“If you don’t teach your children the One True Religion, you’re a lousy parent.”
My own excuse for not signing up for cryonics is not that I don’t think it will work, it’s that I don’t particularly value my own existence. I’m much more concerned about the effects of my death on other people than its effects on me; I’ve resolved not to die before my parents do, because I don’t want them to suffer the grief my death would cause.
Incidentally, is it possible to sign someone else up for cryonics, if they don’t object?
“If you don’t teach your children the One True Religion, you’re a lousy parent.”
Given that the One True Religion is actually correct, wouldn’t you, in fact, be a lousy parent if you did not teach it? Someone who claims to be a Christian and yet doesn’t teach their kids about Christianity is, under their incorrect belief system, condemning them to an eternity of torture, which surely qualifies as being a lousy parent in my book.
IAWYC, but to nitpick, not all Christians believe in an eternity of torture for nonbelievers. Though of course the conclusion follows for any belief in a substantially better afterlife for believers.
(I feel like this is important to point out, to avoid demonizing an outgroup, but don’t trust that feeling very much. What do others think?)
Its conceptually possible to believe that the Bible is full of nonsense yet Jesus really did die for our sins. But nobody ever seems to actually hold this position. Or if they do, they never seem to come out and say it.
Its conceptually possible to believe that the Bible is full of nonsense yet Jesus really did die for our sins. But nobody ever seems to actually hold this position. Or if they do, they never seem to come out and say it.
They do, but they express it as either “the Bible was written by fallible men” or “it’s all Deep Metaphor”.
Indeed, but I wonder how they deal with passages like Revelation 14:11, Matthew 25:41, or Mark 9:43.
If you really want to know, you could try asking them. Or reading their books, if you don’t know any. You could even think up good arguments yourself for reconciling the belief with the verses.
I have no book recommendations. My point is that flaunting Biblical quotations and going “nyah! nyah!” does not make a good argument, even if the conclusion is correct.
Zombie-hunting requires better instruments than that.
I have. You point out the verses to them and they say things like “Well all I know is that God is just.” Or they just say “Hmm.” What I want to know is what a thinking sort of hell-denying Christian says.
Or reading their books
Since this is essentially a heretical position, I’m not sure how heavily it’s defended in the literature. Still, I do have in my bookshelf an anthology containing a universalist essay by Marilyn McCord Adams, where she states that “I do not regard Scripture as infallible [… but …] I do not regard my universalist theology as un-Scriptural, because I believe the theme of definitive divine triumph is central to the Bible”. She seems to want to reject the Bible and accept it too.
You could even think up good arguments yourself for reconciling the belief with the verses.
I think the most coherent Christian position would be: There is a God. Various interesting things happened at God’s doing, including Jesus and his miracles. The people who witnessed all these events wrote about them, but invariably these accounts are half fiction or worse. Paul is clearly a charlatan.
But nobody seems to believe this: Christians who think the Bible is fallible nevertheless act as if it is mostly right.
flaunting Biblical quotations [...] does not make a good argument
It’s necessary when dealing with the doublethink of people who want to take the Bible as divine yet reject key parts of it.
going “nyah! nyah!”
Note that this sort of comment provokes an automatic reaction to fight back, rather than to consider whether you might be correct.
What I want to know is what a thinking sort of hell-denying Christian says.
Many doctrines are collected here. Not all have the damned eternally waterboarded with boiling lead. For example, the Orthodox churches teach that hell is the response to the direct presence of God by the soul which has rejected Him. It is no more a punishment than the pain you feel if you cut a finger.
And then, whatever hell is, who goes there, and do they stay there for eternity? Doctrines differ on this as well—the issue of works vs. faith, or the issue of those who have never encountered the Word and have not been in a position to accept or reject it.
How do they explain Biblical passages? By interpreting them (as they would say) correctly. Unless you look to extreme fringe groups who think that the King James Bible was a new revelation whose every letter is to be as meticulously preserved and revered as Moslems do the Koran, every Christian doctrine allows that the text needs interpretation. As well, the Catholic and Orthodox churches do not regard the Bible as the sole source of the Word, regarding the settled doctrine of the church as another source of divine revelation.
There is also the Book of Nature, which God also wrote.
With multiple sources of divine revelation, but an axiomatic unity of that revelation, any conflicts must result from imperfect human understanding. Given the axiom, it is really not difficult to come up with resolutions of apparent conflicts. Confabulating stories in order to maintain an immovable idea is something the brain is very good at. Watch me confabulate a Bayesian justification of confabulation! Strong evidence can always defeat strong priors, and vice versa. So if the unity of God’s Word is as unshakeable as 2+2=4, a mere difficult passage is less than a feather on the scales.
I say this not to teach Christian doctrines (I’m as atheist as anyone, and my Church of Scotland upbringing was as unzealous as it could possibly be and still be called a religion), but to point out that Christians do actually have answers to these questions. Ok, bad answers if you like, but if you want to argue against them you need to either tackle those answers, or find a weapon so awesome it blows the entire religious enterprise out of the water. (I’m sure there’s a perfect LW link for the latter, but I can’t at the moment recall where. This is rather diffuse.) Just quoting the Bible is like creationists smugly telling each other that evolutionists think a monkey gave birth to a man. It’s an exercise in pouring scorn on Them. You know, those Others, over There.
