The Food & Drugs Administration does not think of aging as a disease. However the FDA only allows to test drugs which potentially fight a disease. One disease. Just one disease. This has practical consequences: the FDA cannot authorize testing drugs which would combat aging. Since, according to the FDA, aging is not a disease.
I disagree. Philosophically considered, aging is obviously a disease. On the face of it, dis-ease means one is not at ease anymore. Not only is aging a reduction of comfort: watch old people bent over, shrunk, transpierced by various pains related to all sorts of inflammations. Moreover nearly all diseases which affect people, and are ultimately impossible to treat are age related. But, moreover, clearly, aging is not comfortable:
Brigitte Bardot In Her 20s, & More recently: If That’s Not A Disease, What Is? Aging Is A Disease, Like Elephantiasis
The FDA’s position is arguably the greatest obstacle to progress in health care. Why? If aging is not a disease, and no drug can be developed to cure this non-disease, most diseases known will not be treated, as most diseases are age-related: when people are in their prime, say between 25 and 45 years of age, they are pretty much disease free.
Theories of how aging proceeds exist. They are not complete, but they fit well with the plausible modes of action of the five substances which are known to have anti-aging effects.
Some will philosophically object to the desire of having people live 1,000 years or so. However, suppose people did. It would be then very easy to persuade people to save the biosphere from the Greenhouse Gas catastrophe.
The one billion people living within 10 meter elevation from the sea would not appreciate to see their properties flooded within a small fraction of their lifetimes. Indeed, it’s pretty much guaranteed that sea level will go up tens of meters in a few centuries, displacing billions of people. Such a displacement of population will bring huge wars, and misery, among other problems.
Thus with long lives will come a better stewardship of the planet.
Some have dared to idiotically proffer that we would not want to live that long. Well, I am all for voluntary euthanasia: let them idiots and people of little appreciation die, that will help the biosphere. And it will help the ambiance too: who wants people in such a bad mood, with a jaundiced attitude to life, sticking around? Would not they start wars, just to get out of their colossal ennui?
Not fighting aging is tantamount to calling death a necessary calling, short-term, of the human experience. It’s nearly tantamount to approving of young people dying in war. It’s the reign of the philosophy of the Dark Side posing as Enlightened.
Ageing as something to be respected has to be disposed of, be it just to improve the philosophical mood of humanity.
Patrice Ayme’
Tags: Ageing, Disease, FDA, Philosophy
Patrice Ayme's Thoughts 
October 24, 2015 at 12:45 am |
Patrice,
I think it is more complex. Not to say we couldn’t have much longer lives, but I doubt it would be a product of the current medical system, which is focused on solving problems within the body, than a much larger focus of environmental and social systems that consume people, emotionally and physically.
Also our minds tend to operate at a fairly set speed. We are not turtles. So that if we make ourselves safer, there becomes a tendency to seek risk in other ways, from simply overeating to taking changes. Both in terms of actual physical risk, to forms of gambling and combinations thereof. Such as political brinksmanship.
Which is not to say it isn’t a noble desire, but would best arrive as an effect of a lifestyle paradigm more closely attuned to nature, than as a direct goal in itself. As is often the case, such endeavors quickly become attached with much additional baggage, that naturally weighs it down.
As it is, aging is very much a part of that non-linearity you went into previously. The coming together and coming apart of the focused, linear individual. When you get good at unfocusing your executive consciousness and start to peer into the subconscious, that sense of singularity that distinguishes you from other people and other beings, starts to break down and the illusion of the self becomes more apparent.
To add a personal detail, I have gran mal epilepsy, that though is controlled, I still skate around the edges of my brain and it gets pretty strange sometimes. Given I still exercise racehorses for a living and mostly ride an old motorcycle for transport, I’m pretty familiar with risk taking as a form of mind control. All a balancing act.
Our sense of personal consciousness arises from a focusing of much deeper elements. When you lose that, everything scurries back into the shadows.
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October 24, 2015 at 1:52 am |
If you don’t mind me asking, how do you ride a horse with epilepsy, let alone a bike? Is not that dangerous?
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October 24, 2015 at 10:32 am |
That is a good question. I try to not overuse the medicine, since it is a sedative, but have been generally lucky. Most episodes on the last decade have been while I was asleep. Twice in my life have occurred on horses and I live and work on a farm, so it keeps it close at hand. Though the very first was riding out to the track at Pimlico, in 89.
As for the motorcycle, I’ve even hit a deer on it and survived. Having driven one for over forty years now, the actual accidents were due to other reasons. Since the epilepsy started when I was 29, some of those might have precipitated it.
Basically I’ve pushed the reset button on my nine lives a few times now.
