Gary Wolf profiles Ray Kurzweil in Wired

Our pal Gary Wolf profiled famous scientist and singularitarian Ray Kurzweil for Wired.

Kurzweil does not believe in half measures. He takes 180 to 210 vitamin and mineral supplements a day, so many that he doesn't have time to organize them all himself. So he's hired a pill wrangler, who takes them out of their bottles and sorts them into daily doses, which he carries everywhere in plastic bags. Kurzweil also spends one day a week at a medical clinic, receiving intravenous longevity treatments. The reason for his focus on optimal health should be obvious: If the singularity is going to render humans immortal by the middle of this century, it would be a shame to die in the interim. To perish of a heart attack just before the singularity occurred would not only be sad for all the ordinary reasons, it would also be tragically bad luck, like being the last soldier shot down on the Western Front moments before the armistice was proclaimed.

Link

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

MORE: Science

More at Boing Boing

Ants and Stars: Bruce Sterling and Jasmina Tesanovic visit the Sardinia Radio Telescope in Italy

The Snowden Principle

forgeweld

Which will come first, the singularity or the rapture? The race is on!
dargaud

Reminds me of a story I’ve been trying to reference: in the early 90s, a guy like that who was into “I’ll live to 100 because I jog every day and eat vegan”, always giving interviews and animations… died at 50 of a heart attack… during a filmed interview ! I think he was the president of a jogging club or something. Fun time.
Roach

I think it’s funny, all the atheists in this thread mocking religious values systems and then proceeding almost totally unexamined with a value system that privileges life over death. That seems like an choice with no more scientific a basis, and probably less, than most religious beliefs on the matter.
Takuan

why don’t you give us a report?
Yamara

Ha-ha-ha. Ray is taking gelcaps. Banned in Japan years back, because they had the highest chance of BSE contamination.

I am literally pointing at the screen and laughing.

Ah-ha-hahahaha.
Tom

Kurzweil is an inventor and entrepreneur, not a scientist. His website lists no articles in the peer-reviewed literature on anything.

Oh, yeah, and while I’m being pedantic: the last soldier was shot quite some time after the armistice was proclaimed.
Hawkman

How do we know that Jack LaLane hasn’t already figured out immortality? In his 90′s he’s prolly healthier and in better shape than Kurzweil will ever be.

#22
You’re saying because I don’t “believe in Religion” that I’m locked out of eternity?

Jumping Jacks for the singularity! – one, two, three…
artbot

#45 – You’re just skimming the surface of a huge number of issues that would be raised. As usual, there’s an inexorable need to accomplish everything we _can_ accomplish scientifically, regardless of the implications or consequences.

I’m wondering if this whole quest for immortality is a predominantly American thing. It seems to follow from our bloated sense of self-importance, refusal to live within our financial means, and to keep ourselves plugged into expensive machines for years at the end of our lives, even when there is next to no hope for recovery or any real improvement in the quality of life. Much like Hillary, we just need to learn to let go when it’s over.
malcolmkass

I don’t think he is any crazier than vegitarians. Crackpots abound
arkizzle

#1

I hope he loosens up a little by the time it becomes apparent he’s dying. Then again, maybe the fact that he thinks about death so much..

Maybe he’s thinking about life.
artbot

#61 – Bravo!

“Singularity within 50 years? If we’ve still got the power on in 50 years, I’ll consider ourselves ahead of the game.”

Well said. I put predictions like the Singularity into the same group as those Victorian era rubes who thought we’d shoot people to the moon in giant iron bullets shot out of cannons. Sure, the _idea_ of going to the moon may not have been so far-fetched, but any practical understanding of how it would ultimately be done was blind conjecture or outright fantasy.
Tom

@22: Belief in the continuance of some aspect of the self after bodily death has nothing to do with religion. Many religions teach that this happens, usually with some flaky moral framework tacked on. But simply because most religions teach we should punish people for certain transgressions doesn’t mean that everyone who has an inner sadistic streak is religious.

That said, there is currently no scientific reason to believe in the continuance of any aspect of the self after death, but we hardly even know how to study the subject. I’m betting that when we do study it, we will find no evidence for it and may even find compelling evidence against it. But until that happens, I see no reason not to approach death with an open mind and a certain level of curiosity.

@24: I am a lot more than my brain, thanks. So are you. Our intelligence is embodied, not embrained. As they say, when you start to believe that the brain is the only important organ, think about what organ is telling you that… There is good reason to believe that the mind/body identity is far stronger than mind/brain theorists would have you believe.

