Abolishing Involuntary Death: Ben Goertzel on Immortality, Pain and the Meaning of Life

Asked whether he would live forever, Goertzel says his goal in longevity research is to abolish the plague of involuntary death. If forced to choose between forced immortality and dying, he would pick immortality, but the more realistic option is immortality with the right to end it whenever you like. People should be able to live until they get sick of living.

He predicts this will look insanely obvious in 50 years, and that people who say death gives life meaning will be viewed the way we now view the Anabaptists of the year 1000, who gave up their possessions and went up a mountain to wait for the Ascension. He concedes that, at 53, knowing he may have only a few more decades does make him reflect differently and gives him deeper understanding. But he says deep understanding can come in many ways.

Goertzel extends the argument to pain, saying that abolishing it would be even more amazing than abolishing death, and that better neuroscience will let us adjust the brain so pain no longer hurts. Lex Fridman pushes back from what he calls his Russian side, saying he romanticizes suffering and that a world without pain or death is not obviously better. Goertzel replies that there is also beauty in overcoming torture, but few would choose it.

To sharpen the question, Goertzel reframes it as a dial on the side of your head that turns pain from zero up to eleven. The question is not whether you would keep pain at zero all the time but whether you would opt to have the dial at all, and he guesses Fridman would choose it in some dark moment. Fridman admits his shoulder hurts from a challenge of 680 push-ups and pull-ups a day and that he would turn the dial down now, but says the point of the journey may be different.

Goertzel says whether suffering is essential is partly a research question for humanity. Humans have a biological makeup that implies a distribution over motivational systems, and the open issue is how flexibly it can change as society and technology do. He imagines a society where nobody has to work and a decentralized, benevolent AI network warns people before they hurt themselves, and suspects people could stay in a state of consciousness with the pain dial all the way down and still lead fulfilling lives, though he is not certain.

He is more confident that a non-human AGI can be built without an analog of feeling pain, and thinks such a system would be fundamentally healthier and more benevolent than humans. If humans do need a bit of suffering, he says, that might be one thing that disqualifies them from being the super-AGI. He notes our tendency to accept discomfort in the small for gratification in the large, as in music, where a theory holds that aesthetics comes from the surprising fulfillment of expectations.

Asked for the meaning of life, Goertzel gives three values: joy, growth and choice. Joy is the basis of everything, but he is unsatisfied with a static joy that never progresses, and he also values individuality, meaning a distinct system with some agency rather than causality spread evenly across a joyous mass. He says these three can continue indefinitely.

For humans, he says the best path to more joy, growth and choice is transhumanism, going beyond the current form. He thinks the human body is great, but other configurations of matter could manifest even more of these values. In practice he finds meaning in creating something better than humans, while still valuing his four kids, granddaughter, friends and time in nature, and he notes that dying seems to inhibit personal growth considerably.

On the state of longevity research, Goertzel says aging and death have not been cured, but progress is interesting, with CRISPR as a powerful tool and stem cell injections into every tissue as a potentially large life-extender once growth technology improves. He mentions using machine learning to guide stem cell differentiation. He also describes the extracellular matrix, the proteins between cells, which stiffens with age and impairs the signaling that coordinates organs.

His friend Christian Schafmeister of Temple University, he says, has designed novel polymers called spiroligomers that fold predictably and could act as edible molecular scissors cutting cross-links in the matrix. Making this work would take several years, and as far as he knows no one is funding it. What the field needs, he argues, is an integrated database of biological knowledge, massive funding for AGI and statistical research aimed at biology, better cloud-based automated experimentation, and regulators who do not stop people trying radical therapies on themselves.

He compares this to the trillions spent in the last financial crisis and during COVID, and asks whether the world could put 10 trillion dollars into bio-AI, simulation and experimental infrastructure without badly harming the economy. Instead, he says, research is siloed in a few companies and agencies, and most personal health data sits unused in hospital databases that could feed AI to solve aging.