Just quoting the Bible is like creationists smugly telling each other that evolutionists think a monkey gave birth to a man.
It’s not like that at all. Many Bible passages dealing with Hell are perfectly clear, whereas it takes a great distortion of evolutionary theory to get to “a monkey gave birth to a man”.
It would be easier to accept texts as mere teaching stories if they were clearly intended as such. A few are, like the Book of Job, and possibly, Jonah. Parts of Genesis, maybe (though I doubt it). But it can’t be right to dismiss as a mere story everything that doesn’t seem likely or decent. Much of it is surely intended literally.
A very common argument taught by the traditional churches (as opposed to the neo-evangelical churches in America) that the notions of “eternal fire” and “hell” are just symbols to express the pain caused by the distance from God. Therefore, the punishment is self-inflicted, not something imposed by God directly, but rather a logical consequence.
It’s not too hard to interpret these passages to mean that hell exists, and is only for certain kinds of sins. There’s a difference between rejecting God and never having heard of him, for instance.
I’m always astounded when Protestants do actually believe the Bible is not full of nonsense. The Catholic Church did a lot of editing / selection of what went in there, using “Sacred Tradition” as their primary justification. Given that Protestants reject Sacred Tradition, it should follow that they have no basis for choosing which apocrypha should have been included in the first place, and shouldn’t just take the Catholics’ word for it.
Protestant religions are mostly political constructs. They tried to make a few theological changes, but mostly on the cosmetic level only to justify the political independence from the Pope.
Even if it would not be the case, religions need something sacrosanct, which is the scripture in this case. It would have been politically very unwise to try to compromise the apparent sanctity of that source, especially since it was very easy to put their own interpretation to it. Even modern evangelical religions don’t try to modify the wording of the actual script.
Additionally, since the language of religion has been latin for more than 1500 years, the actual text of the bible changed practically nothing since around 400. One could argue that the church and its ideology that time was more different from the current catholic ones than the current protestant churches and their teachings.
the actual text of the bible changed practically nothing since around 400.
I’d agree with you there, but the period before 400ish was not negligible. Before that time the New Testament wasn’t even a book, but rather a collection of different books, many of which did not make it into the canon. Clearly, people were actually concerned about the issue of canonicity at around the time of the Reformation; it was touched on at Trent, as well as various non-RC christian councils, in the 16th century or so.
That said, while your political explanation seems correct, it should not be comforting to Protestant theologians.
That said, while your political explanation seems correct, it should not be comforting to Protestant theologians.
To be fair: One of the main cornerstones of a lot of christian religions, the divinity of Christ, was quite a political decision from the fourth century.
The Catholic Church did a lot of editing / selection of what went in there, using “Sacred Tradition” as their primary justification.
Literary quality and coherence were actually optimized pretty well in the selection process; if you don’t believe me, read an apocryphal gospel sometime. They’re basically Jesus fanfic of various stripes, much more ridiculous than the ones deemed canonical, and the vast (secular) scholarly consensus has them all written in the second or third centuries (excepting the Gospel of Thomas).
Then again, since many apocryphal gospels were written to buttress theologies different from the mainline one, it was easy to have them rejected for that reason alone.
Also, there are some Christian denominations which think that nonbelievers simply die and don’t get revived after the world has ended, unlike the believers who are.
IIRC some also put more weight on doing good works during your life than whether you are actually a believer or not.
That was also a belief of some of the most important Jewish scholars. Orthodox Judaism holds it as a truth, and the other sects of Judaism don’t believe it.
Not true AFAIK; last time I checked I was told that sinners got a maximum of twelve months in Gehenna, or eleven months if someone says Kaddish for them, and Saturdays off.
Does this change from Orthodox sect to Orthodox sect or even rabbi to rabbi? I glanced at Wikipedia and assumed that quote from the Talmud applied, but maybe it is interpreted differently, quoted out of context, or just selectively ignored. I think I just underestimated the ability of Orthodox Jews to rationalize away their actual belief system, especially the most negative aspects. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resurrection#Orthodox_Judaism
I would guess that the interpretation changed when Sheol stopped being interpreted as “grave” and started being interpreted as “hell.” I don’t know which meaning of Sheol the Talmudic scholars had.
“If you don’t teach your children the One True Religion, you’re a lousy parent.”
It’s good reasoning (from respective premises) in both cases. It is believing that the One Religion is True that is stupid. We have further negative associations with that kind of statement because we expect most ‘stable’ religious people to compartmentalise their beliefs such that the stupidity doesn’t leak out into their actual judgements.
My own excuse for not signing up for cryonics is not that I don’t think it will work, it’s that I don’t particularly value my own existence.
Could you elaborate on this?
If you are depressed, or not enjoying life, or not satisfied with who you are for some reason or other, have you considered that if we get to a future where technology is vastly more advanced than it is now, that there might be ways to fix that and at least bring you to the level of “life enjoyment” that others who want to sign up for cryonics have (if not much more than that since we are currently very limited)?
Because of that possibility, maybe it would make sense to sign up, and if you get to the “other side” and realize that you still don’t value your existence and there’s no way to change that, then commit suicide.
