FWIW, I spent quite a long time staring at things like this. I started as a die-hard immortalist (ha!). I was raised in a family that signed me up for cryonics when I was 5. They helped inoculate my mind against all the standard deathist stuff. It’s in my memetic DNA at this point.
And yet, now am something like… mmm, an integral immortalist? Which is to say, I think deathist arguments are often bad articulations of something true. And it seems to me that the usual immortalist counterarguments to deathism are attacking the “bad articulation” part instead of orienting to the “something true”.
(But I’m still signed up for cryonics and would love to stick around for at least a few centuries.)
One of my favorite examples is “But won’t you get bored?” Some standard immortalist rebuttals go along the lines of:
“What if you get bored now? Would you want to die? Or would you rather stick around and see if things get better?”
“I’m pretty sure I’ll find something to do given infinite time.”
“I’d like the option to find out whether I’ll get bored, thank you very much.”
“…versus being dead.”
The thing is, none of these address the reason why people say things like “But won’t you get bored living forever?”
One reason is that they’ve heard this concern and are just repeating it. Basic memetics. In which case these immortalist counterarguments are just acting as memetic immune responses for the immortalist. They’re basically useless for opening up a viable incentivized path from the deathist mental frame to the immortalist one.
But that’s a relatively boring case. I think there’s one that’s way, way more interesting:
I think this is often expressing a real concern people are experiencing in the agony of being alive.
How much more alive were you when you were five years old? How ready were you to find something interesting to explore, do, play with? As adults, we can reach so, so much farther with our understanding… and yet. Maybe you in particular are blessed with ever-increasing vitality and fascination. But most people in practice experience something like a gradual entombing.
A sign of this is the wake-up call that a medical death sentence for a loved one brings. If you knew your next conversation with a beloved were your last, there’s a kind of lucidity that would be present in looking into their eyes one last time. Old arguments feel different — not irrelevant, but without their weight either.
Yes, we can analyze this in terms of iterated vs. finite prisoner dilemmas, etc. But that just produces more thoughts and analysis. On the inside, in practice, death brings a freshness that’s absolutely dear to the heart.
The horror of the deathist “But won’t you get bored?” is often pointing at this. If you take humans as they current are and you remove death… where does the freshness come from? It doesn’t? Ever? Except for some vague “We’ll think of something” that feels like it’s missing the point?
It’s as though by default we’re slowly getting buried alive, but at least at some point you die. But if you remove death without orienting to the burial…
…whew.
This stuff is really easy to miss if you boil down the expressions of deathist fears into a few core principles and then logically beat them down. It’s great for memetics, but it doesn’t speak to the heart of the matter.
A loud hint of this is how deathists will usually either disengage or switch arguments once you successfully start countering the argument they’ve put forward. It has a similar structure to when a partner comes up and says something like “I feel hurt and disrespected. The way you, um, brought in the groceries….” If you counter with “Well, here are the logical reasons why I brought in the groceries the way I did, so see it actually makes sense”, you’re presuming that the groceries are the real reason for them bringing in the conversation. What if it was the example that just happened to come to their mind for something that’s hard to articulate and maybe isn’t fully conscious? Well, now you’ve shut down the one avenue they’ve thought of to try to bring their felt sense into contact with you.
Similarly: “Well, okay, yeah, I guess I don’t want to kill myself when I get bored… but what about overpopulation?”
There’s something wrong they’re intuiting about the effort to live forever. They just don’t know how to say it, and they probably don’t know how to think it.
All these questions are not boredom or overpopulation – they are something like a protection from a new idea. Or protection against fear of death. Its like a Stockholm syndrome, where a victim take the side of a terrorist.
If people were really afraid about overpopulation, they should ban sex first.
You are right: they feel that something is amiss. The idea of immortality without an image of paradise is really boring. Becoming immortal without becoming God and without living in galactic size paradize is wrong and they feel it.
All these questions are not boredom or overpopulation – they are something like a protection from a new idea. Or protection against fear of death. Its like a Stockholm syndrome, where a victim take the side of a terrorist.
FWIW: This is part of the standard immortalist memetic immune system response. It’s stuff like this happening in my own head for decades that prevented me from really listening to people.
At the risk of being really annoying to you, here are a few related elements to point at what I mean:
I basically said that these counterarguments weren’t really about boredom or overpopulation. See the analogy with the partner nominally talking about groceries. So why say that?
It’s pretty important which new idea they’re encountering. It’s not a generic response. Most people don’t respond to first hearing the idea of blockchain with “But what if you get bored?”
The thing about protection against fear of death is an assumption. It’s a super duper common one in immortalist circles. Likewise with deathist arguments being about Stockholm Syndrome. It’s a clear hypothesis. But that’s not how it’s used. It’s not presented to stir curiosity and exploration of the deathist psyche. The default reason for saying things like this is to dismiss the deathist concerns as basically delusional. (Speaking from decades of personal experience of enacting this disrespect.)
If people were really afraid about overpopulation, they should ban sex first.
Well, if the single thing they cared about was overpopulation, then sure. The math checks out.
