🟢 Don’t die
Most of us will be able to choose not to die of old age. 😮 How I think about this mindfuck (and 10 other paradigm shifts I experienced this week).
(13.5 min read)
👉 This long article gets cut off in email!
View on the web by clicking the title.This week, I encountered more mind-warping paradigm shifts in less time than ever before.
Trippy thoughts like these can send me spinning. 🌀
Yet this week I was able to cling on.
Keep getting out of bed.
Keep putting pants on.
Keep eating.
You know.
To be honest, I’m impressed that I was able to do not just those basics but also write this post and edit it in time for my self-imposed Saturday deadline. 💪
I’m excited to share with you.
You’ll likely conclude that my new approach to my life is insane.
But first, some backstory:
In 2016, a Wait But Why post by Tim Urban twisted my brain.
(His articles are my favorite! ❤)
The most memorable part:
Imagine a patient arriving in an ambulance to Hospital A, a typical modern hospital.
The patient’s heart stopped 15 minutes before the EMTs arrived, and he is immediately pronounced dead at the hospital.
What if, though, the doctors at Hospital A learned that Hospital B across the street had developed a radical new technology that could revive a patient anytime within 60 minutes after cardiac arrest with no long-term damage?
What would the people at Hospital A do?
Of course, they would rush the patient across the street to Hospital B to save him.
If Hospital B did save the patient, then by definition the patient wouldn’t actually have been dead in Hospital A, just pronounced dead because Hospital A viewed him as entirely and without exception doomed.
What cryonicists suggest is that in many cases where today a patient is pronounced dead, they’re not dead but rather doomed, and that there is a Hospital B that can save the day—but instead of being in a different place, it’s in a different time.
It’s in the future.
The article was about cryonics, which is the process of pausing people in critical condition in the hopes that people from the future will be able to restore them to perfect health.
The article got my wheels turning, but I didn’t actually go buy new insurance policies that would pay for my body to be vitrified in a vat indefinitely in the event of my supposed “death”.
(They are quite expensive, and the technology is still unproven.)
Fast-forward to the early 2020s.
I learned about futurist Ray Kurzweil and his prediction that humanity could achieve longevity escape velocity by ~2029.
Definition:
One’s remaining life expectancy (not life expectancy at birth) is extended longer than the time that is passing.
For example, in a given year in which longevity escape velocity would be maintained, medical advances would increase people’s remaining life expectancy more than the year that just went by.
That’s so exciting!
This idea has remained on my mind for years.
I’m quite healthy, so it’s reasonable to expect I could easily live past 2029.
And if I can stick around until then, if Kurzweil is right, I’ll be all set.
Technology will continue improving exponentially.
Medicine (including preventative best practices) will ward off cancer, heart disease, dementia, and every other condition we encounter.
We could even reverse aging: improve our hair, skin, muscles, and joints.
On the basketball court, I’ll enjoy the same agility I had at 18.
It would be such a shame to die before 2029.
So I’m making sure to avoid the top causes of death in the USA, which are:
Heart disease
Cancer
COVID-19
Accidents
My heart is healthy, my vegan diet + caution about sun exposure will minimize cancer risk, I’ve still never gotten COVID (I don’t know anyone else who can say that), and I minimize time on the road and other accident risks.
Fast-forward to 2024.
Bryan Johnson has gained attention for spending considerable amount of this $400 million net worth trying to reverse his aging.
His progress is astounding:
It’s validating to see yet another person recommending (and demonstrating results from) a plant-based diet. 🌱
But since I’m not uber-wealthy, he and I share few other similarities.
He enjoys a staff of experts + a custom-designed mansion full of gadgets + free time to lift weights, swim, take measurements, etc.
Quite unrelatable.
I don’t particularly care about the results he’s achieved from all of his experiments in his intense lifestyle.
What I deeply care about are his thoughts about how we (individually and collectively) can choose to delay death indefinitely.
Tom Bilyeu published an excellent 3-hour interview with Johnson a month ago (link below).
I’ve watched it multiple times and also studied other materials on this topic this week.
Here are my 10 mind-bending take-aways:
1. Fire your brain as CEO.
Autonomy is overrated.
It’s weird that people choose autonomy instead of health and peace and nearly every other positive outcome we could hope for.
We’re bad at self-control (see binge-eating or getting drunk).
We’re bad at considering the future, in general.
Johnson says:
“I don’t trust my own mind.
I don’t trust what it thinks or what it wants.
My whole life has been a process of learning not to trust my mind.”
Technology has advanced to the point where he feels more comfortable ceding control to algorithms than making decisions for himself.
He doesn’t want to decide what to eat, when to eat, when to sleep, how to exercise, etc.
His answers would be too influenced by emotions and faulty logic.
Humans tend to assume something is impossible until it’s not.
