Further, consider this from the point of view of a parent. It’s OK for a 20-something young adult to decide to take this risk, but how can a parent take this risk for their child? I wouldn’t have children if I didn’t feel as though I had some control over whether they were well taken care of—how could I send them to an unknown point in the future? Today, there are many people and organizations that exploit children. I’m supposed to glibly pretend that these problems will completely disappear just with future technology? That would be pretty irresponsible.
A lot of people make some argument along the lines of, ’if they revive us, it’s because they value us.” Yeah. And if they value children, without their mommies?
This just breaks my heart, because I can understand the fear. I wouldn’t want to have children if I thought they’d be taken away from me. But if I already had them, I would want them alive first and foremost. Even if that meant they’d be taken away. Living far away > dying in my arms.
I can imagine my kids in bad situations, and in most of those situations I would want them to keep living. If I was dying during some kind of terrible revolution, I wouldn’t kill my children to protect them from an unknown future. They’re already alive, come what may.
Cryonics feels like a choice again, and for me this is a moral choice—perhaps a deontological one. I am willing to hear a variety of moral solutions/arguments, I just think this is something that needs address.
I depend upon society to help me explore what the ethical issues are so that I can make up my own mind in an informed way. I’m not an ethicist or a pastor, I’ve specialized in a different area.
By “cryonics feels like a choice again”, do you mean it bears emotional similarity to choosing to have children in the first place, more than choosing to let them go on living, and therefore you wouldn’t sign your children up to be revived under any circumstances you wouldn’t have chosen to have them in the first place?
If so, I hope you will do everything you can to reverse that impression. Think of the frozen people as asleep, comatose, blinking, time-traveling—not dead. They will be revived not as infants, not as new people, not as ontologically unrelated snippets of personhood wearing secondhand names—they will wake up. If your children are frozen and revived, then afterwards, they will be alive. If your children are not frozen and revived, then absent really convenient timing, they will be dead.
This sounds reasonable to me, so I’m not sure why it doesn’t feel conclusive. Maybe I’m just waiting for the revolutionary to contribute his necessary component.
Last night, I had a sad dream that my brother’s little child passed away. (I guess my brain thought this was safe, because my brother doesn’t have kids.) The dream just had one theme: the regret that I felt that when the child died, she was gone forever.
My dream was just an emotion and didn’t address my waking concerns at all.
It so happened in my dream that the child died in a way that was perfect for cryo-preservation, and there was an infrastructure for cryonics in the sense that everyone else in the family decided to sign up for cryonics just a little bit later. The extreme sadness was that they would continue in the future forever without the little one. The sadness of her being left behind was very painful.
Don’t leave your children behind. You don’t have the problem with them that I have with my sister. You have the power to sign them up. You don’t have to let your imaginary niece’s fate happen to your kids.
Cryonics feels like a choice again, and for me this is a moral choice—perhaps a deontological one. I am willing to hear a variety of moral solutions/arguments, I just think this is something that needs address.
You seem to be thinking as if a person dies, and then cryonics is a way that can maybe bring them back to life. It is more accurate to say that a person loses the capacity to to sustain their own life (and experience it), and cryonics is a way to keep them alive until potential future technology can restore their ability to sustain and experience their life.
Can we please focus on one argument against cryonics at a time? Isn’t this shifting to a new counterargument whenever an old one is addressed just logical rudeness?
If you don’t dispute anything I actually say about technical feasibility, please take this discussion elsewhere.
EDIT: Downvotes are useful information, but comments explaining them are even better—thanks!
I didn’t down vote you but I do feel frustrated about the censure. First, I obviously don’t think technological feasibility is anywhere near the right question. So I should just ignore this post. (But) secondly, other people are discussing other issues—this whole thread is all about whether or not we’ll get revived and why; it has nothing to do with technology. If I don’t respond to this thread because it’s off-topic, then I’m just missing an opportunity to further an agenda that is very important to me. I like to follow rules but I’m not likely to follow them sacrificially while others disregard them.
An important subtext of the current extended discussion, which in one sense can be seen as fallout from the “Normal Cryonics” article, is how to conduct a debate in a manner that is both epistemically and instrumentally rational.
One major issue, raised by the “Logical rudeness” post, is that ordinary conversation has a nasty tendency to go in circles revolving around each interlocutor’s pet anxiety or trigger issue. No one is exempt: I tend to focus on the financial and logistical aspects, and that says something about me.