Personally, I have a mild preference towards being alive rather than dead, but it’s not strong enough to motivate me to look at cryonics options. (Especially since their availability in Europe is rather bad.) This is partially motivated by the fact that I consider continuity of consciousness to be an illusion in any case—yes, there might be a person tomorrow who remembers thinking the thoughts of me today, but that’s a different person from the one typing these words now.
Of course, I’m evolutionarily hardwired to succumb to that illusion in some degree. Postulating a period of cryonic suspension after which I’m rebuilt, however, feels enough like being effectively killed and then reborn that it breaks the illusion. Also, that illusion is mostly something that operates in ‘near’ mode. Evoking the far, post-revival future gets me into ‘far’ mode, where I’m much less inclined to attach particular value for the survival of this particular being.
Finally, there’s also the fact that I consider our chances of actually building FAI and not getting destroyed by UFAI to be rather vanishingly small.
This is partially motivated by the fact that I consider continuity of consciousness to be an illusion in any case—yes, there might be a person tomorrow who remembers thinking the thoughts of me today, but that’s a different person from the one typing these words now.
Interesting. That thought process is how I made a case for cryonics to a friend recently. Their objection was that they didn’t think it would be them, and I countered with the fact that the you of tomorrow isn’t really the same as the you of today...and yet you still want to live till tomorrow.
Personally, I have a mild preference towards being alive rather than dead, but it’s not strong enough to motivate me to look at cryonics options. (Especially since their availability in Europe is rather bad.)
Do you think that there might be a link between these two things?
Aubrey de Grey often talks about the “pro-death trance”, and says that as long as people think that death from the diseases of aging is inevitable, they’ll find ways to rationalize why “it’s a good thing” or at least “not so bad”.
Do you think that if Cryonics was widely available where you are and that it was affordable (a hundred Euros a year life insurance, f.ex.) that this would increase your interest in it?
I have pretty much the same view as Kaj, I’d get cryonics if it was cheap.
If I did I’d want to put a note that I’d be okay with people using my brain for science when they needed it to test scanning equipment and the like. For some reason I can associate better and feel more positive about imagining papers being published about my brain than being reincarnated in silicon (or carbon nanotubes).
Do you think that if Cryonics was widely available where you are and that it was affordable (a hundred Euros a year life insurance, f.ex.) that this would increase your interest in it?
I often have this thought, and then get a nasty sick feeling along the lines of ‘what the hell kind of expected utility calculation am I doing that weighs a second shot at life against some amount of cash?’ Argument rejected!
This has to be a rationality error. Given that it’s far from guaranteed to work, there has to be an amount that cryonics could cost such that it wouldn’t be worth signing up. I’m not saying that the real costs are that high, just that if you’re making a rational decision such an amount will exist.
Given the sky-high utility I’d place on living, I wouldn’t expect to see the numbers crunch down to a place where a non-huge sum of money is the difference between signing up and not.
So when someone says ‘if it were half the price maybe I’d sign up’ I’m always interested to know exactly what calculations they’re performing, and exactly what it is that reduces the billions of utilons of living down to a marginal cash sum. The (tiny?) chance of cryonics working? Serious coincidence if those factors cancel comfortably. Just smacks of bottom-line to me.
Put it this way—imagine cryonics has been seriously, prohibitively expensive for many years after introduction. Say it still was today, for some reason, and then after much debate and hand-wringing about immortality for the uber-rich, tomorrow suddenly and very publicly dropped to current levels, I’d expect to see a huge upswing in signing up. Such is the human being!
Do you agree with the quantum physics sequence? This is the big reveal:
If you can see the moments of now braided into time, the causal dependencies of future states on past states, the high-level pattern of synapses and the internal narrative as a computation within it—if you can viscerally dispel the classical hallucination of a little billiard ball that is you, and see your nows strung out in the river that never flows—then you can see that signing up for cryonics, being vitrified in liquid nitrogen when you die, and having your brain nanotechnologically reconstructed fifty years later, is actually less of a change than going to sleep, dreaming, and forgetting your dreams when you wake up.
You should be able to see that, now, if you’ve followed through this whole series. You should be able to get it on a gut level—that being vitrified in liquid nitrogen for fifty years (around 3e52 Planck intervals) is not very different from waiting an average of 2e26 Planck intervals between neurons firing, on the generous assumption that there are a hundred trillion synapses firing a thousand times per second. You should be able to see that there is nothing preserved from one night’s sleep to the morning’s waking, which cryonic suspension does not preserve also. Assuming the vitrification technology is good enough for a sufficiently powerful Bayesian superintelligence to look at your frozen brain, and figure out “who you were” to the same resolution that your morning’s waking self resembles the person who went to sleep that night.
Assuming the vitrification technology is good enough for a sufficiently powerful Bayesian superintelligence to look at your frozen brain, and figure out “who you were” to the same resolution that your morning’s waking self resembles the person who went to sleep that night.
But I don’t think the person tomorrow is the same person as me today, either.
Point taken. Any interest in having your volition realized? This seems much more likely to me to matter and I do happen to run an organization aimed at providing it whether you pay us or not but we’d still appreciate your help.
being vitrified in liquid nitrogen when you die, and having your brain nanotechnologically reconstructed fifty years later, is actually less of a change than going to sleep, dreaming, and forgetting your dreams when you wake up.