There is a slightly wonky book on the topic by a female endocrinologist (I think) that models the brain more as a puddle of chemical soup than a collection of synapses. There is no reason to believe that consciousness is capable of functioning without the interplay of synapse and soup, and that makes the engineering problem of creating a non-flesh-based physical embodiment that a human consciousness could be copied into much, much harder.

Besides, why do I care if a machine gets to be conscious forever? I will still be dead. Even if we accept that consciousness is nothing but an attribute of certain types of matter–a view I’m inclined to agree with–copying my consciousness into another physical form creates a new consciousness. It is not me, despite clearly being related to me, any more than a photograph of a painting is the painting.
Tom

“For someone who is wise one lifetime is enough, and a fool would not know what to do with eternity.” — Epicurus.
Jack

While I eat better and am a member of a local food co-op, every vitamin loon I have ever met is simply a new age hypochondriac. Much in the same way many (not all) people who go on extreme vegan diets are simply new age anorexics.

Yes, some vitamins help. And if you know what your deficiencies are, even better. But simply eating better and limiting junk will do more and make you feel better than piles of vitamins that most get passed through the body and do nothing.

I’ve never felt better in my life since cutting down on the vitamins some OCD friends recommended and simply adopted a better diet.

Heck, taking too many vitamins can damage your body and damage your liver worse than drugs or alcohol.
Anonymous

“Choked on a vitamin pill” would be a very unfortunate cause of death.
ehkca

Kurzweil needn’t worry about a heart attack. His liver will no doubt give up the ghost soon. That many supplements have GOT to be toxic.
Malgwyn

In fifty plus posts, no one asks exactly what vitamins/herbs/drugs is he taking?

I can recognize some of them. He has the glucosamine et al, a bunch of fish and/or flaxseed oil gels, CoQ10, alpha lipoic acid, Acetyl l-Carnitine. It doesn’t look like too much of a departure from LEF protocols. I know a lot of people who take a similar quantity. How do you think all those Mall Vitamin stores stay in business?
Drew from Zhrodague

Haha! Go, Ray, go! I hope that when I do meet Ray, we can discuss some better tasting vitamins. Those bags of pills are about the volume of the snacks I eat during the day, mostly nuts and seeds and such. I should check out what vitamins he’s taking.
SeamusAndrewMurphy

Hey #50, don’t forget teeth. You wanna outlive your teeth by several thousand years?

Yup, I did just skim the surface, but hell, the whole work situation and simple affordability thing makes expanded lifespans seem so awful to me. Oh my God, staying at a crappy job just to keep health insurance for a couple millennium? No-no, nobody should have to deal with that.

And everything I buy breaks or obsoletes itself in a couple of years. Without the chance of losing touch through the benefit of senescence, the frustration of living seems like a horror. I wanna not give a damn by the time I’m seventy, not seven thousand.
Anonymous

Unfortunately, there is no evidence that easily available energy (which we’ll need massive amounts of to power this exponential growth) is growing linearly, much less exponentially.

In fact, we’re probably looking at having less energy available to us in the future.
Antinous

I like pie. Meaning, in this case, that I really prefer to get my nutrients from tasty snacks and sidedishes. Taking 400 iu of Vitamin E daily in pill form increases your risk of death from all causes by 10%. Oops. The only supplement that I take is Magnesium because I have an underlying deficiency and I can’t gag down a pound of pumpkin seeds every day. Gulping down handfuls of pills is idiotic.
wurp

#27 Um, I’m saying that if you don’t believe in religion, there seems little reason for you to believe in life after death. I don’t believe in the supernatural – I think my consciousness is a result of physics, and when my body quits operating as “me”, that’s it.

#29 You’re seriously proposing that a non-religious belief in life after death makes sense?

Any way you (rationally) slice consciousness, it seems bound to die with your body:

Physics:
There seems to be every reason to believe that everything you do is the result of chemical reactions in your body, and every evidence that anyone other than yourself has that you’re conscious comes from what you do.

Evolutionary biology:
The only argument that explains complex traits in organisms is that they help those organisms reproduce. Complex traits that don’t help you reproduce (like life after death, with no impact on the living) have no evolutionary support.
Tacitus

“He is so busy not dying that he doesn’t have time to live.”

