"I don't ever want to die" is not an attitude you need to take today. All you need is "for the foreseeable future, I want the choice on whether to remain alive or die". Who knows? Maybe some day, I'll want to die. But not today, so I don't want a decaying body making that choice for me.
The overpopulation argument doesn't make sense at all. Imagine a hypothetical world in which aging has been conquered, there are no terminal diseases, and life is safer and more peaceful than it is in our world. Eventually, this world's population would get too high, and the populace would have to decide what to do: Should the government impose a one-child rule? Should some of the population be shipped out into the cosmos? Should we let the price of food rise until the market resolves the issue? One thing is clear: the option "let's kill everyone over 80" would not even be on the table, because it's so barbaric that no one would give it much consideration. Furthermore, the policy doesn't even solve the population problem—the growth rate would still be roughly exponential, and the population at a given generation would only be decreased by a constant factor.
The point is this: if we had never heard of death, we would not take it on as a way of stabilizing the population.
Should we let the price of food rise until the market resolves the issue?
I honestly can't see the difference between doing that and "let's kill arbitrary group #27". Or is the market going to provide some third alternative other than not feed the people with the least money?
I meant "some people would have to live with a lower food supply in the short term but food production will be strongly incentivized in the long term." Unfortunately, now that I think about it, "let's kill arbitrary group #27" might actually look more attractive in that situation.
The point is this: if we had never heard of death, we would not take it on as a way of stabilizing the population.
That's probably true within a group, but I'm not so convinced that we wouldn't come up with death as a way to resolve arguments with other people.
Though, given that people would know that they could live forever, I imagine that they'd try really hard to find alternatives. I think the main input to whether or not things turn violent is how quickly resources run out after people notice that it's a problem.
The argument is more like this: would the world be a better place if we didn't stop death and everyone is reasonably happy, or if everyone is still alive, but on the brink of starvation because we don't have enough food or other resources.
It's basically a case of which is better, 7 billion people living decently, or 70 billion people living miserably.
Of course, this is all assuming we don't find new solutions to these problems with the extra manpower.
It's basically a case of which is better, 7 billion people living decently, or 70 billion people living miserably.
False dilemma. What about 7 billion living decently except their procreation is regulated? You pose it as for the role of population stabiliser the only alternative to death from old age is death from starvation.
What would the causes of death be? Accidents and war are the main things I can think of, assuming diseases are completely cured. Would people only be able to have a child if somebody else dies? (Not that it's necessarily a bad thing; I'm trying to understand how controlled procreation would work.)
Elimination of aging doesn't mean elimination of diseases. Even without diseases, motor vehicle accidents make cca. 2% of all deaths. Present average lifespan is cca. 80 years, which means 1/80 of the population dies each year, 1 person of each 4,000 dies each year due to motor vehicle accidents. That leads to expected lifespan about 4,000 years and population is in equilibrium if people have children in average once in 4,000 years.
How exactly would the reagulation work isn't something we can reasonably expect to know in advance. Elimination of aging would most probably be a gradual process during which human institutions will adopt. Whatever will be the final state, it's very improbable that it would be the starvation scenario.
It's unlikely that a general cure for disease will come about as a result of cracking aging; some of the more outlandish possible solutions (i.e. direct intervention by medical nanotech) might qualify, but those require such advanced technology that it probably doesn't make sense to talk about them in conjunction with conventional Malthusian constraints. In any case, the accident rate isn't that low, and birth rates appear to correlate negatively with lifespan and standard of living; I haven't actually done the math, but the constraints on the problem seem to suggest a steady state well before Malthusian catastrophe, even in the absence of regulation.
Evidence suggests that we probably won't have to worry about it. As standards of living increase - particularly education for women - birth rates fall. More reading: demographic transition.
The primary arguments I've heard for death are:
Don't worry so much about what arguments are used to support a policy. Arguments appeal to values. Figure out what you value, and write the important things out. Include a category for things you don't value valuing (e.g. love of sugar) separate from the rest. Then, for each value, ask if your dying or living would make the state of the world more in accord with your values. But since you mentioned a specific argument, I will mention an analogous one I have heard:
"The world is overpopulated and if nobody dies, we will overrun and ultimately ruin the planet."
"The world is becoming ever less religious, and atheists don't have enough children to replace themselves. If we don't fight secularism, humanity will die out."
immortal
If someone uses the "i-word" when you simply talk about living longer than a hundred or so, I recommend rolling up a newspaper, swatting them on the nose once with it, and repeating "No" several times, clearly and firmly.
