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ChoosenUserName4 t1_ivai02u wrote

Reply to comment by abc-5233 in Becoming increasingly pessimistic about LEV + curing aging by Phoenix5869

All this pseudo-philosophical nonsense about entropy isn't going to change the fact that there are major hurdles to be taken before we understand the full complexity of natural systems and have the ability to manipulate it in meaningful ways (escape velocity, immortality). These major hurdles are identification of the right targets / pathways, experimental verification, drug development and testing, and getting the money to finance all of this. None of these steps is currently on a exponential trajectory. Yes, we'll get there, eventually. Everyone in this thread will probably be long dead by then.

Also there's no law saying that there must be pockets of increased complexity to somehow counter balance entropy, that's just a consequence of self organization of molecules, you know the thing that eventually led to life itself.

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abc-5233 t1_ivalary wrote

An honest question: if you think this is pseudo-philosophy, what do you think the Singularity is?

Meaning, do you actually believe there will be a Singularity? And why?

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ChoosenUserName4 t1_ivatb6h wrote

As I've read it (remember it), the singularity is the point where new discoveries are made so quickly that it no longer makes sense to try to predict the future. Yes, I believe we will get there if we don't destroy ourselves before it happens. I don't believe it will happen in the next 10-20 years though.

The only way I see to biological immortality soon is to invent some sort of scanning device that can record an entire human being at the atomic level, and then a machine that can emulate hundreds of millions of copies of that human at the atomic level, preferably sped up by a lot, so that many experiments can be run quickly and in parallel. Not sure if that would be ethical for the simulated human, but that's another question. Of course, the machine should be able to design the experiments and learn from them.

I don't think there's a golden bullet for aging, very much like there doesn't seem to be one for cancer. It's probably a lot of slow processes that are all intertwined with many side effects of upsetting the balance.

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abc-5233 t1_ivayqic wrote

Yes, but the reasoning for the fact that new discoveries will happen in an every increasing lower time span, is described by the Countdown to the Singularity. That is how you get the date 2045. It is not a guess. It is a calculation.

It might be a flawed calculation, for sure. But it is not something that was just guessed out of thin air.

That is why current events usually only distract people from the actual prediction. Because focusing on the small current advances make people lose track of the accuracy of the prediction that was made decades ago.

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