Just have kids. Whatever posttranshuman creature inherits the ghost of your body in a thousand years won’t be “you” in any sense beyond the pettiest interpretation of ego as “continuous memory”, and even that falls apart quickly under scrutiny.
Your offspring are as much “you” as that thousand year ego projection. Except they’re better, because they start a whole new fresh consciousness unfettered with your accumulated prejudices. I advocate we raise children better, wiser, and accept death younger and more usefully.
“Whatever posttranshuman creature inherits the ghost of your body in a thousand years won’t be “you” in any sense beyond the pettiest interpretation of ego as “continuous memory”″
I used to buy into that Buddhist perspective, but I no longer do. I think that’s a sedative, like all religions. Though I will admit that I still meditate, because I still hope to find out that I’m wrong. I hope I do, but I don’t have a lot of hope. My reason and intuition are clear in telling me that the self is extremely valuable, both mine and that of all other conscious beings, and death is a mistake.
Unless you mean to say that they will only be a clone of me. Then you’re right, a clone of me is not me at all, even if it feels exactly like me. But then we would have just failed at life extension anyway. Who’s interested in getting an immortal clone? People are interested in living forever themselves, not someone else. At least if they’re being honest.
“Your offspring are as much “you” as that thousand year ego projection. ”
I’ve been alive for 30 years—not much, I admit, but I still feel as much like me as in the first day that I can remember. I suspect that as long as the brain remains healthy, that will remain so. But I never ever felt “me” in any other conscious being. Again, Buddhist projection. Sedative. Each conscious being is irreplaceable.
Right, that’s my point—the conscious being of your childhood is not replaceable with you now. You are a clone of your dead childhood self. That’s fine for you, the clone. But who’s interested in getting a 30-year-old clone? And the many consciousnesses that flower and die every few decades, will be replaced with the single continuation of a single generation that stumbles into immortality.
>I think that’s a sedative, like all religions
I’m not Buddhist, but your critique extends to yourself. If you take one step back to look at an even broader picture, by replacing religion with ideology, you’ve just reinvented postmodernism. Viz: “Transhumanism, sedative, like all ideologies.” So you either stick with modernism (that transhumanism is the one, special ideology immune from humanity’s tragic need to self-sedate), or dive into the void (which really is just an ocean of sedatives swirling together, I’ve swum deep and I promise it’s ideology all the way down).
Maybe we’re not self-sedating at all, and we can talk to a pharmacist who isn’t just us. It’s hard to say anything about reality when the only thing you know is that you’re high af all the time.
>I’ve been alive for 30 years—not much, I admit, but I still feel as much like me as in the first day that I can remember.
Every day the same sun rises, yet it’s a different day. You aren’t the sun, you’re the day.
Imagine droplets of water trapped in a cup, then poured back into the ocean. Water is consciousness, your mind is the cup.
Each century, the day ends, but your family continues. Every few centuries your family falls apart, but your community thrives. Each millenium your community is ravaged, but your nation lives.
We could go on, to the species, the community of all conscious beings, etc etc. Where you place the self along this line is historically variable. You place it with the continuity of the ego. I place it with my family. There are a zillion answers to this question. Buddhism would say the attempt to answer this question is itself the problem. But I’m not Buddhist.
To meaningfully debate this, we’d have to find out what consciousness is. The academy already moves at a snail pace as science continues to progress one funeral at a time, awaiting the death of precious selves whose lives already had negative value decades ago. Imagine if their reign extended infinitely. But for the grace of Death might we soon unlock Immortality.
Yes, that’s a typical Buddhist-like statement, that we die and are reborn each instant. But I think it’s just incorrect—my childhood self never died. He’s alive right now, here. When I die the biological death, then I will stop existing. It’s as simple as that. Yet I feel like Buddhists, or Eastern religion in general, does this and other mental gymnastics to comfort people.