If someone uses the "i-word" when you simply talk about living longer than a hundred or so, I recommend rolling up a newspaper, swatting them on the nose once with it, and repeating "No" several times, clearly and firmly.
The fault is all mine on that point - sloppy vocabulary. Let it be noted that I repent of the imprecise usage.
And, in fact, that may be part of the fallacious argument bits of my mind have against living; "Aaaah, it could be forever and that will be awful!" Bad brains.
Don't worry so much about what arguments are used to support a policy. Arguments appeal to values. Figure out what you value, ...
The other side of that is don't bother to argue against someone else's stated argument unless you also identify and appeal to the values that caused the argument. Knocking down a rationalization for a value only prompts people to come up with another rationalization.
I've perceived that. Let it be noted that throughout one conversation about what it would be like to stop death by old age, the person with whom I was speaking used five of the arguments I've listed.
So have you come up with what value they're busy rationalizing with all those arguments?
Is it just that they have despair over death, but have convinced themselves that it is good, and so their aversion to talk of immortality is protecting their protection against death?
While we're on death, have you ever noticed how "The Bad Guy" is often after immortality. I went over to TV Tropes, and interestingly, I couldn't find that trope listed - Villain for Immortality.
I haven't had a correct social situation in which to test for that value. The content of their arguments doesn't seem to lead anywhere because they're a matter of belief in belief - they desperately want the iron that's going to strike them within this century to be at least cold. So, I can't say what the value is until I've got down a list of possible values and found ways of testing for them.
"I look forward to the experience of shutting down and fading away," which I hope could be easily disillusioned by gaining knowledge about how truly undignified dying is, bloody romanticists.
I agree that people under this illusion could definitely benefit from knowledge of deconstructing death into it's component bits.
In case anyone wants to have a list of some of the top worldwide causes of death, all of which seem difficult to argue for, I've put Wikipedia's below: (Note, due to how Wikipedia has displayed this information, some of these are subsets of each other, such as Ischemic heart disease being a type of Cardiovascular disease):
1: Cardiovascular diseases
2: Infectious and parasitic diseases
3: Ischemic heart disease
4: Malignant neoplasms (cancers)
5: Cerebrovascular disease (Stroke)
6: Respiratory infections
7: Lower respiratory tract infections
8: Respiratory diseases
9: Unintentional injuries
10: HIV/AIDS
11: Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease
12: Perinatal conditions
13: Digestive diseases
14: Diarrhea diseases
Dying has always been a Big Bad but an inescapable one, and the human race has a bad case of Stockholm Syndrome.
This seems right. Every pro-death argument I've heard either veers into the supernatural, or has the texture of rationalization. So I don't think that's where the real argument lies.
What you want to ask, is, what makes life good? And, frankly, life is good so long as it's comfortable, interesting, satisfying, presents an amount of novelty that suits your tastes, contains time with other people whose company you enjoy, and so on, and so on. To vastly oversimplify, life is good when it's sufficiently Fun.
Plenty of folks won't agree with this, but for the sake of argument, suppose that: If a life is mainly Fun, it's good, and if a life is instead mostly Unfun, then it's bad.
Suppose that Alice believes this, and Alice is fairly intelligent. Moreover, Alice has had a mostly unpleasant life, and there's actually no one in the world who cares if Alice is alive or dead. In a hypothetical flash, Omega appears and offers Alice a choice: immediate, painless death, or thousands of years of life without mental or physical degredation. What should she do?
I'd suggest she take the long life, and here's why: even if Alice's life, up to now, has been pretty crappy, a life of thousands of years is probably going to be pretty good. Alice should have plenty of time to learn what she enjoys: how to make the world around her more comfortable, and who to surround herself with, and how to do interesting and satisfying things, and so on and so on. If Alice sets herself to it, she should be able to make her life good, and for quite some time.
(Yes, you can imagine unlikely scenarios where Alice will be forever prevented from enjoying her life, but they're unlikely. Tiny probabilities of very bad things need to be counterbalance by tiny probabilities of very good things when you're computing expected outcomes.)
So: if you don't have a sense that life is good, perhaps you should spend more effort making it so.