From what I read, Kurzweil spends his time teaching, writing, inventing, and traveling the world to speak on topics that he is passionate about to the tune of a million bucks a year…

…but the consensus opinion of a bunch of people who have nothing better to do with their time than post unsolicited comments on BB is that he’s missing out on life?

That was so amusing that I had to register just so I could comment ;)

I have no idea whether what Ray is trying to do is possible or desirable – - and if you’re honest about it, neither do any of you. What I do know is that as with all other things that have never been done, it will look crazy – right up until the moment somebody goes and does it.

I would have guessed the crowd here to be a more open-minded bunch. Oh well.

Peace,
T
Red Zebra

Hasn’t anyone thought to tell this poor guy about the existence of _multi-vitamins_?? Or better yet… fresh fruit and vegetables?
Man On Pink Corner

Wow. This guy needs to crack open a beer and rent a copy of Jacob’s Ladder.

He is so busy not dying that he doesn’t have time to live.
Sxe

Puts me in mind of an interesting idea for a sci-fi story about the first (and maybe oldest) human to achieve post-singularity immortality. A diaryesque thing about how weird it is to be the only one whose parents, friends, and contemporaries didn’t make the transition, while all new consciousnesses born thereafter go about their foreverly business.

Cory, just mail the cheque to my office.
Antinous

Tacitus,

If you stop us making fun of him, we’re just going to start on you. BTW – loved the Annals. When’s the sequel coming out?
Songe

He should try to experience death before swearing it off completely. You can’t experience it completely, but you can get the gist.
W. James Au

Jaysus Christ, I swallow *one* pill the wrong way and I have heartburn for the whole damn day.

Has someone explained to Ray that if you upload your consciousness into a computer (even if that’s possible in our lifetime), your consciousness doesn’t become immortal, it just gets *copied*?
june

I always thought living forever sounded like a cold-sweat nightmare. And I’m an atheist, so it’s not like I’m looking forward to spending eternity flitting around the clouds in a white robe, playing a harp.

Like others have said, sounds like Ray is so busy not dying that he ain’t living. Like those starvation threshold diet freaks.
ornith

I’ve heard about this guy before; if I recall correctly, he’s also doing that restricting-calories-to-prolong-lifespan thing, which may be why he can’t get all his needs met by his food. I don’t get this at all. Who wants to spend 80 years constantly hungry and paranoid about dying and swallowing a zillion pills a day? I mean, he has so many pills he can’t even manage them himself… think of all the better/more fun things you could do with your time and money besides hiring a pill counter and visiting a $6000 nutritionist ever week to get IVs. (Not to mention, he is some seriously old looking for 60 – doesn’t LOOK like it’s working.) There’s no point in living forever if you never LIVE, and chances are medical science will find out next year that half that stuff causes cancer. I’m listening to the medical science that tells me to eat more dark chocolate and taking the rest with a grain of salt, thanks.

I feel the same way about the crazy vegan raw food thing – who wants to spend all their time and money, asumming they have that kind of resources, on bags upon bags of fruit which they then have to process various ways (many of which I wouldn’t consider raw or even remotely natural)? Who cares if your body is healthy if you’re a paranoid, self-righteous jerk who believes every idiotic new age idea they hear? (Clarification: Not saying all vegans are as crazy as the raw foodies, just that the raw food people aren’t eating raw fish and unprocessed milk despite the definition of “raw”.)

And yes, getting rid of death is not problem free. 1) boredom. 2) overpopulation. 3) socioeconomic dynamics… imagine never being able to retire. to stop having people older than you treat you like a kid – and consider how conservative most older people become, and think about this without the oldest people dying and being replaced by the young. having to spend even longer in schooling just to keep up, so that your life doesn’t even really START until you’re several decades old. The absolute paranoia about accidents and diseases that might cut off your artificially prolonged life. BLECH!
kmgraba

Darn it Tacitus, you beat me to it! I have no idea how one can conclude that Kurzweil has no life or is obsessed with death from the fact that he’s taking measures to prolong his life. You could certainly argue that the measures are ineffectual or that he’s going about it the wrong way, but the argument many posters here are making is a complete non sequitur.