“So you either stick with modernism (that transhumanism is the one, special ideology immune from humanity’s tragic need to self-sedate), or dive into the void”
There are self-sedating transhumanists, for sure. Like, if you think there isn’t a relevant probability that immortality just won’t work, or if you’re optimistic about the AI control problem, you’re definitely a self-sedating transhumanist. I try to not be one as much as possible, but maybe I am in some areas—no one’s perfect.
But it’s pretty clear that there’s a big difference between transhumanism and religions. The former relies on science to propose solutions to our problems, while the later is based on the teachings of prophets, people who thought that their personal intuitions were the absolute truth. And, in terms of self-sedating ideas, if transhumanism is a small grain of Valium, religion is a big fat tab.
“It’s hard to say anything about reality when the only thing you know is that you’re high af all the time.”
I agree. I claim uncertainty on all my claims.
“Every day the same sun rises, yet it’s a different day. You aren’t the sun, you’re the day.
Imagine droplets of water trapped in a cup, then poured back into the ocean. Water is consciousness, your mind is the cup.”
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, I know, I’ve heard the story a thousand times. There’s only one indivisible self/consciousness/being, we’re just an instance of it. Well, you can believe that if you want, I don’t have the scientific evidence to disprove it. But neither have you the evidence to prove it, so I can also disbelieve it. My intuition clearly disbelieves it. When I die biologically it will be blackout. It’s cruel af.
“Imagine if their reign extended infinitely. But for the grace of Death might we soon unlock Immortality.”
Either too deep or I’m too dumb, didn’t quite get it. Please explain less poetically.
I don’t think there is anything particularly scientific about transhumanism relative to other ideologies. They use science to achieve their goals, much like Catholics use science to prove that fetuses have heart beats or whatever.
Really, this debate feels like it boils down to an individualistic vs collectivistic sense of self. In the collectivist view, dying is not that big of a deal. You can see this in action, when dying for your family, country, etc is seen as noble and great. Whereas an individual sacrificing their family to preserve themselves is less lauded (except in Individualist propaganda, where we’re scolded for “judging” and supposed to “understand” the individual circumstances and so on).
I mean, you yourself say it, we have no idea what consciousness even is. Or if it’s valuable at all. We’re just going on a bunch of arbitrary intuitions here. Well, that’s a bad standard. And it’s not like we’re running out of people, we can just create them as needed, indefinitely. So given that
we have a lot of humans, they aren’t a particularly limited resource, and
few if any of the people have super unique, amazing perspectives, such that we really need to preserve that one person for extra time
Why not focus our energy on figuring out what we are, and decide the best course of action from there?
It’s only cruel if you’ve been brainwashed into thinking your life matters. If you never thought that, it’s just normal. Accept your place and die so that our descendants (who we should work really hard to help so they turn out better than we are, and thus deserving of immortality should we ever actually attain it).
But then, if we’ve figured out how to make such amazing people, why not let there be lots of different ones, so they can flourish across many generations, instead of having just one generation forever? I mean, there isn’t even that much to do. Well, there probably is, I’m just too basic to understand it because of my limited natural brain.
I guess transhumanism overall is really cool, taken as a whole package. It’s just the life-extension part I find silly, especially if it’s a priority rather than an afterthought. But even if you want transhumanism, aren’t we far enough from it that the best path towards it is just raising better (smarter, more cooperative, etc) children? Seems like the biggest hindrance to scientific progress is just the state of the quality of human beings.
>Either too deep or I’m too dumb, didn’t quite get it. Please explain less poetically.
Poorly worded on my part. I just mean that it’s thanks to death that we get progress. The old die, and with them out of the way, the young can progress. Lots of fresh new perspectives are a feature of death.
Totally unfair comparison. Do you really think that immortality and utopia are frivolous goals? So maybe you don’t really believe in cryonics or something. Well, I don’t either. But transhumanism is way more than that. I think that its goals with AI and life extension are all but a joke.
