life and death: an open letter to bryan johnson

‘talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see.’ — schopenhauer

‘the qualities of an exceptional idea are its being equally unintelligible and painfully obvious.’ — bryan johnson, 2024

‘the means of obtaining as much variety as possible, but with the greatest possible order...is the means of obtaining as much perfection as possible.... . ‘perfection is at the same time the simplest in hypotheses and the richest in phenomena.’ — gottfried wilhelm leibniz, 1680

in an age of comments without critique, attacks without empathy, and opinions without reflection, i’d love to offer some general commentary on bryan johnson and the don’t die project. i’ve yet to read anything that engages thoughtfully with his work or focuses at a productive level of abstraction. this piece is somewhat a general metaphysical analysis and somewhat of an open letter. i attempt to bridge his philosophical and scientific gap, integrating some of his ideas by advocating the simple idea that ‘life is real’ as a compliment to ‘don’t die.’ do with it as you will. overall, i’m highly positive of bryan and argue that he’s close to a unifying theory. general disclosure — i have no relationship with bryan.

high level summary

bryan has said ‘cultural norms will come and go, being alive will always be cool.’

the fictional character in this image is biologically alive.

but he feels dead. this fictional character is both alive and not cool, because while he’s alive, he’s not full of life. if he’s biologically alive but he’s also dead, then life has to be both a biological status and an attribute.

on the counter, this guy is full of life.

therefore i’d restate bryan’s quote as

‘cultural norms will come and go, being alive life will always be cool.’

this essay will be about analyzing bryan’s project and it’s relationship to my three letter quote edit. the painfully basic proposition is that life is real.

variety as good

as i have previously written, the general goal of platforms is to be able to produce the maximum variety and the maximum order with the fewest rules possible. that is to say that the system with the most life is the system with the most variety (under the constraint of order). in scientific language, this is cybernetician ross ashby’s law of the requisite variety.¹

i’m starting this off by arguing that bryan’s don’t die project is as much about variety as it is about avoiding death. variety is something that bryan understands intuitively. much of bryan’s general ethos about what is to come, what the general project of humanity is, and general expectations with artificial intelligence is in the general spirit of more variety. at the core, i see bryan johnson as a system designer attempting to construct a system with the most variety and the most order with the fewest rules possible.

at the beginning of bryan’s don’t die project he was explicit in stating that blueprint was just showing one way of living and that he imagined many spinoffs. many different ways of living = mucho variety. the life that bryan projects and i’d bet johnson describes his ideal life is one defined by variety (in addition to not dying) — embracing the widest range of experiences, savoring everything life has to offer, seeing all there is to see, and so forth. bryan is an implicit advocate of variety.

and so i’d cough this up to say that johnson’s core ideas are as follows:

• life is good

• so don’t die

• variety is also good

this all seems to make sense to me.

if bryan johnson were to say design a government, he’d go on to do something like say that the first metric that our governments run on life expectancy is totally right and that our second metric gdp, gross domestic production, the consumption or production of goods is totally wrong. bryan would point out as he has pretty consistently that our systems across all levels are generally designed to kill us or make us worse off.

‘the investment returns, for a large percentage of scenarios, are higher for digital. after all, it takes 33 years to produce a single human phd! digital intelligence, generally speaking, simply produces higher roi than investing in humans in our current economic system, and the delta is getting larger daily. this is not an argument that ai is going to take over the world. i am arguing that our own, human-built capitalist systems, are designed to invest money in things that create the highest returns, which is increasingly favoring digital intelligence. that means, soon, there will be little economic incentive to invest in humans. take this example: if 100 investors were each given the option to invest $1m into improving employee skill sets at their company or investing the $1m into a group of employees building digital intelligence (aka artificial intelligence), the vast majority would invest in digital intelligence. this is highly rational.’ — bryan johnson

and he’s totally right.

but this all leaves somewhat of a gap. if we’re getting organized under the notion that not dying is a good thing, then the challenge because how do we getting organized under what we do with all this time we have while we are here. this is can be thought of as either as or related to the notion that what the meaning of life.

not dying =/ living

the general theme of bryan’s project is the project of not dying. this is awesome. everything is set up to get you to do things that are harming yourself to some degree.

