Hi Blueberry. How is that a rational reason for me to care what I will experience tomorrow? If I don’t care what I will experience tomorrow, then I have no reason to care that my future self will have my memories or that he will have experienced a continuous flow of perception up to that time.
We have to have some motivation (a goal, desire, care, etc) before we can have a rational reason to do anything. Our most basic motivations cannot themselves be rationally justified. They just are what they are.
Of course, they can be rationally explained. My care for my future welfare can be explained as an evolved adaptive trait. But that only tells me why I do care for my future welfare, not why I rationally should care for my future welfare.
Richard, you seem to have come to a quite logical conclusion about the difference between intrinsic values and instrumental values and what happens when an attempt is made to give a justification for intrinsic values at the level of values.
If a proposed intrinsic value is questioned and justified with another value statement, then the supposed “intrinsic value” is revealed to have really been instrumental. Alternatively, if no value is offered then the discussion will have necessarily moved out of the value domain into questions about the psychology or neurons or souls or evolutionary mechanisms or some other messy issue of “simple” fact. And you are quite right that these facts (by definition as “non value statements”) will not be motivating.
We fundamentally like vanilla (if we do) “because we like vanilla” as a brute fact. De gustibus non est disputandum. Yay for the philosophy of values :-P
On the other hand… basically all humans, as a matter of fact, do share many preferences, not just for obvious things like foods that are sweet or salty or savory but also for really complicated high level things, like the respect of those with whom we regularly spend time, the ability to contribute to things larger than ourselves, listening to beautiful music, and enjoyment of situations that create “flow” where moderately challenging tasks with instantaneous feedback can be worked on without distraction, and so on.
As a matter of simple observation, you must have noticed that there exist some things which it gives you pleasure to experience. To say that “I don’t care what I will experience tomorrow” can be interpreted as a prediction that “Tomorrow, despite being conscious, I will not experience anything which affects my emotions, preferences, feelings, or inclinations in either positive or negative directions”. This statement is either bluntly false (my favored hypothesis), or else you are experiencing a shocking level of anhedonia for which you should seek professional help if you want to live very much longer (which of course you might not if you’re really experiencing anhedonia), or else you are a non human intelligence and I have to start from scratch trying to figure you out.
Taking it as granted that you and I can both safely predict that you will continue to enjoy life tomorrow… then an inductive proof can be developed that “unless something important changes from one day to the next” you will continue to have a stake in the day after that, and the day after that, and so on. When people normally discuss cryonics and long term values it is the “something important changing” issue that they bring up.
For example, many people think that they only care about their children… until they start seeing their grandchildren as real human beings whose happiness they have a stake in, and in whose lives they might be productively involved.
Other people can’t (yet) imagine not falling prey to senescence, and legitimately think that death might be preferable to a life filled with pain which imposes costs (and no real benefits) on their loved ones who would care for them. In this case the critical insight is that not just death but also physical decline can be thought of as a potentially treatable condition and so we can stipulate not just vastly extended life but vastly extended youth.
But you are not making any of these points so that they can even be objected to by myself or others… You’re deploying the kind of arguments I would expect from an undergrad philosophy major engaged in motivated cognition because you have not yet “learned how to lose an argument gracefully and become smarter by doing so”.
And it is for this reason that I stand by the conclusion that in some cases beliefs about cryonics say very much about the level of pragmatic philosophical sophistication (or “rationality”) that a person has cultivated up to the point when they stake out one of the more “normal” anti-cryonics positions. In your case, you are failing in a way I find particularly tragic, because normal people raise much better objections than you are raising—issues that really address the meat of the matter. You, on the other hand, are raising little more than philosophical confusion in defense of your position :-(
Again, I intend these statements only in the hope that they help you and/or audiences who may be silently identifying with your position. Most people make bad arguments sometimes and that doesn’t make them bad people—in fact, it helps them get stronger and learn more. You are a good and valuable person even if you have made comments here that reveal less depth of thinking than might be hypothetically possible.
That you are persisting in your position is a good sign, because you’re clearly already pretty deep into the cultivation of rationality (your arguments clearly borrow a lot from previous study) to the point that you may harm yourself if you don’t push through to the point where your rationality starts paying dividends. Continued discussion is good practice for this.
On the other hand, I have limited time and limited resources and I can’t afford to spend any more on this line of conversation. I wish you good luck on your journey, perhaps one day in the very far future we will meet again for conversation, and memory of this interaction will provide a bit of amusement at how hopelessly naive we both were in our misspent “childhood” :-)
Hi Blueberry. How is that a rational reason for me to care what I will experience tomorrow? If I don’t care what I will experience tomorrow, then I have no reason to care that my future self will have my memories or that he will have experienced a continuous flow of perception up to that time.