This idea of demoting your brain to be a less important part of your identity is new to me.
I can imagine that as technology improves and gets more affordable, I’ll probably eventually want to demote my brain too.
2. If humanity uses superintelligent AI as a tool within the “games” that are humanity’s current obsessions (social media, businesses, war), we’re going to kill ourselves.
People are overly focused on how much money they could make, the status they could achieve, the power and territory they could acquire.
It leads to rampant conflict.
Right now, it’s leading to the birth of superintelligence.
Have you heard of the “alignment problem”?
The biggest risk is that humans create a super AI that lacks “alignment” to humanity’s needs.
The AI could accidentally destroy Earth in a blink.
Since it will operate at hyper speed, we wouldn’t be able to react in time to turn it off (pull the plug) before it wipes us out.
How can we avoid this apocalypse?
Humanity needs to identify a common goal.
“Don’t die” is the one goal all cultures and religions can agree to aim for.
And if we as humans agree to pursue that goal, we can also unite to design super AIs to honor our goal.
Otherwise, creators of AI will undoubtedly tailor it to maximize profits or promote a certain divisive ideology, etc.
Everyone else’s wants and needs will be sacrificed as collateral damage.
3. Thinking from 1st principles is powerful. From 0th principles is even better.
We need a zeitgeist cultural shift that is completely unimaginable right now.
“First principles” means building steadily from the ground up based on what you know (the essence of a thing at its fundamentals).
Like Elon Musk inventing a reusable rocket and hyperloop. He understood physics and what materials he’d need to acquire.
0th principle thinking means a paradigm shift.
E.g. the 13 colonies were unhappy with how the British monarchy was controlling them.
They could have brainstormed many ways to improve their relationships with the monarchy.
Instead, they decided to throw out the concept of monarchy completely.
Invent a new form of government.
Declare the authority of the government is derived from the consent of the governed.
Another example:
Before germs were discovered, the idea that microscopic objects could influence our lives was absolutely absurd.
“0th principle” just means when you offer an idea that was previously unthinkable.
Such as challenging the assumption that the human mind is the ultimate form of intelligence and saying “maybe we’d each be better off trusting AI instead of our own minds”.
Or solving death.
Until now, people have always said that the only things in life that are certain are death and taxes.
Questioning that premise requires 0th principle thinking.
Everyone is capable of it. Almost nobody does it.
🙌 Do you want to get featured in a future issue? Let me know.
4. New levels of ambition are possible.
Ambitious people start companies.
A 2nd level of ambition would be to start a country, which tend to last even longer than companies.
A 3rd level of ambition would be to start a religion. Religions can last thousands of years.
In the next decade or so, we’ll be able to strive for 4th and 5th levels of ambition.
4: Don’t die.
5: Become a god.
5. AI will enable humans to find common ground via extra dimensions.
Humans are cognitively limited in the number of dimensions we can understand.
Math allows computation in many other dimensions, which is more easily handled by AI.
Problems that would seem impossible for us to solve become more straightforward.
With our 5 senses, we have a limited perception of reality.
Physics and math are much more expansive than our awareness.
Instead of just 3 dimensions of space and 1 of time, there may be 10, 11, or some other number of dimensions.
Our drastically limited perspective means we’ve only been taking advantage of a tiny fraction of possible solutions to many problems.
Advanced math we will make us more likely to reconcile differences and achieve harmony.
6. People living in the 25th century are the ones whose respect we should seek.
What decisions of ours now would people from that time respect?
Johnson abstains from conversations that don’t seem relevant in the eyes of people from the distant future.
We’re at a fork in the road where humanity will either accidentally wipe itself out via its most powerful creation…
OR…
will find ways to embrace and merge with technology such that we can live forever and become inconceivably creative and powerful.
There is no other topic worth giving any attention to right now.
This fork in the road could not be more important.
7. Literally the only intelligent thing we can say is “I don’t want to die”.
If you traveled back in time and talked with homo erectus about food, shelter, tools, etc, it would be entertaining.
But if you asked them to speculate about the future, you already know that they’d have no ability to predict any of it.
That’s the same with us now.
Our intelligence is infinitesimal compared to what’s coming.
To pretend to express other opinions or claim anything as fact is naïve.
(This feels to me like a new version of René Descartes’s “Cogito, ergo sum”.)
8. Humans are no longer the steward of knowledge.
Until now, humans have been the steward of all knowledge.
AI is now taking that role and becoming the authority.
9. We’ve always given too much importance to “right now”.
Imagine you could interview yourself at 1,000 different times in your past.
You’d ask your opinions about death, love, “what does a good life look and feel like” and any other topic.
What if you could also interview yourself at 1,000 moments in your future?
And speak to all 2,000 versions of yourself all in one conversation?
You’d realize how any one momentary slice of your life shouldn’t have overriding authority.
