If Wednesday sees the argument for cryonics and dismisses it out of hand because her religion guarantees her an infinite life, and if a positive singularity occurs >100 years from now, Wednesday will lose nearly everything in that one moment of dismissal, because of her religion.
A problem I have with the LW community is this background assumption that infinite life somehow equals infinite utility, that living forever is clearly the rational goal, and that anyone (the vast majority of people, it seems) who doesn’t express any particular zeal for this notion is deluded, irrational, or under religion’s spell. A long, healthy life is certainly desirable to most people, but I think there are good, irreligious, perfectly sensible reasons for not placing any great value on immortality or living to see the distant future.
Not necessarily. I have a different Mormon friend who wants to be immortal—not just in the going to heaven sense, but also in the not dying sense. She’d probably go for cryonics, if she saw an argument informing her of its potential. Maybe Wednesday would too.
Stephanie Meyer’s “Twilight” books are fascinating in this regard. Meyer is Mormon and she doesn’t inject her religion into her books any obvious ways (for example, theological issues are never mentioned and none of the characters attends church) but there is a fascinating “pro life” theme that includes both the desire to procreate and the desire to be an immortal vampire if and only if it is possible to be a vampire who restrains their innate urge to tear out the necks of mortals and feast upon their blood.
Once I started reading vampire chick lit with an interpretative frame that it was a sort of “publicly accessible” meditation on the real world ethics of transhumanist immortalism, these stories became a lot more philosophically interesting. I watched Vampire Hunter D after seeing the connection and found myself rooting for the vampire :-P
The critical thing I’m trying to point to is that Meyer’s story appears to be anti-abortion and also pro-vampire. And then there’s the existence of the Mormon Transhumanist Association...
Personally I think that the lesswrong community might have a phobic reaction to theism specifically because some religious people (especially first generation converts to new religions of which Mormonism has many) are prone to mentally flinching from obvious conclusions… and sometimes they use their theology to justify doing kind of messed up things to their children. The children grow up and sometimes leap to specifically materialist atheism in an emotional counter-reaction.
I have not seen strong evidence in either direction for materialism versus an idea like simulationism except to the degree that materialism inherently pre-judges the answers to questions like (1) whether there might be some “supernatural” monkey business going on in the corners of apparent physical reality or (2) whether a timing attack on physics might produce interesting results (or cause reality to crash).
I think second and third generation theists are more likely to be open to the idea of cryonics and the reasonableness of ethically pursued transhumanist aspirations. You can put all kinds of mumbo-jumbo in people’s heads, and while it might make them very frustrating parents, after a generation or three I don’t think it will hurt very much, and it might selfishly help them cooperate with other members of their tribe (more than it hurts government policy if people signal their tribal allegiance by voting for, say, dumb educational policies).
By the same token, it wouldn’t totally surprise me if first generation converts from theism to rationality may be going beyond the evidence in some of their initial conclusions, specifically because of the passion with which they left a fundamentalist theism and started subscribing to “fundamentalist rationality”.
I don’t see a sufficient justification to interpret Twilight as anti-abortion independent of the fact that Meyer is a Mormon. It’s against forced abortion, but the person whose choice is relevant—the pregnant woman—wants her baby, and takes steps to keep it, over the objections of generally sympathetic characters who advise her otherwise.
If Wednesday deconverts, and then there’s a positive singularity 30 years from now and it happens that some key people involved in its early stages are Mormons who somehow take steps to ensure that ex-Mormons get as little of the benefits as possible, then she will lose nearly everything on account of her deconversion. But so what?
I take it you mean that the whole scenario MBlume proposed is at least an order of magnitude more likely than the whole scenario I proposed. Quite possibly; but not, I think, much more than an order of magnitude. And I don’t think either scenario dominates the landscape in such a way that we can tell whether or not Wednesday should deconvert on the basis of that one scenario.
“If you do X, the very bad thing Y could be a consequence” is not generally a good argument for doing X.
If Wednesday sees the argument for cryonics and dismisses it out of hand because her religion guarantees her an infinite life, and if a positive singularity occurs >100 years from now, Wednesday will lose nearly everything in that one moment of dismissal, because of her religion.