That’s reductive. As an altruist, I care about all other conscious being. Of course maintaining sanity demands some distancing, but that’s that. So I’d say I’m a collectivist. But one person doesn’t substitute the other. Others continuing to live will never make up for those who die. The act of ceasing to exist if of the utmost cruelty and there’s nothing that can compensate that.
I have no idea of what consciousness is scientifically, but morally I’m pretty sure it is valuable. All morality comes from the seeking of well-being for the conscious being. So if there’s any value system, consciousness must be at the center. There’s not much explaining here needed, it’s just that everyone wants to be well—and to be.
Like I said every conscious being wants to exist. It’s just the way we’ve been programmed. All beings matter, myself included. I goddamn want to live, that is the basis of all wants and of all rights. Have I been brainwashed? Religions have been brainwashing people about the exact opposite for millenia, that death is ok, either because we go to heaven according to the West, or because we’ll reincarnate or we’re part of a whole according to the East. So, quite on the contrary, I think I have been de-brainwashed.
An unborn person isn’t a tragedy. A death one is. So it’s much more important to care about the living than the unborn.
If most people are saying that AGI is decade(s) off then we aren’t that far.
As for raising children as best as we can I think that’s just common sense.
I partly agree. It would be horrible if Genghis Khan or Hitler never died. But we could always put them in a really good prison. I just don’t wanna die and I think no minimally decent person deserves to, just so we can get rid of a few psychopaths.
Also we’re talking about immortality not now, but in a technological utopia, since only such could produce it. So the dynamics would be different.
As for fresh new perspectives, in this post I propose selective memory deletion with immortality. So that would contribute to that. Even then, getting fresh new perspectives is pretty good, but nowhere near being worth the ceasing of trillions of consciousnesses.
Individualism and altruism aren’t exclusive. I didn’t mean to imply you are selfish, just that your operating definition of self seems informed by a particular tradition.
Consider the perspective of liberal republicans of the 19th century who fought and died for their nation (because that’s where they decided, or were taught, to center their self). Each nation is completely unique and irreplaceable, so we must fight to keep nations thriving and alive, and prevent their extinction. Dying for patriotism is glorious, honorable, etc.
I have no idea of what consciousness is scientifically, but morally I’m pretty sure it is valuable. All morality comes from the seeking of well-being for the conscious being. So if there’s any value system, consciousness must be at the center. There’s not much explaining here needed, it’s just that everyone wants to be well—and to be.
But that’s my point, consciousness will go on just fine without either of us specifically being here. Ending one conscious experience from one body so that a different one can happen seems fine to me, for the most part. I dunno the philosophical implications of this, just thinking.
If most people are saying that AGI is decade(s) off then we aren’t that far.
Yeah, it’s exciting for sure.
I’m 30 as well, so I’ll be near death in the decades that likely begin to birth AGI. But it would likely be able to fathom things unfathomable to us, who knows. History beyond that point is a black hole for me. It’s all basilisks and space jam past 2050 as far as I’m concerned :)
The act of ceasing to exist if of the utmost cruelty and there’s nothing that can compensate that.
Well, I guess that’s it, huh? I don’t think so, but clearly a lot of people do. Btw I’m new to this community, so sorry if I’m uninformed on issues that are well hashed out here. What a fun place, though.
I can see the altruism in dying for a cause. But it’s a leap of faith to claim, from there, that there’s altruism in dying by itself. To die why, to make room for others to get born? Unborn beings don’t exist, they are not moral patients. It would be perfectly fine if no one else was born from now on—in fact it would be better than even 1 single person dying.
Furthermore, if we’re trying to create a technological mature society capable of discovering immortality, perhaps much sooner will it be capable of colonizing other planets. So there are trillions of empty planets to put all the new people before we have to start taking out the old ones.
To die to make room for others just doesn’t make any sense.
“consciousness will go on just fine without either of us specifically being here”
It sure will. But that’s like saying that money will go on just fine if you go bankrupt. I mean, sure, the world will still be full of wealth, but that won’t make you any less poor. Now imagine this happening to everyone inevitably. Sounds really sh*tty to me.
