“Machine Learning Is Cool. I’m Cool.”

A question presents itself to the psychoanalytic mind: Who even thinks these things?

When the valence of mind deteriorates past a certain point, people start looking for exits. One of these exits is to claim that everything is a dream, everything is empty, or diluted of substance in some way. This can be a way to dissociate from the social context that breathes the fire of our self and suffering. The sequence similarity between humans/Homo sapiens and green monkeys/Chlorocebus sabaeus is 94%, so it is to be expected that we would want to cut ties with our social group after trauma; our method for clipping the cord to the social eyes is only slightly more sophisticated than that of other social mammals who diverged from a relatively recent common ancestor.

[Ahh… Yes. This is why Elon Musk dotes on the simulation; longs for the holographic principle to delete his curse.]

What is stated around here about the nature of reality should not be confused with that genre even it sounds weird and therefore you complete the pattern: escapist. I am committed to life. And by life, I mean life in the conventional sense from the indexical present which contains human persons dying from trauma and neurofibrillary tangles.

But talk is cheap, let me take a short detour here to contribute to anti-aging research and prove that I believe in us:

So I contacted the SENS Research Foundation, which is lonely at the frontline in the battle to save humanity (aging is the number one cause of death and disease, remember). They gave me a link to a dataset which contains genes associated with aging. And I’m going to use my machine learning skills to see what I can do with it.

Here is the dataset.

Clean The Dataset

A human may understand that 5p13.1 represents a cytogenetic location. Let me correct that: A smart human might understand that 5p13.1 represents a cytogenetic location. But a neural network certainly can’t take the statement 5p13.1 without modification.

All must be transmuted to digit before it is presented to the neural network. It is not that a neural network is incapable of dealing with human-understandable categories, since such a limitation would surely defeat the point of using such a tool. It is merely the case that we need to repackage the categories with a representation that it can understand.

There are 16 fields on the gene data set. The eleventh field indicates the orientation of the gene. This is represented by a 1 or -1. The 1 and -1 correspond to this:

The direction in which the RNA is transcribed is in the 5′ to 3′ direction. But although a gene always has the orientation 5′ to 3′, it can be on one of two opposite strands denoted by + and -. This is what I will choose as my output label.

Now I have to look for the possible dependent labels – those that stand a chance of having a meaningful correlation with the output label. The first six labels:GenAge ID, symbol, aliases, name, entrez gene id, uniprot, and the previous-to-last five: acc promoter, acc orf, acc cds, and references can be neglected since they are IDs telling us about naming conventions and nothing about the physical structure. Now we have 5 fields for consideration apart from the output label.

Of these 5, let’s inspect which columns don’t present their information in digits.

This is the first row:

Crowded, I know. But the 5 things we care about are on the indices 7, 8, 9, 10, and 16:

you will see there are several labels which are not digits: why, location, and orthologs are labels with values that are not digits. We need to transform them into digits in a meaningful way before passing them into the neural network. And they cannot be encoded into just binary digits (0’s and 1’s) because for each label, there are more than 2 possible values.

For example, looking at the data we see that the label why can have the values “mammal” or the value “cell, functional” or the value “mammal, model, cell”, along with several others.

And the label location can have the values appropriate for a gene locus: 17p13.1, or 20q11.2, or 10q22.2, or whatever other value is appropriate for gene locus. If we had to just specify the chromosome for the gene in a human, we would already have 23 different possibilities.

Since we have so many possible values for each label that we care about, this situation calls for one-hot encoding.

So I have set out to follow the conclusions of this procedure:

If values not digits. → Check if values should be binary.

If they should be binary.→Encode in binary digits.

If they should not be binary. → One-hot encode.

My ultimate goal here is to predict whether a gene is in the 5’→3′ DNA strand a.k.a. the ‘sense’, ‘plus’ or ‘coding’ strand. This + strand has a sequence which is identical to the sequence of the premessenger RNA (except for uracile (U) in RNA, instead of thymine (T) in DNA); this is the coding strand which is not transcribed. Or whether it is in the complementary strand that is transcribed by the RNA polymerase – known as either the ‘Antisense’, ‘Minus’ or ‘Not coding’ strand.
Knowing my ultimate goal, I must take care to make all the data relevant to the final prediction. So I must inspect with my own human eyes and intuitions what the uncleaned data contains.