Rather than think of ciphergoth’s intervention as “censure”, please think of it as the unpleasant but necessary work of a volunteer facilitator, doing his best to keep the conversation on track.
This conversation touches on an issue that is deeply important to you, that much I understand. Perhaps your interests are better served by your drafting a separate post to lay out this issue as clearly as you can, a post in which you’d set out to apply the thinking tools you’ve learned from LW or that you wish to introduce to LW?
Your first point I think you answer yourself, is that fair? Your second is a good one, but I wonder what the right thing to do about it is. I did reply to the top-level ancestor comment of this one to say “this is off-topic”; are you saying that where discussion blossoms anyway, that railing against in-thread commenters is a mistake? Certainly where top-level comments have started talking about other arguments, I think that is logical rudeness, and you don’t seem to disagree; is there anything to be done about it beyond the comment on the top-level comment?
Your first point I think you answer yourself, is that fair?
I would have preferred if everyone were conforming, because then my argument could have waited.
I think this just represents a real difference in our goals and objectives: you want focused and on-topic comments, and I want to respond to this thread.
Given the dichotomy in objectives, I think I should make the comment, and you should complain again and down-vote me.
Logistically, you should probably have made it more clear in the Less Wrong post that you were trying to enforce this norm; I didn’t know about this until I read a comment you made far down in the thread that we needed to read and follow the rules in a paragraph at the end of your blog post.
I think we both think the other’s objective is fair enough.
you should probably have made it more clear in the Less Wrong post that you were trying to enforce this norm
I probably should have made it clear, but I’d also like to encourage the norm that with or without such explicit per-post policies, where someone makes a post focussing on counterargument A, that commenting about counterargument B is recognised as logical rudeness. This doesn’t help with the bind you find yourself in today, but might help in future.
Logical rudeness, as I read the article, was referring to switching arguments in the pattern A to B to A but only switching after A was essentially debunked. If byrnema never switches back to A it doesn’t fit the pattern.
I could have misinterpreted the article.
One develops a sense of the flow of discourse, the give and take of argument. It’s possible to do things that completely derail that flow of discourse without shouting or swearing. These may not be considered offenses against politeness, as our so-called “civilization” defines that term. But they are offenses against the cooperative exchange of arguments, or even the rules of engagement with the loyal opposition. They are logically rude.
Okay, I was misinterpreting.
As much as threads are better than anything else I have seen to track multiple participants in a conversation, I get the itch that there is a better way. Maybe I should go find one...
Further, consider this from the point of view of a parent. It’s OK for a 20-something young adult to decide to take this risk, but how can a parent take this risk for their child? I wouldn’t have children if I didn’t feel as though I had some control over whether they were well taken care of—how could I send them to an unknown point in the future? Today, there are many people and organizations that exploit children. I’m supposed to glibly pretend that these problems will completely disappear just with future technology? That would be pretty irresponsible.
A lot of people make some argument along the lines of, ’if they revive us, it’s because they value us.” Yeah. And if they value children, without their mommies?
This just breaks my heart, because I can understand the fear. I wouldn’t want to have children if I thought they’d be taken away from me. But if I already had them, I would want them alive first and foremost. Even if that meant they’d be taken away. Living far away > dying in my arms.
I can imagine my kids in bad situations, and in most of those situations I would want them to keep living. If I was dying during some kind of terrible revolution, I wouldn’t kill my children to protect them from an unknown future. They’re already alive, come what may.
Cryonics feels like a choice again, and for me this is a moral choice—perhaps a deontological one. I am willing to hear a variety of moral solutions/arguments, I just think this is something that needs address.
I wrote in another comment,
By “cryonics feels like a choice again”, do you mean it bears emotional similarity to choosing to have children in the first place, more than choosing to let them go on living, and therefore you wouldn’t sign your children up to be revived under any circumstances you wouldn’t have chosen to have them in the first place?
If so, I hope you will do everything you can to reverse that impression. Think of the frozen people as asleep, comatose, blinking, time-traveling—not dead. They will be revived not as infants, not as new people, not as ontologically unrelated snippets of personhood wearing secondhand names—they will wake up. If your children are frozen and revived, then afterwards, they will be alive. If your children are not frozen and revived, then absent really convenient timing, they will be dead.
This sounds reasonable to me, so I’m not sure why it doesn’t feel conclusive. Maybe I’m just waiting for the revolutionary to contribute his necessary component.
