gold compounding and aging

[king of nowhere]

in aol, during one of the first miles pow, he states that while his body regenerates any harm it is dealt, he will still eventually die of old age.

the thing is, there is no such thing as death by old age. What actually happens is that every day our body collects billions of small damages to the dna, and while it has some real fancy self-repairing mechanisms, after a while it cannot fix itself as it was before. This accumulation of small damages is what we call old age, and death comes by any kind of illness or organ failure caused by those damages. When someone dies of old age, he actually died of heart failure, lungs failure, kidney failure, or whatever else failure.

It stands to reason that gold compounding should take care of that too. Shouldn't miles remain young forever?

 

A couple of obvious answers I already considered and discarded:

1) It has been established gold feruchemy is connected to the cognitive realm. You heal in the way you percevie yourself as healed, and that's why a bullet that's lodged in your body  will be expelled by the healing, but a piercing will stay pierced. So miles will get old because he think he will get old, and that changes his self-perception and therefore his healing.

To this I answer that no young man really think he's going to get old, and even old people tend to perceive themselves as much younger than they are. age sneaks up on us, not the opther way. so miles should not expect to age strongly enough to modify his image in the cognitive realm.

 

2) another cause of old age is the self-destruction mechanism that is in our cells and activates after a given number of cell divisions. it is a mechanism that evolved to prevent tumor, and it remained because the extra chance of developing cancer without it was greater than the chance of dieing of old age. Before we developed civilization, almost no one lived past 40 anyway. So maybe miles will get old for this mechanism.

To this I answer that there's no reason gold healing should not be able to regenerate cells dead from apopthosis. after all, the shortening of the telomeric sequences at every cell division is not something that is in the cognitive realm, so gold healing should generate new cells with all their self-replicating capability intact.

 

Therefore, I see no reason why a gold compounder should die of old age. This also applies to the lord ruler needing atium feruchemy, now that I think about it.

 

[Kurkistan he/him]

Forms, my dear friend. Forms. 
 
Also of note (as you note) is TLR aging; this despite not having any reason to think Atium-compounding couldn't keep him going forever, thinking of himself as a literal god, and having most of a planet's population going along with him. That's an even stronger "what now?" if there's nothing besides "perceptions" to govern healing.
 
Also, people not living past 40 in the good old days is a common misconception. You were usually good if you managed to live past childhood: it's just that that was a big if. So the average life expectancy was crazy low, despite the median being closer to "normal".
 
EDIT: Oops, I forgot just how much of a rabbit hole my framework is. Here's the passage that would most interest you:
 

Basic Theory:

 

Based off of this, I would like to propose a more general theory as to the formation and nature of these Forms.

I believe that Forms are relatively free-floating Spiritual entities representing cultural and factual abstractions of various strengths, the creation and maintenance of which is determined by the perceptions of Cognitively active beings.

These Forms interact meaningfully with the rest of the Cosmere by providing "archetypes" for Cognitive aspects to look to and measure themselves against. An instance of this is the case of the window in TES that I just quoted. Another is TLR and Miles still aging despite being Gold compounders. (This following point is based on my thoughts on this thread):

A simple "how an object is viewed and how it views itself" definition of the Cognitive Realm does not satisfactorily explain why TLR and Miles still aged. Yes, perhaps they could each of been holding onto an "I'm really a human, and so I age" conception of themselves, but that doesn't ring true.

Miles certainly had some ego problems, and could have considered himself above such things. Perhaps he learned as a young man that all Gold twinborns still age, though, and so never considered eternal youth as a possibility.

TLR, though, is another case entirely. The entire population of a planet, even the rebels (around, 100 million, I think), saw him as immortal. Rashek himself most likely didn't have any reason to know that Atium couldn't do the trick forever: Feruchemists might well not have had access to it in classical Scadrial, and, even if they had, wouldn't have been able to get free Age from compounding. So Rashek-as-TLR would have been quite well within his rights to think that he would never have to actually age, and that Cognitive conception of himself would be buttressed by an entire planet's worth of agreement.

I think it's fair to say, then, that it's likely a more metaphysical "view," and a fairly robust one at that, that is at work here. TLR was perceived by most as an inherently immortal god, perhaps by everyone but himself as such, and yet the Human-Form's age-restriction was still present.

It follows, then, that Cognitive restrictions on fundamental things (such as what it is to be Human (to age, to be bipedal, etc.), to be a Window, etc.) are defined on a population, perhaps even Cosmere-wide level, and simply accessed by individuals, while more personal things such as individual state of health have a bit more freedom.

Edited October 12, 2013 by Kurkistan

[DocHoliday he/him]

Ahh Plato my old friend. 

How I hate you some days.LoL

 Thinking about The Republic and how long people lived, just wanted to back Kurk up that people have had a life span roughly equivalent to modern day life spans even in ancient Greece. Problem was, that dieing from the flu, war-fare, and dehydration were much more common. So like he said, if you made it to adult hood you were pretty much set.