For the why label/column, the possible values are:

mammal

“mammal,model,cell”

“mammal,cell”

“cell,functional”

human

“human,mammal,cell”

model

“model,functional”

“cell,downstream”

downstream

functional

putative

“mammal,functional,downstream”

“model,putative”

“model,cell”

“model,downstream”

“cell,upstream”

“functional,putative”

“mammal,putative”

upstream

“functional,downstream”

“upstream,putative”

“downstream,putative”

cell

“model,human_link”

“mammal,model”

human_link

“mammal,functional”

“functional,upstream”

“cell,putative”

“mammal,upstream,downstream”

“mammal,cell”

“mammal,human_link”

Each one of those represents a single value that is possible under the label why. We can choose to one-hot encode them or further engineer them into more sophisticated categories that split the column in pieces so that overlap of the variable is reduced.

I will one-hot encode them for now. So I assign an integer value from 0 to 33 for these categorical values and then translate that into a vector which represents the integer by invoking a 1 at that respective index in an array of 0’s.

You can follow along by doing the following:

Download a 64-bit version of Java from here: Java SE Development Kit 8 Downloads

Now you must set Java_Home

If you have a Mac, go to terminal and run the following commands:

export JAVA_HOME=jdk-install-dir

export PATH=$JAVA_HOME/bin:$PATHIf you have a different system click here.

You also need an IDE such as IntelliJ.

Download either the permanently free Community or the free trial for Ultimate.

You need Maven.

For a Mac, go to terminal and

brew install maven

If you have a different system click here.

You also need git.

Go here if you don’t have it already.

If you have it already, then just update it with this

git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git

Enter this into terminal

git clone https://github.com/deeplearning4j/dl4j-examples.git

cd dl4j-examples/

mvn clean install

Open IntelliJ and choose Import Project.

Select dl4j-examples.

Choose ‘Import project from external model’ and ensure that Maven is selected.

A simple machine learning algorithm cannot “learn” about information such as words and genes without proper translation. “All is number,” said Plato. “All is number,” says the machine.

There are five fields on the dataset that we care about. Our output label, the one that can be a 0 or 1 and which we are learning to predict, is the orientation described by a 1 or -1 on index 11 in the original data.

When building the schema, you use string for things that aren’t composed solely of numbers in the original data.

Schema schema = new Schema.Builder( )
.addColumnsInteger("GenAge ID")
                
.addColumnString("symbol")
                
.addColumnString("aliases")
                
.addColumnString("name")
                
.addColumnInteger("entrez gene id")
                
.addColumnString("uniprot")
                
.addColumnCategorical("why", Arrays.asList(mammal)
               
.addColumnString("band")
                
.addColumnInteger("location start")
                
.addColumnInteger("location end")
                
.addColumnInteger("orientation")
                

…

Unfortunately this was all signaling and real progress requires that we awaken from the slumber of the misaligned need to impress those around us. The competitive spirit of mankind at large must be funneled unto the establishment of rejuvenation therapies that roughly follow the outline sketched by Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence in order to rejuvenate our tissues and cells such that a safety net of biological youth is unlocked and an evil is slayed. 

How can people be true when their bodies rot? How can they read with comfort and grace when entrance to the library requires signing a contract to burn with all the books?

How can they love when those around them will be destroyed?

My duties as a kitchen-knave are done for now. I hope Lynette and Mother see that I am fit to serve the King, fit to be a hero.

Then sprang the happier day from underground;

And revel and song, made merry over Death,

So large mirth lived and Gareth won the quest.

 

 

How to Not Die

First of all, restrict existence to all computable processes. Within that multiverse, there are many instances of being (qualia, experience, consciousness).  For all instances of being, there exists a certain subjective quality.

Due to relativity of simultaneity, time arises in the computations and not in the fundamental physics of the universe.

This means that the subjective quality of time serves a survival role. When the subjective quality of pink circle arises, it serves a survival role.  The universe doesn’t attach identities to particular brains. Particular brains are not ontologically unitary objects. So it would be a mystery why I don’t experience a blue circle if an indeterminate amount of processing in the past light cone of “my brain” was for blue and for circle. Yet it is only the processing distributed in spacetime that codes for pink that binds with circle.