Unborn beings don’t exist, they are not moral patients. It would be perfectly fine if no one else was born from now on—in fact it would be better than even 1 single person dying.
Well, okay, but why? Why don’t tomorrow people matter at all? Is there a real moral normativity that dictates this, or are we just saying our feelings to each other? I don’t mean that condescendingly, just trying to understand where you’re coming from when you make this claim.
I can see the altruism in dying for a cause. But it’s a leap of faith to claim, from there, that there’s altruism in dying by itself.
But I’m arguing for something different from altruism. I go further by saying that the approach to constructing a sense of self differs substantively between people, cultures, etc. Someone who dies for their nation might not be altruistic per se, if they have located their identity primarily in the nation. In other words, they are being selfish, not as their person, but as their nation.
Does that make sense?
Granted, your point about interstellar travel makes all of this irrelevant. But I’m much more cynical about humanity’s future. Or at least, the future of the humans I actually see around me. Technology here is so behind. Growing your own food as a rational way to supplement income is common, education ends for most people at age 12, the vast majority don’t have hot water, AC, etc. Smartphones are ubiquitous though.
Immortal lords from Facebook deciding how many rations of maize I’ll receive for the upvotes I earned today. Like, of course the Facebook lord will think he’s building Utopia. But from here, will it look much better than the utopia that the church and aristocracy collaborated to build in medieval Europe?
I don’t look to the future with hope as often as I look to the past with envy. Though I do both, from time to time.
Tomorrow people matter, in terms of leaving them a place in minimally decent conditions. That’s why when you die for a cause, you’re also dying so that tomorrow people can die less and suffer less. But in fact you’re not dying for unborn people—you’re dying for living ones from the future.
But to die to make room for others is simply to die for unborn people. Because them never being born is no tragedy—they never existed, so they never missed anything. But living people actually dying is a tragedy.
And I’m not against the fact that giving live is a great gift. Or should I say, it could be a great gift, if this world was at least acceptable, which it’s far from being. It’s just that not giving it doesn’t hold any negative value, it’s just neutral instead of positive. Whereas taking a life does hold negative value.
Just have kids. Whatever posttranshuman creature inherits the ghost of your body in a thousand years won’t be “you” in any sense beyond the pettiest interpretation of ego as “continuous memory”, and even that falls apart quickly under scrutiny.
Your offspring are as much “you” as that thousand year ego projection. Except they’re better, because they start a whole new fresh consciousness unfettered with your accumulated prejudices. I advocate we raise children better, wiser, and accept death younger and more usefully.
“Whatever posttranshuman creature inherits the ghost of your body in a thousand years won’t be “you” in any sense beyond the pettiest interpretation of ego as “continuous memory”″
I used to buy into that Buddhist perspective, but I no longer do. I think that’s a sedative, like all religions. Though I will admit that I still meditate, because I still hope to find out that I’m wrong. I hope I do, but I don’t have a lot of hope. My reason and intuition are clear in telling me that the self is extremely valuable, both mine and that of all other conscious beings, and death is a mistake.
Unless you mean to say that they will only be a clone of me. Then you’re right, a clone of me is not me at all, even if it feels exactly like me. But then we would have just failed at life extension anyway. Who’s interested in getting an immortal clone? People are interested in living forever themselves, not someone else. At least if they’re being honest.
“Your offspring are as much “you” as that thousand year ego projection. ”
I’ve been alive for 30 years—not much, I admit, but I still feel as much like me as in the first day that I can remember. I suspect that as long as the brain remains healthy, that will remain so. But I never ever felt “me” in any other conscious being. Again, Buddhist projection. Sedative. Each conscious being is irreplaceable.
>Each conscious being is irreplaceable.