We have to have some motivation (a goal, desire, care, etc) before we can have a rational reason to do anything. Our most basic motivations cannot themselves be rationally justified. They just are what they are.
Of course, they can be rationally explained. My care for my future welfare can be explained as an evolved adaptive trait. But that only tells me why I do care for my future welfare, not why I rationally should care for my future welfare.
Richard, you seem to have come to a quite logical conclusion about the difference between intrinsic values and instrumental values and what happens when an attempt is made to give a justification for intrinsic values at the level of values.
If a proposed intrinsic value is questioned and justified with another value statement, then the supposed “intrinsic value” is revealed to have really been instrumental. Alternatively, if no value is offered then the discussion will have necessarily moved out of the value domain into questions about the psychology or neurons or souls or evolutionary mechanisms or some other messy issue of “simple” fact. And you are quite right that these facts (by definition as “non value statements”) will not be motivating.
We fundamentally like vanilla (if we do) “because we like vanilla” as a brute fact. De gustibus non est disputandum. Yay for the philosophy of values :-P
On the other hand… basically all humans, as a matter of fact, do share many preferences, not just for obvious things like foods that are sweet or salty or savory but also for really complicated high level things, like the respect of those with whom we regularly spend time, the ability to contribute to things larger than ourselves, listening to beautiful music, and enjoyment of situations that create “flow” where moderately challenging tasks with instantaneous feedback can be worked on without distraction, and so on.
As a matter of simple observation, you must have noticed that there exist some things which it gives you pleasure to experience. To say that “I don’t care what I will experience tomorrow” can be interpreted as a prediction that “Tomorrow, despite being conscious, I will not experience anything which affects my emotions, preferences, feelings, or inclinations in either positive or negative directions”. This statement is either bluntly false (my favored hypothesis), or else you are experiencing a shocking level of anhedonia for which you should seek professional help if you want to live very much longer (which of course you might not if you’re really experiencing anhedonia), or else you are a non human intelligence and I have to start from scratch trying to figure you out.
Taking it as granted that you and I can both safely predict that you will continue to enjoy life tomorrow… then an inductive proof can be developed that “unless something important changes from one day to the next” you will continue to have a stake in the day after that, and the day after that, and so on. When people normally discuss cryonics and long term values it is the “something important changing” issue that they bring up.
For example, many people think that they only care about their children… until they start seeing their grandchildren as real human beings whose happiness they have a stake in, and in whose lives they might be productively involved.
Other people can’t (yet) imagine not falling prey to senescence, and legitimately think that death might be preferable to a life filled with pain which imposes costs (and no real benefits) on their loved ones who would care for them. In this case the critical insight is that not just death but also physical decline can be thought of as a potentially treatable condition and so we can stipulate not just vastly extended life but vastly extended youth.
But you are not making any of these points so that they can even be objected to by myself or others… You’re deploying the kind of arguments I would expect from an undergrad philosophy major engaged in motivated cognition because you have not yet “learned how to lose an argument gracefully and become smarter by doing so”.
And it is for this reason that I stand by the conclusion that in some cases beliefs about cryonics say very much about the level of pragmatic philosophical sophistication (or “rationality”) that a person has cultivated up to the point when they stake out one of the more “normal” anti-cryonics positions. In your case, you are failing in a way I find particularly tragic, because normal people raise much better objections than you are raising—issues that really address the meat of the matter. You, on the other hand, are raising little more than philosophical confusion in defense of your position :-(
Again, I intend these statements only in the hope that they help you and/or audiences who may be silently identifying with your position. Most people make bad arguments sometimes and that doesn’t make them bad people—in fact, it helps them get stronger and learn more. You are a good and valuable person even if you have made comments here that reveal less depth of thinking than might be hypothetically possible.
That you are persisting in your position is a good sign, because you’re clearly already pretty deep into the cultivation of rationality (your arguments clearly borrow a lot from previous study) to the point that you may harm yourself if you don’t push through to the point where your rationality starts paying dividends. Continued discussion is good practice for this.
On the other hand, I have limited time and limited resources and I can’t afford to spend any more on this line of conversation. I wish you good luck on your journey, perhaps one day in the very far future we will meet again for conversation, and memory of this interaction will provide a bit of amusement at how hopelessly naive we both were in our misspent “childhood” :-)