If quantum torment is real, attempting suicide would only get you there faster. It would restrict your successor observer-moments into only those without enough control to choose to die (since those who succeed in the attempt have no successors). Locked-in syndrome and the like.
Signing up for cryonics, on the other hand, would probably be a good idea, since it would increase the diversity of possible future observer moments to include cases where you get revived.
Enlightenment (in the Buddhist sense) might possibly be an escape. Some rationalists seem to take the possibility seriously and say you don’t have to believe in anything supernatural. Meditation is just happening in your brain. If you do reach Nirvana, perhaps you can decide not to suffer at all, even if you do get locked-in (or worse). This kind of sounds like wireheading to me, but if the alternative is Literally Hell, then maybe you should take the deal. (Epistemic status: I’m not enlightened or anything. I’ve just heard people talk about it.)
As someone who has had stream-entry, and the change-in-perception called Enlightenment… I endorse your read of it as being potentially useful in this case?
I’m going to give more details in a sub-comment, to give people who are already rolling their eyes a chance to skip over this.
So, here’s the specific thing I can think of that seems like it might be helpful...
I try to be cautious about using meditation-based wire-heading or emotional-dulling, but at minimum, there’s a state one step down from enlightenment (equanimity) that perceives suffering as merely “dissonance” in vibrations. The judging/negative-connotation gets dropped, and internal-perception of emotional affect is pretty flat (Note of caution: the emotions probably aren’t gone, it’s more like you perceive them differently. I’m not 100% sure how it works, myself. While it might sound similar, it’s not quite the same as dissociation; the movement is more like you lean into your experience rather than out of it. Also, I read in a paper that its painkiller properties are apparently not based on opiods? Weird, right? So neurologically, I don’t really know how it works, although I might develop theories if I researched it a bit harder.).
Enlightenment/fruition proper doesn’t even form memories, although I’ve never been able to sustain that state for longer than a few seconds. But when it drops, it usually drops back into equanimity… so I guess between the two, it’d be a serious improvement on “eternal conscious suffering”?
Unfortunately, to get into Enlightenment territory, there’s a series of intermediate steps that tend to set off existential crises, of widely-varying severity. Any book or teacher that doesn’t take this and the wireheading potential seriously, is probably less good than one who does. That said, I still recommend it, especially for people who seem to keep having existential crises anyway. But it’s a perception-alteration workbench; its sub-skills can sometimes be used to detrimental ends, if people aren’t careful about what they install.
Relatedly: I would bet someone money that Greg Egan does something insight-meditation-adjacent.
I started reading his work after someone noted my commentary on “the unsharableness of personal qualia” bore a considerable resemblance to Closer. And since then, whenever I read his stuff, I keep seeing him giving intelligent commentary and elaboration on things I had perceived and associated with deep meditation or LSD (the effects are sometimes similar for me). He’s obviously a big physics fan, but I suspect insight meditation is another one of his big “creativity” generators. (Before someone inevitably asks: No, I don’t say that about everything.)
To me, Egan’s viewpoint reads as very atheist, but also very Buddhist. If you shear off all the woo and distill the remainder, Buddhism is very into seeing through “illusions” (even reassuring ones), and he seems to have a particular interest in this.
I can make up a plausible story that developing an obsession with how we coordinate-and-manifest the illusion of continuity from disparate brain-parts… could be a pretty natural side-effect of sometimes watching the mental sub-processes that generate the illusion of “a single, conscious, continuous self” fall apart from one another? (Meditation can do that, and it’s very unsettling the first time you see it.).
Here’s one plus-side that you don’t need the additional context to understand: I kinda suspect that at least most people would eventually find the right combination of insights and existential-crises to bumble into enlightenment by themselves, if they had an eternity of consecutive experiences to work with. Especially given that there seem to be multiple simple practices that get around to it eventually (although it might take a couple of lifetimes for some people).
Actually, I just realized there’s no reason you would remain conscious in QI. Surely the damage to your brain and body would put you into a coma—a fate I’d like to avoid, but definitely better than Literally Hell.
Also, what is all this talk about suicide? All I said was that I plan to die normally. You guys are reading weird things into that...
It was mostly just for contrast with the cryonics bit. Also, Quantum Suicide is another name for the same thought experiment. The others might be reacting to the “I’m in a bad place right now” combined with all this talk of death.