Last night, I had a sad dream that my brother’s little child passed away. (I guess my brain thought this was safe, because my brother doesn’t have kids.) The dream just had one theme: the regret that I felt that when the child died, she was gone forever.
My dream was just an emotion and didn’t address my waking concerns at all. It so happened in my dream that the child died in a way that was perfect for cryo-preservation, and there was an infrastructure for cryonics in the sense that everyone else in the family decided to sign up for cryonics just a little bit later. The extreme sadness was that they would continue in the future forever without the little one. The sadness of her being left behind was very painful.
Don’t leave your children behind. You don’t have the problem with them that I have with my sister. You have the power to sign them up. You don’t have to let your imaginary niece’s fate happen to your kids.
You seem to be thinking as if a person dies, and then cryonics is a way that can maybe bring them back to life. It is more accurate to say that a person loses the capacity to to sustain their own life (and experience it), and cryonics is a way to keep them alive until potential future technology can restore their ability to sustain and experience their life.
Can we please focus on one argument against cryonics at a time? Isn’t this shifting to a new counterargument whenever an old one is addressed just logical rudeness?
If you don’t dispute anything I actually say about technical feasibility, please take this discussion elsewhere.
EDIT: Downvotes are useful information, but comments explaining them are even better—thanks!
I didn’t down vote you but I do feel frustrated about the censure. First, I obviously don’t think technological feasibility is anywhere near the right question. So I should just ignore this post. (But) secondly, other people are discussing other issues—this whole thread is all about whether or not we’ll get revived and why; it has nothing to do with technology. If I don’t respond to this thread because it’s off-topic, then I’m just missing an opportunity to further an agenda that is very important to me. I like to follow rules but I’m not likely to follow them sacrificially while others disregard them.
An important subtext of the current extended discussion, which in one sense can be seen as fallout from the “Normal Cryonics” article, is how to conduct a debate in a manner that is both epistemically and instrumentally rational.
One major issue, raised by the “Logical rudeness” post, is that ordinary conversation has a nasty tendency to go in circles revolving around each interlocutor’s pet anxiety or trigger issue. No one is exempt: I tend to focus on the financial and logistical aspects, and that says something about me.
Rather than think of ciphergoth’s intervention as “censure”, please think of it as the unpleasant but necessary work of a volunteer facilitator, doing his best to keep the conversation on track.
This conversation touches on an issue that is deeply important to you, that much I understand. Perhaps your interests are better served by your drafting a separate post to lay out this issue as clearly as you can, a post in which you’d set out to apply the thinking tools you’ve learned from LW or that you wish to introduce to LW?
Your first point I think you answer yourself, is that fair? Your second is a good one, but I wonder what the right thing to do about it is. I did reply to the top-level ancestor comment of this one to say “this is off-topic”; are you saying that where discussion blossoms anyway, that railing against in-thread commenters is a mistake? Certainly where top-level comments have started talking about other arguments, I think that is logical rudeness, and you don’t seem to disagree; is there anything to be done about it beyond the comment on the top-level comment?
EDIT to make clear: questions are not rhetorical.
I would have preferred if everyone were conforming, because then my argument could have waited.
I think this just represents a real difference in our goals and objectives: you want focused and on-topic comments, and I want to respond to this thread.
Given the dichotomy in objectives, I think I should make the comment, and you should complain again and down-vote me.
Logistically, you should probably have made it more clear in the Less Wrong post that you were trying to enforce this norm; I didn’t know about this until I read a comment you made far down in the thread that we needed to read and follow the rules in a paragraph at the end of your blog post.
I think we both think the other’s objective is fair enough.
I probably should have made it clear, but I’d also like to encourage the norm that with or without such explicit per-post policies, where someone makes a post focussing on counterargument A, that commenting about counterargument B is recognised as logical rudeness. This doesn’t help with the bind you find yourself in today, but might help in future.
Logical rudeness, as I read the article, was referring to switching arguments in the pattern A to B to A but only switching after A was essentially debunked. If byrnema never switches back to A it doesn’t fit the pattern.
I could have misinterpreted the article.
Okay, I was misinterpreting.
As much as threads are better than anything else I have seen to track multiple participants in a conversation, I get the itch that there is a better way. Maybe I should go find one...
It would be nice if we could transplant threads to where they are appropriate, with just a link to and from the old location where they were inspired.
Let’s move this here.
I didn’t read that Ciphergoth was accusing me of logical rudeness—he meant the whole thread. And I agree.
Yes. Thanks.