I haven’t been entirely convinced on that note. The process of dying and the time it takes from heart stopping to head frozen in a jar seems like it would give plenty of opportunity for minor disruptions even granted that a superintelligence could put it back together.
I’m not sure if this has ever been presented as a scenario, but even if you are looking at many minor disruptions, physically speaking, there aren’t that many places that your neurons would have gone.
So, it is possible that many versions of you might be woken up, wedrifid1, wedrifid2, etc. , each the result of a different extrapolation that was minor enough to be extrapolated, yet major enough to deserve a different version. This would only happen if the damages have occurred in a place critical to your sense of self. I simply don’t know enough neurology and neurochemistry to say how much damage this is and where, but I’m sure that the superintelligences would be able to crack that one.
And your great grand children, being the nice sweet posthumans that we expect them to be, (they did recover you, didn’t they?) will spend time with all versions of their great grand parents. Their brains would be running at higher cycles and keeping intelligent conversations on with 10 versions of you will be trivial to them.
Most of my desires seem to take the form “I don’t want to do/experience X”. Those desires of the form “I want to do/experience X” seem to be much weaker. Being dead means that I will have no experiences, and will therefore never have an experience I don’t want, at the cost of never being able to have an experience I do want. Because I want to avoid bad experiences much more than I want to have good experiences, being dead doesn’t seem like all that bad a deal.
I’m also incredibly lazy. I hate doing things that seem like they take work or effort. If I’m dead, I’ll never have to do anything at all, ever again, and that has a kind of perverse appeal to it.
Because I want to avoid bad experiences much more than I want to have good experiences, being dead doesn’t seem like all that bad a deal.
This rejection doesn’t work: if the world of the future changes so that bad experiences don’t happen, and good experiences are better, it’s in your interest to see it. Furthermore, do you prefer your current disposition, or you’d rather it’d change?
I don’t know if I want it to change or not, but that doesn’t seem like something to worry about because I don’t know how to change my disposition and I don’t know how to go about figuring how to change my disposition.
You know what? Someone should just go hunt down CronoDAS and forcibly cryo-suspend him. It’d be doing everyone a favour. He’d get to live in a future where he doesn’t have to be geek-emo, a perceived ‘murder’ would be less shameful than a suicide for his parents and we wouldn’t have the same old hand wringing conversation all the time.
See you on the other side. (Or not, as the case may be.)
On the other hand, “we should (legally) kill this guy so as to save his life” is unethical and I would never do it. But it is a significant question and the kind of reasoning that is relevant to all sorts of situations.
No, I don’t mind at all. As long as you don’t mind that I don’t treat this specific desire of yours with sombre dignity. I do, after all, think a death wish as an alternative to cryonic revival where your mental health can be restored is silly and something to laugh at (and so lower in status and discourage without being actually aggressive.)
I don’t know if I can be “fixed” without changing me to the point where I’m effectively somebody else. And that’s not much different than someone in the future simply having a baby and raising it to be a better person than I am. Furthermore, if the future has to choose between resurrecting me and somebody raising a child from scratch, I prefer that somebody raise a child; I’d rather the future have someone better than “me” instead of someone that I would recognize as “me”.
(Additionally, the argument you just made is also an argument for getting frozen right now instead of having to wait until you die a natural death before you get to be revived in a better future. “If the afterlife is so great, why not kill yourself and get there right now?”)
The future will have this choice (not to revive you), and will make it against you if this turns out to be a better option, but if you don’t make it to the future, you won’t give it the chance of doing this particular thing (your revival) in case it turns out to be a good thing.
Again, you can’t be certain of what your preference actually says in the not-clear-cut cases like this, you can’t know for sure that you prefer some child to be raised in place of yourself, and for this particular question it seems to be a false dilemma, since it’s likely that there will be no resource limitation of this kind, only moral optimization.
I don’t know if I can be “fixed” without changing me to the point where I’m effectively somebody else.
I don’t want to get into a whole other discussion here, but I think people change a lot throughout their lives—I know I sure did—and I’m not sure if this would be such a problem. Maybe it would be, but comparing the certainty of death to that potential problem, I know I’d take the risk.
Furthermore, if the future has to choose between resurrecting me and somebody raising a child from scratch, I prefer that somebody raise a child; I’d rather the future have someone better than “me” instead of someone that I would recognize as “me”.
The cost of another individual might be so low in the future that there might not be a choice between you and someone else.
(Additionally, the argument you just made is also an argument for getting frozen right now instead of having to wait until you die a natural death before you get to be revived in a better future. “If the afterlife is so great, why not kill yourself and get there right now?”)
For someone who doesn’t want to live at all right now and would commit suicide anyway, then yes, I’d recommend getting cryo’ed instead.
But for someone who enjoys life, then no, I wouldn’t recommend it because it might not work (though having that possibility is still better than the certainty of annihilation).
I’ve actually been thinking about something similar;
What if I find out I have an incurable degenerative brain disease. At which point would I decide to get vitrified to improve my chances of being successfully revived by keeping my brain in better condition at the time of my death?
