That’s a good question. I’m not exactly indifferent. I experienced a major illness where I not only learned what it was like to suffer so much that I understood that there were things worse than death, but had to face the possibility of death and make peace with it. If you haven’t experienced something that caused it to sink in that there are experiences worse than non-existence, you’ll probably be running on the assumption that living is an opportunity for enjoyment. This is biased. Life is also an opportunity for suffering.
And if you haven’t faced death—I mean really faced it, felt like you were going to die, you probably wouldn’t feel that there was anything gained from making peace with it. This is pretty easy to understand if you consider that thinking about death is really upsetting and if you’re sick enough, you’ll be kind of motivated to think about it constantly, which is not particularly useful and it’s definitely not pleasant. At the point where you realize “Gee I’m thinking about this constantly and it isn’t pleasant or useful.” you realize the utility in making peace with death.
I haven’t completely lost interest in life or anything. I have some very strong reasons to be here. But death itself just doesn’t provoke the same terror it once did. I think what I mean by “peace” is not that I am indifferent—I do have a preference—it’s that it’s not provoking the same terror that it used to.
It’s usually a good idea in the short term to make peace with what you can’t change, but when it turns out you can change it, it sort of bites you in the ass. This is true of all forms of learned helplessness, not just accepting death. See what people do to cope with abuse: enormous gain while the abuse lasts, enormous handicap for getting back to life.
On life:
Usual phrasings treat life as neutral and death as insanely bad. I think more of death as neutral and life as insanely good. (Utility is relative, so it makes no difference.) It’s not always (or even often) pleasant and enjoyable, but it’s always interesting. That’s my main problem with pain: it’s bad that it hurts, but it’s worse that it fills your mind and won’t let you focus on something new. Obviously some lives are worse than death (torture, long-term sensory deprivation) and some are better (cake, books). What I’m trying to get at is that “neutral” in terms of pleasure and pain isn’t “neutral” in terms of existence.
Life is full of things; taking in everything about even a tiny detail of a perfectly ordinary object is enough to send you into sensory overload, even before you abstract away curves and colors to categorize the pattern as a single solid object with a given shape, recognize this particular object it as a tin and start getting curious about what it contains and how it’s made and why light reflects off metal that way and a thousand other things about this tin and your model of tins. I don’t spend all my waking hours in childlike wonder over everything, though I can whenever I want if I’m not feeling horrible, but I constantly get tiny slices of novelty. That’s why I value life so highly; the cake is just icing.
(All this sounded a lot less confused in my head.)
It’s usually a good idea in the short term to make peace with what you can’t change, but when it turns out you can change it, it sort of bites you in the ass.
Absence of terror is not biting me in the ass. I am so much stronger than I used to be. I came out of that illness in a state of bliss like I’ve never felt before—and I still feel it. It isn’t just because I’m healthy, it’s also because I learned so many tricks to reduce my stress. Such as not feeling terrified of death.
You are confusing lack of fear with learned helplessness. I didn’t say that I let go of control. I said that I stopped feeling terrified. You’re confusing what I said for something else. Ask yourself this: Does feeling helpless do anything to stop your terror? No. So why would it stop mine? That is not the method by which I learned not to be terrified.
You are also confusing “making peace with death” for “accepting death”. Obviously, I don’t accept it—otherwise, why would I have made this thread?
Please try and interpret what I am actually saying.
Usual phrasings treat life as neutral and death as insanely bad. I think more of death as neutral and life as insanely good.
I see them both as neutral, but I have a wish to make a difference in the world that burns and drives me to live, and I want to experience interacting with others like me (for reasons I don’t totally understand—it is probably some kind of social instinct). For these reasons, I want to live. However, I separate my wishes from my view of whether life and death are good and bad—for the same reason I separate desire from reality. Just because I want something out of life, doesn’t mean that life will give it to me. I could get quite the opposite. Therefore, it doesn’t make sense to me to see life as good or bad. Life is an opportunity for both enjoyment and suffering, and you never know which one you are going to receive next.
but it’s always interesting
You have never been bored?
