But there’s also a significant utilitarian motivation—which is relevant here because utilitarianism doesn’t care about death for its own sake, as long as the dead are replaced by new people with equal welfare. Indeed, if our lives have diminishing marginal value over time (which seems hard to dispute if you’re taking our own preferences into account at all), and humanity can only support a fixed population size, utilitarianism actively prefers that older people die and are replaced.
I strongly disagree with this. I think the idea of human fungibility is flawed from a hedonistic quality of life perspective. In my view, much of human angst is due to the specter of involuntary death. There has been a lot of academic literature on this. One famous book is Ernest Becker’s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Denial_of_Death/
Involuntary death is one of the great harms of life. Decreasing the probability and inevitability of involuntary death seems to have the potential to dramatically improve the quality of human lives.
It is also not clear that future civilizations will want to create as many people as they can. It is quite plausible that future civilizations will be reticent to do this. For one, those people have not consented to be born and the quality of their lives may still be unpredictable. There is a good philosophical case for anti-natalism as a result of this lack of consent. I consider anti-natalism totally impractical—and even problematic—in today’s world because we need the next generation to continue the project of humanity. But in the future that may not be an issue anymore. Whereas people who have opted for cryonics/biostasis are consenting to live longer lives.
(As a side note, I’m a strong proponent of brain preservation/cryonics and I’m consistently surprised others are not more interested in it.)
To steelman it, maybe he’s thinking of how it’s commonly seen as a tragedy for a chicken to be alive for only one week, but killing it after some X years is not as much of a tragedy.
Initially, this implied to me that the curve of “value of remaining alive’ is higher in the beginning of a lifespan. But thinking about it, that’s not the same curve as the curve of “value of being alive”, which is lowest in the beginning.
(If that’s confusing, it helps to think of the one curve as the mirror image of the other, i.e. if value of being alive is high later, it means the value of remaining alive “in order to see the later parts of life” is higher early on.)
It’s also possible to view the value of being alive as a flat line, a positive constant, which could lead to his idea of human fungibility. But to use a different example, if you make me choose between five individuals living one year and one individual living five years, I prefer the latter… Same with two people dying at 25 vs. one dying at 50. Fewer people living longer is better. I can only see this working out if it’s not a flat line: value of life increases with each year already lived.
I strongly disagree with this. I think the idea of human fungibility is flawed from a hedonistic quality of life perspective. In my view, much of human angst is due to the specter of involuntary death. There has been a lot of academic literature on this. One famous book is Ernest Becker’s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Denial_of_Death/
Involuntary death is one of the great harms of life. Decreasing the probability and inevitability of involuntary death seems to have the potential to dramatically improve the quality of human lives.
It is also not clear that future civilizations will want to create as many people as they can. It is quite plausible that future civilizations will be reticent to do this. For one, those people have not consented to be born and the quality of their lives may still be unpredictable. There is a good philosophical case for anti-natalism as a result of this lack of consent. I consider anti-natalism totally impractical—and even problematic—in today’s world because we need the next generation to continue the project of humanity. But in the future that may not be an issue anymore. Whereas people who have opted for cryonics/biostasis are consenting to live longer lives.
(As a side note, I’m a strong proponent of brain preservation/cryonics and I’m consistently surprised others are not more interested in it.)
(updated from a previous comment I made on this topic here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/vqaeCxRS9tc9PoWMq/why-are-some-eas-into-cryonics)
To steelman it, maybe he’s thinking of how it’s commonly seen as a tragedy for a chicken to be alive for only one week, but killing it after some X years is not as much of a tragedy.
Initially, this implied to me that the curve of “value of remaining alive’ is higher in the beginning of a lifespan. But thinking about it, that’s not the same curve as the curve of “value of being alive”, which is lowest in the beginning.
(If that’s confusing, it helps to think of the one curve as the mirror image of the other, i.e. if value of being alive is high later, it means the value of remaining alive “in order to see the later parts of life” is higher early on.)
It’s also possible to view the value of being alive as a flat line, a positive constant, which could lead to his idea of human fungibility. But to use a different example, if you make me choose between five individuals living one year and one individual living five years, I prefer the latter… Same with two people dying at 25 vs. one dying at 50. Fewer people living longer is better. I can only see this working out if it’s not a flat line: value of life increases with each year already lived.