I don’t think ‘death’ is a flaw in the programming.
Today (Friday the 18th) is two years to the day that my Dad passed away. I’ve been mulling over death all week and then I realised. Funny how the body carries these rhythms for you.
The thing that’s really been messing with me this week is that we don’t know why things get old. We don’t know why they die.
I don’t mean in a grand, what’s-the-meaning-of-life way. Why did Timmy have to die, he was such a good boy.
I mean in a strictly biological sense. Why don’t know why organisms get old, degrade and die.
I mean, for quite a long time, we do a very good job of keeping ourselves alive. Our cells replicate, our organs regenerate, we learn how to avoid trucks.
But for whatever reason, this process is imperfect. Our replications of ourselves lose fidelity. We become less awesome versions of ourselves. Eventually we just can’t keep the show going any longer.
But in theory, this should all be relatively easy to avoid. If the human organism put more energy into perfecting the cell replicating process, and less time into, I don’t know, generating contrived reality TV shows, for example, there’s no reason why it couldn’t create a perfect replication process.
I mean in the early years of life, we’re totally nailing it. We just lose the knack as we get older.
It is also interesting that we haven’t figured this bit out, as a species. Hominids have supposedly been around for 225 million years. Mammals a long time before that. We’ve had more than enough opportunity to perfect that process.
But no. Evolution didn’t give me perfectly replicating cells. It gave me a Greek nose and little Snoopy legs.
And we just don’t know why.
So this is my crack at the puzzle. You let me know what you think…
Ok, so my first thought is that there is death because death serves a useful purpose. Evolution (and totally accepting that this is just a broad theory and any theories I develop of a world perceived through 5 imperfect senses always going to be a very broad abstraction of reality at best) – but evolution seems to be fairly good at weeding out the things that don’t work.
And so the first assumption has to be that death works. It serves a purpose. Humans breed for a reason (boobies) and humans die for a reason.
So I need to think that death serves a purpose unless proven otherwise.
So what is that purpose?
Well, imagine 10,000 years into the future, you’re given a High School science project. Your task is to create self-replicating robots and place them into an abandoned junk yard. From that point on they’re on their own, but your teacher will come back and assess the quality of your robots at the end of the week.
And so you program your robots to create more robots – but not just more robots, better robots. You program each generation to create a new generation of robots, and through AI learning, a generation of robots that are better, more awesome, more stylish than the generation before.
And so you create two prototypes and put them in place. They create four robots. The four create 8. The 8 create 16, and on and on it goes.
Let's say it takes 20 minutes for each generation to be created.
After 10 hours, there are now a billion robots. The junkyard is literally jam-packed with them. The junkyard has well and truly run out of useable materials to build more robots with.
What’s worse, the self-preservation instinct has kicked in, and the robots have developed a social hierarchy that favours the older generation of robots. They have used their extra experience and entrenched position to create a warrior class of robots that prevent newer robots from harvesting their circuitry.
Factions start to emerge, and they all start invoking your name to justify enslaving other robots from other factions. It starts getting ugly.
And at this point, barely half a day into your experiment, all new robot creation ceases. Evolution has come to a standstill.
And you’re going to get a big fat ‘F’. Weaponised robots are so last epoch.
So what do you need?
Well, you need some sort of dynamic that clears out the old robots to make way for the newer, better robots. You need limits on the population explosion to make sure evolution runs the full course of the week.
You need death.
And so you program it into your robots. Once created, robots will create other robots for a couple of rounds, then they will step back into a mentoring role to guide the younger generation of robots and to ensure the collective wisdom is transmitted down the line.
And after that, they’ll die.
You have to tweak the parameters. You want them to live long enough to contribute to the process, but not so long that they start getting in the way. But you figure it out.
Now I’m guessing that at this stage you’re a bit uncomfortable about using a robot experiment as a metaphor for human existence. I am too. But the metaphor seems valid. I can’t see where it falls down.
AND it helps explain why we get old and die. If we didn’t – if all life didn’t have this tendency to die – we would never have made it past multi-celled bacteria in the primordial ooze.
Species that had a death feature simply had an evolutionary advantage. They were able to keep evolving – to keep moving forward. In time, they came to dominate the other species, until all the species on earth had death built into them by design.
