The document discusses imagining oneself as a 572-year-old engaged in various activities and scenarios. It explores:
1) Imagining oneself at 572 years old on a Sunday afternoon engaged in a leisure activity and then starting work on Monday.
2) The challenges of imagining oneself or one's environment at such an advanced age, and comparing it to imagining other ages such as 456 or 140 years old.
3) How collective cultural knowledge and examples like fictional characters can make imagining older ages easier by providing models or contexts to imagine within.
1. What is it like to be 572 year old?
Imagination of robustly healthspan extended selves
Attila Csordas
2017/12/20
2. 0. Thought experiment #1
Let’s assume the following:
- you live in a human body and continuous bodily with your current body
- you’re going through continuous regenerative interventions to counteract different aging
processes so
- instead of increased mortality with age, mortality rates are kept at a constant level
- no functional decline with age (no hearing loss, no vision loss, no muscle weakness, no
cognitive decline …)
- no susceptibility increase to current age-associated diseases, the deadly quintet (CVD,
respiratory, diabetes, neurodegenrative …), cancer might be an exception
- can be specified but not necessary: others are going through same interventions and your
social network stays intact (social recognition as PI condition)
- looks roughly the same for everbody >25 as they are now or rejuvenated back to 40 for
older
3. 0. Thought experiment #1
Please try to imagine yourself to be 572 year old and engaged
in some free-chosen activity one Sunday afternoon.
Please try to imagine yourself to be 572 year old and starting
work the Monday after the Sunday.
3 minutes
6. 1. What kind of imagining?
Desire included?
I imagine myself at 572 having finally enough time undisturbed, unhurried to
complete
reading of all the works of Shakespeare.
7. 2. Problems: What is harder to
imagine?
1. me at 572
2.my environment at me being 572 (rest of the world)
8. 110yo
572yo
2. How about imagining with other big
numbers?
456yo
312yo
207yo
172yo
140yo
572 456 312 207 170 140 110
Stephen
10. 2. Psychology: intertemporal choice
saving behavior anf temporal discounting (caring less about future outcomes)
conflicts between temporally distinc selves
more similarity of current self with future self, more vivid imagining and when seen in a
positive light -> more responsible toward future self
11. 2. Psychology: Turning I into me
n=160, mean age=27, SD=9.49, imagine walking along a beach in near (1 week from now) or
distant future (10 years), vantage point switches from I (first-person) to me (third person),
not when imagining (simulating) their best friends, it stayed first-person, it’s not known
where is the switch ~20 years
12. 2. Psychology: pro and contra of I & me-
view
I (first-person) me (third-person)
concrete abstract
affective forecasting leads to more error
handling unpleasant
events, like dying
better
identity split no
future self is a stranger
no corporeal feeling
13. 3. Comfort zone for self
imagination: Principle of collective
knowledge
imagination usually restricted to being somebody actually existed and we have an account on
/Easier to imagine being Jeanne Calment, even easier to imagine being Napoleon or Churchill at some
important historical turning point/
shared/collective cultural experience or knowledge
it’s easier to be me,
14. 3. 5 more imaginings staying within
collective knowledge
15. #1 space jumps: landing/walking on Moon
#2 space jumps: deep space
17. #4 Groundhog day
no problems with being in the skin of ficitional characters
comes out as very different person at the end
18. #5. Interstellar: Miller’s planet
after traversing the wormhole, time dilation: each hour is seven years
19. 4. Personal identity issues
settings of the scenario are such that most conditions of personal identities are
assumed to be hold:
- bodiliy continuity
- psychological continuity
- social recognition
20. 3. At 572 could I be still me?
If de se imagination (from the inside) is not about imaging anything about the actual self, then
imagine myself at 572 might not involve imagining my actual, current self at 572, instead it can be
some other self perhaps?
21. 3. Four-dimensionalism (or
perdurantism)
persons are 4D objects with temporal parts too beside spatial parts
on this account when I imagine myself at 572 I imagine myself being another temporal part
of mine,
or another person stage of mine
22. 3. Three-dimensionalism (or
endurantism)
persons are 3D objects with no temporal parts
an object that exists at t is wholly present
at t, with no parts existing at other times
buddhist, presentism, actual world
23. 4. Can this imagining be used pro- or
contra healthy lifespan extension?
25. 4. Epistemological scepticism #1: it’s
too problematic
if study result is inconsistent, messy
I don’t know, I cannot assess and access my future 572
-> this cannot be used for pro- or contra
cognitive dissonance
26. 4. Epistemological scepticism #2:
training is needed
Most people don’t bother with thinking about it, so most people
lack planning for a scenario like this: what if I were struck with
an opportunity like this?
-> the opinion of the majority is ambiguous and cannot be
trusted
elitism seems unacceptable though
27. 4 arguments
if you practice imagining yourself to be 572 one day
then you consider yourself potentially with extreme
longevity and that modulates your current life with
normal life expectancy
it’s opposite imagining yourself on your last day
5. What’s the point of imagine
yourself being 572 yo in the same
body?
28. to turn yourself into a good person in this life: more
moral responsibility
scaling up your existence mentally might involve more
understanding and patience towards other people
more empathy, less ageism
re-define old age now
5. #1 Moral Goody
29. Mark Baum: “What bothers me isn't that fraud is not
nice or that fraud is mean. It's that, for 15,000 years,
fraud and short-sighted thinking have never, ever
worked. Not once. Eventually, people get caught,
things go south.When the hell did we forget all that?”
5. #1 Moral Goody
30. existing on the same timescale as environmental issues like
climate change might make us more responsible, chance to
become the guardians of the galaxy
5. #2 Ecological Goody
100yo
572yo
