Reading Bryan Johnson’s The Immortalism Manifesto

You can read along with me here.

He opens:

For most of the history of life on Earth, death has been treated as inevitable. Every organism is born, struggles briefly against decay, and eventually dissolves back into the disorder from which it emerged. Civilizations have accepted this pattern as a law of existence. Bodies age. Systems fail. Entropy wins. Yet humanity has never truly accepted this conclusion. 

Because it’s important here, and in many places, I want to correct a fault I see in the use of entropy. There are two kinds: the first is in probability in the branch called information theory, and this entropy is thus like every probability, meaning it is conditional on the evidence assumed. The second is descriptive of “closed” physical systems, and is purely descriptive. But, then, so is probability. There are also no ideal closed physical systems, only approximations, however useful, of these peculiarities.

Entropy is not a force or a cause. It is a description, also conditional, of causes, perhaps even those we do not yet know of. To say “entropy increases in closed systems” is thus a generalization of the causes happening inside that system. Thus when the second law of thermodynamics says entropy increases in “closed” systems, we’re really discussing the nature of causes and substances in those systems. It is not as if entropy is leaking into these systems, or that things naturally seek states of higher entropy. Substances act and are acted on by causes. Those who want to know more can read my review of Cartwright’s How The Laws of Physics Lie.

Anyway, Johnson doesn’t want to die. A sentiment that is not unknown to men, a “refusal to believe that death must be final.” Our man spends a lot of words on this theme. I believe him that he wants not to die. I’m not fond of the idea myself. And he thinks “we” might find a way around it.

Life itself is a thermodynamic process. Living organisms survive by continuously resisting entropy. Cells detect damage and repair it. Proteins fold into precise shapes. Biological systems constantly monitor themselves and correct errors. As long as this repair process continues, life persists….The dream of immortality, once confined to faith, begins to look like an engineering challenge. In its simplest form, the condition for life can be expressed as:

A(t) >= B(t)

$$where the total capacity to repair, maintain, and restore the system $A(t)$ must remain greater than or equal to the forces that degrade it $B(t)$. Life persists only as long as the systems that repair it are stronger than the forces that degrade it. The dream of immortality, once confined to faith, begins to look like an engineering challenge.

The math is undefined, as it must be, and is no more than a cartoon. This is where we need our caution from above: entropy is not a cause. Things do not move toward entropy as if entropy was a goal. That includes life. Life instead moves towards death, and not because of entropy. Death is built in. And has to be. If organisms only died because of accident, then reproduction would seem to be superfluous, or if engaged in would have quickly fill the earth with whatever the first beings were, ones that ate only inorganic material perhaps, and which because of lack of death would therefore have quickly consumed all its available food. There wouldn’t be enough time for any biological change to happen before the groceries ran out. End of life.

Death brings change. I don’t think Johnson would necessarily dispute that, but it is clear he subscribes to the machine metaphor of life, which leads him to believe we can arrest change. The machine metaphor says living things are the sums of their biochemical parts, operating well. He thinks bio-machines can be perpetually fixed or repaired. Which I don’t think is true even for ordinary machines, let alone organisms. Or maybe you know of an example of a complex machine—it has to be complex to complete the human-life metaphor—that is still running after, say, two thousand years. If there is, I don’t know it, but perhaps you do. Yet even if there were, it would certainly be a pale comparison to the complexity of a man. Or even a bacterium.

Johnson spends a lot of words complaining about the economy, a place where “the human instinct for immortality is not extinguished, it is rerouted, diverted into endless cycles of wanting and consuming that never resolve.” A.k.a. breakfast, lunch, and dinner, then repeat. He instead wants an economy devoted to keeping him alive. Not just him, of course, but people. Which is rather a bad plan, because there are a lot of people we don’t want living forever. Or, at least, I don’t want them to. And even if you disagree with that (“We have infinite dignity!”), there’s that nasty habit of reproduction.

Suppose Johnson’s immortality for people is discovered (by AI!). Two things then happen, depending on whether fertility remains fixed in the newly immortal bodies, or it is present only as it is now, in young ladies. The first scenario cannot be neglected, because suppose women opt for their Johnson-Immortality at age 20, after which (first scenario) they either remain ever fertile, or (second scenario) somehow they become infertile.