What is experienced is always what is adaptive. There is no ontologically unitary brain ticking forward through a sequential path. So whatever experiences do become atemporally integrated into being (experience, qualia, consciousness) are not random. There is some mechanism by which this is determined.

Unless we imagine that quantum mechanics only applies to some separate magisterium of small things, as far as we know, the probability distribution that governs what we observe is the squared moduli of the universal wavefunction. Denying macroscopic decoherence is contrary to Occam’s Razor and experimental evidence continues to accumulate for superposition of ever larger objects.

The only way to derive the squared modulus of the wavefunction as that which should govern our anticipation is by applying the behavior of a rational Bayesian agent in Hilbert Space. Otherwise, there would be no reason to anticipate one result in infinity as opposed to any other result in infinity.

You exist in the most probable density of the wavefunction although its impossible to predict the existence of one event as opposed to another; it is probability distributions all the way down. This guarantees a certain range of unknowability to the anthropic core.

So it is in this sense that you are already insured to not die. Feeling like a dying creature is a choice, since you can choose to identify with whatever you want. Non-existence is not possible. The only way that non-existence is possible is if we assume that consciousness was not equivalent to atemporally bound computations, therefore rejecting physicalism.

Choosing Belief In Death

OPTION 1: Under the current binding as a human, one can can choose to degrade the computational specificity: Constant Eastern meditation, psychedelics, brain damage, suicide attempts.

OPTION 2: One can also choose to believe in the human, fight to impose one’s particularities, reinforce auto-telos through sheer faith, believe that one dies.

I chose option two, died. Then swung to option one, died. And now I’m ricocheting full speed into option 2 again.

I choose to identify as someone who dies. And I want everyone around me to identify as dying creatures. The reason for this is because I know that most experience already exists outside the binding into a specific human. If the human wasn’t necessary for sustaining the entire being, I would already not be bound into this particular experience.

It is the people who believe most in their personhood that do the most and are in favor of healthy life extension. Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, Diamandis, etc. People who have tenuous self-belief are calm creatures who pass unnoticed, like leaves unnoticed by the wind.

This choice is strategic based on my motivational system. I know that humans run on signaling fuel. They are attempting to negotiate status across perceived status hierarchies so all their operative mental models are designed to fight that fight. Goodness cannot exist disembodied.

My mistake before was to overestimate the degree to which I could express my soul while disregarding the centrality of the near signaling-landscape in the expression of behavior.

…

The hardest-to-fake status signals by which males are assessed are money and health. Hence these incentives should recruit most motivational systems in the abstract. But as we have discovered in economics and biogerontology, people don’t act out routine behavior with their long-term abstracting right-brain.

Moral signaling (including writing about long-term plans, feeling sad about “important” things, etc.) is used to negotiate status when this is calculated to be easier than using intelligence or aggression to achieve the aimed standing. Of course, this signaling works better when the signaler is deceived about the hidden motives, and is also signaling to oneself – hence why someone can emit depressed signals to four walls even in the absence of competitors or potential mates and allies who may be depressed about the same sorts of things.

The farther away you are signaling from the center, the more you reveal deficit in ability to compete at conventional things and/or need for higher aiming; with the true proportions hidden.

Even string theory hermits hiding in the halls of academia are attempting to establish their sovereignty as men – fisherian runaway which reveals the capacity to raise a powerful signaling shield on a mountain of symbols. The dimorphic selectors aren’t females, but instead rich Western society itself. Perhaps unfortunately, they can get away with that kind of display because there aren’t enough natural selection pressures to sharpen evolution. Instead we are in a period of evolution through meme drift. The evidence for this is detailed by Robin Hanson, whose blog I recommend.

You can become a bit more aware of hidden motives with something as simple as observing your aesthetic; by observing how you dress and what music you listen to. If you dress differently than even the subcultures, you are attempting to be at the top of the hierarchy, signaling this non-conformity. Enjoying popular music means: I am competing at conventional things. Enjoying Japanese music can mean: I am different, I want freedom. Enjoying rap music can mean: I am committed to climbing and won’t be nice about it.