Right, that’s my point—the conscious being of your childhood is not replaceable with you now. You are a clone of your dead childhood self. That’s fine for you, the clone. But who’s interested in getting a 30-year-old clone? And the many consciousnesses that flower and die every few decades, will be replaced with the single continuation of a single generation that stumbles into immortality.
>I think that’s a sedative, like all religions
I’m not Buddhist, but your critique extends to yourself. If you take one step back to look at an even broader picture, by replacing religion with ideology, you’ve just reinvented postmodernism. Viz: “Transhumanism, sedative, like all ideologies.” So you either stick with modernism (that transhumanism is the one, special ideology immune from humanity’s tragic need to self-sedate), or dive into the void (which really is just an ocean of sedatives swirling together, I’ve swum deep and I promise it’s ideology all the way down).
Maybe we’re not self-sedating at all, and we can talk to a pharmacist who isn’t just us. It’s hard to say anything about reality when the only thing you know is that you’re high af all the time.
>I’ve been alive for 30 years—not much, I admit, but I still feel as much like me as in the first day that I can remember.
Every day the same sun rises, yet it’s a different day. You aren’t the sun, you’re the day.
Imagine droplets of water trapped in a cup, then poured back into the ocean. Water is consciousness, your mind is the cup.
Each century, the day ends, but your family continues. Every few centuries your family falls apart, but your community thrives. Each millenium your community is ravaged, but your nation lives.
We could go on, to the species, the community of all conscious beings, etc etc. Where you place the self along this line is historically variable. You place it with the continuity of the ego. I place it with my family. There are a zillion answers to this question. Buddhism would say the attempt to answer this question is itself the problem. But I’m not Buddhist.
To meaningfully debate this, we’d have to find out what consciousness is. The academy already moves at a snail pace as science continues to progress one funeral at a time, awaiting the death of precious selves whose lives already had negative value decades ago. Imagine if their reign extended infinitely. But for the grace of Death might we soon unlock Immortality.
“You are a clone of your dead childhood self.”
Yes, that’s a typical Buddhist-like statement, that we die and are reborn each instant. But I think it’s just incorrect—my childhood self never died. He’s alive right now, here. When I die the biological death, then I will stop existing. It’s as simple as that. Yet I feel like Buddhists, or Eastern religion in general, does this and other mental gymnastics to comfort people.
“So you either stick with modernism (that transhumanism is the one, special ideology immune from humanity’s tragic need to self-sedate), or dive into the void”
There are self-sedating transhumanists, for sure. Like, if you think there isn’t a relevant probability that immortality just won’t work, or if you’re optimistic about the AI control problem, you’re definitely a self-sedating transhumanist. I try to not be one as much as possible, but maybe I am in some areas—no one’s perfect.
But it’s pretty clear that there’s a big difference between transhumanism and religions. The former relies on science to propose solutions to our problems, while the later is based on the teachings of prophets, people who thought that their personal intuitions were the absolute truth. And, in terms of self-sedating ideas, if transhumanism is a small grain of Valium, religion is a big fat tab.
“It’s hard to say anything about reality when the only thing you know is that you’re high af all the time.”
I agree. I claim uncertainty on all my claims.
“Every day the same sun rises, yet it’s a different day. You aren’t the sun, you’re the day.
Imagine droplets of water trapped in a cup, then poured back into the ocean. Water is consciousness, your mind is the cup.”
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, I know, I’ve heard the story a thousand times. There’s only one indivisible self/consciousness/being, we’re just an instance of it. Well, you can believe that if you want, I don’t have the scientific evidence to disprove it. But neither have you the evidence to prove it, so I can also disbelieve it. My intuition clearly disbelieves it. When I die biologically it will be blackout. It’s cruel af.
“Imagine if their reign extended infinitely. But for the grace of Death might we soon unlock Immortality.”
Either too deep or I’m too dumb, didn’t quite get it. Please explain less poetically.
I don’t think there is anything particularly scientific about transhumanism relative to other ideologies. They use science to achieve their goals, much like Catholics use science to prove that fetuses have heart beats or whatever.
