After you’re dead, no; but the you of this moment can look forward at the various possible futures, and make choices that make some of those futures more likely than others. One of your objections was to being put in an R2D2 body—so imagine that you, right now, have a choice to make. One choice is that you end up permanently dead. The other choice offers you a chance at life, but with, say, a 5% chance of being put into an R2D2 body.
Are you so certain that such an existence is so terrible, that even a remote chance of it is a worse fate than total oblivion?
Ok, I won’t be able to speak, enjoy food, express emotion, have sex or do any of the things I normally do with my hands. I would be severely disabled. That would be almost like being a paraplegic but with wheels. And I might not be able to see or hear well (does R2D2 have the ability to enjoy HD quality or is it more like recognizable blurs and discernible murmurs?).
What the hell would I realistically do with myself if I couldn’t even communicate? I find meaning in doing constructive projects. Where would I find meaning in a body like R2D2? Without the ability to experience even sensory pleasures, I would become so bored. Imagine staring at a wall for a whole week. That’s how I think it would feel to be trapped in an R2D2 body—but maybe I’d be stuck like that for years.
If you’ve looked into the concept of “flow” (From the book “Flow: The psychology of optimal experience.”) you’ll know that not being able to do activities that provide an appropriate challenge might mean you aren’t able to be happy. Gifted children, for instance, develop learned helplessness in schooling environments that go at a much slower pace than they do. I am not satisfied by games—I couldn’t just zoom around on my wheels in patterns and be amused. I am not a gnat, I’m a human being and I need fulfillment. Boredom is a formidable affliction which I don’t dare underestimate.
I think I have to classify the R2D2 body as life support, and say pull the plug or put me back in cryo. I’d rather not just wheel around in little circles while my brain tortures me because of boredom. No R2D2 body.
I’d rate the R2D2 much lower than 5%, at least as far as your conscious experience goes. Your brain might technically be kept in a vault or canister somewhere, but there would be extremely good virtual reality linkups to the brain. Look how good movies are getting with current VR. They have to simulate physics and human anatomy in considerable detail, but often take shortcuts to make the characters cuter and sexier. This is much more likely to be what you have to look forward to. Weirder than you’re used to, but much more appealing than you are thinking here. And that’s all just talking about a possible non-uploaded existence as a meat-brain. If you were to be uploaded, the possibility of being limited in your communication to your environment is even lower.
Even if you were stuck in an R2D2 body or something for years on end with no high-end virtual reality, it is doubtful that you would experience boredom or depression. Boredom and depression is an emotional state with particular neurological characteristics. These can be disrupted (even now) by drugs. Furthermore, it seems likely that boredom is dependent on hormonal and/or electrical responses from the rest of the body. A brain by itself probably could not feel boredom without significant prosthetic assistance.
The very notion of existing as a brain in a can means we’ve solved the problem of figuring out how to synthesize and deliver every chemical and stimulus the brain depends on. The delivery mechanism would be digitally regulated, and thus we could feel excitement, boredom, or any other emotion on demand—perhaps even copying these sensations from healthy volunteers. That may not be an optimal human existence, but as an in-between state while waiting on life support to be restored to more optimal humanity it does not seem likely to be unbearable.
For a pop-culture example, take the Cybermen from Dr. Who. (Ridiculous show with ridiculous premises, just using it to make a point.) Their emotions are turned off, but only because their bodies are total pieces of junk that can’t support a brain with emotions. However we’ve seen that the emotions of the brain can in principle be turned back on again. Thus if you were to take away their tendency to be fanatical killing machines and replace it with something else (fanatical lab equipment manufacturers, say), since they can’t feel pain it wouldn’t be a bad thing to be a Cyberman for a few years while waiting to be transplanted into a non-stupid body.
I could wake up in the matrix… I don’t know if I’d want that. Even if it was designed to make me happy. I want meaning, this requires having access to reality. I’ll think about it.
drugs
Why would I want to do that? That is even worse. I am disgusted by the idea of having no ability to do anything of use, and even more disgusted by the idea that the solution to this situation is to drug me so that I can’t properly care about the problem. If I’m not able to interact with reality, what is the point in existing?
it wouldn’t be a bad thing to be a Cyberman for a few years
Three years, okay. But why bring me back at all then? Why not keep me frozen? If I can’t have quality of life, I would prefer that.