Also, have you considered that a life full of meaningless pleasure, or nonconstructive senses of wonder will not be fulfilling? It sounds like you’ve never been through anything horrible enough that the possibility for deep and prolonged misery feels real to you. You are likely to be experiencing normalcy bias.
Okay, then I’m mistaken about what you mean by “peace with death”. What I thought it meant is “GAH I’M GOING TO DIE!! …ehn, it wouldn’t be so bad. At least all this crap would be over. And it’s easier to just let it happen than do it myself. I just hope it doesn’t take too long.”. Obviously this isn’t what you’re getting at. So… you would have signed up for cryo to avoid both death and the fear of death, but just avoiding death isn’t good enough, because death is only bad if life is good, which it might not be. Is that right?
I see them both as neutral
If you don’t see death as inherently worse than life, I don’t think I can convince you to sign up for cryo! (Well, any future in which you get revived is more likely to get you a good life than an inescapable bad one. And you could always ask Mike Darwin if you can state conditions for revival. But still, if you like anchovy and I like pineapple, I can’t convince you to order the Hawaiian pizza.)
I could point to people in awful situations who get an overwhelming drive to survive. The archetypal example would be Saw, which is about people who don’t like life all that much forced to do very painful things to survive, thus revealing a preference for life. (It’s a terrible example, because it’s fictional and the characters have good things to return to, not just life. But you get the point.) But I don’t have stats on how many switch to survivor mode and how many just sort of give up or get suicidal, and even if most people did, you could just say “So? Many people are like you. I’m not.”
You have never been bored?
Well… I get bored when I can’t focus on the shiny, because there’s something I can’t block out (noise, pain, a droning teacher) or because I don’t have enough room in my brain (and any writing material I might have) to comprehend the shiny. I also get bored when I can’t find any new things, because there’s nothing to prompt me to think about a new question (my trick was to start thinking about the psychology of boredom, but that’s exhausted by now).
a life full of meaningless pleasure, or nonconstructive senses of wonder will not be fulfilling
Nonconstructive? Where do you think physicists come from?
More seriously, it wouldn’t be very fulfilling, but I prefer feeling nothing but pleasure to feeling nothing at all.
It sounds like you’ve never been through anything horrible enough that the possibility for deep and prolonged misery feels real to you.
To steelman your argument, I might not remember now what it really felt like, and thus have lost any aliefs I acquired then. I distinctly remember thinking “I’m gonna eat up this plate of shit and demand seconds”, but even that wasn’t at the worst of times.
I try to feed “not existing” into my brain’s utility evaluation module (a.k.a. the “how would I feel if this happened” test) and all it returns is confusion. On the pleasure-pain hedonism scale, not existing doesn’t evaluate to zero, it evaluates to “syntax error”. I can easily calculate that my sudden death would make the world a worse place, but I can’t figure out if I should prefer a world in which my mom had a genetically different child (who would then grow up to be a person that isn’t “me”) to one in which “I” exist.
Of all the possible worlds, why should I prefer those in which “I” came into existence to those in which someone else existed instead? Similarly, why should I prefer a distant future in which I’m resurrected from cryonic suspension to one in which I’m not?
Agree that the utility of death is undefined on the hedonic scale. Still gotta measure it somehow.
why should I prefer those in which “I” came into existence to those in which someone else existed instead? Similarly, why should I prefer a distant future in which I’m resurrected from cryonic suspension to one in which I’m not?
This is not similar! The you algorithm is currently embodied and running. Making it stop running forever, whether by dropping a piano on your head or by neglecting to thaw you, kills you. I don’t want people to die, and I don’t think you do either.
I am indifferent between various people being born, and I think indifferent to how many are born, except insofar as they will lead good or bad lives. You don’t seem to be a very happy person, so I wish you’d never been born. (Zing.) But we can’t unbirth you, and clever tricks like pretending you already die and we have an opportunity to birth you again won’t help.
