Eliezer, your account seems to give people two new excuses for not signing up for cryonics:
1) It seems to imply Quantum Immortality anyway.
2) Since there is nothing that persists on a fundamental level, the only reason new human beings in the future aren’t “me” is that they don’t remember me. But I also don’t remember being two years old, and the two year old who became me didn’t expect it. So the psychological continuity between my past self and my present self is no greater, in the case of my two year old self, than between myself and future human beings. This doesn’t bother me in the case of the two year old, so it seems like it might not bother me in my own case. In other words, why should I try to live forever? There will be other human beings anyway, and they will be just as good as me, and there will be just as much identity on a fundamental level.
You may think that these arguments don’t work, but that doesn’t matter. The point is that because cryonics is “strange” to people, they are looking for reasons not to do it. So given that these arguments are plausible, they will embrace them immediately.
Eliezer, your account seems to give people two new excuses for not signing up for cryonics:
1) It seems to imply Quantum Immortality anyway.
2) Since there is nothing that persists on a fundamental level, the only reason new human beings in the future aren’t “me” is that they don’t remember me. But I also don’t remember being two years old, and the two year old who became me didn’t expect it. So the psychological continuity between my past self and my present self is no greater, in the case of my two year old self, than between myself and future human beings. This doesn’t bother me in the case of the two year old, so it seems like it might not bother me in my own case. In other words, why should I try to live forever? There will be other human beings anyway, and they will be just as good as me, and there will be just as much identity on a fundamental level.
You may think that these arguments don’t work, but that doesn’t matter. The point is that because cryonics is “strange” to people, they are looking for reasons not to do it. So given that these arguments are plausible, they will embrace them immediately.