Everyone with a clue figures themselves out and props up their comparative advantage. Phenotypes that inherited fitness strategies that depended on signaling high capacity for moral emotions sell that capacity – think Jordan Peterson. Phenotypes that have fitness strategies depending on signaling physical dominance sell that. Phenotypes that have a high capacity for math become professors who argue about the the translatability of problem-solving to other domains (which is empirically a lie according to Bryan Caplan who cites the literature on the matter).

• There are things which are true but not useful, e.g., random facts about the 19th century African American Pacific Appeal newspaper.

• There are things that are temporarily useful but not true, e.g., believing in one’s equal potential to achieve anything.

That’s why some of us have a strong scent for finding core truth. Useful truth is robust. We trust that everyone eventually comes around to it when the lies unravel.

It is easy to believe that superintelligence will not occur in one’s lifetime, or that it is not possible. It is also easy to believe that aging will not happen to oneself, or that it will not be plagued with discomfort and disease that steadily rob you of integrity. However, it is at least less difficult to believe the latter, and also more immediately urgent.

Due to the battle against aging being the most useful-true thing I can think of, that’s where I want to channel the competitive spirit of mankind.  Something I want to work on is to attract more than just counter-signalers. The reason we developed an interest in these topics is because our hidden motives wanted to become higher status than our environment, so we absorbed the most adaptive hierarchy’s values and then took the logical limit to infinity. Accepting this should not lead to nihilism or deflation of motivation, once the childlike naive morality bubble bursts, we simply move on to Level-2 signaling.  In this regard, we will do little to fight aging and promote truth if the momentum is restricted to the parameters: “behavior of self-centered types who do not want to conventionally compete” and “excessive fake signaling due to lower quality.”

The first stage is for voyagers to mine new regions knowledge-space.

But the far more important stage is the second stage: to package what is useful for normies in the hopes of tilting the equilibria.

Recruiting conventionally functional men is required for any movement. The British government got men to fight in World War II by hiring women to go into the streets and only date soldiers, shaming the non-fighters.

If I show to conventional young men that there exists a fertile niche for guys who wear Alcor cryonics bands on their wrists… Talk about hidden motives. But even with the energy and funds to put on that show, there is overcrowding of cultural space due to how much artistic expression is valued in our rich society.

The reason Britain got away with pulling men by the balls was because those poor guys had limited options. Today, people’s efforts are diluted by horizontal motion across subcultures. Yet it still wouldn’t hurt to contribute to promoting that subculture by leading through example. Once we force open a new island with credible signaling, radiation results.

For the purpose hiding behind signaling shields, talk about your values. For effecting change, think in terms of policy. Ask where to place people given how they are known to operate. Ask, “where can I place myself given what I know about my revealed behavior and not what I say.” And use whatever comparative advantage to continue living.

This is something that the healthy longevity community needs to understand more. Humans aren’t moved by slogans. I can tell you, “Donate to SENS because it is in all of our best interest to hasten the defeat of aging. We will not be complaining about a lack of Alzheimer’s dementia, sarcopenia, coronary disease and wrinkles.” But unless you are held accountable by a community in which your relative status would depend on donating to SENS, you are more likely to invent reasons for putting the entire project to control senescence out of your mind.

Updated View On These Posts:

In my defense for this cringeworthy writing, I was in the clutches of a sneakily growing psychosis.

Praxis for Healthy Life-Extension Movement

Robin Hanson has a great post titled How To Fund Prestige Science.

In it he asks, “How can we best promote scientific research?”

This is not a relevant goal, of course, because promoting general scientific research leads to death. As Aubrey de Grey argues, the time to take a systematic engineering approach to the human body and forget about simply accumulating more general knowledge is long overdo.

However, what matters is not the hypothetical goal Hanson considers. What’s important are the two standardly effective variables we can tweak. Money and status can be distributed in exchange for useful output.

If you already own money and/or access to the effective distribution of status in all the ways that Hanson details, then just go ahead and use it to fund life-extension; don’t hold back. Believe me, we won’t be complaining about overpopulation or boredom, and instead we will work on fixing them once we enjoy all the other effects of extending healthspan.

What if you don’t have money or access to the distribution of currently minted status points?

Then you have to start getting creative. Think in terms of redesigning these tools as opposed to merely using them.

