Lindbergh’s Deranged Quest for Immortality
May 28th, 2008Life extension technology is a standard obsession with the elite. There has been an attempt to mainstream the nonsense through the activities of lunatics like Ray Kurzweil, who hopes to download his consciousness into a computer at some stage.
Need I say more? Well, there’s a lot more. And, no, this isn’t a character analysis of Darth Vader. * wink *
Via: BBC:
But did you know that he was also a machine-obsessed inventor, who entered into a macabre alliance with a French-born surgeon to try to achieve immortality?
Forget aviation hero. On the side, Lindbergh was a Dr Frankenstein figure, who used his mechanical genius to explore the possibility of conquering death – but only for the select few who were considered “worthy” of living forever.
“Beating death was something he thought about his entire life”, says David M Friedman, American author of the new book The Immortalists. “Even as a small child, he couldn’t accept that people had to die. He would ask: ‘Why do you have to die to get to heaven?'”
Machine-enabled people
Friedman’s The Immortalists relates the untold story of Lindbergh’s frequently bizarre efforts to cheat death by creating machines that might sustain human life.
In the 1930s, after his historic flight over the Atlantic, Lindbergh hooked up with Alexis Carrel, a brilliant surgeon born in France but who worked in a laboratory at the Rockefeller Institute in Manhattan. Carrel – who was a mystic as well as a scientist – had already won a Nobel Prize for his pioneering work on the transplantation of blood vessels. But his real dream was a future in which the human body would become, in Friedman’s words, “a machine with constantly reparable or replaceable parts”.
This is where Lindbergh entered the frame. Carrel hoped that his own scientific nous combined with Lindbergh’s machine-making proficiency (Lindbergh had, after all, already helped design a plane that flew non-stop to Paris) would make his fantasy about immortal machine-enabled human beings a reality.
“Both of their needs were met in this rather strange relationship”, says Friedman. “Carrel benefited from Lindbergh’s mechanical genius and inventiveness, and for Lindbergh – well, Carrel became the most important person in his life, effectively steering the way he viewed the world and the people who lived in it.”
At the Rockefeller lab, Lindbergh and Carrel – almost like a real-life Jekyll and Hyde double act – made some extraordinary breakthroughs.
Lindbergh created something that Carrel’s team had singularly failed to: a perfusion pump that could keep a human organ alive outside of the body. It was called the “Model T” pump. In later years, Lindbergh’s pump was further developed by others, eventually leading to the construction of the first heart-lung machine.
“Some people, even academics and science students, are still shocked when they hear about the contribution that the aviator Lindbergh made to developing life-saving cardiac machinery,” says Friedman.
But there was a serious downside to what Friedman refers to as Lindbergh and Carrel’s “daring quest” to live forever.
Carrel was a eugenicist with fascistic leanings. He believed the world was split into superior and inferior beings, and hoped that science would allow the superior – which included himself and Lindbergh, of course – to dominate and eventually weed out the inferiors.
He thought the planet was “encumbered” with people who “should be dead”, including “the weak, the diseased, and the fools”. Something like Lindbergh’s pump was not intended to help the many, but the few.
Lindbergh himself sympathised with the Nazis.
“I wouldn’t say Lindbergh was the philosophical partner of Himmler or Hitler,” says Friedman. “But yes, he certainly admired the order, science and technology of Nazi Germany – and the idea of creating an ethnically pure race.”
Friedman says Lindbergh considered himself a “superior being”. “Let’s not forget that, as a pilot, he felt he had escaped the chains of mortality. He had had a god-like experience. He flew amongst the clouds, often in a cockpit that was open to the elements. Flying was such a rare experience back then. In taking to the skies, he did something humans have dreamt of for centuries. So it is perhaps not surprising that he ended up trying to play god in a laboratory.”
On the other hand, Robert Anton Wilson was an Immortalist, and he’s certainly not a member of the power elite.
I think we should have infinite space, time and resources for everyone, but it’s not really a political decision. If there were immortality tech on the horizon, like the next 5 to 50 years, there’s no way it could be maintained as a herrenmoral regime indefinetly.