Nothing in ORS 127.800 to 127.897 shall be construed to authorize a physician or any other person to end a patient’s life by lethal injection, mercy killing or active euthanasia. Actions taken in accordance with ORS 127.800 to 127.897 shall not, for any purpose, constitute suicide, assisted suicide, mercy killing or homicide, under the law. [1995 c.3 s.3.14]
Nothing in this chapter authorizes a physician or any other person to end a patient’ s life by lethal injection, mercy killing, or active euthanasia. Actions taken in accordance with this chapter do not, for any purpose, constitute suicide, assisted suicide, mercy killing, or homicide, under the law. State reports shall not refer to practice under this chapter as “suicide” or “assisted suicide.” Consistent with sections 1 (7), (11), and (12), 2(1), 4(1)(k), 6, 7, 9, 12 (1) and (2), 16 (1) and (2), 17, 19(1) (a) and (d), and 20(2) of this act, state reports shall refer to practice under this chapter as obtaining and self-administering life-ending medication.
Incidentally, is it possible to sign someone else up for cryonics, if they don’t object?
Obviously they have to actively consent at some point—even if only to sign the papers you shove in front of them. And then they need to cooperate while dying.
But I suppose you could do the research and fill out the form and pay for their insurance policy, yeah. But I wouldn’t do that for someone who might screw it all up at the end.
I see a disturbing surface similarity.
“If you don’t teach your children the One True Religion, you’re a lousy parent.”
My own excuse for not signing up for cryonics is not that I don’t think it will work, it’s that I don’t particularly value my own existence. I’m much more concerned about the effects of my death on other people than its effects on me; I’ve resolved not to die before my parents do, because I don’t want them to suffer the grief my death would cause.
Incidentally, is it possible to sign someone else up for cryonics, if they don’t object?
“If you don’t teach your children the One True Religion, you’re a lousy parent.”
Given that the One True Religion is actually correct, wouldn’t you, in fact, be a lousy parent if you did not teach it? Someone who claims to be a Christian and yet doesn’t teach their kids about Christianity is, under their incorrect belief system, condemning them to an eternity of torture, which surely qualifies as being a lousy parent in my book.
IAWYC, but to nitpick, not all Christians believe in an eternity of torture for nonbelievers. Though of course the conclusion follows for any belief in a substantially better afterlife for believers.
(I feel like this is important to point out, to avoid demonizing an outgroup, but don’t trust that feeling very much. What do others think?)
Indeed, but I wonder how they deal with passages like Revelation 14:11, Matthew 25:41, or Mark 9:43.
Its conceptually possible to believe that the Bible is full of nonsense yet Jesus really did die for our sins. But nobody ever seems to actually hold this position. Or if they do, they never seem to come out and say it.
Frequently, by not knowing about them.
They do, but they express it as either “the Bible was written by fallible men” or “it’s all Deep Metaphor”.
If you really want to know, you could try asking them. Or reading their books, if you don’t know any. You could even think up good arguments yourself for reconciling the belief with the verses.
I have no book recommendations. My point is that flaunting Biblical quotations and going “nyah! nyah!” does not make a good argument, even if the conclusion is correct. Zombie-hunting requires better instruments than that.
I have. You point out the verses to them and they say things like “Well all I know is that God is just.” Or they just say “Hmm.” What I want to know is what a thinking sort of hell-denying Christian says.
Since this is essentially a heretical position, I’m not sure how heavily it’s defended in the literature. Still, I do have in my bookshelf an anthology containing a universalist essay by Marilyn McCord Adams, where she states that “I do not regard Scripture as infallible [… but …] I do not regard my universalist theology as un-Scriptural, because I believe the theme of definitive divine triumph is central to the Bible”. She seems to want to reject the Bible and accept it too.
I think the most coherent Christian position would be: There is a God. Various interesting things happened at God’s doing, including Jesus and his miracles. The people who witnessed all these events wrote about them, but invariably these accounts are half fiction or worse. Paul is clearly a charlatan.
But nobody seems to believe this: Christians who think the Bible is fallible nevertheless act as if it is mostly right.
It’s necessary when dealing with the doublethink of people who want to take the Bible as divine yet reject key parts of it.
Note that this sort of comment provokes an automatic reaction to fight back, rather than to consider whether you might be correct.
Many doctrines are collected here. Not all have the damned eternally waterboarded with boiling lead. For example, the Orthodox churches teach that hell is the response to the direct presence of God by the soul which has rejected Him. It is no more a punishment than the pain you feel if you cut a finger.
And then, whatever hell is, who goes there, and do they stay there for eternity? Doctrines differ on this as well—the issue of works vs. faith, or the issue of those who have never encountered the Word and have not been in a position to accept or reject it.
How do they explain Biblical passages? By interpreting them (as they would say) correctly. Unless you look to extreme fringe groups who think that the King James Bible was a new revelation whose every letter is to be as meticulously preserved and revered as Moslems do the Koran, every Christian doctrine allows that the text needs interpretation. As well, the Catholic and Orthodox churches do not regard the Bible as the sole source of the Word, regarding the settled doctrine of the church as another source of divine revelation. There is also the Book of Nature, which God also wrote.
