I think you’re missing the point of my question, which was that “Death is bad” is, at least on the surface, an instance of the Mind Projection Fallacy: projecting a label out into the world as if it could exist independently of the mind doing the labeling.
Specifically, “badness” requires a mind capable of experiencing the concept of badness… and a dead person lacks such a mind. So to say “Death is bad” is leaving out the whom. That is, it’s bad as perceived by the living. Dead people lack any values by which to judge it, or an active mind with which to do the judging.
While a person is alive, they can look forward to a future in which they would dead, and experience emotions regarding this imaginary predicted future… but that’s not the same thing as that future actually being “bad” for them in that future time. It can only be bad for people still alive.
So, (for example) the analogy to torture fails here. A tortured person is alive and can perceive the experience to be bad, regardless of whether anyone else cares. But a dead person can only matter to the living.
Do you think the analogy of a person believing (for some reason) that he will live forever in an empty room drugged to feel happy applies here? the person in question might feel negative about his fate but at the moment future-him will not say his experience is bad. and since there is no future-future-him (since he will live there forever) then no one will even say that in retrospect it was bad.
in this case, you could say that it is our place to judge the experience our future self might enjoy.
https://www.yudkowsky.net/other/yehuda
Eliezer has written extensively on why death is bad for everyone and my understanding closely aligns with his.
I think you’re missing the point of my question, which was that “Death is bad” is, at least on the surface, an instance of the Mind Projection Fallacy: projecting a label out into the world as if it could exist independently of the mind doing the labeling.
Specifically, “badness” requires a mind capable of experiencing the concept of badness… and a dead person lacks such a mind. So to say “Death is bad” is leaving out the whom. That is, it’s bad as perceived by the living. Dead people lack any values by which to judge it, or an active mind with which to do the judging.
While a person is alive, they can look forward to a future in which they would dead, and experience emotions regarding this imaginary predicted future… but that’s not the same thing as that future actually being “bad” for them in that future time. It can only be bad for people still alive.
So, (for example) the analogy to torture fails here. A tortured person is alive and can perceive the experience to be bad, regardless of whether anyone else cares. But a dead person can only matter to the living.
Do you think the analogy of a person believing (for some reason) that he will live forever in an empty room drugged to feel happy applies here? the person in question might feel negative about his fate but at the moment future-him will not say his experience is bad. and since there is no future-future-him (since he will live there forever) then no one will even say that in retrospect it was bad.
in this case, you could say that it is our place to judge the experience our future self might enjoy.