Communicating Life Extension

Why is so hard to persuade others that living way longer would be a good thing? Max More makes the case (for making a better case) for life extension.

Max More

is one of the OGs of transhumanism, ironically making him a little older, wiser, and less cuckoo about the idea that we can and should use technological innovation to extend our brains, bodies, and lifespans. For many, the answer to his opening question will be “no” because most people don’t think of taking active measures to live longer and think that the Is of a ‘natural’ life span is also an Ought. But Max More has been making the case for cryonics and life extension for decades. In this case, he makes the case for making a better case. Is he persuasive? -Editor

Have you been frustrated in discussing life extension? Perhaps you were trying to explain your cryonics arrangements. Inevitably, that will lead to the question: “But why would you want to live longer?” You gave perfectly sensible and persuasive reasons. You were baffled at the response. For every reason you cite your conversation partner had an immediate and apparently reflexive counterargument. If you’ve had this kind of conversation more than a couple of times, you may have noticed a pattern in the resistance.

I have supported life extension for myself and advocated for life extension as a desirable goal for all who want it. I was still in my teens when I became serious about it. I’m not sure exactly when I first thought about it as a real possibility, but I know the first book I read on the subject was Alan Harrington’s idiosyncratic but fascinating, The Immortalist: How Science Could Give Humanity Eternal Life. From my notes, I know I read that in June 1982. Being one of those annoying people who enjoy arguing about controversial ideas, I’ve had that conversation (or argument) thousands of times. That doesn’t automatically mean I’m good at it.

For decades, having spent quite a bit of time thinking about how to communicate more effectively, I do think I’ve learned some things. This showed up in a May 2021 Oxford Union debate. The proposition to be debated was: “This House Would Live Forever”. Knowing that the students are constantly blasted with messages of doom and gloom, I expected the pro side to do badly. At the Union debates, votes are counted both before and after the debate. In this case, before the debate, only 29% were in favor, with 71% opposed. After both sides had made their case, the vote was retaken. The results: 59% in favor, with 41% opposed. One of the organizers emailed me and said: “To be honest, such a swing is quite rare!”

Just as in most conversations, I had only eight to ten minutes to make the case. In planning a concise and hopefully compelling argument, I considered the classical rhetorical triangle of pathos, logos, and ethos. Logos comes naturally to many analytically minded people, which includes most people in life extension circles. Logos is an appeal to logic; persuasion through reason. Intellectual honesty makes logos a crucial part of the discussion, but it isn’t enough. Pathos appeals to emotion and attempts to convince an audience of an argument by creating an emotional response. Finally, ethos boosts the message by supporting the speaker’s credibility. You will notice that I did a little of that above. A persuasive argument combines logos, pathos, and ethos so that they dovetail and mutually support one another.

In this case, I faced an immediate obstacle: The word “forever” in the motion. I objected to the organizers, but they wouldn’t change it. I had to begin by explaining that the audience should understand the motion from my perspective to mean: “This House supports the right of individuals to choose to live for an indefinite number of years in good health and finds that choice appealing.” “Indefinite” means that you don’t die from old age or age-related diseases (and increasingly less from accidents and violence). The goal is to be able to live for as long as you choose without age-related disease.

Making this point matters because a distressing number of people otherwise think you are talking about people living a very long time while continuing to age. This common mistake stuns me, but it may be due to a long history of literature and myth. Certainly, we don’t want to make the Tithonus error. According to the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, when Eos asked Zeus to make Tithonus immortal, she forgot to ask that he be granted eternal youth.

Ethos and logos first

Before diving into the many logos-based arguments – and anticipations of objections – I first splashed the audience with a smattering of ethos and pathos to open their minds to reason. Some people will reject your qualifications on the grounds that you live a good life and haven’t suffered aging and death (They assume!). I emphasize first that I have pondered the topic for decades. I tell them that my father died when I was 11, that my oldest friend killed himself, and that I have lost several other friends and dear people to disease, accident, or suicide. I’m old enough at 59 to personally experience the effects of aging and saw up close my mother-in-law’s descent into dementia before dying at 99. As a champion of life, I’m for reducing suffering and building the capacity to live and love. You probably have similar experiences to draw upon.