I want meaning, this requires having access to reality. I’ll think about it.
Does it? You can have other people in the simulation with you. People find a lot of meaning in companionship, even digitally mediated. People don’t think a conversation with your mother is meaningless because it happens over VOIP. You could have lots of places to explore. Works of art.. Things to learn. All meaningful things. You could play with the laws of physics. Find out what if feels like to turn gravity off one day and drift out of your apartment window.
If you wake up one morning in your house, go make a cup of coffee, breathe the fresh morning air, and go for a walk in the park, does it really matter if the park doesn’t really exist? How much of your actual enjoyment of the process derives from the knowledge that the park is ‘real’? It’s not something I normally even consider.
Why is reality important to me? Hmm. Because without access to reality, you always have to wonder what’s happening around you. Wouldn’t there come a point where you went HOLY CRAP someone could be sneaking up behind me right now and I’d never know.
Do you trust the outside world enough not to worry about that?
I don’t.
I’d eventually spill coffee on my computer or something and it would dawn on me “What if they spill coffee on my brain?”
I’d want to speak to the outside world. We’d probably be able to access them on the internet or some such. Things would be happening there. I would know about them. Political problems, disasters. Things I couldn’t get involved in.
And if not, then I’d be left to wonder. What’s going on in the outside world? Are things okay?
Imagine this: Imagine being cut off from the news. Not knowing what’s going on in the world.
Imagine realizing that you are asleep. Not knowing whether there’s a burglar in your house, whether it’s on fire. Not being able to wake up.
Imagine your friends all have the same problem. You have no access to reality, so there’s no way you can help them. If something affects them from the outside world, you can give them a hug. A virtual hug. But both of you knows that there’s nothing you can do.
With friendship, one of the things that creates bonds is knowing that if I’m in trouble at 3:00 am, I can call my friend. If all the problems are happening in a world that neither of you has access to, if you’re stuck inside a great big game where nothing can hurt you for real, what basis is there for friendship? What would companionship be good for?
You’ll be like a couple of children—helpless and living in a fantasy.
Why are you learning rationality if you don’t see value in influencing reality?
Well, there’s no reason to think you’d be completely isolated from top level reality. Internet access is very probable. Likely the ability to rent physical bodies. Make phone calls. That sort of thing. You could still get involved in most of the ways you do now. You could talk to people about it, get a job and donate money to various causes. Sign contracts, make legal arrangements to keep yourself safe. That sort of thing.
With friendship, one of the things that creates bonds is knowing that if I’m in trouble at 3:00 am, I can call my friend. If all the problems are happening in a world that neither of you has access to, if you’re stuck inside a great big game where nothing can hurt you for real, what basis is there for friendship? What would companionship be good for?
Wait, you only value friendship in so far as it directly aids you? I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but if that’s actually true, then you might be a sociopath.
Why are you learning rationality if you don’t see value in influencing reality?
Rationality is about maximizing your values. I happen to think that most of my values can be most effectively fulfilled in a virtual environment. If the majority of humanity winds up voluntarily living inside a comfortable, interesting, social, novel Matrix environment, I don’t think that’s a bad future. It would certainly solve the over-crowding problem, for quite a while at least.
Well, there’s no reason to think you’d be completely isolated from top level reality.
Hmm. I hadn’t thought very much about blends of reality and virtual reality like that. I’ve encountered that idea but hadn’t really thought about it.
you might be a sociopath.
You took one example way too far. That wasn’t intended as an essay on my views of friendship. The words “one of the things that creates bonds” should have been a big hint that I think there’s more to friendship than that. Why did you suddenly start wondering if I’m a sociopath? That seems paranoid, or it suggests that I did something unexpected.
Rationality is about maximizing your values.
Okay, but the reason why rationality has a special ability to help you get more of what you want is because it puts you in touch with reality. Only when you’re in touch with reality can you understand it enough to make reality do things you want. In a simulation, you don’t need to know the rules of reality, or how to tell the difference between true and false. You can just press a button and make the sun revolve around the earth, turn off laws of physics like gravity, or cause all the calculators to do 1+1 = 3.
In a virtual world where you can get whatever you want by pressing a button, what value would rationality have?