I think it’s a combination of (a) they don’t really care about overpopulation per se, (b) they’re bad at exponential reasoning, and (c) they care about a whole system of things that are all interconnected but typically don’t notice the system as a whole.
But that’s just my guess.
You are right: they feel that something is amiss. The idea of immortality without an image of paradise is really boring. Becoming immortal without becoming God and without living in galactic size paradize is wrong and they feel it.
Well…
Okay, so: If I could eliminate aging in my body as is, right now, I would.
I’m totally fine with not having an image of paradise that this leads me to. I’m fine with not clearly seeing how this makes me God. That’s fine.
I’m happy to live as this human for a few centuries. Wandering the Earth.
Even if I’m the only one.
I don’t intuit anything deeply wrong with that. Maybe I’m numb and stupid here. Maybe whatever that intuition others get was burned out of me by my immortalist family.
But my guess is, the deathist cringe isn’t to a lack of vision of paradise or of becoming God.
Like, another deathist counterargument goes along the lines of “But people I love will die. I’d have to deal with that again and again, forever.”
It’s curious how often this shows up when talking about ending aging for everyone. It doesn’t make logical sense given the thought experiment: those loved ones would have their aging cured too.
And yet.
So what’s up with that? If I had to hazard a guess, it’s that they’re carrying collective (and maybe personal) trauma from losing loved ones. The burden of the mortality of those who came before us across the aeons. And they just don’t know how to orient to that titanic burden.
I don’t think offering them a vision of Heaven would address that. What of the scar that Yehuda left? There’s a soul-rending agony and grief here to reconcile with. The engineering question is important too, but on its own it comes across like the stereotypical “man fixes women’s feelings” scenario.
I think this whole scenario is way more intricate and nuanced than immortalist narratives tend to allow for.
The fact that people are not interested in the immortalists’ staff is one of the greatest misteries. It is the black matter for transhumanism. Less people have signed for cryonics than was eaten by birds in Zoroastrism.
One way to explain it is Tanatos, built-in death drive. Human apoptosis. But on personal level humans try to survive.
Or fear of revolting against God’s will. Religious people are ok with immortality in afterlife, and they are not afraid that the paradise will be overpopulated or will be boring. The key difference is the idea of God? But we have superintelligence as its substitute.
Or, if we try to rationalize their argument in another way, they say: it is impossible to overstretch one parameter of the system to infinity, while other parameters are finite. Like if we get infinite lifespan, but the amount of fun is the same, the fun will be so narrowly distributed over eternity that there will be no fun at all in any given moment. The same about resources. This argument is at least reasonable, but could be objected.
I don’t intend to continue this exchange. Just so you know. I’ve walked this particular road plenty of times already and am just not interested anymore.
FWIW, I spent quite a long time staring at things like this. I started as a die-hard immortalist (ha!). I was raised in a family that signed me up for cryonics when I was 5. They helped inoculate my mind against all the standard deathist stuff. It’s in my memetic DNA at this point.
And yet, now am something like… mmm, an integral immortalist? Which is to say, I think deathist arguments are often bad articulations of something true. And it seems to me that the usual immortalist counterarguments to deathism are attacking the “bad articulation” part instead of orienting to the “something true”.
(But I’m still signed up for cryonics and would love to stick around for at least a few centuries.)
One of my favorite examples is “But won’t you get bored?” Some standard immortalist rebuttals go along the lines of:
“What if you get bored now? Would you want to die? Or would you rather stick around and see if things get better?”
“I’m pretty sure I’ll find something to do given infinite time.”
“I’d like the option to find out whether I’ll get bored, thank you very much.”
“…versus being dead.”
The thing is, none of these address the reason why people say things like “But won’t you get bored living forever?”
One reason is that they’ve heard this concern and are just repeating it. Basic memetics. In which case these immortalist counterarguments are just acting as memetic immune responses for the immortalist. They’re basically useless for opening up a viable incentivized path from the deathist mental frame to the immortalist one.
But that’s a relatively boring case. I think there’s one that’s way, way more interesting:
I think this is often expressing a real concern people are experiencing in the agony of being alive.
How much more alive were you when you were five years old? How ready were you to find something interesting to explore, do, play with? As adults, we can reach so, so much farther with our understanding… and yet. Maybe you in particular are blessed with ever-increasing vitality and fascination. But most people in practice experience something like a gradual entombing.
A sign of this is the wake-up call that a medical death sentence for a loved one brings. If you knew your next conversation with a beloved were your last, there’s a kind of lucidity that would be present in looking into their eyes one last time. Old arguments feel different — not irrelevant, but without their weight either.
Yes, we can analyze this in terms of iterated vs. finite prisoner dilemmas, etc. But that just produces more thoughts and analysis. On the inside, in practice, death brings a freshness that’s absolutely dear to the heart.
The horror of the deathist “But won’t you get bored?” is often pointing at this. If you take humans as they current are and you remove death… where does the freshness come from? It doesn’t? Ever? Except for some vague “We’ll think of something” that feels like it’s missing the point?
It’s as though by default we’re slowly getting buried alive, but at least at some point you die. But if you remove death without orienting to the burial…
…whew.