But we can’t unbirth you, and clever tricks like pretending you already die and we have an opportunity to birth you again won’t help.
I’m not so sure; “you’ve already died and we have an opportunity to birth you again” isn’t very relevant to the question of whether one should commit suicide or not, but it does seem, to me, to be exactly what cryonics is offering.
It seems like most of the external effects of my death happen regardless of whether I’m revived from cryonic suspension or not. Suppose that a piano is about to fall on my head, but at the last minute, a wormhole opens up beneath me, and I end up in the middle of the Delta Quadrant surrounded by friendly, English-speaking aliens. ;) Now, in this (silly) scenario, I happen to be alive and well, but everyone else saw me get flattened by a falling piano and thinks I’m dead. As far as its effect on the rest of the Earth is concerned, this is basically just as bad as if the piano actually did hit me: my family and friends will still grieve, etc. And since all I get is confusion when I ask myself if it is better for me if I exist or not, I don’t know if I have a reason to prefer “piano + wormhole” to “piano + splat”. (Ignore the effect my presence will have on the aliens.)
I prefer you not to die even if I don’t know about it. I’m allowed to have preferences about events I can’t observe and there’s nothing you can do about it, so there.
Also, wouldn’t people you care about we happier hoping you’ll make it to the future than knowing you’re dead and gone? Some of them might even be around when you get thawed.
I told my 14 year old daughter about cryo, she was amazed, incredulous. She said something like “those people don’t believe in life after death?” I said “no, do you?” She said she did.
I realized that there would be a case that if there is a life after death that cryo would interfere with that.
I think there are a lot of reasons I don’t buy in to cryo. But one of them is that I think the extremely small chance of successful and happy revival is at a similar level with the extremely small chance that there is some sort of “next step” for us after death. If the people buying in to cryo are making a sort-of Pascal’s wager with death, I feel like I’m the guy saying “but what if god is buddha? What if god is Islamic?”
When it comes down to it, my estimate is cryo is 99.999+% likely to be meaningless, epsilon likely to result in a happy revival and epsilon likely to screw up my afterlife.
I’m a neurotypical straight male, but I suspect my reaction to cryo is similar to the caricature of female reactions. That’s my intuition anyway.
Really? I wouldn’t put odds of revival for best-case practices any lower than maybe 10%. How on earth do you have such a high confidence that WBE emulation won’t be perfected in the next couple of hundred years?
I put the odds that we will have nanobots in our bloodstream killing cancer cells and regulating our chemistry to avoid a lot of metabolic problems, repair injuries, and so on, at a pretty high number. I put the odds that we will figure out how to put a living human into some sort of suspended animation and bring them back into regular animation at some sort of reasonable odds. I put the odds that if we did our best effort to freeze a living person now without damage that we would be able to eventually revive them at maybe 10%. The odds that we will be able to revive a person frozen or otherwise preserved after they are legally dead, that’s getting down towards time-machine to the past odds, since I think you are freezing after important parts of the information are lost.
Conditioned on having the technical ability to revive the frozen, that might raise the odds of eventually being revived towards 10%. There are a lot of things that might keep revival from happening other than it not being possible technically.
If you’re talking about people frozen after four plus hours of room temperature ischemia, I’d agree with you that the odds are not good. However, somebody with a standby team, perfused before ischemic clotting can set in and vitrified quickly, has a very good chance in my book. We’ve done SEM imaging of optimally vitrified dead tissue, and the structural preservation is extremely good. You can go in and count the pores on a dendrite. There simply isn’t much information lost immediately after death, especially if you get the head in ice water quickly.
I also have quite a high confidence that we’ll be seeing WBE technology in the next forty years (I’d wager at better than even odds that we’ll see it in the next twenty). The component technologies already exist (and need only iterative improvements), and many of them are falling exponentially in cost. That combined with what I suspect will be a rather high demand when the potential reaches the public consciousness, is a pretty potent combination of forces.
