Why I am a deathist, for those who can’t understand the mentality:
Because the thought that someday I will die is a -liberating- thought for me. First you must understand who I was, however—in my youth I was absolutely terrified of a permanent injury of any sort. (When I realized, truly realized, I’d been circumcised, it was mildly traumatizing.) This extends to the mental as well as the physical.
The realization, later, that I would die—wasn’t a horrifying thought. It was a realization that permanence was a faulty assumption about anything except death. It freed me to take risks, and even to engage in permanent modification of myself, both physical and mental.
Death let me live.
So I don’t have a sour grapes attitude towards death. I believe that death as a horizon event is necessary to my sanity.
The “horizon event” may be important, however. I certainly would prefer not to die tomorrow. And tomorrow, I would not want to die on that day’s morrow. This may well stretch into infinity. Death has become the sole permanent injury; to be avoided, as previously I avoided all other permanent injury, but necessary, in order to invalidate all other such fears.
This does not imply, however, that today I should prefer never to die at all. I am running on corrupted hardware, and I balance one corruption against another. Until such time as living with mistakes forever is rendered irrelevant, or ceases to be an object of abject terror for me, death as a horizon event is necessary to my sanity, necessary to my ability to deal with the world.
(The opportunity for suicide does not alleviate these issues, incidentally, because of my certainty I would not choose it. I suspect an actual debilitating injury would be sufficient to overcome my fears, but that is hardly an experiment I would like to deliberately run.)
Speak to me of being able to replace arms and legs, lungs and heart, to repair a damaged brain, and those parts of the brain we sometime refer to as the heart—speak to me of clinical immortality by component pieces, and that I can fathom and accept and support. Speak to me of conquering death, however, and you lose me. Because I don’t desire never to die, but rather not to crumble away into something just more than nothing.
It sounds like you’re describing two attitudes towards immortality, an abstract one and a concrete one. The concrete attitude: “I don’t desire never to die, but rather not to crumble away into something just more than nothing.” “What’s more likely in any given ten year period, pristine immortality being fully resolved, or somebody awakening my mind to an existence I would never want?” “The opportunity for suicide does not alleviate these issues, incidentally, because of my certainty I would not choose it.” I will not comment on these concerns today.
The abstract attitude is summed up by:
I believe that death as a horizon event is necessary to my sanity.
The map-territory distinction is useful here. You should say instead
I believe that “death as a horizon event” is necessary to my sanity.
The idea of death allays your anxieties by inspiring healthy emotions. That doesn’t mean that the idea of death should inform your decisions. It’s possible to comfort yourself with the thought of death and then go ahead and sign up for cryonics anyways, just like how people can comfort themselves by not thinking about death and then go ahead and wear a seat belt. But you no doubt have other, more concrete objections to cryonics, which takes us back to your first attitude. Those objections are better reasons to make “deathist” decisions.
Better yet, you could use a different narrative to comfort yourself. Just because the thought that you’re going to die someday succeeded in allaying your anxieties doesn’t mean it’s the only narrative that can do so. (That it is sufficient for your sanity does not imply that it is necessary for your sanity!) It’s worth spending some time on looking for an alternative narrative that’s just as comforting and which is more concordant with your preference “not to die tomorrow”.
If you do switch narratives, you might find that you’re no longer “deathist” but none of your decisions have changed. In that case all that changed was your aesthetic. But I suspect if you change your abstract attitude towards death, you might find that your concrete attitude changes as well: You might notice ideas you didn’t notice before, which make important life decisions more or less compelling.
It was a realization that permanence was a faulty assumption about anything except death. It freed me to take risks, and even to engage in permanent modification of myself, both physical and mental.
This problem has been solved already. Keep backups.
Shouldn’t you be working on that phobia directly? Even without the part where it makes you want to die, it sounds pretty unpleasant. It might help to spend time around disabled people, especially those who aren’t just adapting to their disability but actively building culture around it, like the Deaf community. Paralympic athletes with better-than-natural accommodations also come to mind, but you might react better to people just going about their daily life in slightly unusual ways than to awesome flashy gizmos.
What is frightening you exactly? Your circumcision example suggests visibly losing body parts is the problem, but the rest of your post mentions loss of abilities more.