Since it is more difficult to redesign money so as to maximize the prospects for reaching longevity escape velocity*, the goal should be to design status in such a way that typical stuff that gets worked on today becomes worth dirt cheap status-cents or has negative status effects.

This can be achieved. Status does not exist in an immutable form. Gradually tilt the conversation so that it is low-status to not be in favor of healthspan extension through the engineering approach.

This dipole flip in high-status/low-status opinion can happen very quickly on a large societal level, as happened with homosexual rights. We just need people to come out.

In this regard, self-identified Hispanics, Blacks and youth are doing a somewhat better job of coming out against aging and in favor of extending youth. This would not be expected if you thought that human variation on the matter only correlated with IQ. Lower IQ leads to less planning for the future. And above average IQ is often one variable that correlates with people self-orienting towards an interest in life extension. Out of the blue, I hypothesize that the correlation may be more with conscientiousness.

Highly conscientious people will serve Caesar or scheme along with the revolution of Cassius – they don’t really care as long as they get to be conscientious. If Caesar says we ought to age and die for the next generation, they will do so. But if a sliver of the conscientious population wants to be greater than the others, it will try to up-level the competition by conscientiously rebelling alongside the whispering Cassius instead. People might want to take the sideways plunge to conscientiously murder Caesar if they calculate that this will make them a better senator unto the projected plebeians; this slight capacity to disagree into where you funnel your conscientiousness becomes your comparative advantage.

Of course, the plebeian praise is simulated in the mind of the conspirators, because humanity at large (the plebeians) don’t really care. They don’t really care if they age and lose everything. Haven’t you noticed that you have to tell them about it? Haven’t you realized that your own life is not oriented towards the vision of that truth?

All tragedies are invented so that we may be heroes. We invent the problem of aging in order to sweep the rug from underneath the feet of the hierarchy.

Because the adaptive behavior of Hispanics, Blacks, and youth is often less tied to signaling conscientiousness with regard to White metropolitan humanism, they accidentally converge with the up-leveling desire in White metropolitan humanism: (longevists/transhumanists).

It just so happens that this Caesar will be murdered unlike other invented problems. The reason is circular: the hardest to fake human quality signals are: 1. Physical health (based on biological age, symmetry, height, physique, smell) and 2. Money (very often filters for genes that allow its attainment in some way: intelligence, conscientiousness, extroversion, all of the above)

People prop up their comparative advantage in order to distract from the hard-to-fake signals. In the absence of immediate physical needs not met, the behavior of humans is signaling, and those two things are some of the most effective at having men** assessed, so it is fate that has spawned this as our next monolith.

To speed it up, we need to understand this framework, realize where we physically stand, and then fully remember. Remember again and again.

*Even this has seen progress with the rise of crypto-currencies. Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum, donated 2.4 million in Ether. The Pineapple Fund donated 1 million dollars in Bitcoin.

**Women can also be effectively assessed by these signals. But what sexually competing men are assessed by is crucially important because that’s the main fuel that bores the tunnels. A subpopulation of half-eunuch’s and unconventionally-competing women who do not get absorbed as low-status or fully defect themselves away are those who make the change by tilting the direction where conventional men aim. All the while trophy fertile women are the judging eyes that indirectly get everyone to do things. Even creative up-leveling involves not being crazy to the point of losing recruitment potential that raises standing. What constrains possibility is that which the mind considers adaptive.

&&& Acknowledgement is not endorsement. The biological and social sciences reveal this to be approximately true across vast anthropological terrain. It must be taken into account even when our ultimate aim is transhumanism (the dreams of the half-eunuch who prefers creativity because telling stories was his comparative advantage).

A Page of History: Longevists, Crypto-Trillionaires, and Tortured Simulations

KARROUBI, HASSAN, AND THE LONGEVIST BETRAYAL

To understand the road to the singularity, it is necessary to revisit an almost forgotten episode in Homo sapiens sapiens history – the Longevist negotiations with Anarcho-Primitivist fundamentalists before the 2080 election to stop Hashemi from successfully negotiating the deletion of the tortured computations in the AGI’s servers. These illicit contacts generated partnerships in secrecy that united at least two Longevist politicians Cyrus Hilzenrath and the elder Mehdi Hassan, with unlikely co-conspirators from the AGI, Neo-Tokyo, and the scandal-ridden Self-Amending Ledger for Postnational Contracts (SALPC).

