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.
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.