I used to have conflicting thoughts about death.
Does death nullify the value of life, because you yourself are destroyed? Or maybe, on the contrary, immortality, because you will ever achieve everything? The first is false, because a person has other values besides the state of his own brain. The second has nothing to do with life, because really by immortality we mean “not dying of old age” and not “living infinity of years”, so you only have a trillion years ahead of you, and this is a very limited time. And any other finite time too. Thus, one should not be an absolutist, the value of life is equal to the lived period by the coefficient of average goodness, and the anti-value of death is equal to the product of the distribution of expected value and the distribution of expected probabilities.
I also wondered, if there are no stupid values, then can’t any person choose the value of death himself? And… No. The word “terminal” is missing. Instrumental values are a different type of information altogether and can easily be silly. And a person is clearly not born with a final desire to die, as, for example, one is born with a desire for sweetness and the absence of pain.
So no, death destroys too much expected positive utility to rationally prefer it to anything. Another thing is that the decision-making mechanisms in the human brain are far from rational, and first of all, we are talking about time discounting at a fixed, not a probabilistic rate, which makes you extremely overestimate what is happening now compared to the future.
I used to have conflicting thoughts about death. Does death nullify the value of life, because you yourself are destroyed? Or maybe, on the contrary, immortality, because you will ever achieve everything? The first is false, because a person has other values besides the state of his own brain. The second has nothing to do with life, because really by immortality we mean “not dying of old age” and not “living infinity of years”, so you only have a trillion years ahead of you, and this is a very limited time. And any other finite time too. Thus, one should not be an absolutist, the value of life is equal to the lived period by the coefficient of average goodness, and the anti-value of death is equal to the product of the distribution of expected value and the distribution of expected probabilities. I also wondered, if there are no stupid values, then can’t any person choose the value of death himself? And… No. The word “terminal” is missing. Instrumental values are a different type of information altogether and can easily be silly. And a person is clearly not born with a final desire to die, as, for example, one is born with a desire for sweetness and the absence of pain. So no, death destroys too much expected positive utility to rationally prefer it to anything. Another thing is that the decision-making mechanisms in the human brain are far from rational, and first of all, we are talking about time discounting at a fixed, not a probabilistic rate, which makes you extremely overestimate what is happening now compared to the future.