You’ve changed continually throughout your life.
You should acknowledge that you won’t be the same in the future.
You shouldn’t give undue importance to right now.
If you can extend your horizon, you don’t worry so much about whether you’re adhering to what people in today’s time would label a good life.
Especially since certain behavior change now could determine whether you live not just for another decade but indefinitely.
Behaviors today that sacrifice that option seriously lack foresight.
10. Reality is so much bigger than the universe.
A long time ago, if you asked someone “how big is reality?” they’d talk about what they could experience with their 5 senses.
What they’ve witnessed in life.
Maybe describe the towns that they were able to walk to.
Later, people realized that the Earth was much larger, although they figured it was flat and had a cliff’s edge.
Later, scientists discovered the solar system and realized that Earth was relatively small.
And also that with microscopes, we can see that on smaller scales there is so much more happening than people had realized.
We now have increased understanding about how vast the universe is, both outward from Earth and at a sub-atomic level.
But we don’t have tools yet to explore how vast consciousness could be!
The Fermi paradox wonders why humans on Earth haven’t encountered evidence of any alien civilizations even though the observable universe includes 2 trillion galaxies.
Could it be because sufficiently intelligent beings choose not to travel or explore other planets but instead explore consciousness itself?
What if our experiences (falling in love, raising children, watching entertainment, learning) are just a tiny sliver of all the possible experiences?
There could be more available to explore within consciousness itself than in all of the observable physical universe.
My other favorite points:
We have no reason to believe that humans will remains superior to AI at anything.
Humans individually and collectively are prone to self-destructive behavior.
We should create guardrails for ourselves, ways that improve our choices and behaviors.Ulysses wanted to hear the Sirens’ song, so he ordered his mates to tie him to the ship’s mast and put wax in their ears so that they wouldn’t hear him ask to be released.
We need to surrender to algorithms in this way.We already do this in certain ways.
Ozempic is an example of a drug that turns off certain parts of your brain so that you can achieve your fat loss goal.
Nearly every action in your life right now relates to an assumption you’ve carried around that your death is inevitable.
It’s quite difficult (and threatening) to grapple with the possibility that it’s wrong.The whole world shut down within weeks because of COVID.
There was unity around a goal.
Existential risk from AI will cause this too.
Who can we trust, given the increasing use of deepfakes?
Who is in charge of identity verification?
We’re going to need to rebuild how to keep law and order.We are giving birth to superintelligence. The way we raise it is the the most critical priority.
“The situation in front of us right now is sufficiently serious that we should be reallocating all of our attention to figure out how [to save ourselves and our planet].”
“If you’re having breakfast with a tsunami on the way, what you have for breakfast doesn’t really matter.”
“Aligning with AI and making sure our Earth is actually inhabitable and that we humans don’t annihilate ourselves is the most significant situation on planet Earth.
It is much more important than anything else in existence we could be talking about.”[paraphrasing]
I think it’s imminent (next 3-10 years).
It would be great if we have more time than that, but we can’t afford to assume that we do.
We’d be gambling our existence.
Death may not be inevitable.
Do we value consciousness enough to preserve it if we can?In the future we’ll probably value consciousness at a level we can’t even currently contemplate.
There is power in having 35 trillion cells unite towards one goal above all other goals: don’t die.
And then uniting 8 billion people towards that goal too.“Don’t die” is applicable in all domains: recipes, medical protocol, engineering guide, economic plan, philosophy, [alternative to religion].
Humans, governments, corporations are not trustworthy.
AI isn’t either… yet.
But we can engineer AI, and it’s a much more reasonable bet that the improvement of AI will be faster than the improvement of the human condition.
AI can help us mature beyond our current primitive selves.Is there any individual, corporation, or government that you’d like to be a trillion times more powerful?
AI will empower someone to an extent we can’t fathom.
We need to be sure to make it safe and useful to everyone.Soon, many more humans will be implanting devices.
More than 300,000 already have chips in their brains.
There will certainly be massive pushback to this movement.
Large groups of people will be scared about the future.
Violence is almost inevitable.
Humans are predictable in this way.People often pose a moral conundrum (like the “trolley problem”, like a self-driving car needing to decide whether to kill a group of people or a pregnant woman).
We ought to get in the habit of rising above those questions and reframe to solve at the actual goal level.
E.g. how can we engineer society and vehicles and our bodies etc such that it would be physically impossible for something to travel at a dangerous velocity near others.Lee Sedol was one of the best Go players in the world, and he lost 4 out of 5 matches to DeepMind AlphaGo AI.
He said its moves were “alien”.
Something no human ever would have thought to do.
In response, he retired, citing his belief that no matter how good he was, he’d never beat AI.In the future, we’ll have so many sensors and tools built in to our bodies that we’ll be getting continual updates the way that software does, so it’s reasonable to assume that we’ll be in near-perfect health all the time.