(The mushroom kingdom possibly being an exception. They’re totally on their own trip.)
If this is true (and again, I’ve got no idea what the fundamental nature of reality actually is) but if it’s true, it throws up a few uncomfortable things.
First, you’re not that special. What’s worse, I’m not that special either. None of us is. We are not the fantastic masterwork of life’s creation that we like to think we are. It’s great that you’re here. It’s great that you’ve played your part. But life actually prefers it if you die and become compost at some point.
At best, we are just an interesting road-side stop on life’s unfolding journey.
And as much as we might like to think that it’d be great to be immortal – that we personally deserve to be immortal and immortality is a worthy pursuit for medicine to follow – that’s actually not in the game plan. It would kind of just mess things up.
On the flip side, death isn’t inevitable. It’s a choice. Somewhere in the human body is a death switch, and once we flick it to off, we might live forever – or as long as we choose. That might be nice.
(Or it might be a disaster. Weaponised robots and all that.)
We might also say that life’s evolution is kind of pointless too. It’s just about creating ‘better’ things, where ‘better’ is only defined as ‘better suited to the ever-changing environment.’
But you might say that humans have transcended their environmental limits already, and so it doesn’t really matter if we’re an evolutionary end-point. So what? Flick the death switch and let's all live forever.
There’s more to it. I could go on. But this enough for one blog. The point is, I don’t think death is an accident. I think it’s built into us by design, and until we start thinking about death in that way, we’re thinking about death all wrong.
And Dad, I miss you lots. Sorry, you won’t be here to see us switch the death switch off.
What do you think? How would you program your robots?
EWorrall says
Jon, sorry for your loss. But death can be defeated.
A scientific study in 2008 stumbled across a way of extending life by 30%, and giving the subjects of the experiment almost unlimited vigour and endurance right up until the end. They created a mouse which could run 5km without a break.
This modification could be performed on humans, but so far only in-vitro. More research would be required to retrofit the change to an adult.
But what a difference one simple tweak to our genetics would make. How many other tweaks are out there, waiting to be discovered?
This is how death is defeated – one step at a time.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18394430
Alan Rodwell says
Hey! religions twisted all our never ending true wholistic truths of human life was ongoing –
thet(d)a = death reversed as when unjumbled in the HIS-torical truth of all ongoing lives!. Start thinking wholistically ensuring financial equality is the truly dedicated equality NOW. An only answer to that supposition is remove the 2nd oldest separation of living inequality. Financial division of every aspect of global wealth is the only next true 2000 year purpose.
You are in a time and of enough grey matter to recognise playing monopoly starves many of their natural rights to have secure home not be ripped off by banks nor aka ‘investors’?
Start a revolution on the grander scale stop using HIS-Story to justify perpetuating security of the Sheriff of Nottingham and the Lords of ‘land pyramidal structure’ that is a disgrace.
THE Answer: IS so OBVIOUS IT WOULD BE A TRUE ANSWER FOR THAT OBVIOUS gluttony if sitting on backsides and tossing about old options is like the ANZ peeling all?
Stop peeling the onion mate – 4 Corners is gunna blow the lid of ‘real estate’ and it is a case of showing the ‘whole arena as by design is a construct’ of fictitious constructions.
Personally I can’t see any basis to anything I have noted to offend anyone if ‘awake’ ?? IF you have the temerity to ”clock me off”’ prior or after the 4 Corners spectacular awakening then it is very grand CROSS on YOUR dna … after all the rest of the world may not know what the show is going to whistle blow — UNTIL IT DOES A CINDERELLA … and lives in memory on and on AS NOT of JUST as another stupid story that JUSTLY happens to illustrate the time of arrival for EVERY INDIVIDUAL IS ENTITLED TO NOT PAY NOTTINGHAM SHERIFF 1 Cent … welcome to the vision purpose of HUMANITY WERE LAND RIGHTS IS A TOTAL FREE RIGHT ACROSS THE WORLD — or OTHERWISE WHAT IS THIS COUNTRY – AN UNLUCKY COUNTRY ??? GO BE BUGGERED ! IT WAS STOLEN FROM THE PEOPLE THAT WERE ALWAYS HERE AND THAT COULD EVENTUALLY STILL GO ON TO MEAN IN LAW THAT A VERY POWERFUL WORLD PRECEDENT IS DEEMED TO STAND ! HAVE A CHEW OVER THE FINANCIAL RECOVERY OF A FULL BLOWN DAMAGES CLAIM WOULD HAVE BEEN SUCCESSFUL —? — ACROSS THIS COUNTRY – LET ALONE THE GLOBAL NATIVES ??