Additionally, reality and virtual reality can get a lot fuzzier than that. If AR glasses become popular, and a protocol exists to swap information between them to allow more seamless AR content integration, you could grab all the feeds coming in from a given location, reconstruct them into a virtual environment, and insert yourself into that environment, which would update with the real world in real time. People wearing glasses could see you as though you were there, and vice versa. If you rented a telepresence robot, it would prevent people from walking through you, and allow you to manipulate objects, shake hands, that sort of thing. The robot would simply be replaced by a rendering of you in the glasses. Furthermore, you could step from that real environment seamlessly into an entirely artificial environment, and back again, and overlay virtual content onto the real world. I suspect that in the next twenty years, the line between reality and virtual reality is going to get really fuzzy, even for non-uploads.
In a simulation, you don’t need to know the rules of reality, or how to tell the difference between true and false. You can just press a button and make the sun revolve around the earth, turn off laws of physics like gravity, or cause all the calculators to do 1+1 = 3.
Try doing that in World of Warcraft, and you’ll find your account canceled.
The words “one of the things that creates bonds” should have been a big hint that I think there’s more to friendship than that. Why did you suddenly start wondering if I’m a sociopath? That seems paranoid, or it suggests that I did something unexpected.
Well, then there’s your answer to the question ‘what is friendship good for’ - whatever other value you place on friendship that makes you neurotypical. I was just trying to point out that that line of reasoning was silly.
Okay, but the reason why rationality has a special ability to help you get more of what you want is because it puts you in touch with reality. Only when you’re in touch with reality can you understand it enough to make reality do things you want. In a simulation, you don’t need to know the rules of reality, or how to tell the difference between true and false. You can just press a button and make the sun revolve around the earth, turn off laws of physics like gravity, or cause all the calculators to do 1+1 = 3. In a virtual world where you can get whatever you want by pressing a button, what value would rationality have?
Well, you have to get to that point, for starters. And, yes, you do need some level of involvement with top-level reality. To pay for your server space, if nothing else. Virtual environments permit a big subset of life (play, communication, learning, etc. much more efficiently than real life), with a few of the really horrifying sharp edges rounded off, and some additional possibilities added.
There are still challenges to that sort of living, both those imposed by yourself, and those imposed by ideas you encounter and by your interactions with other people. Rationality still has value, for overcoming these sorts of obstacles, even if you’re not in imminent danger of dying all the time.
You’re only expressing personal preferences, but I feel enormously uneasy to hear you say “Human beings need fulfillment, therefore I’d rather die than be like a paraplegic with wheels”. People who can’t speak, are fed through tubes, get around on wheels, express emotion in nonstandard ways, lack functioning hands, and can’t have most forms of sex, don’t usually want to die, but when they’re murdered by an “angel of mercy” serial killer you get people saying stuff like
How much life did she really take? All of the victims weren’t even living. They enjoyed nothing, experienced nothing and were going to die. The families at the time of death were relieved at the end of suffering . . . I know they had no right to play God . . . but when you decide how much of her life should be taken or lost to prison, shouldn’t it be equal to what was taken from their victims?
Ken Wood, ex-husband of one of the Grand Rapids killers
You might be a very atypical person who’d prefer death to severe disability, but if you are, could you pepper statements like that with disclaimers? That’s kind of a dangerous meme to reinforce.
You might be a very atypical person who’d prefer death to severe disability, but if you are, could you pepper statements like that with disclaimers? That’s kind of a dangerous meme to reinforce.
This idea that we need to censor ourselves when having honest discussions is a meme I would not like to see reinforced. I would propose to work against this meme by arguing emotionally and rationally against it rather than by trying to censor it.
You might be a very atypical person who’d prefer death to severe disability,
Your values are leaking all over your statements of fact. It is not plausible to me that you have not seen the idea of preferring death to severe disability in lots of places at this point in your rational career. From this I conclude your describing those who feel that way as “very atypical” is not only false, but badly motivated as well.
On the (in my estimation) extremely small chance that you really don’t know what a common idea preferring death to severe disability is, google “living will,” “kervorkian” “suicide law oregon” to get a jump start into the large world of people who discuss a myriad of versions and implications of this pretty common meme.
People who can’t speak, are fed through tubes, get around on wheels, express emotion in nonstandard ways, lack functioning hands, and can’t have most forms of sex, don’t usually want to die
You might be a very atypical person who’d prefer death to severe disability, but if you are, could you pepper statements like that with disclaimers? That’s kind of a dangerous meme to reinforce.
