Over the past few years, a few people have claimed rejection of cryonics due to concerns that they might be revived into a world that they preferred less than being dead or not existing.
Uh, plenty of born are born into worse-than-death situations already, at least by our standards, yet they generally make a go of their lives instead of committing suicide. We call many of them our “ancestors.”
I get a chuckle out of all the contrived excuses people come up with for not having their brains preserved. I really have to laugh at “But I won’t know anyone in Future World!” We go through our lives meeting people every day we’ve never met before, and humans have good heuristics for deciding which strangers we should get to know better and add to our social circles. I had that experience the other day from meeting a married couple involved in anti-aging research, and I got the sense that they felt that way about me, despite my social inadequacies in some areas.
As for revival in a sucky Future World, well, John Milton said it pretty good:
“The mind is its own place, and in it self/
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n ”
Besides, if you have radical life extension and some freedom of action, you’ll have the time and resources to find situations more to your liking. For example, suppose you wake up in Neoreactionary Future World, and you long for the Enlightenment sort of world you remembered in the 21st Century. Well, find your place in the current hierarchy and wait a few centuries. The Enlightenment might come around for a second go.
For example, suppose you wake up in Neoreactionary Future World, and you long for the Enlightenment sort of world you remembered in the 21st Century. Well, find your place in the current hierarchy and wait a few centuries. The Enlightenment might come around for a second go.
We all know at this point that this is your favorite example and apparently what you hope will happen. We get the point. Whatever government there is if any in a few centuries I expect to be radically different from anything we’ve imagined. People might take your point more seriously if you didn’t use it to harp on your own political agenda repeatedly.
In this one case I think it was okay. It was a very blank example—the roles could have been swapped or replaced with nearly anything else without any other changes—and moreover he was speculating that people would not like it and that it is reasonable to expect it to fail.
I think you are correct to identify these excuses as “contrived”- the central reaction is purely emotional in that the idea seems weird and triggers certain disgust and fear-of-hubris reactions. The reasoning is purely a rationalization.
Uh, plenty of born are born into worse-than-death situations already, at least by our standards, yet they generally make a go of their lives instead of committing suicide. We call many of them our “ancestors.”
Can you elaborate? Your statement seems self-contradictory. By definition, situations “worse than death” would be the ones in which people prefer to kill themselves rather than continue living.
In the context of the original post, I take “worse-than-death” to mean (1) enough misery that a typical person would rather not continue living, and (2) an inability to commit suicide. While I agree many of our ancestors have had a rough time, relatively few of them have had it that hard.
I’m guessing the author meant that the ancestral environment was one that many of us now would consider “worse than death” considering our higher standards of expectation for standard of living, whereas our ancestors were just perfectly happy to live in cold caves and die from unknown diseases and whatnot.
I guess the question is, how much higher are our expectations now, really? And how much better do we really have it now, really?
Some things, like material comfort and feelings of material security, have obviously gotten better, but others, such as positional social status anxiety and lack of warm social conviviality, have arguably gotten worse.
The tl;dr is that we live in a multiverse, signing up for cryonics moves your probability mass into worlds in which very few people survive, whereas not signing up moves your probability mass into worlds in which other things make you survive, which are likely to be the sort of thing which make a lot more people survive. Also, surviving via not-cryonics seems better than surviving via cryonics, for reasons I can go into if pressed.
I don’t feel it’s contrived; if I knew that we weren’t living in a multiverse, I don’t think I would have major objections.
Uh, plenty of born are born into worse-than-death situations already, at least by our standards, yet they generally make a go of their lives instead of committing suicide. We call many of them our “ancestors.”
I get a chuckle out of all the contrived excuses people come up with for not having their brains preserved. I really have to laugh at “But I won’t know anyone in Future World!” We go through our lives meeting people every day we’ve never met before, and humans have good heuristics for deciding which strangers we should get to know better and add to our social circles. I had that experience the other day from meeting a married couple involved in anti-aging research, and I got the sense that they felt that way about me, despite my social inadequacies in some areas.
As for revival in a sucky Future World, well, John Milton said it pretty good:
“The mind is its own place, and in it self/ Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n ”
Besides, if you have radical life extension and some freedom of action, you’ll have the time and resources to find situations more to your liking. For example, suppose you wake up in Neoreactionary Future World, and you long for the Enlightenment sort of world you remembered in the 21st Century. Well, find your place in the current hierarchy and wait a few centuries. The Enlightenment might come around for a second go.
We all know at this point that this is your favorite example and apparently what you hope will happen. We get the point. Whatever government there is if any in a few centuries I expect to be radically different from anything we’ve imagined. People might take your point more seriously if you didn’t use it to harp on your own political agenda repeatedly.
In this one case I think it was okay. It was a very blank example—the roles could have been swapped or replaced with nearly anything else without any other changes—and moreover he was speculating that people would not like it and that it is reasonable to expect it to fail.
I think you are correct to identify these excuses as “contrived”- the central reaction is purely emotional in that the idea seems weird and triggers certain disgust and fear-of-hubris reactions. The reasoning is purely a rationalization.
Can you elaborate? Your statement seems self-contradictory. By definition, situations “worse than death” would be the ones in which people prefer to kill themselves rather than continue living.
In the context of the original post, I take “worse-than-death” to mean (1) enough misery that a typical person would rather not continue living, and (2) an inability to commit suicide. While I agree many of our ancestors have had a rough time, relatively few of them have had it that hard.
I’m guessing the author meant that the ancestral environment was one that many of us now would consider “worse than death” considering our higher standards of expectation for standard of living, whereas our ancestors were just perfectly happy to live in cold caves and die from unknown diseases and whatnot.
I guess the question is, how much higher are our expectations now, really? And how much better do we really have it now, really?
Some things, like material comfort and feelings of material security, have obviously gotten better, but others, such as positional social status anxiety and lack of warm social conviviality, have arguably gotten worse.
My “excuse” was outlined here.
The tl;dr is that we live in a multiverse, signing up for cryonics moves your probability mass into worlds in which very few people survive, whereas not signing up moves your probability mass into worlds in which other things make you survive, which are likely to be the sort of thing which make a lot more people survive. Also, surviving via not-cryonics seems better than surviving via cryonics, for reasons I can go into if pressed.
I don’t feel it’s contrived; if I knew that we weren’t living in a multiverse, I don’t think I would have major objections.