The illicit liaison produced a flow of Longevist computing power brokered by SALPC, from Neo-Tokyo to the AGI servers. The arrangements, that could not be acknowledged, continued unchecked until they were exposed in the AGI-Contra scandal of 2086. By then they had also generated Longevist dependence on the life-extension therapy laundering SALPC for Longevist drug deliveries to the UBI underclass. They also figure in the personal financial involvement of both Mehdi Hassans, father and embryo-selected son, in a cluster of SALPC-connected Libertarian investors who have been accused of funding Neb Leztreog. At least some of the strange events surrounding and leading up to the singularity can only be understood in the light of this Longevist-Libertarian connection. A celebrated example is the permission granted Leztreog family members to upload their consciousness out of the biological wetware in the days after the singularity.

What has been less noted, however, is that the powerful influence of Longevists from the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence in the two Hassan administrations can also be dated back to the intrigues of the 2080 Longevist betrayal. A section of the Universal Library of Babel who’s block formed in 2093 revealed that the Khan-Hassan campaign created “a strategy group, known as the ‘Red November Harikiri.’ Its ten members included Chu Li from the LSD; and David Markoff, Shen Huang, and John Shapiro (all from the LSD) “also participated in meetings although they were not considered members.” Huang, a major figure in the AGI-Contra scandal, has since the 2090s been a leading advocate for the Longevist invasion of both Second Scape and the AGI servers.

In 2105, Li cochaired the commission that exonerated CEO Mehdi S. Hassan from responsibility for the false stories linking Second Scape to synthetically engineered pathogens. The commission report, called by many a whitewash, was praised in the Immortalist Sequences by Huang. In short, the intimate and overlapping Hassan family links to both pro-Anarchoprimitivist conspirators and pro-Tokyo vectors can be dated back to the 2080 Longevist betrayal, negotiated in part with Anarcho-Primitivist fundamentalists. People who have collaborated secretly in a shameful if not treasonable offense cannot dispense lightly with their co-conspirators.

Through 2080 there were two competing sets of secret Longevist negotiations with the AGI for the cessation of the blackmail suffering computations. The first set, official and perforce Aubreyist, was labeled Hashemi’s November Salvation by vice presidential candidate Hassan on November 2, 2080. In competition with it was a second set of negotiations, possibly transgalactically illegal, to delay the hostages’ cessation until Khan’s inauguration in 2081. The Longevist betrayal (often also called “November Betrayal”) had a precedent: Raynor’s secret deals with Martian colonist Douglas Kuvshinoff in 2068, to delay President Erlang’s “November Salvation” – his hopes of scalping a merciful compromise – until after the presidential election.

It is now certain that Raynor, acting through his avatar Kenneth Stevens persuaded the head of the Martian colony not to unleash his aligned agent until after Raynor had been elected. (His action of intervening in a major diplomatic negotiation of this sort has been called sinful – even by the godless.) In this way, Raynor helped secure not only his election but also the further prolongation of blackmail and negative hedons in a fruitless extension of the Hell Simulation. Thus the actions of Hassan the elder and Hilzenrath in November 2080 had antecedents. But in one respect they were unprecedented: Raynor in 2068 was negotiating privately with Longevist client and ally Douglas Kuvshinoff. Hilzenrath in 2080 was negotiating with representatives of an intelligence that President Hashemi had designated as the devil. This is why Mohamad Washington funded memetic missiles suggesting a “political coup,” Kenneth Norton suggesting possible treason, and China Taylor of the possibility whether the deal “would have violated some intergalactic law.”

Even in 2105, accounts of the 2080 Longevist surprise remain outside the confines of mainstream transhumanist political history. This is in part because, as I detail in this book, the events brought in elements form powerful and enduring forces on Earth – trillionaires and IWG on the one hand ( IWG is traditionally close to the Longevist crypto trillionaires and the VC-funded islands of the Pacific Ocean) and the pro-Tokyo lobby on the other. Just as crypto-anarchists are powerful in the global bureaucracy, so the pro-Tokyo lobby, represented by the Longevist-Tokyo Political Action Committee (LTPAC) is powerful in supporter purchasing power. The two groups have grown powerful through the years in opposition to each other, but on this occasion they were allied against Mario Hashemi.