'all successful consumer-facing companies appeal to one or more of the seven deadly sins. there are no successful consumer companies that do not appeal to any of the seven deadly sins. different motivators can apply to different constituents within each company, even different behaviors from the same constituent. examples: sloth: uber, amazon pride: instagram, tik tok gluttony: doordash, netflix lust: tinder, onlyfans envy: pinterest wrath: twitter greed: bitcoin, robinhood.’ — venture capital investor chris paik

bryan johnson as a missionary against ‘not doing the things that kill you’ is a beam of light in a sea of darkness. full-stop. but with that said, i’m going to advocate that he can take it further. i’m going to argue that life and death have a more complicated relationship than what we see.

the definition of life that bryan has currently advanced goes something along the lines of this:

life is a binary status. things are either biologically alive or biologically dead. to the extent that someone is aging, someone is getting closer to death.

bryan’s work, the not dying project, has simultaneously led to him having a world full of life. ²he’s moving and shaking, meeting people, getting people doing things and so forth. and herein lies my general point; his increasing rate of not dying is distinct from his increasing rate of living. life is distinct from not being dead.

bryan implicitly defines life as a binary status, wherein life is both a binary status as well as an attribute. bryan as a general system designer, building his world to maximize life by means of the most variety and most order under the fewest rules possible, may be lacking the general variety of his definition of the word life. excluding life as an attribute creates a large degree of ontological confusion. the crux of the ideas in this essay is that a more accurate representation of bryan’s metaphysics are as follows:

• life is good

• so don’t die

• variety is also good

• life is a product of variety

• life is real

or more specifically, life is a measurable attribute inherent in all systems including non-biologically alive and abstract systems. the classic question of the meaning of life fails to recognize that life itself has meaning. what the rest of this essays aims to do is show modeling life as a general unifier of the ideas that he’s already advocating.

johnson’s project promotes the idea of not dying, but it seems to be almost equally as much about living. bryan is often talking about seeing people, including his son, is now full of life. this quote of his is talking about the fact that his son has been injected with more life without saying it in such words.

‘here are last night's sleep stats of my 19 year old son @talmagejohnson_ . it's a snapshot of exceptional cardiovascular, nervous system, and psychological health. his mother and I divorced ten years ago. when he decided to come live with me two years ago, his was averaging less than 6 hours of sleep a night (now 8+), his resting heart rate was in the 60s (42 now), and his heart rate variability was in the 50s (now 166). he was eating loads of sugar and junk food and not exercising. he tells me he previously felt like a zombie, always tired--now having endless energy.’

when his son is saying he felt like a zombie, his son is saying that he felt dead. now he’s full of life.

johnson’s project focused on not dying, seems to be equally as much about living. futhermore, the project is about how living is a general function of variety.

and this insight solves the general attacks behind johnson’s critics. the slew of mostly unfair hit pieces on johnson go something along the lines of ‘nah i’d rather just have chips and a sandwich,’ or ‘jesus, chill out guy.’ the critiques are generally saying that life does not possess the degree of rigidity that johnson advocates for. said differently, what they are saying is that life is more about variety then johnsons rigidity. where the confusion comes in is that (1) said rigidity is directly observed clearly is overcome by the general variety that johnson does exhibit in his life — the general moving and shaking (2) his general insistence on variety — he’s not advocating for one system rather he’s advocating for a variety of systems (3) while johnson is somewhat rigid (or said differently full of order) at an ecosystem level he represents a lot of variety. and so at the right level of abstraction bryan’s strength (variety) is what he’s getting critiqued for (lack of variety). life is a function of variety and johnson both is variety himself and advocates for variety.

unifying the philosophical and the scientific.

‘science is rad.’ — bryan johnson

‘existence is the highest virtue.’ — bryan johnson

‘religious services seem to extend earthly lives too. + weekly service attendance reduces despair deaths by 68% in women, 37% in men; suicide risk drops 75% and 48%.’ — bryan johnson

‘... the ‘life’ which i am talking about also includes the living essence of ordinary events in our everyday worlds ... a back-street japanese restaurant ... an italian town square ...an amusement park ... a bunch of cushions thrown into a corner window-seat ... this quality includes an overall sense of functional liberation and free inner spirit. above all it makes us feel alive when we experience it....it is undeniable – at least as far as our feeling is concerned, that a ... breaking wave feels as if it has more life as a system of water than an industrial pool stinking with chemicals. so does the ripple of a tranquil pond. a fire, which is not organically alive, feels alive. and a blazing bonfire may feel more alive than a smoldering ember.’’ — christopher alexander

‘can science answer moral and ethical questions? from the time of the enlightenment philosophers have speculated that the remarkable advances of science would one day spill over into the realm of moral philosophy, and that scientists would be able to discover answers to previously insoluble moral dilemmas and ethical conundrums. one of the reasons ed wilson's book consilience was so successful was that he attempted to revive this enlightenment dream. alas, we seem no closer than we were when voltaire, diderot, and company first encouraged scientists to go after moral and ethical questions. are such matters truly insoluble and thus out of the realm of science (since, as peter medewar noted, "science is the art of the soluble")? should we abandon ed wilson's enlightenment dream of applying evolutionary biology to the moral realm? most scientists agree that moral questions are scientifically insoluble and they have abandoned the enlightenment dream. but not all. we shall see.’