And I don’t see how a death being “natural” makes it OK. Death is Bad.
if people got hit on the head by a baseball bat every week, pretty soon they would invent reasons why getting hit on the head with a baseball bat was a good thing.
If you want to live today, and expect to feel the same way tomorrow, then by induction, why not at 80? Ill health? Medicine might be more advanced by then.
And I don’t see how a death being “natural” makes it OK.
That’s not what I said (though it is a good reason to be suspicious of attempts to remove it.) I’ll just leave it that I have some philosophical opinions which lead me to believe it is not annihilation.
Also, the baseball example is not a natural phenomenon. If it were, I’d consider it rational to accept it as a good thing.
I wouldn’t consider it rational even if natural. You know what else is natural? Smallpox. The Appeal to Nature is generally considered a weak argument. A “natural life” is a stone-age life. You could certainly do worse, but it’s not setting the bar very high.
If you think something is bad you are likely to oppose it or suffer experiencing it.
If you have opposed it for quite a while then there is inductive proof that opposing it is not effective. Those resources are then not producing anything. You are better of moving resources from opposition to other tasks.
If you experience it often without opposition thinking that it should not happen to you might make you suffer more. There you can cut your losses by making the adverse event hurt you as little as possible.
Magic baseball bats are ambigious how easy it would be to oppose them. Smallpox clearly does admit effective opposing.
A coma where you’re semiconscious maybe. You can’t get a successor observer-moment to the current one without the “observer”. And have you considered more exotic possibilities like Boltzmann brains?
But you still experience things when you sleep, hence are observing. Also, quantum insomnia should exist if you’re correct, but it doesn’t.
I don’t see how a Boltzmann brain spontaneously forming could ever be more likely than existing in a universe with all the infrastructure necessary to support a natural brain—even if that infrastructure beats some amazing odds, it only has to maintain itself. The theory further requires that mind unification be true.
As I said elsewhere observer moments need not be contiguous. And I agree that you could count as an observer if you’re dreaming (“semiconsciouse maybe”), but not if you’re anesthetized or similarly unconscious. This is probably the case in deep sleep and likely in comatose states.
I’ve been anesthetized twice. I don’t remember any dreams whatsoever, but I had the distant feeling that I did dream upon waking (though they may have happened as the drug was loosening its hold).
If quantum torment is real, attempting suicide would only get you there faster. It would restrict your successor observer-moments into only those without enough control to choose to die (since those who succeed in the attempt have no successors). Locked-in syndrome and the like.
Signing up for cryonics, on the other hand, would probably be a good idea, since it would increase the diversity of possible future observer moments to include cases where you get revived.
Enlightenment (in the Buddhist sense) might possibly be an escape. Some rationalists seem to take the possibility seriously and say you don’t have to believe in anything supernatural. Meditation is just happening in your brain. If you do reach Nirvana, perhaps you can decide not to suffer at all, even if you do get locked-in (or worse). This kind of sounds like wireheading to me, but if the alternative is Literally Hell, then maybe you should take the deal. (Epistemic status: I’m not enlightened or anything. I’ve just heard people talk about it.)
As someone who has had stream-entry, and the change-in-perception called Enlightenment… I endorse your read of it as being potentially useful in this case?
I’m going to give more details in a sub-comment, to give people who are already rolling their eyes a chance to skip over this.
So, here’s the specific thing I can think of that seems like it might be helpful...
I try to be cautious about using meditation-based wire-heading or emotional-dulling, but at minimum, there’s a state one step down from enlightenment (equanimity) that perceives suffering as merely “dissonance” in vibrations. The judging/negative-connotation gets dropped, and internal-perception of emotional affect is pretty flat (Note of caution: the emotions probably aren’t gone, it’s more like you perceive them differently. I’m not 100% sure how it works, myself. While it might sound similar, it’s not quite the same as dissociation; the movement is more like you lean into your experience rather than out of it. Also, I read in a paper that its painkiller properties are apparently not based on opiods? Weird, right? So neurologically, I don’t really know how it works, although I might develop theories if I researched it a bit harder.).
Enlightenment/fruition proper doesn’t even form memories, although I’ve never been able to sustain that state for longer than a few seconds. But when it drops, it usually drops back into equanimity… so I guess between the two, it’d be a serious improvement on “eternal conscious suffering”?