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October 24, 2015 at 1:40 pm |
No point to living without danger! I agree to this. As a still rather young woman, I run in the wilds of the American West, just as Patrice does. At the risk of very bad encounters. Same with other sports I do: no danger, no gain
😉
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October 24, 2015 at 4:46 pm
Have to keep the blood flowing.
Life is like a sentence. Some are long and some are short, while the end is just punctuation. What matters is how well you tie together what came before, with what comes after.
It’s been about 35 years since I was last out west, though I hitchhiked several thousand miles as a teenager in the 70’s, doing several loops, from LA, to Washington, to Montana, to Arizona. It is beautiful country. My sister lives in Tucson. I had some cousins in Santa Barbara and still have some in Tahoe. Various school friends ended up moving out there. Now the daughter’s boyfriend is from Sacramento, so I might make it back out one day, though horses are a full time job.
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October 25, 2015 at 12:31 am
Funny how times have changed. Women running alone in the woods were unknown not so long ago. Now I was stunned to meet, miles in the deepest woods, with the most gigantic trees, in the dankest forest, a woman, an astounding runner and climber, someone like you, who knew who I was, just like that. (I did not get her name!)
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October 24, 2015 at 6:19 am |
So you want aging so you can focus? And so that dissolution of the self brings the collective to the fore? Gee, and if the state of the world was not so good? Don’t we need to focus more? So we need to die more?
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October 24, 2015 at 10:34 am |
Hitting fifty did slow the drive and get me to just accept things more. There are two sides to every coin. To understand the broader sweep of reality, we do need as wide angle a shot as possible.
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October 25, 2015 at 12:33 am |
I do not use coins! 🙂
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October 25, 2015 at 4:28 pm
Then again, as a contract, money is both asset and debt.
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October 25, 2015 at 6:04 pm
Money has several functions. The most justifiable, and fundamental one is what I call AWE, Absolute Worth Energy.
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October 25, 2015 at 10:12 pm
Two of the primary are as medium of exchange and store of value, which is a bit of a contradiction, since a medium of exchange is necessarily dynamic, while a store is static. Sort of like in the body, blood is the medium of exchange and fat is the store, it it isn’t built into muscles, bones and other organs. Consequently the entire economy has devolved into the manufacture and storage of abstractions of wealth, even to the serious determent of the foundation of this notional device.
Basically a metastatic cancer.
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October 24, 2015 at 2:24 pm |
Now this post, Patrice, does raise a number of questions in my mind. Albeit, questions of a more philosophical nature. But a need to be out of the house in an hour’s time postpones me raising them just now. Anyway, we may have another few hundred years to chat on about the topic!
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October 24, 2015 at 5:22 pm |
Well Paul, I was left deeply frustrated by Brodix’s musings about aging necessary for focus, so I wish you could say more when Patrice is playing possum.
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October 24, 2015 at 11:48 pm |
Gmax,
Actually I was saying the opposite. That we are born very forward, focused and linear, even if it isn’t always on what society expects of us and seeks to train us toward. It is with age that we have seen the same things from every possible angle, that we can learn to sit back and ride the wave, so to speak, yet still maintain our sense of self, even as we feel it being nibbled away…
Not meaning to frustrate, but that lack of clarity is part of the problem/reality. Clarity is focus.
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October 25, 2015 at 10:12 am |
Gmax,
I suppose I better put this in more context. Patrice and I have conversed over these issues at the old Scientia Salon, so I’ve made assumptions;
I see reality as the dichotomy of energy and form(information, in the subjective). With energy manifesting form and form defining energy. Given energy is dynamic and form is static, the form is constantly being created and dissolved. This creates the effect of time. Which we naturally think of as the point of the present moving from past to future, but is the changing configuration that turns future into past. (Tomorrow becomes yesterday because the earth turns.) So energy goes past to future, as form goes future to past.
Now we have evolved a central nervous system to process form and the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems to process energy. On a deeper level, consciousness acts like energy, in that it goes past to future, being it exists in/as the present, while the forms it manifests, ie. thoughts, come into being and dissolve, going future to past.
So the issue is to try to see beyond those static configurations which our mental processes extract from the flows of energy and that does involve trying to go beyond the very thought processes on which our minds are based. The focus that creates clarity. Now too little information is black out and too much information is white out, so it is a balancing act and involves a bit of zoning/zenning out.
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October 25, 2015 at 4:16 pm |
The problem of whether the future exists is deep in the unknown, unpredictable entanglement of mathematics, physics and metaphysics.
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October 25, 2015 at 4:29 pm
The future is where the energy goes. Conservation.
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October 25, 2015 at 12:28 am |
Let’s hope… Because apparently we are going to need them! 😉
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October 25, 2015 at 2:00 am |
[…] Morality Without Intelligence Makes As Much Sense As Will Without Mind. Intelligence Is At The Core Of Humanism. « Aging Is A Disease. To Improve Wisdom, Fight It. […]
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