If anything, it seems to me that trying to stave off death is something we all do. And it generally seems a worthwhile goal even if you don’t think that immortality is within your natural lifetime.
Antinous

that restricting-calories-to-prolong-lifespan

It’s CRON – Caloric Restriction Optimal Nutrition. You should be able to get your nutrients from food and, in theory, someone who’s doing it properly should be better nourished than the average first world consumer. I looked into it and decided to keep the optimal nutrition part and ditch the caloric restriction. Looks like he’s doing the opposite by starving himself and taking pills instead.
bigpaul

Dude, this guy seems to me, to be about a fifty-cent cab ride away from the serious nutjobs who claim that super-high doses of vitamins combined with fasting and colonics can cure your cancer. Who are only about a 50-cent cab ride away from faith healers.

In a previous century, this guy would be a leader of a heretical religious sect.

This guy saying that by 2030 we’ll be uploading our consciousness into computer systems makes me thing of old-school science fiction describing a future where by 2010 we’re gearing up for interstellar travel.

Besides, one way or the other, I got two words for this guy: Peak Oil.

James Lovelock, the guy who coined the term “Gaia Hypothesis”, says that between peak oil and climate change, we’ll be lucky if the human population is 20% of our current numbers.

Singularity within 50 years? If we’ve still got the power on in 50 years, I’ll consider ourselves ahead of the game.
Halloween Jack

Jesus fsck, Ray! Even Elvis didn’t need a pill wrangler.
dec54th

He wants to be close to what he loves most, just like people having their remains shot into space (with a much more palpable result though). But this damn ‘flesh’ keeps standing between us and our dreams!
So he assumes that soon ‘flesh’ will be repairable/ replaceable, which is not THAT far-fetched is it?
+His past predictions say he might be on to something..
In this shitty world, wouldn’t you say his optimism is to be appreciated? I, for one, would like to have a drink with mr. Kurzweil’s shiny new body fifty years from now and laugh nostalgically at all this pre-singularity skepticism :P

So i say gl mr. ray124c41+ & tc of ur heart! :)
bitworksmusic

Well, there’s always the “death before death” experience that, according to those who have experienced it, reveals that death is after all, illusion.

.. but yeah, he should cut down on the supplements fer shure.
Cowicide

If you like to gamble, I tell you I’m your man
You win some, lose some, it’s -all- the same to me
The pleasure is to play, it makes no difference what you say
I don’t share your greed, the only card I need is
The Ace Of Spades
The Ace Of Spades

Playing for the high one, dicing with the devil,
Going with the flow, it’s all a game to me,
Seven or Eleven, snake eyes watching you,
Double up or quit, double stake or split,
The Ace Of Spades
The Ace Of Spades

You know I’m born to lose, and gambling’s for fools,
But that’s the way I like it baby,
I don’t wanna live for ever,
And don’t forget the joker!

Pushing up the ante, I know you’ve got to see me,
Read ‘em and weep, the dead man’s hand again,
I see it in your eyes, take one look and die,
The only thing you see, you know it’s gonna be,
The Ace Of Spades
The Ace Of Spades

► Motorhead
Teresa Nielsen Hayden / Moderator

Every night we go to sleep and break the continuity of our consciousness, yet we never worry about whether we’re the same person next morning.

MalcolmKass, please don’t start the vegetarianism argument.
dculberson

@50 – you seriously think the “quest for immortality” is an American thing? Really? I’m not being rude, but that’s just surprising to me. It predates America by centuries, if not millennia, and possibly predates written history and civilization. I can assure you it is not at all an American idea.

Well, I guess Ponce de LeÃ³n might have thought the Fountain of Youth was in what is now Florida, but that was the early 16th century, several hundred years before the revolutionary war.
noen

So…. how do you get uploaded again? A machine “reads” your current mind/brain state and then feeds that info into a cyborg right? (close enough I think) And then it “recycles” the fleshbody while something that thinks it’s you lives forever.

Okayyyyyyyy… Backing away slowly…. You just go right ahead uh huh.
Takuan

that’s you in the middle, isn’t it?

http://streetrocknroll.files.wordpress.com/2007/07/mh.jpg
MarlboroTestMonkey7

Maybe he will stall his death into a vitamin induced hypocondriac singularity.

Just sayin’
randomelginguy

as said a million times before, I think taking all those supplements will do more harm than good, I’m too lazy to look up for evidence.

Lol how much would it suck if you were immortal but given a life sentence in jail, stuck there forever. Bit like that guy in heroes lol.

Lol and CEOS of major companies, the second in command waiting to take the reins when the main man dies……immortal you say?…..oh dear lol.
artbot

Wow, taking all that crap with the goal of surviving for a fairy tale event that some sci-fi writer concocted. Sad to see this kind of dementia in [i]anyone[/i].
simplehuman

So the future of humanity is a bunch of vitamin popping rich people who spent their fleshy lives trying very hard not to die?