With multiple sources of divine revelation, but an axiomatic unity of that revelation, any conflicts must result from imperfect human understanding. Given the axiom, it is really not difficult to come up with resolutions of apparent conflicts. Confabulating stories in order to maintain an immovable idea is something the brain is very good at. Watch me confabulate a Bayesian justification of confabulation! Strong evidence can always defeat strong priors, and vice versa. So if the unity of God’s Word is as unshakeable as 2+2=4, a mere difficult passage is less than a feather on the scales.
I say this not to teach Christian doctrines (I’m as atheist as anyone, and my Church of Scotland upbringing was as unzealous as it could possibly be and still be called a religion), but to point out that Christians do actually have answers to these questions. Ok, bad answers if you like, but if you want to argue against them you need to either tackle those answers, or find a weapon so awesome it blows the entire religious enterprise out of the water. (I’m sure there’s a perfect LW link for the latter, but I can’t at the moment recall where. This is rather diffuse.) Just quoting the Bible is like creationists smugly telling each other that evolutionists think a monkey gave birth to a man. It’s an exercise in pouring scorn on Them. You know, those Others, over There.
As Nick Tarleton warned, upthread.
It’s not like that at all. Many Bible passages dealing with Hell are perfectly clear, whereas it takes a great distortion of evolutionary theory to get to “a monkey gave birth to a man”.
Speaking of thinking Christians makes me think of Fred Clark: some clue might be found in his interpretation of Genesis 6-9.
It would be easier to accept texts as mere teaching stories if they were clearly intended as such. A few are, like the Book of Job, and possibly, Jonah. Parts of Genesis, maybe (though I doubt it). But it can’t be right to dismiss as a mere story everything that doesn’t seem likely or decent. Much of it is surely intended literally.
I would agree, which is part of why I found the linked post so strange.
A very common argument taught by the traditional churches (as opposed to the neo-evangelical churches in America) that the notions of “eternal fire” and “hell” are just symbols to express the pain caused by the distance from God. Therefore, the punishment is self-inflicted, not something imposed by God directly, but rather a logical consequence.
It’s not too hard to interpret these passages to mean that hell exists, and is only for certain kinds of sins. There’s a difference between rejecting God and never having heard of him, for instance.
I’m always astounded when Protestants do actually believe the Bible is not full of nonsense. The Catholic Church did a lot of editing / selection of what went in there, using “Sacred Tradition” as their primary justification. Given that Protestants reject Sacred Tradition, it should follow that they have no basis for choosing which apocrypha should have been included in the first place, and shouldn’t just take the Catholics’ word for it.
Protestant religions are mostly political constructs. They tried to make a few theological changes, but mostly on the cosmetic level only to justify the political independence from the Pope.
Even if it would not be the case, religions need something sacrosanct, which is the scripture in this case. It would have been politically very unwise to try to compromise the apparent sanctity of that source, especially since it was very easy to put their own interpretation to it. Even modern evangelical religions don’t try to modify the wording of the actual script.
Additionally, since the language of religion has been latin for more than 1500 years, the actual text of the bible changed practically nothing since around 400. One could argue that the church and its ideology that time was more different from the current catholic ones than the current protestant churches and their teachings.
I’d agree with you there, but the period before 400ish was not negligible. Before that time the New Testament wasn’t even a book, but rather a collection of different books, many of which did not make it into the canon. Clearly, people were actually concerned about the issue of canonicity at around the time of the Reformation; it was touched on at Trent, as well as various non-RC christian councils, in the 16th century or so.
That said, while your political explanation seems correct, it should not be comforting to Protestant theologians.
To be fair: One of the main cornerstones of a lot of christian religions, the divinity of Christ, was quite a political decision from the fourth century.
Theologians learned to live with it as well.
Literary quality and coherence were actually optimized pretty well in the selection process; if you don’t believe me, read an apocryphal gospel sometime. They’re basically Jesus fanfic of various stripes, much more ridiculous than the ones deemed canonical, and the vast (secular) scholarly consensus has them all written in the second or third centuries (excepting the Gospel of Thomas).
Then again, since many apocryphal gospels were written to buttress theologies different from the mainline one, it was easy to have them rejected for that reason alone.
Some Protestant sects do, indeed, use a slightly different Bible than the Catholic one. (Or so I heard.)
That’s correct; they drop some late-written Old Testament books, which they call the “Catholic Apocrypha”.
Also, there are some Christian denominations which think that nonbelievers simply die and don’t get revived after the world has ended, unlike the believers who are.
IIRC some also put more weight on doing good works during your life than whether you are actually a believer or not.
This is what Jehovah’s Witnesses believe.
That was also a belief of some of the most important Jewish scholars. Orthodox Judaism holds it as a truth, and the other sects of Judaism don’t believe it.
Not true AFAIK; last time I checked I was told that sinners got a maximum of twelve months in Gehenna, or eleven months if someone says Kaddish for them, and Saturdays off.
Does this change from Orthodox sect to Orthodox sect or even rabbi to rabbi? I glanced at Wikipedia and assumed that quote from the Talmud applied, but maybe it is interpreted differently, quoted out of context, or just selectively ignored. I think I just underestimated the ability of Orthodox Jews to rationalize away their actual belief system, especially the most negative aspects. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resurrection#Orthodox_Judaism
I would guess that the interpretation changed when Sheol stopped being interpreted as “grave” and started being interpreted as “hell.” I don’t know which meaning of Sheol the Talmudic scholars had.
