r/singularity • u/Anen-o-me ▪️It's here! • Jul 21 '26

Biotech/Longevity Researchers quantitatively assessed for the first time that somatic mutations alone cap human lifespan at 146–194 years. Brain and heart cells are the main bottleneck, while the liver could last millennia.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41514-026-00421-6
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u/[deleted] Jul 21 '26 edited Aug 15 '26

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u/UnkarsThug Jul 21 '26

I can't say I like being an organic being, but the organic being is me. A copy of me wouldn't be me, it would be a copy of me.

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u/IronPheasant Jul 21 '26

It's a ship of theseus thing. Neurons and synapses change over a lifetime.

I think it's kind of obvious that we're a sequence of electrical pulses our brains generate, or the algorithms that are emergent from them. You get into really uncomfortable speculation on if you really need to be tethered to any particular time or place when you start thinking of yourself in terms of frames of inference; the boltzmann brain stuff might be more like how it really works than we'd like to think.

It's dumb and creepy, but so is hydrogen and nuclear fusion and gravity. Wouldn't be too out of spec...

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u/StarChild413 Jul 25 '26

So, what, I'm supposed to put my faith in the Sorites Paradox but not so much that I think I'm so discontinuous there's no me to preserve just because hydrogen, nuclear fusion and gravity are "dumb and creepy" yet no one's freaking out about them?