This stuff is really easy to miss if you boil down the expressions of deathist fears into a few core principles and then logically beat them down. It’s great for memetics, but it doesn’t speak to the heart of the matter.
A loud hint of this is how deathists will usually either disengage or switch arguments once you successfully start countering the argument they’ve put forward. It has a similar structure to when a partner comes up and says something like “I feel hurt and disrespected. The way you, um, brought in the groceries….” If you counter with “Well, here are the logical reasons why I brought in the groceries the way I did, so see it actually makes sense”, you’re presuming that the groceries are the real reason for them bringing in the conversation. What if it was the example that just happened to come to their mind for something that’s hard to articulate and maybe isn’t fully conscious? Well, now you’ve shut down the one avenue they’ve thought of to try to bring their felt sense into contact with you.
Similarly: “Well, okay, yeah, I guess I don’t want to kill myself when I get bored… but what about overpopulation?”
There’s something wrong they’re intuiting about the effort to live forever. They just don’t know how to say it, and they probably don’t know how to think it.
That doesn’t mean it has no value.
All these questions are not boredom or overpopulation – they are something like a protection from a new idea. Or protection against fear of death. Its like a Stockholm syndrome, where a victim take the side of a terrorist.
If people were really afraid about overpopulation, they should ban sex first.
You are right: they feel that something is amiss. The idea of immortality without an image of paradise is really boring. Becoming immortal without becoming God and without living in galactic size paradize is wrong and they feel it.
FWIW: This is part of the standard immortalist memetic immune system response. It’s stuff like this happening in my own head for decades that prevented me from really listening to people.
At the risk of being really annoying to you, here are a few related elements to point at what I mean:
I basically said that these counterarguments weren’t really about boredom or overpopulation. See the analogy with the partner nominally talking about groceries. So why say that?
It’s pretty important which new idea they’re encountering. It’s not a generic response. Most people don’t respond to first hearing the idea of blockchain with “But what if you get bored?”
The thing about protection against fear of death is an assumption. It’s a super duper common one in immortalist circles. Likewise with deathist arguments being about Stockholm Syndrome. It’s a clear hypothesis. But that’s not how it’s used. It’s not presented to stir curiosity and exploration of the deathist psyche. The default reason for saying things like this is to dismiss the deathist concerns as basically delusional. (Speaking from decades of personal experience of enacting this disrespect.)
Well, if the single thing they cared about was overpopulation, then sure. The math checks out.
I think it’s a combination of (a) they don’t really care about overpopulation per se, (b) they’re bad at exponential reasoning, and (c) they care about a whole system of things that are all interconnected but typically don’t notice the system as a whole.
But that’s just my guess.
Well…
Okay, so: If I could eliminate aging in my body as is, right now, I would.
I’m totally fine with not having an image of paradise that this leads me to. I’m fine with not clearly seeing how this makes me God. That’s fine.
I’m happy to live as this human for a few centuries. Wandering the Earth.
Even if I’m the only one.
I don’t intuit anything deeply wrong with that. Maybe I’m numb and stupid here. Maybe whatever that intuition others get was burned out of me by my immortalist family.
But my guess is, the deathist cringe isn’t to a lack of vision of paradise or of becoming God.
Like, another deathist counterargument goes along the lines of “But people I love will die. I’d have to deal with that again and again, forever.”
It’s curious how often this shows up when talking about ending aging for everyone. It doesn’t make logical sense given the thought experiment: those loved ones would have their aging cured too.
And yet.
So what’s up with that? If I had to hazard a guess, it’s that they’re carrying collective (and maybe personal) trauma from losing loved ones. The burden of the mortality of those who came before us across the aeons. And they just don’t know how to orient to that titanic burden.
I don’t think offering them a vision of Heaven would address that. What of the scar that Yehuda left? There’s a soul-rending agony and grief here to reconcile with. The engineering question is important too, but on its own it comes across like the stereotypical “man fixes women’s feelings” scenario.
I think this whole scenario is way more intricate and nuanced than immortalist narratives tend to allow for.
[edited]
Yes, I agree. You don’t.
I’m not available for arguing you into seeing it. If you can’t see it from what I’ve already said, then I’m not the one to show you.
The fact that people are not interested in the immortalists’ staff is one of the greatest misteries. It is the black matter for transhumanism. Less people have signed for cryonics than was eaten by birds in Zoroastrism.
One way to explain it is Tanatos, built-in death drive. Human apoptosis. But on personal level humans try to survive.
Or fear of revolting against God’s will. Religious people are ok with immortality in afterlife, and they are not afraid that the paradise will be overpopulated or will be boring. The key difference is the idea of God? But we have superintelligence as its substitute.
Or, if we try to rationalize their argument in another way, they say: it is impossible to overstretch one parameter of the system to infinity, while other parameters are finite. Like if we get infinite lifespan, but the amount of fun is the same, the fun will be so narrowly distributed over eternity that there will be no fun at all in any given moment. The same about resources. This argument is at least reasonable, but could be objected.
I don’t intend to continue this exchange. Just so you know. I’ve walked this particular road plenty of times already and am just not interested anymore.
But I sincerely wish you well on your journey.