So, for me, I lose most of my probability mass to the idea that, if you’re vitrified now, something will happen to Alcor within 40 years, or, more generally, some civilization-disrupting event will occur in the same time frame. That your brain isn’t preserved (under optimal conditions), or that we’ll never figure out how to slice up and emulate a brain, are not serious points of concern to me.
That’s a good question. I’m not exactly indifferent. I experienced a major illness where I not only learned what it was like to suffer so much that I understood that there were things worse than death, but had to face the possibility of death and make peace with it. If you haven’t experienced something that caused it to sink in that there are experiences worse than non-existence, you’ll probably be running on the assumption that living is an opportunity for enjoyment. This is biased. Life is also an opportunity for suffering.
And if you haven’t faced death—I mean really faced it, felt like you were going to die, you probably wouldn’t feel that there was anything gained from making peace with it. This is pretty easy to understand if you consider that thinking about death is really upsetting and if you’re sick enough, you’ll be kind of motivated to think about it constantly, which is not particularly useful and it’s definitely not pleasant. At the point where you realize “Gee I’m thinking about this constantly and it isn’t pleasant or useful.” you realize the utility in making peace with death.
I haven’t completely lost interest in life or anything. I have some very strong reasons to be here. But death itself just doesn’t provoke the same terror it once did. I think what I mean by “peace” is not that I am indifferent—I do have a preference—it’s that it’s not provoking the same terror that it used to.
On making peace with death:
It’s usually a good idea in the short term to make peace with what you can’t change, but when it turns out you can change it, it sort of bites you in the ass. This is true of all forms of learned helplessness, not just accepting death. See what people do to cope with abuse: enormous gain while the abuse lasts, enormous handicap for getting back to life.
On life:
Usual phrasings treat life as neutral and death as insanely bad. I think more of death as neutral and life as insanely good. (Utility is relative, so it makes no difference.) It’s not always (or even often) pleasant and enjoyable, but it’s always interesting. That’s my main problem with pain: it’s bad that it hurts, but it’s worse that it fills your mind and won’t let you focus on something new. Obviously some lives are worse than death (torture, long-term sensory deprivation) and some are better (cake, books). What I’m trying to get at is that “neutral” in terms of pleasure and pain isn’t “neutral” in terms of existence.
Life is full of things; taking in everything about even a tiny detail of a perfectly ordinary object is enough to send you into sensory overload, even before you abstract away curves and colors to categorize the pattern as a single solid object with a given shape, recognize this particular object it as a tin and start getting curious about what it contains and how it’s made and why light reflects off metal that way and a thousand other things about this tin and your model of tins. I don’t spend all my waking hours in childlike wonder over everything, though I can whenever I want if I’m not feeling horrible, but I constantly get tiny slices of novelty. That’s why I value life so highly; the cake is just icing.
(All this sounded a lot less confused in my head.)
Absence of terror is not biting me in the ass. I am so much stronger than I used to be. I came out of that illness in a state of bliss like I’ve never felt before—and I still feel it. It isn’t just because I’m healthy, it’s also because I learned so many tricks to reduce my stress. Such as not feeling terrified of death.
You are confusing lack of fear with learned helplessness. I didn’t say that I let go of control. I said that I stopped feeling terrified. You’re confusing what I said for something else. Ask yourself this: Does feeling helpless do anything to stop your terror? No. So why would it stop mine? That is not the method by which I learned not to be terrified.
You are also confusing “making peace with death” for “accepting death”. Obviously, I don’t accept it—otherwise, why would I have made this thread?
Please try and interpret what I am actually saying.
I see them both as neutral, but I have a wish to make a difference in the world that burns and drives me to live, and I want to experience interacting with others like me (for reasons I don’t totally understand—it is probably some kind of social instinct). For these reasons, I want to live. However, I separate my wishes from my view of whether life and death are good and bad—for the same reason I separate desire from reality. Just because I want something out of life, doesn’t mean that life will give it to me. I could get quite the opposite. Therefore, it doesn’t make sense to me to see life as good or bad. Life is an opportunity for both enjoyment and suffering, and you never know which one you are going to receive next.