Tony Nicklinson’s case is by no means the only one I’ve heard of. How do you know that these people are “very atypical” of the severely disabled?
Of course, the idea does lend itself to rationalisations, and according to this blog post, Ken Wood, who you quoted, is doing exactly that:
This view contrasts sharply with the reality that most of the patients killed were not particularly debilitated and perpetrator Cathy Wood’s own statement that “we did it because it was fun” (quoted in Cauffiel, 1992, p. 254).
Nerd alert: R2D2 was able to talk with C3P0. Presumably under normal circumstances, there would be a robot culture. This doesn’t address whether such a life would be satisfying for someone who was born human.
I realize R2D2 could communicate to C3P0, however I would not qualify that as “being able to speak”. Needing an interpreter would leave me disabled in any situation where the interpreter was not present. Communicating in beeps is a disability, not an ability.
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.
To me, death is merely non-existence. I won’t suffer after that. I won’t know that I’m dead.
After you’re dead, no; but the you of this moment can look forward at the various possible futures, and make choices that make some of those futures more likely than others. One of your objections was to being put in an R2D2 body—so imagine that you, right now, have a choice to make. One choice is that you end up permanently dead. The other choice offers you a chance at life, but with, say, a 5% chance of being put into an R2D2 body.
Are you so certain that such an existence is so terrible, that even a remote chance of it is a worse fate than total oblivion?
Ok, I won’t be able to speak, enjoy food, express emotion, have sex or do any of the things I normally do with my hands. I would be severely disabled. That would be almost like being a paraplegic but with wheels. And I might not be able to see or hear well (does R2D2 have the ability to enjoy HD quality or is it more like recognizable blurs and discernible murmurs?).
What the hell would I realistically do with myself if I couldn’t even communicate? I find meaning in doing constructive projects. Where would I find meaning in a body like R2D2? Without the ability to experience even sensory pleasures, I would become so bored. Imagine staring at a wall for a whole week. That’s how I think it would feel to be trapped in an R2D2 body—but maybe I’d be stuck like that for years.
If you’ve looked into the concept of “flow” (From the book “Flow: The psychology of optimal experience.”) you’ll know that not being able to do activities that provide an appropriate challenge might mean you aren’t able to be happy. Gifted children, for instance, develop learned helplessness in schooling environments that go at a much slower pace than they do. I am not satisfied by games—I couldn’t just zoom around on my wheels in patterns and be amused. I am not a gnat, I’m a human being and I need fulfillment. Boredom is a formidable affliction which I don’t dare underestimate.
I think I have to classify the R2D2 body as life support, and say pull the plug or put me back in cryo. I’d rather not just wheel around in little circles while my brain tortures me because of boredom. No R2D2 body.
Good try though.
I’d rate the R2D2 much lower than 5%, at least as far as your conscious experience goes. Your brain might technically be kept in a vault or canister somewhere, but there would be extremely good virtual reality linkups to the brain. Look how good movies are getting with current VR. They have to simulate physics and human anatomy in considerable detail, but often take shortcuts to make the characters cuter and sexier. This is much more likely to be what you have to look forward to. Weirder than you’re used to, but much more appealing than you are thinking here. And that’s all just talking about a possible non-uploaded existence as a meat-brain. If you were to be uploaded, the possibility of being limited in your communication to your environment is even lower.
Even if you were stuck in an R2D2 body or something for years on end with no high-end virtual reality, it is doubtful that you would experience boredom or depression. Boredom and depression is an emotional state with particular neurological characteristics. These can be disrupted (even now) by drugs. Furthermore, it seems likely that boredom is dependent on hormonal and/or electrical responses from the rest of the body. A brain by itself probably could not feel boredom without significant prosthetic assistance.
The very notion of existing as a brain in a can means we’ve solved the problem of figuring out how to synthesize and deliver every chemical and stimulus the brain depends on. The delivery mechanism would be digitally regulated, and thus we could feel excitement, boredom, or any other emotion on demand—perhaps even copying these sensations from healthy volunteers. That may not be an optimal human existence, but as an in-between state while waiting on life support to be restored to more optimal humanity it does not seem likely to be unbearable.