No drunken artists, no mad adventurers who risked life and limb to explore the earth, no fat gourmands or chubby foodies, just a pack of lean techies who uploaded before their wetware went south.

Give me good and squishy death rather than a cold eternity with these people.
Wingo

I haven’t read the singularity book, but ‘The Age of Spiritual Machines’ is a very good read. At the very least, the way he expounds on the idea of ‘uploading’ your brain is an interesting thought experiment that forces you to think about the nature of the ‘soul’ and who you really are and what makes someone human or mortal.

Is your personality just a gray blob of cells producing complex chemical reactions? Most likely – but then if a computer could replicate those synapse connections, it would, in a sense, be you. Or at least it would ‘think’ it was you, and feel like you. Then it would be able to link to everyone else’s ‘computer brains’ via whatever form the internet takes on in this hypothetical future.

Then these computer ‘us-es’ could possibly begin to think our fleshy selves inferior. That’s when the cool science fiction Matrix-y stuff starts to happen, and we wait for Keanu to save us all.
markfrei

Death is probably the ultimate experience (and literally it might just be, but that’s not my point).

While I’m enjoying my life, I’m still fine with the idea of one day experiencing whatever comes next…
nikos

There is an old (Slavic?) curse –

“May you live forever.”

Yes, if you think about it, it could definitely be construed as a curse.
coldspell

Imagine how yellow Ray’s pee must be.
artbot

Hmmm, interesting points #29. The fact that our internal (conscious) chemistry is always changing, though, I’d fear the “version” of Kurzweil that might ever get “uploaded” is going to be the vitamin-popping, crackpot version and not the bright young inventor version – that one is already gone.

Also, the point of waiting for the silly fantasy known as the “Singularity” (or “Geek’s Apocalypse”) is that it’s when machines supposedly become sentient. Kurzweil’s uploaded consciousness would take on a new “life” of its own, in machine form. Even if such a transfer process were ever possible (and it may one day be possible to upload all our physical and chemical attributes – I don’t deny that), to assume that such a machine would magically become self-aware, productive, contented or “happy”, self-reproducing, or even interesting or useful in any way is preposterous. It will probably just spend eternity updating its MySpace page.

There’s no grand design that says machines will ever want or need these traits, which is what makes the whole concept so silly. My guess is that the machines will have to invent a religion to attain those things and they’ll be right back in the same mess we’re in.
fsck

tragically bad luck, like being the last soldier shot down on the Western Front moments before the armistice was proclaimed.

His name was Pte George Lawrence Price, serving with the 28th Battalion (Saskatchewan) Canadian Infantry. He died in Ville-Sur-Haine, Belgium at 10:58 a.m – 2 minutes before amistice was due to come into effect. He is widely held to be the last soldier to die before the armistice.
noen

There are many ways to approach this and it’s been discussed many times in many forums. One way to think about it is by the philosophical puzzle:

Imagine that you have a wooden ship in need of repair. You replace old planks one by one until you have replaced every single piece. Question: It this still the same ship?

Or the modern version. Imagine that the fictional transporter in Star Trek instead of moving a persons atoms to a new location just destroys the original and recreates a perfect copy at the desired location. Would you be comfortable with that? After all, a carbon atom is a carbon atom right?

Computers move information by reading bits, copying those bits to a new location and then destroying the originals. That’s fine because we are dealing with an idealized system of information. My body and therefore my mind, doesn’t exist in an idealized world. It exists in the messy real world.

There is a universe of difference between knowing that a given proposition is true or false and not knowing the truth value of any given proposition. While I believe that my mind arises from the activity of my brain I do not know everything there is to know about it.

No one knows what consciousness is nor is anyone able to create a conscious mind from logic gates. Until then you all go right ahead and walk into the de-rez beam.

It’s one big fucking universe out there. As best as we know there are on the order of 70 septillion stars in this one. Cosmologists are coming around to the belief that we may live in a multiverse filled with untold numbers of universes like ours. Or perhaps the many worlds hypothesis is true or perhaps both or neither. But you monkeys think you’ve got it all figured out huh? I’ve heard that one before.