The image I associate with “something just more than nothing” is that of the kind of patients uncharitably called “vegetables”. Is that correct? I don’t know how much limits-pushing badassery appeals to you, but I’d like to present another view: someone with a broken body and a broken mind, who refuses to give up and every day deploys great courage and cunning and perseverance to achieve what you do without thinking, through pain and fear and confusion and repeated failure. It’s very bad, but the attitude is awesome.
Loss of abilities is something people can relate to more. The “permanent” part is more important than the “injury” part. A small scar nobody could see was a horrifying thought to me.
It extended to the mental as well. The thought that I might not be able to learn every language in existence in the narrow timeframe before my mind “hardened” against learning new languages was horrifying as well. (Particularly torturous, that one, because languages were dead-last on my list of things I needed to learn -soon-. I recognize Eliezer’s fear that he won’t be done with what he needs done by the time he’s 40 - but start those fears at age 7 and thinking it may already be too late and you might have some inkling of what my childhood was like.)
Is it any comfort that no injury can be permanent, since it’s vanishingly unlikely that we’ll find a way around the universe’s heat death but not around damage to human bodies in the next few billion years?
I don’t think this reasoning actually makes sense, but regardless, why do you think this makes it okay for other people to die, if they don’t want to? That’s what deathism is.
Hum, I don’t get the reasoning. You say the perspective of death allows you to better handle the thought of permanent injury. But “conquering death” also implies conquering permanent injury. I really don’t see how we could prevent death but not be able to regrow a limb (or foreskin). So if we remove both the risk of permanent injury and death at the same time, what’s your need for death ?
“I don’t desire never to die, but rather not to crumble away into something just more than nothing.”
There is a difference between conquering death and conquering the ailments of the mortal condition—mental and physical. If we can upload minds before we can repair bodies, we can achieve immortality without solving any of these issues.
Hrm, no, if we can upload mind, then we can just hold the minds in “stand by” mode until we have the technology to build bodies at least as good as a fully sane normal human.
Contingency-based wish machines are evil genies who may not even respect your wishes. I have to ask—what’s more likely in any given ten year period, pristine immortality being fully resolved, or somebody awakening my mind to an existence I would never want?
You should never pause your mind until some contingency is reached unless you are precisely aware of what other contingencies could result in your mind being unpaused—and have done the calculations and identified the risk.
Why I am a deathist, for those who can’t understand the mentality:
Because the thought that someday I will die is a -liberating- thought for me. First you must understand who I was, however—in my youth I was absolutely terrified of a permanent injury of any sort. (When I realized, truly realized, I’d been circumcised, it was mildly traumatizing.) This extends to the mental as well as the physical.
The realization, later, that I would die—wasn’t a horrifying thought. It was a realization that permanence was a faulty assumption about anything except death. It freed me to take risks, and even to engage in permanent modification of myself, both physical and mental.
Death let me live.
So I don’t have a sour grapes attitude towards death. I believe that death as a horizon event is necessary to my sanity.
The “horizon event” may be important, however. I certainly would prefer not to die tomorrow. And tomorrow, I would not want to die on that day’s morrow. This may well stretch into infinity. Death has become the sole permanent injury; to be avoided, as previously I avoided all other permanent injury, but necessary, in order to invalidate all other such fears.
This does not imply, however, that today I should prefer never to die at all. I am running on corrupted hardware, and I balance one corruption against another. Until such time as living with mistakes forever is rendered irrelevant, or ceases to be an object of abject terror for me, death as a horizon event is necessary to my sanity, necessary to my ability to deal with the world.
(The opportunity for suicide does not alleviate these issues, incidentally, because of my certainty I would not choose it. I suspect an actual debilitating injury would be sufficient to overcome my fears, but that is hardly an experiment I would like to deliberately run.)
Speak to me of being able to replace arms and legs, lungs and heart, to repair a damaged brain, and those parts of the brain we sometime refer to as the heart—speak to me of clinical immortality by component pieces, and that I can fathom and accept and support. Speak to me of conquering death, however, and you lose me. Because I don’t desire never to die, but rather not to crumble away into something just more than nothing.
It sounds like you’re describing two attitudes towards immortality, an abstract one and a concrete one. The concrete attitude: “I don’t desire never to die, but rather not to crumble away into something just more than nothing.” “What’s more likely in any given ten year period, pristine immortality being fully resolved, or somebody awakening my mind to an existence I would never want?” “The opportunity for suicide does not alleviate these issues, incidentally, because of my certainty I would not choose it.” I will not comment on these concerns today.
