Ask A Genius 920: Sleep and Longevity
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/04/20
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What did you learn about sleep that helps you live longer? Is there such a thing as too much sleep when you’re healthy?
Rick Rosner: Well, the chapter in this guy’s book, and I’ve forgotten the guy’s name, he said eight hours is what you want to shoot for, which seems like a lot. I’ve gotten by on five or six hours a night and a nap. I’ve been sleeping six to seven hours plus perhaps a nap, and I remember my dreams better, which isn’t that great because, in my dreams, the common theme is that I’m barely failing at something. I have some tasks to do, and as I try to go around and complete them, more complications arise, and some of the elements that I’m supposed to be gathering disappear, which all makes sense, just not in that your dreaming brain isn’t so great at keeping track of stuff. So, you can lose things in your dreams, plus I’ve spent chunks of my life barely failing at stuff.
This stuff, Rapamycin, plus getting more sleep; let’s see if it changes my numbers positively, not that my numbers are nasty anyway. I am still determining what number this auxiliary doctor who’s getting me the Rapamycin wants to see. I assume A1C and some C are reactive, like something that measures inflammation. I don’t know if the eight hours need to be uninterrupted, which doesn’t seem consistent with sleep styles historically where I guess in the Middle Ages, people went to sleep when it got dark and maybe got up and quietly did stuff by candlelight for an hour or two then went back to sleep again. I am trying to understand how all that works. That’s all I have on that topic.
Jacobsen: Before the invention of light bulbs and candles, did you think people slept better?
Rosner: Well, according to this chapter in Common Sense, people like to say that the blue light from computer and phone screens is particularly unrestful if you look at the stuff right before you sleep. I don’t know, but on the other hand, we have state-of-the-art mattresses, and we sleep two people to a bed at most, and our dwellings are generally well insulated. We have a bunch of light sources because we control light now, but I’d rather sleep under current conditions than try to sleep in the 14th century on shitty blankets, maybe in all my clothes, probably on top of bundled straw or just raw straw with all the occupants of my barn. Current sleeping conditions are better than they were 700 years ago.
Jacobsen: It is probably largely to do with the improvement in technology, poor comfort, and the reduction of the number of predators, so a lot of the stresses are down.
Rosner: Yeah, we control the world around us, and we live much better now than kings and queens did in the 17th century. In some ways, we are better than the 17th century, but kings and queens probably had pretty sweet beds in the 17th century, at least.
Jacobsen: They weren’t at all clean too.
Rosner: Yeah, they didn’t know about germs. So, there was a certain level of filth, and if you had to make night soil which is the excellent term for getting out of bed and peeing or pooping in a chamber pot if you were lucky, it came with a lid so the stink wouldn’t get out. I like having a toilet.
Jacobsen: Low-level inflammation from being so constant with germs would also be a factor. I don’t know how disgusting food was if you were rich then. It’s still pretty disgusting; food science has come a long way in 30-40 years. We process food that might not be ideal for you, but people in the 17th century ate a ton of stuff that could have been better for them.
Currently, we’re annoyed daily by some aspects of modern technology. Internet technology, smartphone technology, streaming technology, and all the information-based tech of the past 30 years, with its latest incarnations, come with many annoyances. We were doing this particular talk because Carol got an email that her bank account had a data breach, so she had to get in there and track down and see if any harm had been done. It’s going to be no surprise to anybody who reads any science fiction or thinks about the future that when we become more intimately linked with tech, there are going to be glitches and annoyances that will likely, in a bunch of instances, be even more dangerous to us than current tech annoyances because those tech glitches of the near future will be linked to the functioning of our bodies and brains.
So, here’s a topic from my book: rich people, tech billionaires, and the tech bros who want to live indefinitely. They will explore all sorts of new tech to fortify and immortal-ify their consciousness and link it to more information. These people will have tasters equivalent to the food tasters of old, employed by royalty who tasted the food to see if they were getting poisoned. So, rich tech-positive people will have tech tasters who test out new installs to see if they work well and don’t kill you. There will be the Rotten Tomatoes, The Yelp of new tech, but for people who are rich and powerful and tech-advanced enough to try stuff that hasn’t even hit the public enough to be reviewed yet, they’ll have to employ humans to try this stuff before they try it.
Distributed immortality: Some people are already claiming a form of immortality via AI, and your thoughts, if you’ve typed them out via social media, are part of the database for large language models. So, your thoughts are already being incorporated into something that will transcend and live beyond you, which is not a very satisfying form of immortality. Still, in the future, we may see more pleasing forms of distributed immortality if patterns of thought become replicate-able and transmittable from person to person more directly when you can transfer thoughts from person to person without having to translate the thoughts into words and then back into thoughts via the recipient hearing your words. Popular thoughts can be shared repeatedly if there are more direct forms of sharing. So, that is closer to immortality, but still not satisfying. Satisfying immortality involves your consciousness continuing.
Now, it may be satisfying to people and other conscious beings of the future if your consciousness continues but merges with other consciousnesses. I’ve brought up the movie All of Me, in which a wealthy old lady does some mystical Hocus Pocus and merges her consciousness into the head of Steve Martin’s character. It’s Lily Tomlin and Steve Martin from 35 years ago, and it’s a form of ancestor worship that you would have your ancestors’ consciousness riding along with yours. That might be somewhat satisfying, and eventually, if you go through enough iterations of that, your consciousness will be deluded. On the other hand, you will have the strength of thinking in tandem with the linked consciousnesses of a ton of people, and so you’ll be this linked consciousness thing with the shared memories and remembered attitudes of dozens and maybe more people, which is better than nothing.
When consciousness becomes sharable, you can bunch it up with other consciousnesses. Still, you’ll also be able to distribute it and have deluded iterations of yourself in different streams of consciousness so you can branch and then come together if circumstances allow. This may be comfortable for individuals in the future, and we may come to value consciousness less because we see what it is mathematically and mechanically. We’ve discussed that our current continuity of consciousness is not excellent; we think it’s perfectly fine because it’s what we live with, moment to moment. We’re used to it, and we forget a ton of stuff, or that stuff might be able to be remembered but not easily because you need a particular set of stimuli to remind you, but we’re okay with losing a ton of information. Our consciousness has evolved in conjunction with our brain, so it’s the right size and the right amount of fidelity to be contained in our brain; it works for us, and newer forms of consciousness may be better remembered. Maybe we should be able to handle more extensive data sets but may not initially offer the comfort that we have with our current day-to-day consciousness. We know that it becomes uncomfortable when our brains start to fall apart. People with dementia experience sadness and fear, so we’re not okay with every manifestation of consciousness within our brains when it gets shitty; we don’t like it, but the average level of shitty, we’re perfectly okay with it.
[Recording End]
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