I suppose you could try the abstract route. What sort of properties would cause a utility-maximizing agent to be okay with dying? What sort of utility functions could lead to an agent choosing, say, $500 and a 100 year lifespan over immortality? What sort of agent could extract an infinite amount of utility from living an infinite life? What sort of agent would only get a finite amount of utility from a finite life?
These problems are a bit tricky.
And then of course the subjective part. Which agent are you most like?
Presently, entertainment media worth consuming seems to be being produced at a faster rate than one individual could consume it. (Entertainment media not worth consuming is, of course, produced at a faster rate still per Sturgeon's law, but that's not really relevant). It is easy to find something to do with excess time that would be better than not existing, even if you don't want to work hard at anything and are limited to your current mental abilities, for the foreseeable future; removing those restrictions will add vastly more options.
My mind/human minds are meant to exist for longer than one generation."
Was that supposed to be aren't meant to exist?
So I pose the question: what does a person do to click that death is really, really bad?
The most common way I know is having someone close to you die. If that hasn't happened to you, try to imagine waking up one morning and learning that the person you care about the most has died unexpectedly and that you will never see them again. And if you do manage to imagine that with sufficient detail to get an emotional reaction (ie you don't flinch away from the painful thought), realize that all the other people in the world are that valuable to someone.
"I've read science fiction stories about being immortal, and in those stories immortality gets really boring, really fast. I'm not interested enough in reality to be in it forever." I can't see where this perspective could come from other than mind-numbing ignorance/the unimaginable nature of really big things (like the number of languages on Earth, the amount of things we still don't know about physics or the fact that every person who is or ever will be is a new, interesting being to interact with.)
We should avoid generalizing from fictional evidence, but fiction can give us insight. I suspect that this sort of statement generally is not a person's true rejection, though. On the off chance that this does comprise some portion of the thinking behind a person's deathism, you could try recommending science fiction stories where being "immortal" doesn't get boring. An example: Peter F. Hamilton's series, the Commonwealth Saga and the Void Trilogy. The latter series takes place over a thousand years after the former, which takes place several hundred years in the future relative to the present day. Some characters who were born in the 21st century appear in all of the books, having lifespans over a millennium, and they are far from bored.
"I can't imagine being immortal. My idea about how my life will go is that I will watch my children grow old, but I will die before they do. My mind/human minds are meant to exist for longer than one generation." This fails to account for human minds being very, very flexible. The human mind as we know it now does eventually get tired of life (or at least tired of pain,) but this is not a testament to how minds are, any more than humans becoming distressed when they don't eat is a testament to it being natural to starve, become despondent and die.
It's a valid point that we would have to make some improvements to the human brain in order for longer lifespans to be enjoyable. Neuroplasticity decreases as we get older, and advanced age can bring Alzheimer's, dementia, and other such disorders. As with overpopulation, though, this is another problem to solve, not an absolute objection.
t's a valid point that we would have to make some improvements to the human brain in order for longer lifespans to be enjoyable. Neuroplasticity decreases as we get older, and advanced age can bring Alzheimer's, dementia, and other such disorders.
I can't really see this as a problem at all; it's always seemed to me like an erroneous assumption that whatever technology allows the human body to stay healthy indefinitely will work on the rest of the body but not the brain.
Neurogenesis is not trivially similar to cell division in bodily tissues, so a technology which assists the latter may not assist the former. I think it is likely that some combination of methods will be required.
I would disagree with the proposition that people are in any way actually OK with death. I don't think the problem is that people are at peace with death too much; instead, it's an issue that people are so afraid of death that they don't talk or even think realistically about it at all. The quotes you listed above sound like people were speaking hypothetically; if they were in an actual situation where their life was medically threatened but an intervention would likely save them I'm sure they would take the intervention without much consideration (barring depression). Instead, I believe the fear of death is so great, rational thinking about it is pushed aside. It's worse than Stockholm Syndrome, it's learned helplessness. People don't buy cryonics plans for the same reason they don't buy life insurance in the first place or even write a will, in that they're procrastinating in putting together concrete plans for something that makes them feel extremely uncomfortable.
The cryonics specific sales pitch doesn't have any happy early adopters running around saying "Thank Hanson I signed up! A cure was right around the corner, just 3 years away from being on the open market. If I hadn't enrolled I'd be...DEAD!" We're obviously not at that point yet, but if a Peter Thiel (to pull a name out of the air) were to use cryonics and successfully return to the land of the thawed, a hypothetical would become an actual, and people would become much more interested.