For a pop-culture example, take the Cybermen from Dr. Who. (Ridiculous show with ridiculous premises, just using it to make a point.) Their emotions are turned off, but only because their bodies are total pieces of junk that can’t support a brain with emotions. However we’ve seen that the emotions of the brain can in principle be turned back on again. Thus if you were to take away their tendency to be fanatical killing machines and replace it with something else (fanatical lab equipment manufacturers, say), since they can’t feel pain it wouldn’t be a bad thing to be a Cyberman for a few years while waiting to be transplanted into a non-stupid body.
I could wake up in the matrix… I don’t know if I’d want that. Even if it was designed to make me happy. I want meaning, this requires having access to reality. I’ll think about it.
Why would I want to do that? That is even worse. I am disgusted by the idea of having no ability to do anything of use, and even more disgusted by the idea that the solution to this situation is to drug me so that I can’t properly care about the problem. If I’m not able to interact with reality, what is the point in existing?
Three years, okay. But why bring me back at all then? Why not keep me frozen? If I can’t have quality of life, I would prefer that.
Does it? You can have other people in the simulation with you. People find a lot of meaning in companionship, even digitally mediated. People don’t think a conversation with your mother is meaningless because it happens over VOIP. You could have lots of places to explore. Works of art.. Things to learn. All meaningful things. You could play with the laws of physics. Find out what if feels like to turn gravity off one day and drift out of your apartment window.
If you wake up one morning in your house, go make a cup of coffee, breathe the fresh morning air, and go for a walk in the park, does it really matter if the park doesn’t really exist? How much of your actual enjoyment of the process derives from the knowledge that the park is ‘real’? It’s not something I normally even consider.
Why is reality important to me? Hmm. Because without access to reality, you always have to wonder what’s happening around you. Wouldn’t there come a point where you went HOLY CRAP someone could be sneaking up behind me right now and I’d never know.
Do you trust the outside world enough not to worry about that?
I don’t.
I’d eventually spill coffee on my computer or something and it would dawn on me “What if they spill coffee on my brain?”
I’d want to speak to the outside world. We’d probably be able to access them on the internet or some such. Things would be happening there. I would know about them. Political problems, disasters. Things I couldn’t get involved in.
And if not, then I’d be left to wonder. What’s going on in the outside world? Are things okay?
Imagine this: Imagine being cut off from the news. Not knowing what’s going on in the world.
Imagine realizing that you are asleep. Not knowing whether there’s a burglar in your house, whether it’s on fire. Not being able to wake up.
Imagine your friends all have the same problem. You have no access to reality, so there’s no way you can help them. If something affects them from the outside world, you can give them a hug. A virtual hug. But both of you knows that there’s nothing you can do.
With friendship, one of the things that creates bonds is knowing that if I’m in trouble at 3:00 am, I can call my friend. If all the problems are happening in a world that neither of you has access to, if you’re stuck inside a great big game where nothing can hurt you for real, what basis is there for friendship? What would companionship be good for?
You’ll be like a couple of children—helpless and living in a fantasy.
Why are you learning rationality if you don’t see value in influencing reality?
Well, there’s no reason to think you’d be completely isolated from top level reality. Internet access is very probable. Likely the ability to rent physical bodies. Make phone calls. That sort of thing. You could still get involved in most of the ways you do now. You could talk to people about it, get a job and donate money to various causes. Sign contracts, make legal arrangements to keep yourself safe. That sort of thing.
Wait, you only value friendship in so far as it directly aids you? I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but if that’s actually true, then you might be a sociopath.
Rationality is about maximizing your values. I happen to think that most of my values can be most effectively fulfilled in a virtual environment. If the majority of humanity winds up voluntarily living inside a comfortable, interesting, social, novel Matrix environment, I don’t think that’s a bad future. It would certainly solve the over-crowding problem, for quite a while at least.
Hmm. I hadn’t thought very much about blends of reality and virtual reality like that. I’ve encountered that idea but hadn’t really thought about it.
You took one example way too far. That wasn’t intended as an essay on my views of friendship. The words “one of the things that creates bonds” should have been a big hint that I think there’s more to friendship than that. Why did you suddenly start wondering if I’m a sociopath? That seems paranoid, or it suggests that I did something unexpected.
Okay, but the reason why rationality has a special ability to help you get more of what you want is because it puts you in touch with reality. Only when you’re in touch with reality can you understand it enough to make reality do things you want. In a simulation, you don’t need to know the rules of reality, or how to tell the difference between true and false. You can just press a button and make the sun revolve around the earth, turn off laws of physics like gravity, or cause all the calculators to do 1+1 = 3.