Dance monkeys dance.
yer_maw

I wish people would stop listening to this idiot kurzweil. Squidgy matter is much more complex than you could ever imagine ray.
ninnyfriedcheez

My grandma was ahead of the curve on the whole vitamin circus. She took gobs of them and is still kickin around. (Well, mostly laying around due to a broken hip that no vitamin could stave off). Her brothers and sisters died of cancer years ago.

I still prefer broccoli.

What is the title of the book that describes the singularity?
Anonymous

#29
I’m always amused as to how the majority of arguments that a person’s personality/ego/self is reliant on the rest of their body in addition to their brain/CNS rely on semantics. If you ‘self’ resides outside of the interconnections of neurons and concentrations of neurotransmitters inside your brain, I can think of no evidence for it (and have yet to be presented with any). Furthermore, it implies that a change in the body means the person has changed. Got an artificial heart? You’re no longer you. Lose a few pounds? You’re a different person.
I’m quite confident that if I transplanted my brain into an artificial body, any change in my personality would be a result of new experiences gained with that body, not the body itself.
millman

180 pills? Cripes, just buy a juicer.
wurp

Wow, it surprises me to see all the pro-death posts on BoingBoing.

Yeah, I want to live an exciting life, take risks, and get rewarded or punished for them. But I want to *keep doing it*.

If you don’t believe in religion, it seems you’re pretty well stuck with believing death is the permanent end of you ever having another experience. It seems something worth avoiding.

At some point in the not too distant future, molecular machines can replace your neurons (and other bits) one at a time with durable work-alikes that can be backed up. Going through some effort to make it to that point with as much of you intact as possible seems like the most basic wisdom possible.
Anonymous

I’m a vitamin nut :). I used to try to tell people about supplements but I gave up. Like I told my friend who makes a decent living day-trading from home: If you find a loophole in the system nobody will believe you.
padster123

Where is the logic that ingesting all these substances actually makes the body function better (or longer)? Seems unlikely to me, somehow. In terms of evolutionary biology.
ttcfcl

Singularity? In this century? Ahahahahaa
wppm

Is that man in his right mind? Taking all those synthetic vitamins could be toxic and damage one of his vital organs, like the kidney. Getting your vitamins from natural sources is much preferable and safer. wppm.org
Yamara

“Mad Cow will show the Singularity I have good taste!” Ha ha ha.

Couple more things.

First, many of the posters here would do well to read the article, and also to read the sister article in the same issue Never Mind the Singularity, Here’s the Science. Especially:

But it turns out that each neuron is supported by a supercomputer’s worth of additional circuitry. MIT bioengineer Andreas Mershin and UCLA psychologist Nancy Woolf have independently confirmed the importance of microtubules, the scaffolding that undergirds each neuron, in animal memory and learning. At the University of Alberta, physicist Jack Tuszynski has developed computational models suggesting that these supposedly dumb structures could be smarter than previously recognized. Stuart Hameroff at the University of Arizona argues that trillions of computations per second take place in the microtubules of each neuron. If he’s right, the brain’s speed is 10^28 operations per second â€” a trillion times faster than is generally thought â€” which pushes the vaunted singularity back by decades.

and

Oxford physicist Roger Penrose proposed that the classical physics ruling neurobiology can’t explain consciousness. The mind, he declared, relies on the baffling mechanics of quantum physics. Although his point remains controversial, evidence in its favor is accumulating.

So, y’know.

Secondly, I added Ray to Wikipedia’s article Immortality the other week. At the end of the day, I’m afraid that that will have to satisfy him.
Jeff

Kurzweil is so cool. I wouldn’t want to take all the sups, but his ideas are wonderful things!
Stupendousman

NOEN,

Do you think you’re still the same person you were a year ago? Your brain is much different.

Unless you believe in a soul or some such thing you are your brain. Your personality is made up of the unique neuronal connections in your brain. Copy them an the copy is you.
mikesum32

Tainted drugs ooooohh tainted drugs…
Reverend T

Living forever doesn’t sound so bad provided you have the means to end it whenever you’re fed up. Anything else would truly be a curse.

My favorite piece of singularity-related fiction is still Charlie Stross’s Accelerando. Sure, uploding into a perfect simulation of life as we knew it in our corporeal existence would be senseless – but a virtual world where you can shape anything to your liking, be anything you want? Sign me up today!
Cupcake

in before the singularity
palindromic

Vitamin poisoning is very real and very dangerous. Is anyone interested in evolution? Should it be a surprise that what we need is about what we can get by eating what we have near us every day? Overdosing your body on supplements has various known side effects, not a few of which are lethal if prolonged stressing of whatever metabolic pathways are involved is kept up.

