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)

I bought, downloaded and read the e-book Homo Evolutis right after the last TED conference, where the book was launched. I have a couple of major problems with it. One is the logic of the argument. The second is the presentation of the book. Luckily, it was cheap. And short.

Juan Enriquez & Steve Gullans, “two of the world’s most eminent science authors, researchers, and entrepreneurs” write about speciation, evolution and technological change. In being able to control our genome, we are able to control our evolution, they say. Not only that, but the world we build around us has a feedback effect into our evolution, and things like culture, sport and aesthetics dictate the direction in which our evolution is being engineered. This is all very good and accurate.

They make the historical point that for the vast majority of the time that species of the homo genus have existed, multiple hominid species have roamed the earth at the same time. That is not the case today, they say, but soon it is possible that we will speciate into a new species, the homo evolutis, a new species of a hominid. If the homo evolutis are anything like the homo sapiens, they might just quickly proceed to eradicate or otherwise suppress the other competing hominid species of the planet.

This is rubbish for two big reasons:
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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…)

In last week’s Twitter newsletter, Biz Stone tells us that they recently hired their 140th employee. Well done. In hypergrowth, that’s a short jump to 150, often quoted as the Dunbar number of social relations. The theory behind the value states that based on our brain size, we can maintain a limited number of social relations in our head.

The critical mass of 150 social connections is highly speculative, but I think it is indicative. We can only keep track of finite dimensions of a social structure in our finite brain (which equals “mind” in my books), and once that threshold is crossed, the social dynamics of the structure can change and the groups will be under pressure to restructure to fit the cognitive capacity of humans. The latter hypothesis was superficially popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his over-read book Tipping Point.

Note that this number is not the number of people you know. That number, just by looking at your Facebook profile, is much higher. This is something that many commentaries on the topic get wrong (just see some related articles in the bottom of the post). The Dunbar limit should instead be interpreted to reflect the number and content of social connections that we can be informed of at any given time. In order to understand your social environment, it is not enough that you know Harry and Sally. You also need to know what Harry and Sally think of each other and how they behave towards you together or separately. (more…)

Jerry Fodor, with his co-author Piattelli-Palmarini, wrote an article in the New Scientist to pre-defend their new book, What Darwin Got Wrong. Here is a comment I composed and posted on the NS site after reading the article:

This sounds like it’s all quite wrong. I can only imagine arriving at such conclusions by looking at too short time periods as your references, and by defining environment naively, i.e. by what you see when you look out the window. I’m looking forward to reading the book to see if there is an inkling of sense in the claims, but let’s take some of the claims in the article up for scrutiny first. (disclaimer: I cancelled my pre-order of the book already before I read this article, but may have to reconsider. Decent marketing.)

Natural selection is not a force, it is statistical. You may agree on that point. There is no machinery, there is no telos. Simple. The things that are likelier to exist from times T1 to T2  are the ones that we’ll be likelier to see around at time T3. In the biological sphere, this can be interpreted by concepts of fitness and “selection for” in order to get a few steps away from the apparent tautology. (more…)

District 9 – an incredible, intelligent, multilayered story – is the movie of the year.

I’ll quickly concentrate on a layer that I’ve thought quite an interesting angle into an inquiry into ethics – and if this is not too sci-fi, would like to explore this academically at some point, at least on a level of a thought-experiment.

How would our ethical system change if we were not to consider ourselves the highest species? What would an inter-species ethical system look like? What would we consider moral action towards lower and higher species if humans were only a step on a continuum of species?

There are many assumptions and beliefs in the above, begging definition, but since this is not an academic piece, I’ll just pen down some ideas I have about this. This far, we have fought and argues about what is right and wrong; whether such questions can be answered; whether they can be asked at all. We have been severely handicapped by our acceptance that the naturalistic fallacy and Hume’s guillotine separate the worldly from the the ethical, and that arguments of ethics are eternally doomed to either clash or descend into cultural relativism and even nihilism.

By the fact that we exist, we cannot deduce that our existence has any moral value. We can, however, say that we have the right to exist. Analyzed further, this breaks down to simply two things: that we WANT to exist, and that we have the ability to DECLARE it. Most mammals – lower species in terms of cultural complexity, technology and communication – can be deduced to want to exist as well. In fact, they display fear, warn others of danger and attempt to flee when faced with imminent doom. Of course, that is an declaration of desire to exist, since we wouldn’t understand them without some kind of communication.

That’s a very short introduction to some ethical dilemmas around animal rights – a loaded subject among vegetarians and carnivores alike. To escape that, I’ll just place the point of observation outside the animal-human distinction, and assume that the continuum of species goes beyond that of humans – again, beyond in terms of cultural, societal and technological complexity. How should we assume our declaration of our desire to exist should be reacted to?

One answer could be based on intelligence and self-consciousness, but this approach would require us to draw a line between intelligence and non-intelligence. Are we intelligent? Not in comparison, necessarily. Are sheep not non-intelligent? Again, not in all comparisons. If it is likelier, that intelligence, like other forms of complex interaction, is not a huge, emergent leap but a spectrum (this is my stance, which I aim to argue for in entirety later).

I won’t offer answers here, but you should see the perspective I’m aiming for now. Is an ethical system possible that can be accepted between species on a continuum of interacting species (eating another species counts as interaction)? What would that entail? If such a system is feasible to accept, should we accept it, or continue to assume that we are, morally, the highest species?

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).