...perhaps you should try reading the rest of the book.

> It's kind of a noob outlook to find something mind boogling about the fact that a mind can contemplate itself.)

Do you have a photo? Because if there's a Wikipedia article about how a fake blase-sophisticated seen-it-all-before pose of superiority can suck all the joy out of life, it should show your photo.

Aging isn't a disease, because lifespan is something which is subject to evolutionary pressure. Our lifespans are what they are because they evolved to be that way. It's a little unintuitive, but consider the tarantula. The female tarantula lives 8 years; the male tarantula only about 2. This is because it's advantageous for females to live longer. For the males, it's more advantageous to live for shorter periods, so they age and die earlier.

You're not going to be able to treat aging because it's programmed in. The only solution is to fix the source code.

That's incorrect. Our genes don't care if they carry on by reproduction or by living longer in a single individual, but we care. How a body ages after reproductive age is in an evolutionary blind spot. Individuals with mutations that promote longer life aren't passing those genes on so the selective pressure if very small.

We don't have a clock that runs out of time. We just keep accumulating long-lived damage (misfolded proteins, advanced glycation endproducts, etc) until its enough to cause pathologies, from which we eventually die.

You are not the cells that you were a few years ago. Most have been replaced. But there are certain types of damage that your body can't fix, which is where an engineering approach could come in (for example, say we could have a vaccine that would make your body target beta amyloids in your brain, so you'd clear those misfolded proteins before they accumulate enough to give you alzheimer's).

Yes, we keep accumulating damage. But we have mechanisms to control that damage. And clearly there's not a set limit on it. Tarantulas that only live 2 years are not constrained by cell damage. Cell damage is allowed to happen.

On a physiological level, increasing investment in the individual is difficult because so much about how we are built is developmentally fixed. You can't cure a kid with Down's Syndrome by taking out every extra third chromosome in every cell.

However, we know what genotype would produce a non Down's baby. In the near future, we might be able to clone a trisomy 21 person and produce a non Down's syndrome clone. But we can't produce a clone of that person that won't age.

We have no idea which genes contribute to aging, and how, and even how many. In all likelihood a simply astronomical number of genes would have to be altered to extend life.

>We have no idea which genes contribute to aging, and how, and even how many. In all likelihood a simply astronomical number of genes would have to be altered to extend life.

The whole point of SENS is that it DOESN'T try to fiddle with metabolism (our genes). All of the genetic diseases you mention are different from the diseases of aging, so they're a bad example.

SENS is all about maintenance and periodical repair (like with an antique car, for example). Every, say, 10 years you go in and they remove accumulated damage (which can only be present in a limited number of long-lived molecules) BEFORE it causes pathologies. Most of this can probably be done with your own immune system (you train it to recognize some molecules), and some of it will have to be done other ways (gene therapy to make your body produce certain enzymes, etc).

No you don't know "exactly" what he's proposing, and you don't understand what senescence is, as you've made clear many times here. I'm starting to feel this isn't very productive so we should probably stop this conversation.

> Sure, you can replace blood cells, but do you really think we can replace all your cells, including your neurons? If you want to go in for a complete brain transplant, be my guest.

Here you show again that you have no idea what SENS is proposing and you are making up strawmen. If you want to criticize something, please learn about it first.

Sure, you can replace blood cells, but do you really think we can replace all your cells, including your neurons? If you want to go in for a complete brain transplant, be my guest.

2) That's the whole point of SENS; repairing the damage for which we DON'T have repair mechanisms because of point #1. For example, our lysosomes (the "garbage collector/incinerator" in our cells) accumulate some molecules that they can't break down because they don't have the right enzymes, so they accumulate throughout our lives and end up affection cell function all around our bodies (lysosomes are full and can't do their jobs anymore). SENS has found other organisms that do have these enzymes, and are looking at ways for us humans to use those enzymes to clean up that "long-lived garbage".

> Cell damage is allowed to happen.

Yes, because your genes don't care about you (so to speak - read Dawkins's The Selfish Gene). After you've reproduced, there's no pressure to fix damage that only affects you after reproduction age.

Nothing causes more suffering in the world than the diseases of aging, and curing those diseases should be priority #1. Living longer is just a welcome side-effect.

Again, this is completely irrelevant to your argument. You can still evolve to live for a longer time while reproductively viable.

>Once you have sexual reproduction in place, it is much simpler to just have lots of offspring than to evolve even more repair mechanisms to extend life (at no great benefit to genes).

Again, it's all about trade-offs. For some organisms, it's most advantageous for them to reproduce as much as they can all in one go, and for others it makes sense to live a really long time and reproduce throughout that time period. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semelparity_and_iteroparity

I own The Selfish Gene. And unlike you, I've read most of his actual scientific work as well, not just his work for the plebeian.

Okay, you've just crossed the pompous ahole threshold. Good day to you, sir.

How about people who just don't think getting sick and frail looks like fun? People who don't want to lose loved ones, who think that 100-200k people dying each day is a tragedy, and who think that we and future generations should have a choice on the matter (you can refuse any therapies that are developed if you want, but shouldn't make the choice for others).

I bet you're not against finding a cure for cancer or malaria. Why would you think it's ridiculous to try to find a cure for the diseases of aging?

Cancer is, effectively, a form of aging, which is why it's so damn hard to cure. Fortunately, it's what happens when one cell breaks down. Most other aging happens to all your cells, all at once.

Secondly, the argument on tarantulas does not rest on group selection at all. For any one male tarantula, he spreads his genes better by living 2 years than living 8. Long living male tarantulas don't do as well, presumably because of some trade-offs between reproduction and lifespan. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_history_theory

The engineering approach of periodical repair seems like the only game in town.

1) His work in the field of Artificial General Intelligence

2) His desire to see human rationality turned into something a bit more organized and easy to spread (see his post cycles at lesswrong.com).

That's not what he claims. You have apparently only heard the soundbites. All the details of his proposals are in his book (check Amazon). After reading it, I happen to think that his engineering approach is brilliant compared to the traditional gerontological approach. Periodically repairing the damage (of which there are only 7 types) before it accumulates enough to create pathologies is much smarter than trying to learn how to cure all pathologies, or trying to fiddle with metabolism. For a quick overview, you can google his TED talk (but it's a bit old and doesn't contain much biology).

>And Hofstadter, the guy who wrote that really dumb book? (Here I admit that I only read the introduction

Once again, you seem to be commenting on something that you don't know much about. I'll admit I like Hofstadter more for who he is and how he writes, not for a specific idea or achievement, but GEB definitely isn't "dumb".

Please elaborate.

Why do you think it's bullshit? Why shouldn't it be possible to repair damage that accumulates in our cells? You've offered no clear arguments so far.