Really, this debate feels like it boils down to an individualistic vs collectivistic sense of self. In the collectivist view, dying is not that big of a deal. You can see this in action, when dying for your family, country, etc is seen as noble and great. Whereas an individual sacrificing their family to preserve themselves is less lauded (except in Individualist propaganda, where we’re scolded for “judging” and supposed to “understand” the individual circumstances and so on).
I mean, you yourself say it, we have no idea what consciousness even is. Or if it’s valuable at all. We’re just going on a bunch of arbitrary intuitions here. Well, that’s a bad standard. And it’s not like we’re running out of people, we can just create them as needed, indefinitely. So given that
we have a lot of humans, they aren’t a particularly limited resource, and
few if any of the people have super unique, amazing perspectives, such that we really need to preserve that one person for extra time
Why not focus our energy on figuring out what we are, and decide the best course of action from there?
It’s only cruel if you’ve been brainwashed into thinking your life matters. If you never thought that, it’s just normal. Accept your place and die so that our descendants (who we should work really hard to help so they turn out better than we are, and thus deserving of immortality should we ever actually attain it).
But then, if we’ve figured out how to make such amazing people, why not let there be lots of different ones, so they can flourish across many generations, instead of having just one generation forever? I mean, there isn’t even that much to do. Well, there probably is, I’m just too basic to understand it because of my limited natural brain.
I guess transhumanism overall is really cool, taken as a whole package. It’s just the life-extension part I find silly, especially if it’s a priority rather than an afterthought. But even if you want transhumanism, aren’t we far enough from it that the best path towards it is just raising better (smarter, more cooperative, etc) children? Seems like the biggest hindrance to scientific progress is just the state of the quality of human beings.
>Either too deep or I’m too dumb, didn’t quite get it. Please explain less poetically.
Poorly worded on my part. I just mean that it’s thanks to death that we get progress. The old die, and with them out of the way, the young can progress. Lots of fresh new perspectives are a feature of death.
To each paragraph:
Totally unfair comparison. Do you really think that immortality and utopia are frivolous goals? So maybe you don’t really believe in cryonics or something. Well, I don’t either. But transhumanism is way more than that. I think that its goals with AI and life extension are all but a joke.
That’s reductive. As an altruist, I care about all other conscious being. Of course maintaining sanity demands some distancing, but that’s that. So I’d say I’m a collectivist. But one person doesn’t substitute the other. Others continuing to live will never make up for those who die. The act of ceasing to exist if of the utmost cruelty and there’s nothing that can compensate that.
I have no idea of what consciousness is scientifically, but morally I’m pretty sure it is valuable. All morality comes from the seeking of well-being for the conscious being. So if there’s any value system, consciousness must be at the center. There’s not much explaining here needed, it’s just that everyone wants to be well—and to be.
Like I said every conscious being wants to exist. It’s just the way we’ve been programmed. All beings matter, myself included. I goddamn want to live, that is the basis of all wants and of all rights. Have I been brainwashed? Religions have been brainwashing people about the exact opposite for millenia, that death is ok, either because we go to heaven according to the West, or because we’ll reincarnate or we’re part of a whole according to the East. So, quite on the contrary, I think I have been de-brainwashed.
An unborn person isn’t a tragedy. A death one is. So it’s much more important to care about the living than the unborn.
If most people are saying that AGI is decade(s) off then we aren’t that far.
As for raising children as best as we can I think that’s just common sense.
I partly agree. It would be horrible if Genghis Khan or Hitler never died. But we could always put them in a really good prison. I just don’t wanna die and I think no minimally decent person deserves to, just so we can get rid of a few psychopaths.
Also we’re talking about immortality not now, but in a technological utopia, since only such could produce it. So the dynamics would be different.
As for fresh new perspectives, in this post I propose selective memory deletion with immortality. So that would contribute to that. Even then, getting fresh new perspectives is pretty good, but nowhere near being worth the ceasing of trillions of consciousnesses.
