Today will go down in history for this bit of news: cancer vaccine advances to clinical Stage 1 trials. It may not be this one that works for everyone, and it may not be a vaccine that will be used long into the future, but it’s a major step. As pointed out by cperciva on Hacker News, Stage 1 is basically testing to see if it doesn’t kill people, but it is still a major step.

Of course it’s a major step in fighting cancer, a disease that kills over 20,000 people every day. Even more importantly in the long term it is major step in human longevity, and the holy grail of biological immortality*. The control over telomerase and cell division are the key problems in tackling aging – key problems in even conceptualizing aging as a ‘clinical condition’ instead of just ‘inevitable biological destiny’.

With each opportunity the challenges, too, multiply. If we keep people alive for longer in the developed world, what does that mean to the already fragile social and economic welfare systems? There are already strong economic and social arguments for us having to abandon the model of work, pay, taxation and pensions we have inherited from the industrial age. How much stronger will the pressure be if biological arguments are added to this?

If major leaps in human longevity are made before equality (even ballpark) in global income levels is reached, what does that mean to social justice? Will we see a world where people in developed nations are looking at a prospect of immortality, while the life expectation in developing nations, even after major improvements, is still measured in decades? Inequality measured in economic terms is serious, but inequality measured in terms of immortality seems much more dramatic.

I don’t have the answers, though I’m definitely juggling these ideas. What are your thoughts?

* Note about immortality, since it easily seems far-fetched. Improvements in longevity are cumulative – that is, if we are able to extend someone’s lifespan by 50 years now, and during those 50 year a new treatment arrives which extends it again by 100 years, and within those 100, a new one extends by 1,000… you get the point. Therefore the small steps we may take now can already be the first steps on a path to biological immortality. And biological immortality simply means ‘not dying of natural causes’ – there is no convincing argument at the moment that we can avoid death from accidental massive trauma to the brain, for example.

Related articles

• Phase I clinical trials for dendritic cell vaccine designed to both eradicate cancer cells and prevent disease relapse (nextbigfuture.com)
• Sailing the seas of immortality and discovering the lands of longevity (silverevolution.wordpress.com)
• Longevity will be the new inequality (wall-notes.com)
• Transhumanism, Immortality, and Prolonging Human Lives (rogerdhansen.wordpress.com)
• Is the Soul of Man Immortal? (5ptsalt.com)

On a British train, a large red sticker on the door of the First Class carriage reads: “WELCOME TO FIRST CLASS. Passengers in this compartment without a First Class ticket could be prosecuted or issued a penalty fare.” In this brief bright sticker the non-complying passenger is given a warning and threatened with “prosecution” and a “penalty fare”. Implicitly but quite directly, the passenger is also threatened with force, which is only one step removed from the threats listed on the sticker: if a passenger refuses to pay a penalty fare, they may be removed by force to answer for their actions. If they are prosecuted, they may even be removed from their own home later to face any legal proceedings, or after them, for the punitive results.

Like this, we are threatened by violence, systematically and constantly, by the very structure of the society we form and live in. Violence is “behaviour involving physical force intended to hurt, damage or kill someone” (OAD). If an individual does not comply with the rules forming the structure of society, they may face action by force against their own will, and thus action which hurts them.

Naturally, laws are based on a foundation of force. Far removed from everyday actions are threats of physical damage, incarceration and even death, but as we might all agree, they are exceptional. After all, if you do nothing wrong, you should have nothing to fear? Yet the fact remains that the threat of violence lurks in the background: an unfortunate misunderstanding, a morally relative transgression or an act that is universally agreed to be wrong can all lead to an outcome of force acted upon the individual against their will. Violence, deserved or not. (more…)

A book called “Wake Up, You’re A Liberal” that I browsed once at the airport years ago had a line: “If we would all be conservatives, we would still be living in caves.” I think that’s funny, and true. Conservatism is by definition a traditional view of the world, which contains a mechanism that ensures its own survival. Liberalism needs to reinvent itself again every generation. There are no great liberal traditions, because liberalism is a stance that includes it own demise. Critical social science is a leftist philosophy of science, which claims that science must be critical of existing power structures. If the views promoted by critical social sciences were to become mainstream and structurally entrenched, the critics should turn their criticism to their own theories. Liberalism is not immune to this feedback loop.

So why does conservatism survive? Upholding traditions, ways of acting and modes of thought ensures that past gets transmitted into the future faithfully. This is high-fidelity heredity. Compare this to biological evolution. Genetic material is inherited accurately and exactly: it is a method of heredity which is high in fidelity. Conversely, cultural evolution has methods of heredity that include low-fidelity methods of transmission. Inherited material can mutate greatly as it is passed on. (more…)

I’m looking forwards to reading some non-academic philosophy for a change. Alain de Botton’s The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work will probably be as light a snack as his previous books have been, by which I don’t mean to offend: popularising philosophy is a worthy task and de Botton does it as good as anyone.
With another high-profile strike going on in the UK, I think we should give some thought to how work, jobs and labour organisation will look like in the future, beyond the next 20 years. The 20th century gave us all ideas that now seem universal, among these the right to work. This, to me, seems like it will be quite a short-lived right. These are my ideas.

