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Daily effort: Open Lifespan does not rely on strong anthropocentrism

Anthropocentrism is also known by other names as humanocentrism, human-centeredness or human exceptionalism. It has something to do with attributing a special significance to humans in the universe.
According to the Environmental Ethics entry of Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy strong anthropocentrism only assigns intrinsic value to human beings alone. So intrinsic value, whatever it would be, is captured in absolute terms and applied only to humans.
In weak anthropocentrism value assignment gets relative and quantitative by human beings representing greater amount of intrinsic value than any non-human things.
Ecological thinkers and environmental ethicists have a rather easy job finding traces of anthropocentrism in the works of canonical thinkers of Western philosophy.
Object-oriented ontology also attacks and rejects anthropocentrism and moves away from epistemological approaches.
When working out bits and pieces of Open Lifespan philosophy Continue reading “Daily effort: Open Lifespan does not rely on strong anthropocentrism”
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The concept and reality of a Longevity World Community, reading Jens Bartelson

Introduction

The immediate focus of this post is to investigate the possibility of a world community centered around longevity. Is there an existing seed of such a community and conceptually what other features make a compelling case for the emergence of an organised Longevity World Community?

The historical apropos is the emergence of such a world-wide longevity community in the last two decades starting in the nineties of the last millennium and the very recent turning of part of this community into a world-wide longevity industry aiming to capitalise on the breakthrough understanding of the biological aging process and interventions counteracting it in order to increase healthy lifespan.

The background context of this mini-study is the question of how longevity can be introduced into politics. One prominent feature of this introduction is informed by the philosophical discussion between Rawls-ian liberalism and its communitarian critics.

The intellectual trigger is Jens Bartelson’s book, called Visions of World Community, published in 2008 by CUP. Continue reading “The concept and reality of a Longevity World Community, reading Jens Bartelson”

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Individual Open Lifespan Trajectories as hyperobjects

I am more and more interested in connecting ecological thought and open lifespan longevity philosophy and in this book blog I have so far made 2 direct attempts, please see Open Lifespan & ecological awareness: scaling up to become global humans  and Wanted: a Global Healthy Longevity report a la IPCC study on Global Warming of 1.5ºC .

My current main theoretical inspiration and guide is Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects. Here I need to acknowledge that I am less certain in what I have to say as Morton writes in the style of continental philosophy and draws largely from that tradition, while the knowledge and method base am using mainly comes from analytic philosophy. But I welcome the uncertainty that comes with moving into a stranger territory.

Let’s start with the thought experiment of assuming that Open Healthspan technologies counteracting the biological aging processes have been developed and mature enough to grant individuals Open Lifespans, that is people have open-ended, indefinite lifespans and a fixed low mortality rate.

Consider now an individual open lifespan trajectory that is your life lived for hundreds of years: wouldn’t that object qualify for being a hyperobject in the Mortonian sense? Continue reading “Individual Open Lifespan Trajectories as hyperobjects”

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Daily Effort: Why coma is not a good fit for first-person, moral thought experiments?

This is going to be a very dense daily effort as I’m sitting alone in a big reception tent at the Eden Project in Cornwall, tired and it’s getting cold.

Already discussed Nagel’s Death essay twice, now is the 3rd time. In the text, after he has introduced the principle of life’s default positivity he is aiming to conceptually restrict discussion on the value of one person’s life. So he makes the following attempt to dismiss ‘mere organic survival’:

The value of life and its contents does not attach to mere organic survival: almost everyone would be indifferent (other things equal) between immediate death and immediate coma followed by death twenty years later without reawakening.

Nagel is asking us here to do a first-person, moral thought experiment in which we are given 2 options to conclude quickly that mere organic survival (coma being an obvious example of it) is not satisfactory (fit enough) when the value component of the principle ‘it is good simply to be alive’ is being discussed. He knows that coma technically speaking is still being alive so it’s important for him to dismiss it from the discussion.

I think mere organic survival cannot be simply dismissed with a one-sentence thought experiment like this. Here’s quickly why. Continue reading “Daily Effort: Why coma is not a good fit for first-person, moral thought experiments?”