Remind your conversant that, in opposing aging, you are opposing the progressive loss of resistance to disease, growing infirmity and disability, the loss of function, the growing collection of aches and pains and sagging skin and loss of sexual function, and you are opposing the loss of each unique mind and person. This deterioration is horrible at any age, whether 70, 90, or 300. It would be better to go out when you feel it’s time – if ever.

The pursuit of an indefinite lifespan is driven not by a fear of death but by a desire for life and all that it makes possible.

The pursuit of an indefinite lifespan is – at least for me and most others I know – driven not by a fear of death but by a desire for life and all that it makes possible. Consider the tragedy of the human condition as it is and has been so far: We start off with great vigor and health and the capacity to enjoy and to create. At the same time, we are only just beginning to learn and acquire wisdom. Over time, we increasingly lose those vital qualities just as we are accumulating knowledge and wisdom. What if we could combine vigor with wisdom? What if both could be maintained or built up over time? We would have time to further learn, mature, create, contribute, explore, and experience. We would have the energy and the ability to continue participating in the progress of humanity.

All I know is logos

One of Mr. Spock’s classic lines from the original Star Trek is “All I know is logic”. Of course, that wasn’t true. Spock’s thinking clearly was guided strongly by emotions, non-rational commitments, and values. Logic tells you about consistency and means to ends; it tells you nothing about which ends to pursue. Spock also confused logic with reason. Logos is more about reason and rational argumentation rather than pure logic. If all you know or use is logos, you will not be persuasive in most situations. Even when focusing on reason-based arguments, it is both sensible and justifiable to blend in elements of pathos and logos, so long as they support rather than conflict with logos. Let’s take a look at how logos supports advocacy of life extension and how it anticipates and responds to common objections.

When people hear about life extension, they think of it as living longer than around 70 (“three score years and ten”) or 80 years or so. They forget that our current life expectancy differs greatly from that of only a century ago. Make the point that there is no right age to die. Our life expectancy has grown radically over time. On a global level it was around 35 a century ago. The world average now exceeds 70 years and in the OECD countries it is 80 years.* (About half of this is probably due to reduced child mortality; the rest from longer life spans in adulthood.)

You may think this is too obvious to mention. Mention it anyway. Most people have little awareness of these facts. Even if they have, they may have tucked that knowledge away in the back of their mind and not considered the implications. You need to break apart the idea that there is a right age to die. You also need to demolish the closely related idea that we die at a “natural” time.

Why accept a “natural” termination of your life? We fight natural ends all the time. If you have a cardiovascular problem, you don’t say “Ah, well, I’m just going to let it kill me.” You get stents put it, or have heart surgery, take statins, or kick your smoking habit and exercise. We don’t let infectious diseases kill us when there are safe and effective vaccines available.** It used to be common to be killed by tigers, bears, neighboring tribes, falls, or infections. Yet no one believes we acted unnaturally in minimizing those causes of death. Yes, it’s wise to accept the truly inevitable (but when is that?) and to acknowledge that we are mortal, but it’s a mistake to give this any normative weight.

It’s easy to say that we should accept death when “our time” comes. But it is not “our time”, it’s the time of uncontrolled biological entropy. Take almost anyone who reflexively preaches the gospel of departing when our natural time comes. If they fall critically ill, they will desperately try to gain a few more days or weeks of life – even if miserable days – usually at great expense. How, then, can anyone oppose a painless, potent, pleasant, and productive extension of the days of our lives? (This is an appeal to consistency.)

Above, I made the pathos-heavy point about the tragedy of losing our vitality as we gain wisdom. Here’s the logos aspect of that. Our personalities and traits change over time. Those changes are limited by our health and well-being. Even so, psychologists have found that there are some important upsides to the gradual changes in our personalities as we reach our 70s and 80s. It seems that the trajectory of what psychologists call “personality maturation” is seen in all cultures. We gain in three of the “Big Five” personality traits by becoming more conscientious and agreeable, and less neurotic.