You have never been bored?
Also, have you considered that a life full of meaningless pleasure, or nonconstructive senses of wonder will not be fulfilling? It sounds like you’ve never been through anything horrible enough that the possibility for deep and prolonged misery feels real to you. You are likely to be experiencing normalcy bias.
Okay, then I’m mistaken about what you mean by “peace with death”. What I thought it meant is “GAH I’M GOING TO DIE!! …ehn, it wouldn’t be so bad. At least all this crap would be over. And it’s easier to just let it happen than do it myself. I just hope it doesn’t take too long.”. Obviously this isn’t what you’re getting at. So… you would have signed up for cryo to avoid both death and the fear of death, but just avoiding death isn’t good enough, because death is only bad if life is good, which it might not be. Is that right?
If you don’t see death as inherently worse than life, I don’t think I can convince you to sign up for cryo! (Well, any future in which you get revived is more likely to get you a good life than an inescapable bad one. And you could always ask Mike Darwin if you can state conditions for revival. But still, if you like anchovy and I like pineapple, I can’t convince you to order the Hawaiian pizza.)
I could point to people in awful situations who get an overwhelming drive to survive. The archetypal example would be Saw, which is about people who don’t like life all that much forced to do very painful things to survive, thus revealing a preference for life. (It’s a terrible example, because it’s fictional and the characters have good things to return to, not just life. But you get the point.) But I don’t have stats on how many switch to survivor mode and how many just sort of give up or get suicidal, and even if most people did, you could just say “So? Many people are like you. I’m not.”
Well… I get bored when I can’t focus on the shiny, because there’s something I can’t block out (noise, pain, a droning teacher) or because I don’t have enough room in my brain (and any writing material I might have) to comprehend the shiny. I also get bored when I can’t find any new things, because there’s nothing to prompt me to think about a new question (my trick was to start thinking about the psychology of boredom, but that’s exhausted by now).
Nonconstructive? Where do you think physicists come from?
More seriously, it wouldn’t be very fulfilling, but I prefer feeling nothing but pleasure to feeling nothing at all.
To steelman your argument, I might not remember now what it really felt like, and thus have lost any aliefs I acquired then. I distinctly remember thinking “I’m gonna eat up this plate of shit and demand seconds”, but even that wasn’t at the worst of times.
I try to feed “not existing” into my brain’s utility evaluation module (a.k.a. the “how would I feel if this happened” test) and all it returns is confusion. On the pleasure-pain hedonism scale, not existing doesn’t evaluate to zero, it evaluates to “syntax error”. I can easily calculate that my sudden death would make the world a worse place, but I can’t figure out if I should prefer a world in which my mom had a genetically different child (who would then grow up to be a person that isn’t “me”) to one in which “I” exist.
Of all the possible worlds, why should I prefer those in which “I” came into existence to those in which someone else existed instead? Similarly, why should I prefer a distant future in which I’m resurrected from cryonic suspension to one in which I’m not?
Agree that the utility of death is undefined on the hedonic scale. Still gotta measure it somehow.
This is not similar! The you algorithm is currently embodied and running. Making it stop running forever, whether by dropping a piano on your head or by neglecting to thaw you, kills you. I don’t want people to die, and I don’t think you do either.
I am indifferent between various people being born, and I think indifferent to how many are born, except insofar as they will lead good or bad lives. You don’t seem to be a very happy person, so I wish you’d never been born. (Zing.) But we can’t unbirth you, and clever tricks like pretending you already die and we have an opportunity to birth you again won’t help.
I’m not so sure; “you’ve already died and we have an opportunity to birth you again” isn’t very relevant to the question of whether one should commit suicide or not, but it does seem, to me, to be exactly what cryonics is offering.