like the rest of us, bryan has one conceptual space in which he’s placing a high value on the scientific and then has another one filled with more intuitive and philosophical thinking. i’m going to argue that ‘life is real’ as a general unifier with ‘don’t die’ bridges the general gap between said things.

the basis of johnson’s program is scientific, his essence is deeply philosophical. today he’s able to model all different parts of the body and get quantitative across many things like sleep. what’s missing is modeling out the value of a home cooked meal or the general spiritual experience of hosting somewhat for dinner, or the general feeling one gets from dancing or the why behind the general benefit of religion. if we accept the simple premise that life is real (as an attribute) then these seemingly philosophical ideas are symbol groundable.

life is a scale-free fine grained explanatory mechanism to explain what works and does not work across systems. life as a property enables a wide diversity of meaning in life that enable us to both see that we are more productively alike and diverse than imagined across ideology, time period, ethnicity, and culture while paying respect to other non-human systems.

life the general conceptual answer to bryan’s apt question:

‘‘how do we get the world to coordinate and get radically aligned in six months’

which solves for the previous point of what to replace gdp as an organizing metric with. said differently, the point of a government, or the point of any platform, when designing for maximum order, maximum variety with the fewest rules possible is about putting not dying and living as the core rules to organize by.

2030 goals

at a few different points johnson has publicly made his annual goals public.

i’d advocate for a 2030 goal: symbol grounding life³ in the fifth amendment⁴ as a goal.⁵

the fifth amendment asserts that "no person shall... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." this provision is foundational to ensuring that individuals' fundamental rights are safeguarded, particularly the right to life, which should not be deprived without due legal process, regardless of subjective interpretation.

the maker of this system is the maker of a system that violates the fifth amendment…

and so maybe the ambition (which for bryan is already there) should be about the right kind of e/acc to ensure the 5th amendement. maybe it’s time to leap from creating the conceptual foundations for a new world to like something like….

• fictional world b: a completely distinct and recognizable world, an evolving utopia, that is obviously and performatively fantastical still interoperable within the current global system, has been created. world b is remarkably more truth, competent, trustworthy and represents a new standard for online and offline experience by means of a complete infrastructure re-offering. man’s miracles of today are common events, a full-scale rehabilitation of our infrastructure, it’s the age of light and so forth.

…because ‘cultural norms will come and go, life will always be cool.’

1. ashby’s law of requisite variety states that for a system to be stable and effectively controlled, the variety in the controller must match or exceed the variety present in the system it seeks to manage. variety refers to the number of possible states a system can take, meaning that the complexity of the controller must be sufficient to handle the complexity of the environment. this principle is central in cybernetics and systems theory, emphasizing that a mismatch in complexity leads to ineffective regulation or instability.

2. existence is relational and to that end his existence is soaring. napoleon today is more alive then say my great great grandfather.

3. symbol grounding is the process of linking abstract symbols to real-world meanings. this issue arises from the variety in how symbols are understood and interpreted across different cultures, languages, and contexts. for instance, a concept like "freedom" might be represented by various symbols or expressions that carry distinct nuances depending on cultural or social backgrounds. misalignment in symbol grounding is the root of misunderstanding.

symbol grounding is more straightforward in contexts with clear and universally understood rules, such as the nba's three-pointer. in basketball, the three-pointer is an unambiguous symbol with a concrete, universally accepted meaning: a shot made from beyond the three-point line earns three points. this rule is consistent across all nba games, regardless of location or audience. the symbol is reinforced by visual markers on the court, official rules, and shared understanding among players, coaches, referees, and fans. this clarity ensures that the three-pointer is grounded in a way that leaves no room for misinterpretation, serving as an example of how well-defined rules can overcome the challenges of symbol grounding in broader contexts.

similarly, the world is able to coordinate remarkably well around the concept of death because it is a universally grounded symbol with a clear and undeniable outcome: the cessation of life. across cultures, languages, and contexts, death carries a shared meaning, enabling humanity to build rituals, laws, and systems around this event with minimal ambiguity.

we have not achieved similar clarity in symbol grounding what life is. life remains a complex, multi-faceted concept, varying widely in its definitions—biological, philosophical, and existential—depending on the context. this lack of a universally accepted grounding for life creates challenges in global coordination on issues like ethics, human rights, and sustainability, as interpretations of life’s meaning and value can differ dramatically. symbol grounding words is the core challenge in global human coordination.

4. the fifth amendment does not operate on a definition of life because there is no definition for life no more then there is no official dictionary no more then their is an official us dictionary no more then their is an official us language

5. doing this requires about 60-70 capabilities that the US last had in FDR’s new deal. getting those 60-70 capabilities requires 2-3 capabilities which can be accomplished! carly rae jaepsen i think said call me maybe.