Older people tend to have more control over their emotions, a better sense of humor, and are more trusting. Anti-social behaviors go down along with levels of the “Dark Triad” traits: Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy. Late in old age, as people lose friends and relatives and suffer worsening health, there is often a reduction in openness and extraversion. That seems likely to change for the better if we can control the aging process. It’s hard to clearly imagine a world of people at the height of their vigor but with a century or two of experience and wisdom. I’ve sometimes referred to this state as “ultramature” to distinguish it from mere adulthood.

Here’s a peculiar phenomenon: Billions of people believe in an eternal “afterlife”. They don’t seem to have a problem with “after-living” forever. This seems odd to me. To the extent that believers are able to describe how they see the afterlife, it sounds stunningly boring to me. All our needs are taken care of and we are loved unconditionally all the time. There is no creative activity, no striving, no self-improvement, no need to help others. Sounds nice for a break but not for too long and certainly not forever. If those people have no problem with not only very long life but endless life in that form, why would they object to a long but non-infinite life of good health?

Anticipate objections

Most objections are extremely flimsy; they are rationalizations, desperate attempts to avoid the existential uncertainty revealed by the possibility of living indefinitely. You can almost count on hearing about boredom and stagnation, meaninglessness, stultification of society, running out of resources, and “inequalities”. I don’t have the space to provide adequate answers to each of these here (some will be addressed in my “Getting Better” series) but I’ll make a few observations.

Boredom: If you live long enough, you will have done everything there is to do and will become bored and stay bored. This common objection comes from some combination of lack of imagination and a static view of the self. Perhaps the most influential statement of this argument was made by philosopher Bernard Williams in his essay, “The Makropulos case: reflections on the tedium of immortality.” The essay is based on Janacek’s opera The Makropulos Affair in which Elina Makropulos is given the elixir of life by her father. The elixir allows Elina to live for three hundred years at her current biological age. She then has to decide whether or not to take the elixir again and live for another three hundred years. At the end of the first three hundred years, she has become bored with her existence and chooses to die.

Williams argues against the desirability of immortality. However, as others have observed [Dannaher, 2015] if successful, the argument would apply just as well to very long lives. Williams understands immortality to mean an existence that cannot come to an end. This is consistent with much historical usage but is not something most of us would want. We want to live as long as we choose. If life should become unbearable with no prospect of ever getting better, we might prefer to end our lives. Do you find that unlikely? Suppose all civilization has been destroyed along with all other people and you are in constant agony.

His argument is that we are engaged with life by certain “categorical desires” which are deeper than passing contingent desires. These are long-term commitments and projects. Williams thinks there are a limited number of categorical desires to pursue. Over an immortal (or even merely a super-long) life, you would chase and satisfy every possible categorical desire. With nothing left to make life worth living, you would be bored, listless, apathetic. Williams explicitly bases this argument on a view of the self as having a relatively fixed set of characteristics over time. The problem is avoided by changing the self, but then you cease to exist.

I see four big problems with this line of argument. First, as Donald Bruckner agrees, our memory decays, so we could once again be motivated and entertained by forgotten experiences. Second, even if we retained memories with far more fidelity and vividness, desires that we satisfied in the past often re-emerge or can be rekindled after enough time. [Bruckner, 2012.] Third, we may devise drugs capable of making repeated experiences seem perpetually fresh and exciting. Finally, and most importantly, we have barely started to explore an ever-expanding universe of possibilities. The inventive minds of billions of humans will continue to invent novel careers, pursuits, hobbies, and cultures. Boredom sometimes results from low mood and cognitive energy or from an inability to maintain focus. To the extent that we solve or minimize those problems, we also banish boredom.

Williams tries to convince us that if we change enough to avoid boredom, we will no longer be the same self. This relies on a rather silly and extremely static view of the self. Humans can change over time and retain their identity so long as change is not too drastic and discontinuous at any one time. Small changes over a long time add up to major change but the self is retained.