Networking work

The jobs will go. Now, you will be right to point out that this is a bad thing. Yet, the jobs will go. There is no question about this. Protectionism will slow it down, but production will first move into larger units and to cheaper countries, and then consolidate even further. We have a right to work – but if there are rights at all, surely this “we” must be the universal “we”. The West had a good run with increasing employment for a couple of centuries. Why shouldn’t China, India and Mexico have their turn now? And they will have their turn. (more…)

Saw this pointed out by Sami and had to post myself since I’ll want to watch this over and over again. Hubble’s Ultra Deep Field is the most incredibly imaging development in the history unti l now, and YouTube’s HD is almost as unparalleled.

Watch in HD and full screen and see what I mean.

An essay on assigning meaning to the evolution of consciousness (don’t worry, more holiday photos coming up in the next post soon).

Abstract: The only quality separating humans from animals is our ability to craft elaborate excuses for our instincts.

On the train from Tokyo to Kyoto, I finished reading Richard Wright’s Nonzero (thanks for the recommendation, Jon). It took me a while to get through it, and despite the author’s ultimate conclusions, it’s a very good pop-science book on the evolution of culture, cooperation in culture and genetics and the (potential) directionality of evolution. Here’s what I thought, written on the Shinkansen train.

During the book, Wright carefully tiptoes the line between the Intelligent Design camp and the hard-core-scientific evolutionary camp. In the end, he states that evolution exhibits evidence of teleology – being designed for a purpose, or more robustly, exhibiting persistent, flexible directionality via information processing. But from the evidence he presents, and the little this armchair anthropologist has gathered this far, I claim that Wright misreads the evidence and that there is no mystery of consciousness.

Consciousness is the most important stepping stone in making any claims for or against a teleological design, but for Wright this is a tripping stone. He juxtaposes consciousness – subjective experience of the world and of existing in the world – with evolutionary needs on the basis that subjective experience, interpreted through modern science and behavioural theory is superfluous, an epiphenomenon: unnecessary.

Granted, the existence of consciousness is a tough nut. Intelligence, in general, is a positive thing for evolution of a species – fast, more complex information processing and communication of this information has been the ticket of our species, and is employed by many other successful species as well. Depending on definitions, you can claim that these properties correlate positively with the success of a species.

But what about consciousness? In setting the stage for claiming that consciousness can be ascribed as having almost mystical properties, Wright argues that it isn’t necessary – we don’t need to be self-aware, to be able to assign qualities to our own existence in order to evolve successfully. As long as we care for our offspring as efficiently as we can, we don’t have to feel love for our offspring. Evolution doesn’t call for it. In essence, he bases the appreciation of consciousness on the question “Why is it like something to be alive?”, the sub-question “What is being alive like?” being answerable with adjectives and adverbs. Or as a little thought experiment, contrast “Why do we feel love?” with “Why are we able to doubt the love we feel?”

But in my subjective experience: subjective experience – self-awareness and the subscription to definitions of being alive – is perfectly in line with evolution. From reacting to a simple set of stimuli (threat, hunger, cold), we’ve over time grown to having to react to an increasingly complex set of stimuli, and the organism has started to prioritize both between stimuli and between reactions to different stimuli.

From the gene’s perspective, sorting out the best prioritizations (not just the best reactions) has grown more complex as well. So we start to create mental taxanomies of our reactions. This is still far from subjective experience, and is merely algorithmic. But we are a social species, and the evolution of the species goes hand in hand with the evolution of society (it’s just that societal evolution of a species doesn’t really mushroom until communication skills evolve). As complexity grows (and our processing of sensory information feeds into this growth), we start to react to expectations of our reactions to stimuli. This means we need to plan our place into the future, and we prioritize this placement of ourselves. Feelings, urges, are the most efficient way of processing this. Fear and greed, the muscles in the arm moving the Invisible Hand, allow us to ‘feel’ our anticipated place after a series of reactions to an array of stimuli and in order for this to happen, we need to be aware of ourselves in relation to others. Self-awareness wouldn’t evolve in a species that favors solitary existence.

Intelligence, consciousness and self-awareness are over-simplifications, they are just shorthand. They are not emergent properties of a supercharged brain, a brain that during it’s evolution passes a point where it ‘tips’ into intelligence and self-awareness. It’s not black and white. There are various stages in evolution of subjective experience as there are of consciousness – and not even stages, but a constant slope, or curve, or flatline – and we, as a species, are at a point where prioritization of our behaviour includes the prioritization of our own experience of the world. Subjective experience has a function and is thus a natural product of evolution. There is nothing mystical or metaphysical to it.

Just because we can play with the abstract concept of intelligence doesn’t mean we’re intelligent. And just because we are aware of our selves, of our experience in existence, doesn’t mean we’ve somehow ‘arrived’ at a some peak of awareness, or even a waypoint, of evolution (Wright doesn’t imply this either). A species, quite likely ours, will develop into being more intelligent and more self-aware: after all, our species, being highly social and having some genetics wired for social interaction and cooperation has jump-started collective self-awareness by being able to engage in (very) abstract communication (such as this essay).