shifting thing in AI, and maybe we are.
Speaker: But it doesn't justify this, I think, leap that people then want to take to saying, and we as individuals can maintain our identity but lose the kind of thing we are.
Speaker: And so I see them even at this kind of more boring level of the mechanics of it as being really similar.
Speaker: Yeah, I see.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So, but I don't know, but all of this, so let's, let's even say that the biohackers are right about whatever.
Speaker: Let's say I could become a, you know, AI human or whatever.
Speaker: All of that still has to be like premised on them being correct about where we are in history.
Speaker: Yeah, right.
Speaker: So this depends on the empirical facts on the ground or how good is AI, you know, people disagree.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: People disagree.
Speaker: Yeah, I don't know, Frank, if you have any thoughts on this, but I mean, to me, this seems like a humongous gamble because it seems like if they're wrong about that, then not only like is biohack not going to achieve what they wanted to achieve, but it's going to be like a monstrous waste of your life.
Speaker: Yeah, and a monstrous race is a waste of resources, too.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: The generative AI LLM movement, I guess, is very resource intensive.
Speaker: If you look at the kinds of- Environmentally catastrophic.
Speaker: Yeah, if you look at how much money Sam Altman of OpenAI wants, it's a very large amount of money he wants to invest in this.
Speaker: So yeah, I don't know.
Speaker: I'm not impressed.
Speaker: It's been like over a year now since like chat GPT and all those things became mainstream.
Speaker: And has the world changed?
Speaker: Well, it's changed.
Speaker: Has it changed for the better?
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: I don't think so.
Speaker: It's just made grading much more irritating.
Speaker: Made grading worse.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, right.
Speaker: It's destructive to the environment as we're doing it now.
Speaker: And, you know, the apologia for this is always like, well, the AI will fix that for us.
Speaker: It'll tell us how to fix it.
Speaker: But as of right now, all of the space and energy that we need to preserve all this data is not good for the earth, making things much worse for the people who are here now and the other
Speaker: forms of life that are here now.
Speaker: So if they're wrong about where we are in history, even if they're wrong by like 100 years, that seems like totally catastrophic to this entire plan.
Speaker: Yeah, very relevant consideration.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So they have to be extremely confident.
Speaker: And I don't know, to me, they're not justified in that.
Speaker: I don't think they're justified in having this confidence.
Speaker: I don't know about you.
Speaker: Well, I don't, but obviously.
Speaker: Now I know.
Speaker: All right, so I'll ask you another question then.
Speaker: So I'm just, I really want to probe your brain about this.
Speaker: So as Brian Johnson et al.
Speaker: claim, everyone wants to be immortal.
Speaker: This isn't super clear to me, but obviously lots of people want to be immortal.
Speaker: Most people don't want to die.
Speaker: So why?
Speaker: Why do you think that immortality itself, not like, you know, heaven or whatever, like a sublime, ecstatic immortality, but just like immortality itself, why does that appeal to people so much?
Speaker: Yeah, good question, right?
Speaker: So we want to get deeper than just they have desire to not die.
Speaker: Like, why not?
Speaker: And I think a lot of people who have written about this have connected to wanting to, like, leave a trace that persists beyond you.
Speaker: So if you die, then sort of, like, every trace of your existence is gone.
Speaker: And staying around is a good way to, like, you know, continue to causally impact the world, influence people, and all of that.
Speaker: So the 19th century German philosopher Schopenhauer, you know, the big old pessimist guy, he, this is one of the things he thought made the life, made life meaningless, right?
Speaker: That everything eventually just sort of goes away.
Speaker: Like everything just sort of disappears.
Speaker: Everything is destroyed by time.
Speaker: So he says,
Speaker: He also says, for that which in a moment ceases to exist, which vanishes as completely as a dream, cannot be worth any serious effort.
Speaker: So here Schopenhauer is saying, you know, we live our life.
Speaker: We, you know, we engage in these meaningful projects.
Speaker: Maybe they persist after we're dead a little bit, but eventually it's all just going to go away.
Speaker: Everyone's going to forget who you were.
Speaker: It's going to be as though you did not exist.
Speaker: And that's sort of what makes life meaningless.
Speaker: So we need immortality or this kind of quasi immortality where you leave this kind of permanent trace in order to live a meaningful life.
Speaker: And that is not given to us given the human conditions that we have.
Speaker: You know what this always makes me think of?
Speaker: You're going to laugh at this because I did not bring this up to you before we started recording.
Speaker: But this always makes me think of the philosopher Jason Stanley, one of his last Twitter interactions he had before leaving Twitter.
Speaker: I'm never going to call it X. It's just Twitter.
Speaker: is that, you know, people were asking him what like drives him in life.
Speaker: And he he was very honest.
Speaker: He was like, I want people to be reading my work in like 500 years.
Speaker: And and that, you know, I guess like, you know, some people made fun of him for that.
Speaker: But some people were like, that's really honest.
Speaker: And that also resonates with me.
Speaker: Yeah, it's not just the philosophers too.
Speaker: William Faulkner, the great American novelist, says the same thing.
Speaker: He says, I think that a writer wants to make something that he knows that 100 or 200 or 500, 1,000 years later will make people feel what they feel when they read Homer or read Dickens or Balzac, Tolstoy.
Speaker: He knows he has a short lifespan.
Speaker: That day will come when he must pass through the Wall of Lydian.
Speaker: He wants to leave a scratch on that wall.