If anarcho-primitivism has a polar opposite, then that would probably be the Transhumanism of Kurzweil, et. al. These freaks actually think of the planetary biosphere that nurtures and sustains our life as a “gravity well” at the bottom of which we are supposedly stuck, as if our species were the demonic little girl Samara in The Ring.
Kev said: “…lunatics like Ray Kurzweil…”
My favorite Kurzweil prediction:
“2049: Food is commonly ‘assembled’ by nanomachines. This food is externally indistinguishable from ‘natural’ food, but can be made much healthier since production can be controlled at the molecular level. This technology decouples food production from climate conditions and the availability of natural resources. [An implication of this is that meat production will no longer require the slaughter of animals.]”
He’s an amazing fellow, let me tell you. A non-stop flow of highly prescient “modeled” predictions with only one glaring flaw: they assume technology to be an all-conquering force capable of individual — or worse, networked — sentience.
That’s why I love the quote above so dearly. It reveals his complete LACK of understanding of an entire planet’s worth of evidence of molecular complexity well beyond our limited ken as a species, despite our missiles and microscopes.
Yes, his “nanobots” are capable of autonomous action with enough complex and overlapping programming, but they remain a parasitic creation. Should they actually reach the point where thy can reproduce (will it be nano-smelters and nano-assembly lines, or will they spit out nano-copies?), then I will truly be worried, in a “James Cameron/John Connor/I’ll be back” kind of way.
How does one program consciousness?
What really nukes me is that über-nerds like him still assume we can teach a machine to “think”, when we still have very little idea what is actually involved — beyond our feeble human attempts to describe and label with sticky notes a vast and ineffable uni/multi/omniverse.
See? Which one is it? Naturally, we have no actual idea, beyond satellite snapshots and radio-frequency postcards from distant stars, offering us stark images of twinkly lights a gazillion miles away to be pondered. Establishment science struggles ever-harder to squish their pre-limited ideas into broken models already better explained by the emerging field of electric and plasma-universe theories.
Kurzweil should stick to building his brilliant toys.
What they all get wrong is purity as such a grand and good thing. Purity usually means death. Lack of interaction, interplay, change, flux, etc. Complex systems can be defined by their distinct lack of purity. Life is messy. Hygiene is not about purity, but a proper balance. Molecular manufacturing might be possible, but I’m not so sure I want to taste — or try surviving on — the results.
Sure, the modeling the AI guys are doing reaches into the realm of “sugarscape” and molecular interaction, but for all the pattern recognition and decision trees in the whatever-verse, how can one possibly greet an exception to all the known rules?
What happens when the lightning strikes?
Alright, good to see some transhumanist topics being discused. I’d like to see more of this as time moves foward.
Loveandlight:
You could reconcile anarcho-primitivism with transhumanism by imagining a world where natural beauty and balance is made possible by the resource benefits of nanotechnology and non-invasive B-CIs. Terrence McKenna described something along these lines.
Miraculix:
Nobody said these weren’t hard problems, but there remains the probability that they are ineffable, which would shape he constraints of what kind of future would emerge. The two main criticms of strong AI are, to simply, that it’s software wouldn’t be able to exhibit consciousness due to limitations in the software, or that it’s hardware would prevent true consciousness from emerging.
In the first case, there’s a pretty solid background of prior art suggesting that recombinant explosions in output from complex, interacting systems can constrain each other in order to yield sufficient dynamism to constitute general intelligence. For example, the storms of electricity building in different parts of your brain as you read this allow an extremely nuanced and highly adaptive pattern to emerge and be interpreted by other parts of your brain, constituing your comprehension of this text. Cluster computing and a sufficiently sophisticated design of interacting modules might be able to achieve similar results, over time. See Novamente, for a potential example (the creator is a pretty cool guy and not an elitist in the sense portrayed, he told me a story about John Poindexter I’ll have to relate sometime).
In the latter case, there’s a fear that no matter how well you design your architecture, or train the burgeoning mind, it will ultimately run into the Halting Problem because it’s hardware is a Turing Complete Silicon transistor. For example, you tell it to become more intelligent and optimize a conglomeration of factors, but then it gets stuck on that optimization process and the results in the mid to long-term are unexpected and perhaps disastrous. The solution is to solve the Reimann Hypothesis and design a quantum computer based on that math.