The abstract attitude is summed up by:
The map-territory distinction is useful here. You should say instead
The idea of death allays your anxieties by inspiring healthy emotions. That doesn’t mean that the idea of death should inform your decisions. It’s possible to comfort yourself with the thought of death and then go ahead and sign up for cryonics anyways, just like how people can comfort themselves by not thinking about death and then go ahead and wear a seat belt. But you no doubt have other, more concrete objections to cryonics, which takes us back to your first attitude. Those objections are better reasons to make “deathist” decisions.
Better yet, you could use a different narrative to comfort yourself. Just because the thought that you’re going to die someday succeeded in allaying your anxieties doesn’t mean it’s the only narrative that can do so. (That it is sufficient for your sanity does not imply that it is necessary for your sanity!) It’s worth spending some time on looking for an alternative narrative that’s just as comforting and which is more concordant with your preference “not to die tomorrow”.
If you do switch narratives, you might find that you’re no longer “deathist” but none of your decisions have changed. In that case all that changed was your aesthetic. But I suspect if you change your abstract attitude towards death, you might find that your concrete attitude changes as well: You might notice ideas you didn’t notice before, which make important life decisions more or less compelling.
I am pondering on this. It may take some time.
This problem has been solved already. Keep backups.
Shouldn’t you be working on that phobia directly? Even without the part where it makes you want to die, it sounds pretty unpleasant. It might help to spend time around disabled people, especially those who aren’t just adapting to their disability but actively building culture around it, like the Deaf community. Paralympic athletes with better-than-natural accommodations also come to mind, but you might react better to people just going about their daily life in slightly unusual ways than to awesome flashy gizmos.
What is frightening you exactly? Your circumcision example suggests visibly losing body parts is the problem, but the rest of your post mentions loss of abilities more.
The image I associate with “something just more than nothing” is that of the kind of patients uncharitably called “vegetables”. Is that correct? I don’t know how much limits-pushing badassery appeals to you, but I’d like to present another view: someone with a broken body and a broken mind, who refuses to give up and every day deploys great courage and cunning and perseverance to achieve what you do without thinking, through pain and fear and confusion and repeated failure. It’s very bad, but the attitude is awesome.
Loss of abilities is something people can relate to more. The “permanent” part is more important than the “injury” part. A small scar nobody could see was a horrifying thought to me.
It extended to the mental as well. The thought that I might not be able to learn every language in existence in the narrow timeframe before my mind “hardened” against learning new languages was horrifying as well. (Particularly torturous, that one, because languages were dead-last on my list of things I needed to learn -soon-. I recognize Eliezer’s fear that he won’t be done with what he needs done by the time he’s 40 - but start those fears at age 7 and thinking it may already be too late and you might have some inkling of what my childhood was like.)
Is it any comfort that no injury can be permanent, since it’s vanishingly unlikely that we’ll find a way around the universe’s heat death but not around damage to human bodies in the next few billion years?
I don’t think this reasoning actually makes sense, but regardless, why do you think this makes it okay for other people to die, if they don’t want to? That’s what deathism is.
Not all deathism holds that everybody should die, only that death is good.
My brother prefers the label “anti-liveite”.
Hum, I don’t get the reasoning. You say the perspective of death allows you to better handle the thought of permanent injury. But “conquering death” also implies conquering permanent injury. I really don’t see how we could prevent death but not be able to regrow a limb (or foreskin). So if we remove both the risk of permanent injury and death at the same time, what’s your need for death ?
“I don’t desire never to die, but rather not to crumble away into something just more than nothing.”
There is a difference between conquering death and conquering the ailments of the mortal condition—mental and physical. If we can upload minds before we can repair bodies, we can achieve immortality without solving any of these issues.
Hrm, no, if we can upload mind, then we can just hold the minds in “stand by” mode until we have the technology to build bodies at least as good as a fully sane normal human.
Contingency-based wish machines are evil genies who may not even respect your wishes. I have to ask—what’s more likely in any given ten year period, pristine immortality being fully resolved, or somebody awakening my mind to an existence I would never want?
You should never pause your mind until some contingency is reached unless you are precisely aware of what other contingencies could result in your mind being unpaused—and have done the calculations and identified the risk.