(nods) Agreed; I don’t think I was saying anything Eliezer wasn’t, just building a slightly different intuition pump.
That said, the precise construction of the intuition pump can matter a lot for rhetorical purposes.
Mainstream culture entangles two separate ideas when it comes to death: first, that an agent’s choices are more subject to skepticism than the consistently applied ground rules of existence (A1) and second, that death is better than life (A2).
A1 is a lot easier to support than A2, so in any scenario where life-extension is an agent’s choice the arguments against life-extension will tend to rest heavily on A1.
Setting up a scenario where A1 and A2 point in different directions—where life-extension just happens, and death is a deliberate choice—kicks that particular leg out from under the argument, and forces people to actually defend A2. (Which, to be fair, some people will proceed to do… but others will balk. And there are A3..An’s that I’m ignoring here.)
The “I think that if you took someone who was immortal, and asked them if they wanted to die for benefit X, they would say no.” argument does something similar: it also makes life the default, and death a choice.
In some ways it’s an even better pump: my version still has an agent responsible for life-extension, even if it’s accidental. OTOH, in some ways it’s worse: telling a story about how the immortal person got that way makes the narrative easier to swallow.
(Incidentally, this suggests that a revision involving a large-scale mutation rather than a rogue scientist might work even better, though the connotations of “mutation” impose their own difficulties.)
It might just be easiest to postulate an immortal person and obfuscate the process entirely.
Also, I am trying to come up with a quick test to distinguish passive deathists from active deathists—ie, who would refuse an offered immortality potion, and who would vote against funding to develop an immortality potion? Who would say “I don’t want to live forever” and who would say “People shouldn’t live forever”? Arguments need to be tailored in different ways for these different types. Something like “How about you take the potion, and then if you actually do wake up one day and want to die, you can commit painless suicide?” for the passives and your “Would you vote for a policy of artificial death?” for the actives.
(nods) Agreed; I don’t think I was saying anything Eliezer wasn’t, just building a slightly different intuition pump.
That said, the precise construction of the intuition pump can matter a lot for rhetorical purposes.
Mainstream culture entangles two separate ideas when it comes to death: first, that an agent’s choices are more subject to skepticism than the consistently applied ground rules of existence (A1) and second, that death is better than life (A2).
A1 is a lot easier to support than A2, so in any scenario where life-extension is an agent’s choice the arguments against life-extension will tend to rest heavily on A1.
Setting up a scenario where A1 and A2 point in different directions—where life-extension just happens, and death is a deliberate choice—kicks that particular leg out from under the argument, and forces people to actually defend A2. (Which, to be fair, some people will proceed to do… but others will balk. And there are A3..An’s that I’m ignoring here.)
The “I think that if you took someone who was immortal, and asked them if they wanted to die for benefit X, they would say no.” argument does something similar: it also makes life the default, and death a choice.
In some ways it’s an even better pump: my version still has an agent responsible for life-extension, even if it’s accidental. OTOH, in some ways it’s worse: telling a story about how the immortal person got that way makes the narrative easier to swallow.
(Incidentally, this suggests that a revision involving a large-scale mutation rather than a rogue scientist might work even better, though the connotations of “mutation” impose their own difficulties.)
It might just be easiest to postulate an immortal person and obfuscate the process entirely.
Also, I am trying to come up with a quick test to distinguish passive deathists from active deathists—ie, who would refuse an offered immortality potion, and who would vote against funding to develop an immortality potion? Who would say “I don’t want to live forever” and who would say “People shouldn’t live forever”? Arguments need to be tailored in different ways for these different types. Something like “How about you take the potion, and then if you actually do wake up one day and want to die, you can commit painless suicide?” for the passives and your “Would you vote for a policy of artificial death?” for the actives.