If fertility is made eternal, because nobody dies except by accident, the world would soon fill with people; people who, one imagines, would become annoyed, or at least bored, with one another. Anyway, they’d eat everything up or start killing each other to make room.

If fertility is as it is now, with women largely having the ability to become pregnant from 15 to 35, then the first scenario happens again, but at a slower rate, depending on how and when people can opt in to Johnson-Immortality. Or, the newly immortal know this, and most or all cease having children altogether. Why bother if you’re going to live forever? Accidents would still pick people off, and anyway the dull and bored people roaming around forever would, I think, be unable (because old) or unwilling to make new babies.

Immortality, if men were machines and the machines capable of infinite repair, would therefore have to be constrained to only a few. And kept secret at that, because once word got out that immortality has been granted to only a few, well, there would be a clamor. And one raised by young and vigorous people who think they have little to lose.

So it’s well Johnson brings this subject up:

Peter Thiel has suggested that the figure of the biblical Antichrist may not appear as a tyrant of chaos, but as a system of order, one that promises stability, safety, and the elimination of existential risk, while quietly consolidating control.

Consider that it’s well for the reader to nod along with some of the abstract arguments I made above. There will be quibbles about this or that, but likely academic (I choose this word carefully) agreement. All can enjoy pleasant disputations about the lineaments of a cursed immortality. Because, of course, it ain’t going to happen.

But. The Big But. If people really did think the possibility was at hand, well. Out goes academic. I do not say it will be at hand: I say it will never be at hand: I say imagine if people are convinced it is at hand. Death is by definition a “problem”—concern may be a superior word—shared by all. A person who promised to end it, and went some way to making demonstrations he has, could command mighty powers. If all you had to do was follow the political prescriptions of the Promiser, would you? What if you were told it’s only a few bad people holding back this Greatest Gift to “humanity”? What attitude would you strike toward this group of skeptics?

You might agree immortality is bad for mankind, but you are only one man, and you’re sure you could handle it. And anyway, all the problems outlined above are far into the future. When you have your shiny new aluminum body, you’re sure things will sort themselves out.

Johnson is serious about this, ending his manifesto (we have to briefly jump to the end) with this, recalling that even the Devil (and me!) can cite scripture:

“He will wipe every tear from their eyes.  There will be no more death.”  Revelation 21:4

Don’t Die. 

A prophecy fulfilled.

Thiel, and it seems Johnson, too, fret the Antichrist would use the “fear of AI, of catastrophe, of collapse and that it could justify the creation of a centralized system that halts innovation in the name of preservation.” I think the opposite is far more possible, especially after the gibbering turmoil we lived through during the covid panic. And that madness, for the vast majority, was only over the chance of catching a minor cold. Here we’re talking the promise of ending all sickness, all pain, and Death itself.

With that aside, Johnson is aware of the “stagnation” that could occur if immortality were genuine:

Immortalism proposes that survival alone is not sufficient. A system may satisfy this inequality A(t) >= B(t) and yet remain static, perfectly stabilized, but incapable of further improvement. For life to not only persist but continue evolving, a second condition must hold:$$\frac{dA(t)}{dt}>0$$The capacity to repair, learn, and adapt must continue to grow. If it does not, the system risks entering a state of controlled equilibrium, stable, but frozen.

I show this cartoon equation only to show that equations have no power in themselves. But it’s fascinating that they have the power to beguile. Nothing is gained in Johnson’s argument (or in most) by trying to put a mathematical patina on it. The equation has no real-life implementation.

We are clearly in the realm of science fiction anyway. Even accepting the machine metaphor as truth, there is nothing even close to the ability to repair a man so that he never reaches senescence. And then the machine metaphor is false. We are not assemblages of parts, but wholes. Parts of us (say I and others) are not even material, our intellect and possibly memories, and thus we cannot even begin to frame these things in entropic terms.

I highlight this, because Johnson includes an Appendix with lots more equations. There is nothing wrong with applying these as descriptions of physical systems, but that they apply to life in the way he suggests is not proved. He also mistakenly brings in the entropy from information (probability) and uses it incorrectly (as many do). I will cover all this in a Class, and won’t burden readers here with an explanation.

Video

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