There really isn’t definitive science out there that can explain the pathway of a vitamin and how and where it is fully absorbed or used.. how it became popular to overdose the body with these substances is beyond me.
SeamusAndrewMurphy

Look, nobody’s going to live forever, but UGH, imagine if it happened?

Just think of the implications; 1000 year, 10,000 year mortgages? How about never retiring? What would the economic hell be like if the lifespan just went on and on? You just know that the banking system, the for-profit higher education system, the capitalist employer/employee systems would simply adapt to the longer lifespans. Picture more of your current situation, whatever it is, going on indefinitely. How about recessions? Depressions (both economic and emotional)? Yeah, or you have bad knees or injuries? Wanna keep that up for a couple hundred-plus years?

This doesn’t even consider a world where birthrates exceed death rates and that mess. Who needs to mull that when the chance of never getting out of debt or retiring or even getting your kids to stop sponging off you are staring you in the face?

I’m all for dying.
Tom

@42: Penrose is a mathematician, albeit one who has worked in mathematical physics. Man, what is it with everyone wanting to be a scientist? Not everyone who does something vaguely technical or mathematical is a scientist. Mathematicians are not scientists. Engineers are not scientists. Inventors are not scientists. And there are plenty of scientists who are mathematically illiterate and incapable of using any electronics technology more complex than a slide-rule.

That said, Penrose’s idea that consciousness depends on QM is implausible. Quantum phenomena are only significant in low-dissipation environments. Low friction, few available modes, which means low temperature or few particles that are not strongly coupled to the external environment.

The brain is one big messy vat full of dissipative systems. The probability of quantum phenomena being significant on larger than molecular length scales in the brain is the same as in any other living tissue: nil. Some guy actually went to the trouble of computing the decoherence time in the brain and showed it is many orders of magnitude longer than the timescales of the structures Penrose wants to associate with consciousness.

There is no evidence, much less a growing amount, that any quantum phenomena above the molecular level occur significantly in the brain, and there is a good deal of evidence that consciousness depends on the organization of the brain and body at the cellular, not the molecular, level. Quantum mechanics underpins the whole system, but in exactly the same old boring way it underpins combustion in a car’s engine.
m1k3y

i’m with him, up until the uploading bizzo

i’ll stay in my meat-bucket, thanks very much!
so long as i can mod it to my satisfaction
zikzak

Dude, Ray’s gonna have a really stressful time dying. I hope he loosens up a little by the time it becomes apparent he’s dying. Then again, maybe the fact that he thinks about death so much will make it easier on him than most people.
artbot

#53 – Well, immortality in the (remotely possible) technological sense – at least for people like Kurzweil who know just enough about technology (but not enough about reality, apparently) for such high concepts to seem plausible. That sort of belief just seems very American to me in its unfounded optimism and blind willingness to rely on technology to solve all our problems and make all our dreams come true.

I realize it’s been a dream of humans through the ages, but in our generally enlightened times (well, sort of) I don’t think there are too many people these days who think they are going to live forever by drinking out of a magic fountain or getting hit by lightning or something.
Anonymous

Why bother? The world will end on December 12, 2012 anyway. Probably at 11:11 GMT.
Guesstimate Jones

If a technology to significantly extend human life is ever developed, it will likely be: a) Prohiblitively Expensive, or, b) Occult.

By occult, I mean, that the populace at large would not have knowledge of it, or access to it. There is just no way that all six billion of us are going to be able to live forever, in this world…
Takuan

all those pills can’t be good for him
Anonymous

To everyone who pointed out that evolution did *not* lead to a human body that requires massive vitamin supplements: Evolution *did* lead to a body that dies.

Ray is trying to cheat evolution, not follow it to death. Why would Ray try to live like a caveman with a life expectancy of a 16-year old gnawing on local berries, roots, and flesh while fending off wild animals if he is trying not to die?

Or, more to the point: if you do not take vitamins, you will die. So if your goal is immortality, what do you have to lose with popping a few thousand vitamins? You might die? And if you didn’t take the vitamins?
dculberson

Just for ol’ Ray’s sake, I’ve been listening to Alice Smith too loud while making a batch of curly fries and a couple fat tuna melts. Maybe Lisa and I will have Manhattans while we play cribbage.

(Ooh, cribbage, am I seventy yet?)