Planning: A related objection is a reaction to seeing a vast expanse of time lying ahead. “But what would I do with all that time?” When I first heard this, it made me chuckle. I imagine the person pulling out their Day Planner, along with their Weekly, Monthly, Annual, Centennial, and Millennial Planners, scratching their head over how to fill in blocks of time for the next few decades, centuries, and beyond. You don’t have to plan your entire long life today!  

Meaning: Death gives meaning to life. You’ve heard it before. It’s spoken as if it’s a piece of ancient wisdom not to be questioned. “You foolish person! An extended life may be healthy, vital, and interesting but without a limit it would be drained of all meaning.” Call me a fool, but I’ve never been able to make any sense of this argument (or assertion). To the extent that it’s founded on the argument from boredom, I’ve already addressed it. At other times, it’s based on an abstract and obscure thought: That life has a shape or structure and is bounded by birth at one end and death at the other.

The “shape” of your life can change, as we have seen happen in recent generations as family and social structures have shifted at a historically rapid pace. The shape of a life can change while still having a shape. Death gives no shape, only a boundary. The meaning we create or attribute to our lives depends on our choices, values, activities, and commitments and not on having an inevitable end. On the contrary, I would argue that, other things being equal, longer lives would be or could be more meaningful. Each action you take at any time will have a longer future trajectory to echo down and influence. You can build on each action and reach greater heights. Your life can amount to more.

If the “meaning” argument relies on literal immortality, we need not concern ourselves with it. At least, we can return to it in a trillion billion years or so, which is an infinitesimal fraction of forever. Even with the abolition of aging, you would not know how long you’re going to live. There’s always some chance that you will be murdered, catastrophically damaged beyond repair in an accident, struck by an asteroid, or evaporated by a gamma ray burster. If it’s the expectation of death that gives meaning to life, is life more meaningful or less if you believe you have almost no time left? Did the shorter-lived people of the past have more meaningful lives? Should we take a lesson from Logan’s Run and require everyone to die at 30 (or 21 in the book) to ensure a super-meaningful life? I think not.

Historical note: I covered some of the above objections 30 years ago in Alcor’s Cryonics magazine. [More, 1991]

Stagnation of society: Conservative bioethicist Lean Kass worries that delaying retirement will “clog the promotional ladders and block opportunities for young people just starting out”. [Kass, 1983] He wonders who would do the “numerous tedious, unrewarding, or degrading jobs?”. He suggests that to avoid resulting strains and disasters, great changes in social patterns and institutions would have to be compelling by central “planning”. As economist Brian Kaplan put it: “Since he’s writing in 1983, I have to take the last paragraph as a thinly-veiled warning that, ‘Immortality will end in communism’. I’ve heard of ‘Better dead than Red,’ but this is ridiculous!” [Caplan, 2009]

There might be a real worry in rigid caste systems (or mediocre academic departments, notes Caplan), but in advanced capitalist economies “talented young people don’t have to wait for retirements to get promoted. If their current employer won’t pay them their marginal productivity, somebody else will.” If unchanging hierarchies ruled existing firms, the results would be creative destruction by new entrants. Caplan also points out that “in the first two weeks of graduate macroeconomics, students learn all about the infinitely-lived agent model”. “Economies with immortal agents… are the benchmark case, and their efficiency is easy to prove.”

It’s also worth noting that the human species made virtually no progress for tens of thousands of years – when our lives were much shorter. The way the society and the economy are structured matters far more than how long people live. A short-lived people can be stagnant; a long-lived people can be dynamic. To keep things dynamic, we need to ward off centralized control. That’s something we should do regardless of life span.

Entropy: Leonard Hayflick (discoverer of ‘Hayflick limit’ on cell divisions) dismissed longevity research because “aging is inevitable – it is obvious from the Second law of thermodynamics – the entropy always goes up!”. This is just as mistaken as the idea that our civilization is doomed because the Earth is subject to entropy. Entropy increases in a closed system. Like the Earth, living organisms are not closed systems. It is actually part of the definition of living systems that they take in and excrete matter and energy from their environment.