It’s good reasoning (from respective premises) in both cases. It is believing that the One Religion is True that is stupid. We have further negative associations with that kind of statement because we expect most ‘stable’ religious people to compartmentalise their beliefs such that the stupidity doesn’t leak out into their actual judgements.
Could you elaborate on this?
If you are depressed, or not enjoying life, or not satisfied with who you are for some reason or other, have you considered that if we get to a future where technology is vastly more advanced than it is now, that there might be ways to fix that and at least bring you to the level of “life enjoyment” that others who want to sign up for cryonics have (if not much more than that since we are currently very limited)?
Because of that possibility, maybe it would make sense to sign up, and if you get to the “other side” and realize that you still don’t value your existence and there’s no way to change that, then commit suicide.
Personally, I have a mild preference towards being alive rather than dead, but it’s not strong enough to motivate me to look at cryonics options. (Especially since their availability in Europe is rather bad.) This is partially motivated by the fact that I consider continuity of consciousness to be an illusion in any case—yes, there might be a person tomorrow who remembers thinking the thoughts of me today, but that’s a different person from the one typing these words now.
Of course, I’m evolutionarily hardwired to succumb to that illusion in some degree. Postulating a period of cryonic suspension after which I’m rebuilt, however, feels enough like being effectively killed and then reborn that it breaks the illusion. Also, that illusion is mostly something that operates in ‘near’ mode. Evoking the far, post-revival future gets me into ‘far’ mode, where I’m much less inclined to attach particular value for the survival of this particular being.
Finally, there’s also the fact that I consider our chances of actually building FAI and not getting destroyed by UFAI to be rather vanishingly small.
Interesting. That thought process is how I made a case for cryonics to a friend recently. Their objection was that they didn’t think it would be them, and I countered with the fact that the you of tomorrow isn’t really the same as the you of today...and yet you still want to live till tomorrow.
Do you think that there might be a link between these two things?
Aubrey de Grey often talks about the “pro-death trance”, and says that as long as people think that death from the diseases of aging is inevitable, they’ll find ways to rationalize why “it’s a good thing” or at least “not so bad”.
Do you think that if Cryonics was widely available where you are and that it was affordable (a hundred Euros a year life insurance, f.ex.) that this would increase your interest in it?
I have pretty much the same view as Kaj, I’d get cryonics if it was cheap.
If I did I’d want to put a note that I’d be okay with people using my brain for science when they needed it to test scanning equipment and the like. For some reason I can associate better and feel more positive about imagining papers being published about my brain than being reincarnated in silicon (or carbon nanotubes).
Probably, yes.
I often have this thought, and then get a nasty sick feeling along the lines of ‘what the hell kind of expected utility calculation am I doing that weighs a second shot at life against some amount of cash?’ Argument rejected!
This has to be a rationality error. Given that it’s far from guaranteed to work, there has to be an amount that cryonics could cost such that it wouldn’t be worth signing up. I’m not saying that the real costs are that high, just that if you’re making a rational decision such an amount will exist.
Sorry, should have given more context.
Given the sky-high utility I’d place on living, I wouldn’t expect to see the numbers crunch down to a place where a non-huge sum of money is the difference between signing up and not.
So when someone says ‘if it were half the price maybe I’d sign up’ I’m always interested to know exactly what calculations they’re performing, and exactly what it is that reduces the billions of utilons of living down to a marginal cash sum. The (tiny?) chance of cryonics working? Serious coincidence if those factors cancel comfortably. Just smacks of bottom-line to me.
Put it this way—imagine cryonics has been seriously, prohibitively expensive for many years after introduction. Say it still was today, for some reason, and then after much debate and hand-wringing about immortality for the uber-rich, tomorrow suddenly and very publicly dropped to current levels, I’d expect to see a huge upswing in signing up. Such is the human being!
I agree with all of this.
Do you agree with the quantum physics sequence? This is the big reveal:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/qx/timeless_identity/
But I don’t think the person tomorrow is the same person as me today, either.
Point taken. Any interest in having your volition realized? This seems much more likely to me to matter and I do happen to run an organization aimed at providing it whether you pay us or not but we’d still appreciate your help.
Well, I am a monthly donor, and unless something unexpected happens I’ll be coming over in a few months to see what I can do for SIAI, so yes. :)
I haven’t been entirely convinced on that note. The process of dying and the time it takes from heart stopping to head frozen in a jar seems like it would give plenty of opportunity for minor disruptions even granted that a superintelligence could put it back together.
I’m not sure if this has ever been presented as a scenario, but even if you are looking at many minor disruptions, physically speaking, there aren’t that many places that your neurons would have gone.
So, it is possible that many versions of you might be woken up, wedrifid1, wedrifid2, etc. , each the result of a different extrapolation that was minor enough to be extrapolated, yet major enough to deserve a different version. This would only happen if the damages have occurred in a place critical to your sense of self. I simply don’t know enough neurology and neurochemistry to say how much damage this is and where, but I’m sure that the superintelligences would be able to crack that one.