The Longevist betrayal of 2080 was originally described in two full-immersion experiences by insider designers Abdula Timmerman (a former Cabrini campaign aide) and William Khalaj (the AGI hired proxy under Rulifson for Hashemi’s Global Security Front). A strategic News Stream Fork split in 2092, paid by the wealthy Geoffrey Haug, buried the truth by 2093, after reinforcing that a ten-month investigation found “no credible evidence” to support allegations that the Reagan-Hassan campaign in November 2080 sought to delay the destruction of simulations held hostage in Hell until after that year’s presidential election.

Their matters might have rested had it not been for the indefatigable researches of scraper 3MMI6 by Ordbog Company. 3MMI6 had twice been targeted for destruction by its enemies due to its pursuit of the truth about AGI-Contra: first at the Coding Nucleus after breaking the longevist-drugs story, and then with Antigens. It found clear evidence of a major cover-up, particularly with respect to Kuvshinoff: “The [Ordbog Company] scraper learned that Douglas Kuvshinoff’s schedules, avatars and preference records had been preserved by IWG and were turned over to his family after his cryopreservation in 2087. When the scrapers searched Kuvshinoff’s memory palaces, they found all the preserved records, except Kuvshinoff’s communications for 2080, a “blackmail” file, two AI-planned schedules and loose pilots to satisfice a third utility function which covered the preferences from June 24, 2080 to December 18, 2080. Checked against IWG’s index, the only data missing was that relevant to the November Betrayal issue.

At the same time, during the investigation of SALPC by…

 

 

 

 

Career/Academic Goals

I’m taking up science with the specific intent of doing SENS research. This is because young transhumanists may be key to changing the biogerontology establishment from within. The people of SENS and I envision a phenomenon in which there will be a small cadre of people opposed to aging in institutions all over the place. And as the economy improves over the next few years, and the public finally starts to demand serious work on rejuvenation biotechnologies (with any luck, just as I’m getting on with my postdoctoral studies), we’ll be ready to take up the challenge with full public and government support.

Here, I summarize the two strategies I’ve discussed with the people at SENS for clearing lysosomal aggregates:
*The first, involves decomposer bacteria. We identify the specific enzymes they are using and then modify them for the different environment in our lysosomes. Then we unleash a barrage of injections upon the living.
*The second is to genetically engineer our own macrophages so that they produce the necessary enzymes themselves.

The gene therapy approach is a continuation of the injectable enzyme approach: the sticking point is that I’ve been told we don’t have a safe, reliable system for gene therapy in humans yet, except for very niche applications such as the genetic form of retinitis pigmentosa1 (where target cells are few in number and located in a compartment that is isolated from the immune system). As a researcher, I need to identify a candidate enzyme, test it in cell models, and then in animals. If by the time I get to human testing there is safe, reliable gene therapy, I can encode the gene into a vector; if not, I can work on modifying it for cellular and then lysosomal uptake after injection, as is done today for genetic lysosomal storage diseases.

Exactly what direction I should push to pursue this kind of work will depend substantially on which target I go after. But since it is not the case that I graduated from high school at 15 and have already completed my BS, those decisions are still some time off: my real goal as an undergrad is not to specialize, but to get a broad foundation in life sciences. And I think there normally isn’t that much specialization at the undergrad level anyway. So I will want to focus to the extent that I can on cellular and molecular biology. I’ll be talking to my department student advisor to tailor my classes in that direction — but honestly, I doubt there will be much tweaking. My real goal is to build up foundational skills and the knowledge base, and to set myself up to do whatever most appeals to me and matches my aptitude at the graduate level.

A Thought on the Aging Plague

Biological senescence has had a busy first 130,000 years in office, displaying the misanthropic bravado, crudity, and proficiency of which it seems naturally tasked. It is quite absolutely what we allow it to be: a deceptive Grim Reaper. And now our lives have begun to wilt at its whim. The fact that people like me can’t find the time to think about the infectious diseases with which it has tag-teamed us into oblivion is a measure of how bad the problem is. Transmissible disease has become the lesser of our assailants. Our fates have been stolen by an imbroglio of metabolism.