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Thomas Nagel and the familiar inner experience of Open Lifespan

The important principle of life’s default positivity was introduced via Thomas Nagel’s Death essay in an earlier post. This essay is a masterful essay of analytical philosophy: dense, full with deep thoughts, yet it is clearly written and most arguments and positions can be recovered with relative ease. On the other hand, it keeps you engaged as it opens up new questions and make you think further. Today my job is to type here almost the complete last section of the essay as it provides a great description of why the assumption of open-ended, indefinite lifespan is a familiar, default and ‘natural’ inner experience of people. As such it can be used as an argument for wanting to actually live an Open Life and push for developing the technology (what I call Open Healthspan) eventually yielding an external experience matching this inner experience. Continue reading “Thomas Nagel and the familiar inner experience of Open Lifespan”

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Is life in a box is better than no life at all? Help and hope, so.

Last time I’ve introduced the principle of life’s default positivity, and the first formula provided was the one used by Thomas Nagel in his Death essay:

It is good simply to be alive.

Another way to phrase this is comparatively

It’s better to be alive than dead.

Let me introduce now a potential counterargument, extracted from the words of one of my favourite fictional characters, Rosencrantz, played by Garry Oldman in Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. Mind you, this is Stoppard’s but not Shakespeare’s Rosencrantz, speaking. How about watching it first:

Here’s the corresponding section from the script: Continue reading “Is life in a box is better than no life at all? Help and hope, so.”

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Daily Effort: Thomas Nagel and the principle of life’s default positivity, first take

The thesis or principle I’d like to introduce today is a (possibly) central thesis behind Open Lifespan philosophy and I’ll keep coming back to it throughout this blog and book in the making. I’m going to extract it first from Thomas Nagel’s masterful and dense essay, Death, originally published in Noûs, in 1970 but am actually going to use the edited version published in Mortal Questions, in 1979.
Then I simply try to provide different formulations. So no arguments today, just a start to understand this principle by stating it and have a glimpses at the heavy philosophical concepts behind it.
Nagel’s main problem in the essay is to investigate why and how and when death can be a misfortune (evil, bad) to the persons who died. And it has to do something with bringing ‘to an end all the goods that life contains’.
And in this context the principle is first stated as an ‘allegiation’ that

It is good simply to be alive, even if one is undergoing terrible experiences.

So first formula

1. It is good simply to be alive.

Let’s continue here cause this leads to another formulation of the principle:

Continue reading “Daily Effort: Thomas Nagel and the principle of life’s default positivity, first take”

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Open Lifespan & ecological awareness: scaling up to become global humans

I’ve rethought my older post in the light of the dramatic IPCC report on climate change giving humanity a deadline of 2030 to avoid a climate disaster. I think it is important to connect and discuss Open Lifespan in the context of ecological awareness. I saved my earlier hyperobject analysis for another time.

The argument: Humans with Open Lives can act on ecological scales

Imagine the following: you are living potentially not up to 100 years but up to 1000 or 10000 years as a biological being without the accumulated effects of aging related negative processes as Open Healthspan technology lets you to counteract those major declines time to time, resets your physiological age and keeps increasing mortality continuously at bay. In short, you have Open Lifespan and you are living an Open Life.
If your potential lifespan gets so close to the time-scale of many big environmental processes then human ecological awareness might reach a new level as full ecological responsibility can be taken for the things you do. From this point of view Open Healthspan technology can be considered and desired as a mighty enabler of ecological thought as by achieving this aim you get to act on previously unprecedented timescales, you get to act like a fully, environmentally responsible human being. At 1000 year old with a pretty good chance you are going to be amongst the Guardians of the Galaxy. And at 1001 even more so.

Continue reading “Open Lifespan & ecological awareness: scaling up to become global humans”

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Daily Effort: Can we build a better self without building a better world?

Our daily today is posing a heavy philosophical question: can we build a better self without building a better world? For understanding the level of this question one needs to take a moral/ethical concept of the self granted. But we don’t need to dig into the depth of the malleability of personal identity, but mostly focus on our narrative, social construct of our selves that is a prime bearer of moral values and changes and agent of moral decisions. Continue reading “Daily Effort: Can we build a better self without building a better world?”