The human brain is capable of 10^16 processes per second, which makes it far more powerful than any computer currently in existence. But that doesnt mean our brains dont have major limitations. The lowly calculator can do math thousands of times better than we can, and our memories are often less than useless - plus, were subject to cognitive biases, those annoying glitches in our thinking that cause us to make questionable decisions and reach erroneous conclusions. Much of what we don’t understand about being human is simply in our heads. Its important to distinguish between cognitive biases and logical fallacies. A logical fallacy is an error in logical argumentation (e.g. ad hominem attacks, slippery slopes, circular arguments, appeal to force, etc.). A cognitive bias, on the other hand, is a genuine deficiency or limitation in our thinking - a flaw in judgment that arises from errors of memory, social attribution, and miscalculations (such as statistical errors or a false sense of probability). Cognitive biases are instances of evolved mental behavior. When people face an uncertain situation, they don’t carefully evaluate the information or look up relevant statistics. Instead, their decisions depend on a long list of mental shortcuts, which often lead them to make foolish decisions. The more you see old folks as a problem, the more you oppose life extension/the defeat of age-related-ill health. Respondents who think having “more elderly people” is good for society are evenly split on extending life to 120 years. Respondents who think having more elderly people is bad solidly oppose this increase in longevity: A majority of them say it would be bad for society. The less you’re looking forward to the next decade, the less you favor life extension. Among respondents who think their lives will be better in the next 10 years, a considerable number says they’d want treatments so they could live to 120. Among respondents who think their lives will be the same, less say they’d want such treatments. Among those who think their lives will be worse, only a minority percent want the treatments. Of course depriving people from the sheer possibility to benefit from the defeat of age-related-ill-health, only because you are personally unhappy with your life is irresponsible, immature und deeply immoral. Social proof is also among the cognitive biases that support and enable the pro-Aging-trance and the irrational opposition against the defeat of age-related-ill-health. When undecided, people tend to follow the patterns of others, and most people are indifferent towards, or even specifically opposed to defeating age-related-ill-health, because of different reason among which are also other cognitive biases, which will be explained in the following. Scope Insensitivity makes people insensitive to changes in magnitude: It has been shown that people are willing to donate almost the same amount to save 2,000, 20,000 or 200,000 birds drowning in oil ponds. People are insensitive to numbers but are extremely sensitive to the plight of individuals, therefore even if exposed to the fact that age-related-ill-health kills and lowers more people than all other causes of death COMBINED, they fail to draw the right conclusions from this horrible fact and to set the right priorities to change the situation, like supporting SENS Foundation. This is also because of the Proportion dominance, that makes people often give more weight to the proportion of lives they are saving than to the absolute number of lives saved. This might be because proportions are easier to evaluate than absolute numbers and is why people must be repeatedly exposed to the fact that Aging is the supreme reason of suffering and death. All in all, it is so much easier to attribute death by age-related-ill-health some meaning or even positive qualities, because of certain genuine deficiencies in our thinking, that might even have an evolutionary purpose, because for the vast majority of time the modern human race is in existence, doing something about age-related-ill-health was simply not feasible and very far off, making certain preconceived biases an adequate coping-mechanism. It means that we don’t have to fight it or fear it, death is normal, good even and we can get back to our everyday routine. But the reality is 100% different. Death from aging-associated-diseases is not the mother of beauty. Death is the mother of worms, eating your rotting body. There is no excuse, no justification, no reason you can give for accepting age-related-ill-health meekly. No misery greater to endure than that one. Too many have already been lost to it. This causes the problem of unaware politicians making uninformed decisions based on what makes them more popular in their constituency. A lot of Politicians do not seem to understand the science’ and are therefore easily swayed by public opinion. The correct way to approach intuitive thinking in moral debate is to make use of the insights that intuitions can enable us to make, whilst being aware of their potential to mislead and remaining vigilant in identifying potentially misleading applications. The more optimistic and unbiased articles we have about the possibility of life extension, the greater our chances are to eliminate all the age-related diseases and make people live much healthier and happier lifes that are beyond anything the inhabitants of a world ruled by Cancer and CVD can imagine.
Posted on: Mon, 17 Mar 2014 10:00:04 +0000