Speaker: All I feel when I read Dickens is annoying.
Speaker: But the other ones, sure.
Speaker: So something like this, leaving a trace.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, I guess.
Speaker: So like, I guess emotively I can feel that but I cannot if pushed for a reason why being remembered 1000 years ago, or 1000 years from now would like infuse my life with more meaning than if I wasn't I don't think I could come up with one.
Speaker: It's kind of metaphysically weird if you think about it.
Speaker: You live now, right?
Speaker: And then your life becomes meaningful now if a thousand years from now people are reading you.
Speaker: Metaphysically, the people reading you a thousand years from now reverberates back in time and makes your life meaningful.
Speaker: That's kind of weird, right?
Speaker: It's very weird.
Speaker: Like backwards causation or something.
Speaker: I don't really understand how that's supposed to work.
Speaker: Like I want someone to say like what is the property that that infuses the situation with that makes it meaningful.
Speaker: And I don't know that there's anything – like that's not necessarily like a knockdown argument against this view, you know, just that you can't like articulate it or whatever.
Speaker: But I do think – I have not –
Speaker: heard a good articulation of what that would be but but this is also something that biohackers bring up themselves this idea of like a legacy so in this in this youtube interview with brian johnson um his his interlocutor pushes him and he says well what if you knew for sure that in four years you were going to die like nothing you could do about it you know you're going to be like assassinated or something and you knew that like for 100 certainty he says surely you would not continue doing blueprints mm-hmm
Speaker: You wouldn't continue doing your regimen.
Speaker: And he said, no, actually, I would.
Speaker: And his interviewer was really surprised.
Speaker: And he said, well, why?
Speaker: And Brian Johnson said, because I think it's really going to make a difference in humanity.
Speaker: And I want to be remembered as the person who did that.
Speaker: So there is this kind of like backup immortality plan he has.
Speaker: We're like, well, maybe it's like literally I'm not immortal.
Speaker: At least I'll have this kind of immortality that I've achieved through my work.
Speaker: Yeah, people call that quasi immortality in some of the literature I've read.
Speaker: Right, right.
Speaker: And Simone de Beauvoir, again, she also talks about this with respect to she thinks that it's a one advantage that women have over men because they can bear children and males can't.
Speaker: And she thinks that this is like one kind of like existential benefit or something like that.
Speaker: Or at least she entertains the idea.
Speaker: Um, yeah, so I think that that's interesting.
Speaker: It's certainly I like I said, I feel the draw of it, but it's really hard to articulate why that would make a difference.
Speaker: Do you think modern physics refutes Schopenhauer?
Speaker: I mean, yeah, you know, I do.
Speaker: Well, you want to explain to the listeners what you mean by that?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So what Frank is getting at is the idea that this is all premised on this picture of time that is essentially like presentistic or at least like where only the now exists.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: In contrast to eternalism, which says like the past, the present and the future are all equally real.
Speaker: Or even as opposed to growing block, which would still allow for the past and present to all be equally real.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So it's premised on some particular picture of time being the case.
Speaker: And this particular picture of time, presentism, it's not necessarily vindicated by modern physics.
Speaker: In fact, it seems at the moment, at least, like there's a little more evidence against it.
Speaker: Yeah, right.
Speaker: So one implication of special relativity, at least according to the experts and according to Einstein himself, is that time, in a sense, is an illusion.
Speaker: This idea that there's this spotlight on the present and only the present is real.
Speaker: Well, a lot of people think that that's not really the best way to think about time, given modern physics.
Speaker: That really the best way to think about time is this idea that all times are equally real, where the now is
Speaker: is kind of like here.
Speaker: It's not special.
Speaker: It's just like where you are in the block of the universe or whatever.
Speaker: So I wonder about this.
Speaker: If like people like Schopenhauer who lament the passage of time or people like apparently the biohackers who lament the passage of time.
Speaker: Yeah, like shouldn't what would they have to say about this?
Speaker: And actually, I should if I can do just a tiny bit of self-promotion.
Speaker: I guess I shouldn't say that I totally don't understand this idea that being remembered is what makes life meaningful.
Speaker: Because I think to some, there is a sense in which I kind of agree with this picture in the sense that I think it's relations with others that primarily imbue life with meaning and that we do have actually a real existential problem
Speaker: if those relationships permanently end in this way, you know, one of the persons passes away and then they don't exist anymore.
Speaker: And so that relation that was like incredibly, that really composed like an important part of who you were ceases, you in an important way cease to exist.
Speaker: So I have actually written about this and do think that there is a sense in which like personal identity and value in life to some extent
Speaker: do depend on what we consider the past being just as real, just as existent as what we consider the future or the present.
Speaker: Yeah, fascinating.
Speaker: This topic leads us down the rabbit hole of philosophy of time.
Speaker: Maybe a good place to stop there.
Speaker: That's a tough one.
Speaker: That's a tricky one, and we're going to leave you with a lot of feelings and a lot of questions.
Speaker: That's about all the time we have for today.
Speaker: Join us after our hiatus for an episode on some topic that we've not decided on yet.
Speaker: It's going to be a mystery.
Speaker: Maybe we'll do some like teasers on social media once we start planning it.
Speaker: But, you know, nevertheless, it will be fun no matter what we play.
Speaker: So join us next time for whatever that is.
Speaker: Wish us luck in the next, you know, few weeks of our lives.
Speaker: And we will talk to you later.
Speaker: Bye.