Population and resources: This is a big one. [More detailed response here.] Not only is this objection raised often, it takes quite a bit of explanation to overturn it – if the listener is even willing to let you try. The short answer is that the rate of population growth peaked in the late 1960s and has been slowing ever since. This seems to happen in every society that reaches a certain level of income and education. Within 50 years, demographers expect global population to stop growing and to decline. In wealthy countries, that point will be reached sooner and has already come for quite a few countries.

Even a growing population is not a problem so long as you have the resources to meet their needs and methods to handle side-effects such as pollution. Most people have been inculcated with the belief that resources are limited and that larger populations mean running out of resources sooner. This complex issue has been addressed well by plenty of writers. (Simon, 1981; Goklany, 2007; McAfee, 2019.) I’m addressing it in my “Getting Better” series for this magazine. Some quick points: Resources have become more available, not less, over time thanks to new technologies and incentives in the economic system. A growing population may, counterintuitively, increase resource availability. [More, 2021] We seem to have reached a point where economic growth is continuing even as we use fewer physical resources (in total, not just per capita). Earth is not a closed system. The potential resources beyond our gravity well are immense.

Only for the rich: You’ve heard this one over and over. Life extension is a bad idea because only the rich can afford it, and it would widen the wealth gap. The short answer is that most new technologies and treatments start off being expensive. The richer people create a market, and then competition and new discoveries drive down prices. This is happening faster in cases where government regulation doesn’t prevent it.

In the end, being able to communicate the life extension idea effectively – and the cryonics idea beyond that – takes engagement and practice. Don’t shy away from these conversations unless inappropriate. Pay attention to the way your interlocutor responds. You may be able to sense when they are merely parroting what they have heard and when they really mean what they say. Use some humor if you can but don’t force it. It’s okay to be passionate although how much passion is good will depend on your conversant or audience. Avoid being combative for the most part. However, this can be okay within reason – especially when you are trying to persuade an observer rather than the person you’re speaking to.

I welcome feedback on any of the above, based on your personal experiences.

Max More

writes at

Extropic Thoughts

.

Footnotes

* The longest possibly surviving human being is being cared for in cryopreservation at Alcor: James Bedford, born April 20, 1893, may be counted as still surviving at the chronological age of 128.

** Resistance by many in numerous countries to the COVID-19 vaccines is not really an exception to the rule. Official mismanagement and poor communication explain some of this. The belief that COVID-19 isn’t serious enough is another. None of the COVID-19 vaccines have been approved for use; they have only an Emergency Use Authorization. For a population long conditioned to rely on a government agency to decide for them which medicines are safe and effective, the lack of FDA approval is unsurprisingly an issue.

References

Bruckner, Donald W. “Against the Tedium of Immortality.” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 20 (5):623-644 (2012)

Caplan, Bryan. “Life Extension and the Economy.” Econlib, December 2009. https://www.econlib.org/archives/2009/12/life_extension_1.html

Dannaher, John. “Longer Lives and the Alleged Tedium of Immortality.” https://philosophicaldisquisitions.blogspot.com/2015/01/longer-lives-and-alleged-tedium-of.html.

Harrington, Alan. The Immortalist: An approach to the engineering of man's divinity. Random House, 1969.

Goklany, Indur M. (2007). The Improving State of the World. Cato Institute, 2007.

Kass, Leon R. “The Case for Mortality.” Am Scholar, Spring 1983;52(2):173-91.

McAfee, Andrew. More from Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources—and What Happens Next. Scribner, Oct 8, 2019.

More, Max. “Scarcity or Abundance? Place Your Bets.” Cryonics, third quarter 2021. Alcor Foundation.

More, Max. “Meaning and Mortality.” Cryonics, February 1991.

Simon, Julian L. The Ultimate Resource. 1981.

Williams, Bernard. “The Makropulos case: reflections on the tedium of immortality” in Problems of the Self, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973.