And your great grand children, being the nice sweet posthumans that we expect them to be, (they did recover you, didn’t they?) will spend time with all versions of their great grand parents. Their brains would be running at higher cycles and keeping intelligent conversations on with 10 versions of you will be trivial to them.
Most of my desires seem to take the form “I don’t want to do/experience X”. Those desires of the form “I want to do/experience X” seem to be much weaker. Being dead means that I will have no experiences, and will therefore never have an experience I don’t want, at the cost of never being able to have an experience I do want. Because I want to avoid bad experiences much more than I want to have good experiences, being dead doesn’t seem like all that bad a deal.
I’m also incredibly lazy. I hate doing things that seem like they take work or effort. If I’m dead, I’ll never have to do anything at all, ever again, and that has a kind of perverse appeal to it.
I just wanted to note that your post seems completely alien to me.
Not to me.
This rejection doesn’t work: if the world of the future changes so that bad experiences don’t happen, and good experiences are better, it’s in your interest to see it. Furthermore, do you prefer your current disposition, or you’d rather it’d change?
I don’t know if I want it to change or not, but that doesn’t seem like something to worry about because I don’t know how to change my disposition and I don’t know how to go about figuring how to change my disposition.
You know what? Someone should just go hunt down CronoDAS and forcibly cryo-suspend him. It’d be doing everyone a favour. He’d get to live in a future where he doesn’t have to be geek-emo, a perceived ‘murder’ would be less shameful than a suicide for his parents and we wouldn’t have the same old hand wringing conversation all the time.
See you on the other side. (Or not, as the case may be.)
This post was obviously a joke, but “we should kill this guy so as to avoid social awkwardness” is probably a bad sentiment, revival or no revival.
On the other hand, “we should (legally) kill this guy so as to save his life” is unethical and I would never do it. But it is a significant question and the kind of reasoning that is relevant to all sorts of situations.
Should I stop talking about this here?
No, I don’t mind at all. As long as you don’t mind that I don’t treat this specific desire of yours with sombre dignity. I do, after all, think a death wish as an alternative to cryonic revival where your mental health can be restored is silly and something to laugh at (and so lower in status and discourage without being actually aggressive.)
Well, as long as I’m being funny...
Not to nitpick, but I think wedrifid was implying “ridiculous” rather than “funny”.
;-p
Being dead != Not doing anything
Not doing something because you’re lazy != Not existing
I don’t believe that you put low utility on life. You’re just putting low utility on doing stuff you don’t like.
I don’t know if I can be “fixed” without changing me to the point where I’m effectively somebody else. And that’s not much different than someone in the future simply having a baby and raising it to be a better person than I am. Furthermore, if the future has to choose between resurrecting me and somebody raising a child from scratch, I prefer that somebody raise a child; I’d rather the future have someone better than “me” instead of someone that I would recognize as “me”.
(Additionally, the argument you just made is also an argument for getting frozen right now instead of having to wait until you die a natural death before you get to be revived in a better future. “If the afterlife is so great, why not kill yourself and get there right now?”)
The future will have this choice (not to revive you), and will make it against you if this turns out to be a better option, but if you don’t make it to the future, you won’t give it the chance of doing this particular thing (your revival) in case it turns out to be a good thing.
Again, you can’t be certain of what your preference actually says in the not-clear-cut cases like this, you can’t know for sure that you prefer some child to be raised in place of yourself, and for this particular question it seems to be a false dilemma, since it’s likely that there will be no resource limitation of this kind, only moral optimization.
I don’t want to get into a whole other discussion here, but I think people change a lot throughout their lives—I know I sure did—and I’m not sure if this would be such a problem. Maybe it would be, but comparing the certainty of death to that potential problem, I know I’d take the risk.
The cost of another individual might be so low in the future that there might not be a choice between you and someone else.
For someone who doesn’t want to live at all right now and would commit suicide anyway, then yes, I’d recommend getting cryo’ed instead.
But for someone who enjoys life, then no, I wouldn’t recommend it because it might not work (though having that possibility is still better than the certainty of annihilation).
Life > Cryo uncertainty > Death
This leads directly into the morbid subject of “What is the optimal way to kill oneself, for purposes of cryo?”
I’ve actually been thinking about something similar;
What if I find out I have an incurable degenerative brain disease. At which point would I decide to get vitrified to improve my chances of being successfully revived by keeping my brain in better condition at the time of my death?
Now that’s a tough decision to make…
If you live in the US, make sure you have had life insurance for at least two years. Then move to Oregon or Washington).
Suicide is automatic grounds for autopsy; if this is not true in the assisted-suicide states, I haven’t heard about it.
Technically, neither state considers it suicide. I don’t know if that rules out autopsy in practice though.
From the Oregon Death with Dignity Act:
From Washington Initiative 1000:
How would you make sure that will not happen?
I’ll rephrase.
I’ve resolved not to die voluntarily before my parents do.
Obviously they have to actively consent at some point—even if only to sign the papers you shove in front of them. And then they need to cooperate while dying.
But I suppose you could do the research and fill out the form and pay for their insurance policy, yeah. But I wouldn’t do that for someone who might screw it all up at the end.