OK, you’re risk averse. Specifically, you’re scared. If you put a bit of imaginative effort into it you can play out scenarios of awakening into a dystopia, or botched revival, or abusive uploading, or various nastiness. Fair enough.
I propose that you haven’t stretched your imagination far enough.
Staying in doom-n-disaster mode, what are the other ways you could suffer? Illness, madness, brain damage, disability, mistreatment, war, famine, plague, loneliness… it just goes on and on.
Switching to happy mode, what are the good scenarios? Love, long life, wealth and good ideas to use it on… again it goes on and on.
Then if you take all those scenarios, and add a whole lot more of mediocre and tolerable and mildly downbeat ones, and you scatter them out ahead of you into an imaginary branching map of infinite reachable futures. Not all equally easy to reach. There are probability assignments on each, shifting and flowing as your actions and experiences move the chances.
This sort of visualization helps me put my own worrying into perspective. Worrying is a kind of grasping for control, but the future is too big and surprising to be pinned down that way. You can’t control what you get. You can steer into a region with more good chances than bad. To do that you have to learn to discount the low chance of bad as just the price of admission.
OK, you’re risk averse. Specifically, you’re scared. If you put a bit of imaginative effort into it you can play out scenarios of awakening into a dystopia, or botched revival, or abusive uploading, or various nastiness. Fair enough.
I propose that you haven’t stretched your imagination far enough.
Staying in doom-n-disaster mode, what are the other ways you could suffer? Illness, madness, brain damage, disability, mistreatment, war, famine, plague, loneliness… it just goes on and on.
Switching to happy mode, what are the good scenarios? Love, long life, wealth and good ideas to use it on… again it goes on and on.
Then if you take all those scenarios, and add a whole lot more of mediocre and tolerable and mildly downbeat ones, and you scatter them out ahead of you into an imaginary branching map of infinite reachable futures. Not all equally easy to reach. There are probability assignments on each, shifting and flowing as your actions and experiences move the chances.
This sort of visualization helps me put my own worrying into perspective. Worrying is a kind of grasping for control, but the future is too big and surprising to be pinned down that way. You can’t control what you get. You can steer into a region with more good chances than bad. To do that you have to learn to discount the low chance of bad as just the price of admission.