HA, I’ll certainly go and read your blog but just to comment on your point:
I aspire to the position of contradicting your central presumption about me: that I would use my full resources in this life towards maximizing my persistence odds. The truth is, I think any other position is absurd, or a triumph of genes/species over me as a subjective conscious entity.
Your characterisation of the case against denial in this life with the promise of an eternal after-life (now that sounds familiar...) as if it were about the interests of the genes/species set against the individual is incorrect. There are perfectly selfish reasons not to devote significant amounts of money on an extremely improbable payoff.
The analogy I’m working with is not buying a lottery ticket for a chance at a big lifechanging payoff, it’s more disaster movie survivalism. Current hedonism in the context of future nonexistence is just absurd to me, sort of like how it is in the people seeking to escape impending death rather than party hardy in disaster flicks.</>
Your analogy is leading you astray—in a given disaster flick there’s a cast of, what?, less than 50. Less than 10 if you get to characters you actually care about. How many of the people who try, get to survive disaster movies? I’ll pick a figure out of the air—two out of ten? 20% survival odds aren’t bad. There’s typically a window of, what, 90 minutes or less? For a 20% chance of eluding doom, it might indeed be worth forestalling 90 minutes of “party hard” aka “living”.
Try a different disaster movie scenario—let’s say there’s an earth-bound asteroid. It’s going to wipe out life on earth in 48 hours. There is no realistic probability of averting it. Do you try and build a spaceship, do you try and build your own missile to divert it off course or do you try and enjoy the time you have left. Assuming the probability of success (yours, the authority’s or anyone else’s) hasn’t changed, is your answer any different if the asteroid is due in a month’s time, a years time or a decade’s time?
The only reason to persist is to live and there’s no reason to postpone living in the hope that maybe, just maybe, someone will end up defrosting and reviving you after death.
HA, I’ll certainly go and read your blog but just to comment on your point:
Your characterisation of the case against denial in this life with the promise of an eternal after-life (now that sounds familiar...) as if it were about the interests of the genes/species set against the individual is incorrect. There are perfectly selfish reasons not to devote significant amounts of money on an extremely improbable payoff.
Your analogy is leading you astray—in a given disaster flick there’s a cast of, what?, less than 50. Less than 10 if you get to characters you actually care about. How many of the people who try, get to survive disaster movies? I’ll pick a figure out of the air—two out of ten? 20% survival odds aren’t bad. There’s typically a window of, what, 90 minutes or less? For a 20% chance of eluding doom, it might indeed be worth forestalling 90 minutes of “party hard” aka “living”.
Try a different disaster movie scenario—let’s say there’s an earth-bound asteroid. It’s going to wipe out life on earth in 48 hours. There is no realistic probability of averting it. Do you try and build a spaceship, do you try and build your own missile to divert it off course or do you try and enjoy the time you have left. Assuming the probability of success (yours, the authority’s or anyone else’s) hasn’t changed, is your answer any different if the asteroid is due in a month’s time, a years time or a decade’s time?
The only reason to persist is to live and there’s no reason to postpone living in the hope that maybe, just maybe, someone will end up defrosting and reviving you after death.