Cloning and Self-Enhancement in Relation to Life Extension

I used to be opposed to the idea of cloning oneself as a means of life extension for three reasons: 1) early cloning work resulted in sickly animals, 2) a newborn clone will have different life experiences that shape its biology and mind, and 3) I held a naive materialist view of the locus of a subject of experience and action or self-same mind.

I have moved beyond my third objection to view information processed in a manner that is relevantly the same to be an identical mind. Now, if cloning techniques were better, say, even allowing healthy identical copies of adults to be produced (perhaps with advanced nanotech and supercomputing) I would consider that fully adequate for life extension. Moreover, it easily could encourage venturesome risk-taking rather than discourage it among people who find appealing the incentive of a long and youthful lifespan.

At some point, I suspect that such approaches to life extension will be adopted in part because it offers the best of both investment strategies: high risk and novelty seeking / high reward potential and long duration of learning and expertise cultivation through risk aversion / likelier reward potential even if comparative returns are modest. Additionally, more of the same person could be applied to a given problem or challenge (e.g. several clones of the same nobel prize winning physicist could compete and collaborate with one another and other as well as clones of other notable or highly capable physicists to save the planet from the latest existential risk).

Notice I mentioned physicists. On a morning news show with a section on radical life extension I saw an interviewer ask Aubrey de Grey if it really was worth living to watch a million episodes of reality television (to which Aubrey replied something like he wouldn't want to watch a million microseconds of reality television but you can't do anything when dead). Although I see nothing wrong with enjoying reality television we should hope to achieve a bit more with our resources; for example, reaching the stars to seed the galaxy with life and averting extinction in the near future.

In developed nations the tested intelligence of the general population has risen slowly based on a more cognitively demanding environment. At the upper end of the spectrum there also are social filters that encourage some traits to an eccentric extent (e.g. the higher rates of Aspergers Syndrome in Silicon Valley). However, the very word "eugenics" is tainted with the murderous and sadistic regime of the Nazis and any explicit program of genetic enhancement through selective breeding might risk promoting sociopathic and psychopathic tendencies along with intelligence.

One genetic enhancement strategy that doesn't risk oppressive social regimes would be voluntary self-enhancement through the use of early childhood education, nootropic drugs and eventually more dramatically effective forms of neural enhancement and nanorobotically achieved genetic engineering within the self-same person. Ultimately, uploading onto another computational format could enable much more radical enhancement. Let's hope that the leaders, legislators and judges of today and tomorrow have the wisdom and foresight to provide both access to such technology (lest the users become outlaws) and regulation for safety (lest unforeseen glitches in cognitive tech seriously harm the users or those who they interact with while under the influence).