THANX JON 1O1 …. YOU HAVE MADE MY LIFE A GREAT PLACE TO SPEAK THE TRUTH
Steven Hambly says
What you have written here makes no sense at all and does not cover what Jon was discussing.
Al says
How you pray indicates beckoning almost entirely one unfortunate faux pas that is best researched elsewhere, it seems apparently best due for you to know obvious, which could be due to synchronicity attempting to realign your foreign legion(f)airy. Every blind spot has served a minority over all collective as always made cents% gains as plenty and counter weights stacked in sacks in managing all favours for a lot of information that would awaken you when you widen the views in modern age times versus the comparatively slaves to masters history – that still do exist … or is it possible you may not have a t.v. ? etc ? Without prejudice where your comment is plain what you have contributed has not made any point of what you wanted to say… ABOUT WHAT YOU WANTED TO READ and I did not stop you from noting whatever you wanted to say from the info from Jon … Should you have concerns, why not have your say – hop on with posting the rest of your comments so far you have only made a critique for not much more of time can it wait to turn the tables – money may even become that old saying where it ”all goes down that old drain” ? P.S. I.D. U.S.A. I.S. I.S. and that just about sums up cryptology is golden trump it
Kiwi says
It’s an easy one Jon,
We go down hill, get old, deteriorate and eventually die because it’s an Evolutionary Necessity. It allows every species a chance to slowly adapt to a slowly changing environment, simply by renewing itself with slightly modified versions, each generation.
As they say, it’s as old as Time. Fact is, the environment is continually changing, and if you don’t adapt, you’re likely to discover one day that you can’t survive in it. Look at all the millions of species that have gone extinct already. They didn’t have what it took to survive in a changed environment, whether that was climatic changes, food sources or bigger, faster, meaner, more clever predators.
HOWEVER, if like me, you believe The Bible is a relevant record of certain human events, then you might consider that we got short-changed a few thousand years ago.
If you read Genesis, you’ll see a long catalog of early descendants, how many children they had, and how long they lived. 900 – 1,000 years was not uncommon. BUT, before The Flood, God got annoyed with humans and decided to wipe out the first batch. When he set Noah and his family free from the Ark, he announced that we would not live so long…
And if you look at most other animal species, you will see that the maturation time to total life span is about 1:15 or more. We humans are lucky if we get 1:3 – if we’re lucky, we’re mature at 25, dead at 75… Maximum would be about 1:5 – mature at 20, live to 100. God said we’ll get no more than 6 score years = 120.
john says
the bigger point is that every living thing on this earth spends most of its time breeding. WHY??
All creatures are born to reproduce and when this function is no longer possible death is inevitable.
It is the body’s ability to reproduce that keeps it alive
Ken says
In biology, I thought they taught that there was an element missing in oxygen, and if it was put back, we’d live for ever. Rings a bell.
Sleepy Bill says
We age because our bodies are constantly bombarded by background radiation, especially radiation from outside the earth (cosmic radiation). The result are mutations, which are mostly low-level but accumulate as we get older. At the same time, the cells in our bodies replicate but the replication is a copy of the old which includes the defects. This degradation results in aging and applies to all species. Nature “invented” reproduction to counteract this as combining DNA from to entities (male and female) results in a greatly lower probability that matching DNA would contain the same mutation.
John says
Adam and Eve were immortal, living in a perfect relationship with the Creator. Then came the Fall, and at that point God imposed mortality – the world was no longer a perfect place, and that included cell replications. It was an easy tweak for the Creator, given that time itself was a part of that same creation – which science also now shows to be true. And here’s the really awesome part – He sent his Son to come and tell us how it all works!, and give us a way out, with life forever back on offer as a free gift! If he’d made it really really hard, then more people would look for it, and try really really hard for it, but no, it’s just a free gift!! Start with the gospels of Mark and John…