It seems like most of the external effects of my death happen regardless of whether I’m revived from cryonic suspension or not. Suppose that a piano is about to fall on my head, but at the last minute, a wormhole opens up beneath me, and I end up in the middle of the Delta Quadrant surrounded by friendly, English-speaking aliens. ;) Now, in this (silly) scenario, I happen to be alive and well, but everyone else saw me get flattened by a falling piano and thinks I’m dead. As far as its effect on the rest of the Earth is concerned, this is basically just as bad as if the piano actually did hit me: my family and friends will still grieve, etc. And since all I get is confusion when I ask myself if it is better for me if I exist or not, I don’t know if I have a reason to prefer “piano + wormhole” to “piano + splat”. (Ignore the effect my presence will have on the aliens.)
I prefer you not to die even if I don’t know about it. I’m allowed to have preferences about events I can’t observe and there’s nothing you can do about it, so there.
Also, wouldn’t people you care about we happier hoping you’ll make it to the future than knowing you’re dead and gone? Some of them might even be around when you get thawed.
I told my 14 year old daughter about cryo, she was amazed, incredulous. She said something like “those people don’t believe in life after death?” I said “no, do you?” She said she did.
I realized that there would be a case that if there is a life after death that cryo would interfere with that.
I think there are a lot of reasons I don’t buy in to cryo. But one of them is that I think the extremely small chance of successful and happy revival is at a similar level with the extremely small chance that there is some sort of “next step” for us after death. If the people buying in to cryo are making a sort-of Pascal’s wager with death, I feel like I’m the guy saying “but what if god is buddha? What if god is Islamic?”
When it comes down to it, my estimate is cryo is 99.999+% likely to be meaningless, epsilon likely to result in a happy revival and epsilon likely to screw up my afterlife.
I’m a neurotypical straight male, but I suspect my reaction to cryo is similar to the caricature of female reactions. That’s my intuition anyway.
Really? I wouldn’t put odds of revival for best-case practices any lower than maybe 10%. How on earth do you have such a high confidence that WBE emulation won’t be perfected in the next couple of hundred years?
I put the odds that we will have nanobots in our bloodstream killing cancer cells and regulating our chemistry to avoid a lot of metabolic problems, repair injuries, and so on, at a pretty high number. I put the odds that we will figure out how to put a living human into some sort of suspended animation and bring them back into regular animation at some sort of reasonable odds. I put the odds that if we did our best effort to freeze a living person now without damage that we would be able to eventually revive them at maybe 10%. The odds that we will be able to revive a person frozen or otherwise preserved after they are legally dead, that’s getting down towards time-machine to the past odds, since I think you are freezing after important parts of the information are lost.
Conditioned on having the technical ability to revive the frozen, that might raise the odds of eventually being revived towards 10%. There are a lot of things that might keep revival from happening other than it not being possible technically.
If you’re talking about people frozen after four plus hours of room temperature ischemia, I’d agree with you that the odds are not good. However, somebody with a standby team, perfused before ischemic clotting can set in and vitrified quickly, has a very good chance in my book. We’ve done SEM imaging of optimally vitrified dead tissue, and the structural preservation is extremely good. You can go in and count the pores on a dendrite. There simply isn’t much information lost immediately after death, especially if you get the head in ice water quickly.
I also have quite a high confidence that we’ll be seeing WBE technology in the next forty years (I’d wager at better than even odds that we’ll see it in the next twenty). The component technologies already exist (and need only iterative improvements), and many of them are falling exponentially in cost. That combined with what I suspect will be a rather high demand when the potential reaches the public consciousness, is a pretty potent combination of forces.
So, for me, I lose most of my probability mass to the idea that, if you’re vitrified now, something will happen to Alcor within 40 years, or, more generally, some civilization-disrupting event will occur in the same time frame. That your brain isn’t preserved (under optimal conditions), or that we’ll never figure out how to slice up and emulate a brain, are not serious points of concern to me.