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Why Do People Accept Aging?
(Thursday March 04 2010)
 | From the IEET Blog: "When I was in undergrad, a professor asked our whole class a strange question. ... 'Lets say that I have in my hand, right now, a pill. This pill, if you take it, will make you ageless. [If] you would take this pill, raise your hand.' ... His point was not that people want to age and die but that we naturally distrust such offers. It simply sounds too good to be true. ... Our brains are trained, over time, to understand what a reasonably possible benefit can exist for a given price. A free pill that has no side-effects and no Twilight Zone caveats (you have to be alive, can't die so are tortured, etc) seems more impossible than the idea of anti-aging itself. The problem is that this protective aspect of our mind can become over excited, so we stop believing certain solutions are ever possible. To cure, or even significantly reduce the damages caused by aging, are such an epic benefit that it seems our minds will actively manufacture problems, because the benefit must have some sort of epic cost associated. So we tell ourselves curing aging will cause too many problems and that aging has a lot of natural beauty to it and creates a lot of meaning and that all of that is good." |
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