In a virtual world where you can get whatever you want by pressing a button, what value would rationality have?
You still need to figure out what you want.
Unless the virtual world is capable of figuring out what you want itself at least as well as you can. In which case bravo, press the button, you win.
Additionally, reality and virtual reality can get a lot fuzzier than that. If AR glasses become popular, and a protocol exists to swap information between them to allow more seamless AR content integration, you could grab all the feeds coming in from a given location, reconstruct them into a virtual environment, and insert yourself into that environment, which would update with the real world in real time. People wearing glasses could see you as though you were there, and vice versa. If you rented a telepresence robot, it would prevent people from walking through you, and allow you to manipulate objects, shake hands, that sort of thing. The robot would simply be replaced by a rendering of you in the glasses. Furthermore, you could step from that real environment seamlessly into an entirely artificial environment, and back again, and overlay virtual content onto the real world. I suspect that in the next twenty years, the line between reality and virtual reality is going to get really fuzzy, even for non-uploads.
Try doing that in World of Warcraft, and you’ll find your account canceled.
Well, then there’s your answer to the question ‘what is friendship good for’ - whatever other value you place on friendship that makes you neurotypical. I was just trying to point out that that line of reasoning was silly.
Well, you have to get to that point, for starters. And, yes, you do need some level of involvement with top-level reality. To pay for your server space, if nothing else. Virtual environments permit a big subset of life (play, communication, learning, etc. much more efficiently than real life), with a few of the really horrifying sharp edges rounded off, and some additional possibilities added.
There are still challenges to that sort of living, both those imposed by yourself, and those imposed by ideas you encounter and by your interactions with other people. Rationality still has value, for overcoming these sorts of obstacles, even if you’re not in imminent danger of dying all the time.
You’re only expressing personal preferences, but I feel enormously uneasy to hear you say “Human beings need fulfillment, therefore I’d rather die than be like a paraplegic with wheels”. People who can’t speak, are fed through tubes, get around on wheels, express emotion in nonstandard ways, lack functioning hands, and can’t have most forms of sex, don’t usually want to die, but when they’re murdered by an “angel of mercy” serial killer you get people saying stuff like
Ken Wood, ex-husband of one of the Grand Rapids killers
You might be a very atypical person who’d prefer death to severe disability, but if you are, could you pepper statements like that with disclaimers? That’s kind of a dangerous meme to reinforce.
If they want to live, I have no problem with it. I am not advocating killing them. I realize this is my personal preference. Feel better now?
I don’t know what kind of disclaimer I would even add. “Don’t become a serial killer because I said this?”
And I question whether it really is uncommon for people to choose death over severe disability. Why do so many people have living wills?
I don’t think this is dangerous. What’s dangerous is if the person doesn’t realize that not everyone shares their personal preference.
This idea that we need to censor ourselves when having honest discussions is a meme I would not like to see reinforced. I would propose to work against this meme by arguing emotionally and rationally against it rather than by trying to censor it.
Your values are leaking all over your statements of fact. It is not plausible to me that you have not seen the idea of preferring death to severe disability in lots of places at this point in your rational career. From this I conclude your describing those who feel that way as “very atypical” is not only false, but badly motivated as well.
On the (in my estimation) extremely small chance that you really don’t know what a common idea preferring death to severe disability is, google “living will,” “kervorkian” “suicide law oregon” to get a jump start into the large world of people who discuss a myriad of versions and implications of this pretty common meme.
Except when they do.
Tony Nicklinson’s case is by no means the only one I’ve heard of. How do you know that these people are “very atypical” of the severely disabled?
Of course, the idea does lend itself to rationalisations, and according to this blog post, Ken Wood, who you quoted, is doing exactly that:
Nerd alert: R2D2 was able to talk with C3P0. Presumably under normal circumstances, there would be a robot culture. This doesn’t address whether such a life would be satisfying for someone who was born human.
I realize R2D2 could communicate to C3P0, however I would not qualify that as “being able to speak”. Needing an interpreter would leave me disabled in any situation where the interpreter was not present. Communicating in beeps is a disability, not an ability.
Are you claiming to be indifferent to death?
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.