Important Bryan Johnson quotes
We [former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan and I, Bryan Johnson] see the world in very similar ways.
And we both see the new Trinity1 being:
- AI
- on-chain [blockchain]
- and Don’t Die.That’s the structure that builds society [for the network state that we’re creating].
On chain: you get the computational scaffolding of systematic build.
“Don’t die” gives you the directional attention of what you’re actually playing.
And AI is the intelligence fueling the system.
Interesting. These topics are the main ones on my mind these days.Why use “Don’t die” as a rallying cry instead of something positive, like “Live forever”?
There’s a few layers why I use the negative. […]
When you make the positive statement of ‘live long’, for example, the person’s going to immediately say ‘Fuck yeah; I’m doing it!’
Everyone does.
If you say ‘don’t die’, you invite the person to collapse everything they understand about reality and have to rebuild from scratch.
If you take this the ‘don’t die’ admonition seriously, you have to reconstruct everything about your existence.
You have to reconcile that you believe death is inevitable.
You have to believe that your choice to engage in debauchery is living life. […]
People are not consciously aware of how deeply programmed death is into their existence.
And therefore it sits blindly.
So… ‘live long’? ‘Fuck yeah’.
They just carry on with life and give it no thought.
‘Don’t die’: they have to say ‘I either believe that we’re heading towards a path where we may not die or I have to say I am going to die’.
But you create a fork for decision-making, and it creates a real psychological and practical conundrum.
Do you continue the debauchery, or do you say I’m going to try this new thing?
And so I love it, that it it cracks reality in a way that forces people to reconcile their existence.
And number two is ‘don’t die’ is omnipresent practical.
You and I are doing ‘don’t die’ right now. We breathe every few seconds.
Whereas the future is so far away—what is the expanse, what is this, and what is that?
Our minds immediately discount it because we don’t know if it’s true.
We don’t know if it’s is going to arrive. We think it’s something of sci-fi.
It may be a fun imagination, but I can’t act on that now.
And so we do future discounting where it’s like ‘I’m just going to have a beer and chill’.
And so it’s not actionable. It’s not omnipresent.
And so you have so ‘don’t die’ creates a crack where they have to reconcile existence and immediately actionable one second later for the decision they make next.
Impact on my life
I haven’t felt a need to study and replicate Johnson’s strict diet or workout routine.
Maybe I’m overestimating the exponential progress of technology that will lead to longevity escape velocity.
But currently it seems reasonable to me to assume that it will be achievable for me within 50 years.
I expect to live another 50+ years even if I don’t change my habits.
But I’m glad that he’s exploring and demonstrating what’s possible so that this topic becomes popular.
So alive and so paralyzed
These days, I excitedly watch interviews like this one and read books on this topic, and I feel so fired up!
But from a different angle, these ideas have such a demotivating effect on me.
[Consider how deflation causes people to save their money rather than spend it (because they know tomorrow that same money could buy much more stuff).]
The more I learn about technology, the less time I spend writing code or even doing anything productive.
I could just wait until “tomorrow” when AI lets me accomplish whatever I want much easier, faster, and better.
Applying for jobs feels impossible right now.
The work would feel so small and unimportant.
I feel so nervous admitting that here publicly, though.
Even people who loved my work in the past would probably think “Ryan has lost his mind.”
But I probably should grovel for a job soon because depleting my savings indefinitely isn’t an option.
I’m stuck between those 2 worlds.
As for why I continue writing 2 newsletter issues per week:
A) I don’t have chips in my brain yet. Writing helps me think.
B) I think relationships will be among the last areas for AI to conquer. To connect with people like you is one of the best goals I could have.
There are some other interviews in my queue that could be even trippier than this one, which makes me scared and eager to dive in.
Stay tuned.
💬 Conversation starters:
Which of the points above blew your mind the most?
What do you think about Bryan Johnson and/or his ideas?
Reply or leave a comment!
I’ll be so excited to write back to you.
🕙 What we learned in recent posts:
🟢 Risky
🟢 $20M profit by talking to yourself?
🟢 Bitcoin bullshit (+ the truth)
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Johnson said he doesn’t label “Don’t Die” as a religion but also doesn’t dissuade others from calling it one.
He respects religions as one of the most effective, long-lasting influences on intelligence.
His reference to the Trinity seemed not to be overly serious but more just to speak in terms that will sound familiar to many people.
One thing that preoccupies me is that so many resources go into Technology and so few into retirement savings, even on a national level. While living longer is cool and we must absolutely pursue this, we must also create favorable economic conditions for us to be able to afford to live longer. Otherwise, we'll simply outlive our retirement savings.
I have come to the conclusion that life only has meaning if we know we are going to die. I like the idea of future generations looking back at our present and being grateful for how we managed the world.