Unfortunately, to get into Enlightenment territory, there’s a series of intermediate steps that tend to set off existential crises, of widely-varying severity. Any book or teacher that doesn’t take this and the wireheading potential seriously, is probably less good than one who does. That said, I still recommend it, especially for people who seem to keep having existential crises anyway. But it’s a perception-alteration workbench; its sub-skills can sometimes be used to detrimental ends, if people aren’t careful about what they install.
Relatedly: I would bet someone money that Greg Egan does something insight-meditation-adjacent.
I started reading his work after someone noted my commentary on “the unsharableness of personal qualia” bore a considerable resemblance to Closer. And since then, whenever I read his stuff, I keep seeing him giving intelligent commentary and elaboration on things I had perceived and associated with deep meditation or LSD (the effects are sometimes similar for me). He’s obviously a big physics fan, but I suspect insight meditation is another one of his big “creativity” generators. (Before someone inevitably asks: No, I don’t say that about everything.)
To me, Egan’s viewpoint reads as very atheist, but also very Buddhist. If you shear off all the woo and distill the remainder, Buddhism is very into seeing through “illusions” (even reassuring ones), and he seems to have a particular interest in this.
I can make up a plausible story that developing an obsession with how we coordinate-and-manifest the illusion of continuity from disparate brain-parts… could be a pretty natural side-effect of sometimes watching the mental sub-processes that generate the illusion of “a single, conscious, continuous self” fall apart from one another? (Meditation can do that, and it’s very unsettling the first time you see it.).
Here’s one plus-side that you don’t need the additional context to understand: I kinda suspect that at least most people would eventually find the right combination of insights and existential-crises to bumble into enlightenment by themselves, if they had an eternity of consecutive experiences to work with. Especially given that there seem to be multiple simple practices that get around to it eventually (although it might take a couple of lifetimes for some people).
Actually, I just realized there’s no reason you would remain conscious in QI. Surely the damage to your brain and body would put you into a coma—a fate I’d like to avoid, but definitely better than Literally Hell.
Also, what is all this talk about suicide? All I said was that I plan to die normally. You guys are reading weird things into that...
It was mostly just for contrast with the cryonics bit. Also, Quantum Suicide is another name for the same thought experiment. The others might be reacting to the “I’m in a bad place right now” combined with all this talk of death.
And I don’t see how a death being “natural” makes it OK. Death is Bad.
If you want to live today, and expect to feel the same way tomorrow, then by induction, why not at 80? Ill health? Medicine might be more advanced by then.
That’s not what I said (though it is a good reason to be suspicious of attempts to remove it.) I’ll just leave it that I have some philosophical opinions which lead me to believe it is not annihilation.
Also, the baseball example is not a natural phenomenon. If it were, I’d consider it rational to accept it as a good thing.
I wouldn’t consider it rational even if natural. You know what else is natural? Smallpox. The Appeal to Nature is generally considered a weak argument. A “natural life” is a stone-age life. You could certainly do worse, but it’s not setting the bar very high.
If you think something is bad you are likely to oppose it or suffer experiencing it.
If you have opposed it for quite a while then there is inductive proof that opposing it is not effective. Those resources are then not producing anything. You are better of moving resources from opposition to other tasks.
If you experience it often without opposition thinking that it should not happen to you might make you suffer more. There you can cut your losses by making the adverse event hurt you as little as possible.
Magic baseball bats are ambigious how easy it would be to oppose them. Smallpox clearly does admit effective opposing.
A coma where you’re semiconscious maybe. You can’t get a successor observer-moment to the current one without the “observer”. And have you considered more exotic possibilities like Boltzmann brains?
But you still experience things when you sleep, hence are observing. Also, quantum insomnia should exist if you’re correct, but it doesn’t.
I don’t see how a Boltzmann brain spontaneously forming could ever be more likely than existing in a universe with all the infrastructure necessary to support a natural brain—even if that infrastructure beats some amazing odds, it only has to maintain itself. The theory further requires that mind unification be true.
As I said elsewhere observer moments need not be contiguous. And I agree that you could count as an observer if you’re dreaming (“semiconsciouse maybe”), but not if you’re anesthetized or similarly unconscious. This is probably the case in deep sleep and likely in comatose states.
I’ve been anesthetized twice. I don’t remember any dreams whatsoever, but I had the distant feeling that I did dream upon waking (though they may have happened as the drug was loosening its hold).