A problem I have with the LW community is this background assumption that infinite life somehow equals infinite utility, that living forever is clearly the rational goal, and that anyone (the vast majority of people, it seems) who doesn’t express any particular zeal for this notion is deluded, irrational, or under religion’s spell. A long, healthy life is certainly desirable to most people, but I think there are good, irreligious, perfectly sensible reasons for not placing any great value on immortality or living to see the distant future.
My pet peeve is when people equate living for a long time with living forever or immortality.
Pet peeves are like opinions, everybody has one.
Not necessarily. I have a different Mormon friend who wants to be immortal—not just in the going to heaven sense, but also in the not dying sense. She’d probably go for cryonics, if she saw an argument informing her of its potential. Maybe Wednesday would too.
Stephanie Meyer’s “Twilight” books are fascinating in this regard. Meyer is Mormon and she doesn’t inject her religion into her books any obvious ways (for example, theological issues are never mentioned and none of the characters attends church) but there is a fascinating “pro life” theme that includes both the desire to procreate and the desire to be an immortal vampire if and only if it is possible to be a vampire who restrains their innate urge to tear out the necks of mortals and feast upon their blood.
Once I started reading vampire chick lit with an interpretative frame that it was a sort of “publicly accessible” meditation on the real world ethics of transhumanist immortalism, these stories became a lot more philosophically interesting. I watched Vampire Hunter D after seeing the connection and found myself rooting for the vampire :-P
The critical thing I’m trying to point to is that Meyer’s story appears to be anti-abortion and also pro-vampire. And then there’s the existence of the Mormon Transhumanist Association...
Personally I think that the lesswrong community might have a phobic reaction to theism specifically because some religious people (especially first generation converts to new religions of which Mormonism has many) are prone to mentally flinching from obvious conclusions… and sometimes they use their theology to justify doing kind of messed up things to their children. The children grow up and sometimes leap to specifically materialist atheism in an emotional counter-reaction.
I have not seen strong evidence in either direction for materialism versus an idea like simulationism except to the degree that materialism inherently pre-judges the answers to questions like (1) whether there might be some “supernatural” monkey business going on in the corners of apparent physical reality or (2) whether a timing attack on physics might produce interesting results (or cause reality to crash).
I think second and third generation theists are more likely to be open to the idea of cryonics and the reasonableness of ethically pursued transhumanist aspirations. You can put all kinds of mumbo-jumbo in people’s heads, and while it might make them very frustrating parents, after a generation or three I don’t think it will hurt very much, and it might selfishly help them cooperate with other members of their tribe (more than it hurts government policy if people signal their tribal allegiance by voting for, say, dumb educational policies).
By the same token, it wouldn’t totally surprise me if first generation converts from theism to rationality may be going beyond the evidence in some of their initial conclusions, specifically because of the passion with which they left a fundamentalist theism and started subscribing to “fundamentalist rationality”.
I don’t see a sufficient justification to interpret Twilight as anti-abortion independent of the fact that Meyer is a Mormon. It’s against forced abortion, but the person whose choice is relevant—the pregnant woman—wants her baby, and takes steps to keep it, over the objections of generally sympathetic characters who advise her otherwise.
So… have you provided her with the arguments?
She wants to sign up but needs to a) talk to her fiancé, and b) wait until after the wedding, which is currently eating her money very hungrily.
That’s a lot of ifs.
If Wednesday deconverts, and then there’s a positive singularity 30 years from now and it happens that some key people involved in its early stages are Mormons who somehow take steps to ensure that ex-Mormons get as little of the benefits as possible, then she will lose nearly everything on account of her deconversion. But so what?
I would say that a religious person dismissing cryonics is at least an order of magnitude more likely than the scenario you proposed.
I take it you mean that the whole scenario MBlume proposed is at least an order of magnitude more likely than the whole scenario I proposed. Quite possibly; but not, I think, much more than an order of magnitude. And I don’t think either scenario dominates the landscape in such a way that we can tell whether or not Wednesday should deconvert on the basis of that one scenario.
“If you do X, the very bad thing Y could be a consequence” is not generally a good argument for doing X.