Individualism and altruism aren’t exclusive. I didn’t mean to imply you are selfish, just that your operating definition of self seems informed by a particular tradition.
Consider the perspective of liberal republicans of the 19th century who fought and died for their nation (because that’s where they decided, or were taught, to center their self). Each nation is completely unique and irreplaceable, so we must fight to keep nations thriving and alive, and prevent their extinction. Dying for patriotism is glorious, honorable, etc.
But that’s my point, consciousness will go on just fine without either of us specifically being here. Ending one conscious experience from one body so that a different one can happen seems fine to me, for the most part. I dunno the philosophical implications of this, just thinking.
Yeah, it’s exciting for sure.
I’m 30 as well, so I’ll be near death in the decades that likely begin to birth AGI. But it would likely be able to fathom things unfathomable to us, who knows. History beyond that point is a black hole for me. It’s all basilisks and space jam past 2050 as far as I’m concerned :)
Well, I guess that’s it, huh? I don’t think so, but clearly a lot of people do. Btw I’m new to this community, so sorry if I’m uninformed on issues that are well hashed out here. What a fun place, though.
I can see the altruism in dying for a cause. But it’s a leap of faith to claim, from there, that there’s altruism in dying by itself. To die why, to make room for others to get born? Unborn beings don’t exist, they are not moral patients. It would be perfectly fine if no one else was born from now on—in fact it would be better than even 1 single person dying.
Furthermore, if we’re trying to create a technological mature society capable of discovering immortality, perhaps much sooner will it be capable of colonizing other planets. So there are trillions of empty planets to put all the new people before we have to start taking out the old ones.
To die to make room for others just doesn’t make any sense.
“consciousness will go on just fine without either of us specifically being here”
It sure will. But that’s like saying that money will go on just fine if you go bankrupt. I mean, sure, the world will still be full of wealth, but that won’t make you any less poor. Now imagine this happening to everyone inevitably. Sounds really sh*tty to me.
“Btw I’m new to this community,”
Welcome then!
Well, okay, but why? Why don’t tomorrow people matter at all? Is there a real moral normativity that dictates this, or are we just saying our feelings to each other? I don’t mean that condescendingly, just trying to understand where you’re coming from when you make this claim.
But I’m arguing for something different from altruism. I go further by saying that the approach to constructing a sense of self differs substantively between people, cultures, etc. Someone who dies for their nation might not be altruistic per se, if they have located their identity primarily in the nation. In other words, they are being selfish, not as their person, but as their nation.
Does that make sense?
Granted, your point about interstellar travel makes all of this irrelevant. But I’m much more cynical about humanity’s future. Or at least, the future of the humans I actually see around me. Technology here is so behind. Growing your own food as a rational way to supplement income is common, education ends for most people at age 12, the vast majority don’t have hot water, AC, etc. Smartphones are ubiquitous though.
Immortal lords from Facebook deciding how many rations of maize I’ll receive for the upvotes I earned today. Like, of course the Facebook lord will think he’s building Utopia. But from here, will it look much better than the utopia that the church and aristocracy collaborated to build in medieval Europe?
I don’t look to the future with hope as often as I look to the past with envy. Though I do both, from time to time.
Tomorrow people matter, in terms of leaving them a place in minimally decent conditions. That’s why when you die for a cause, you’re also dying so that tomorrow people can die less and suffer less. But in fact you’re not dying for unborn people—you’re dying for living ones from the future.
But to die to make room for others is simply to die for unborn people. Because them never being born is no tragedy—they never existed, so they never missed anything. But living people actually dying is a tragedy.
And I’m not against the fact that giving live is a great gift. Or should I say, it could be a great gift, if this world was at least acceptable, which it’s far from being. It’s just that not giving it doesn’t hold any negative value, it’s just neutral instead of positive. Whereas taking a life does hold negative value.
It’s as simple as that.