I would disagree with the proposition that people are in any way actually OK with death. I don't think the problem is that people are at peace with death too much; instead, it's an issue that people are so afraid of death that they don't talk or even think realistically about it at all.
It would be pleasant to me if this were true, but the talk I hear from some sources is actively pro-death. (Specifically, the "But fading into darkness will be so nice" and "I look forward to the Next Thing" camps of thought.) That is to say, when I bring up cryonics, the thought is actively abhorrent to these people. They profess quite strongly to prefer dying to cryonic preservation because having a frozen, inactive brain will stop their Soul from Departing. So... I can't tell if this is just really, really powerful belief in self-deception. The sentiment feels believed to me, which is what's so concerning.
I agree strongly with your last point, and am having trouble with how to express that agreement, so we'll leave it there. (Augh, words!)
People don't buy cryonics plans for the same reason they don't buy life insurance in the first place or even write a will
I'm not so sure about that. I mean, a LOT more people have an insurance plan than have a cryonics plan. I would agree that the truth of death is so terrible that people develop a complex set of thoughts and behaviors to insulate themselves from this terror. Naturally, they do not want to re-decision this over and over and suffer that pain, so we may even be resentful of the idea that someone thinks that they are not going to die. I think this is part of whats happening in cryonics. But to a larger extent I think people are skeptical of cryonics working, on a number of different levels.
That's true, my original statement is too broad. To your point, that people are skeptical of cryonics in general, I am in complete agreement, and that's what I was trying to get at in my final point.
Its not an argument in favor of death, but one thing I still struggle with is the notion of identity - what does it really mean to say that I might live for a thousand years if there is nothing in that future mind that I would recognize now as my own? I'm not advancing this as an argument as I know there are problems with drawing any conclusions from it but I cannot dismiss it entirely either. Yes there is not a single day that I'd say I wasn't me yesterday, or that I don't expect to be me tomorrow. But I also wouldn't put any money on myself retaining a single aspect of myself that I would presently describe as essential to my personal identity.
I have thought about that as well, but then couldn't you say the exact same thing about growing up? I mean I am in some ways vastly different from the 5-year old me, but still I share my past me's memories, and memories of becoming present me. In that sens I guess you can view a person as a symbol, "I" encompassing all "me", past, future and present. But I agree it is problematic especially if you take into account possible mental enhancements/engineering.
I'm not sure memory - in so far as memories of stories and people's names and so on - is even essential to personal identity. I guess my real problem here is that I don't know what to make of identity, full stop.
I don't believe in personal identity. As such, death is just an arrangement of observer-moments. It's not that different from birth.
I also don't see why it would be bad if I did. Pleasure is good. Pain is bad. Death tends to involve pain in some way, but it isn't in of itself pain. As such, there's nothing wrong with it. More life is better, but you can do that by creating more people instead of having them last longer.
That said, death is expensive. It costs a lot to raise someone from childhood to replace people that died.
Which is better: a society of immortals who never give birth, or a society that procreates and dies in the normal manner, whose population is stable at the same size?
That is to say, if both equally maximize observer-moments, does the "life-cycle" increase or decrease utility?
I don't see why it would change it (ignoring pain of death and childbirth, and cost of raising kids, of course).
Also, since birth is death in reverse, I'd expect it to count as negative one deaths, so the net amount of death is zero anyway. This is sort of like how, since pain makes you want it to happen less, I count it as negative pleasure.
Also, as I said in the beginning, I don't believe in personal identity. If one choice is for everyone to die every night and be instantly replaced with someone who has the same memories, and the other choice is to go on as normal, I wouldn't care at all between them because they're the same choice.
Saying:
If one choice is for everyone to die every night and be instantly replaced with someone who has the same memories, and the other choice is to go on as normal, I wouldn't care at all between them because they're the same choice.
Does not necessarily imply that you don't believe in personal identity, just that personal identity is not something that is attached to the body, something all (most) physicalists would agree on.
Dying and giving birth both seem to involve considerable suffering, so you'd need to augment your stable population with additional assumptions like 'childbirth is rendered painless' before it's even a challenging question.
so you'd need to augment your stable population with additional assumptions
Then pretend he did. http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Least_convenient_possible_world
Because at some point it stops being least convenient and it becomes 'let me define away any counterpoints which might matter'. Maybe quentin really did forget about birth & death as major disutility generators and pointing out that alone contributes to the discussion.
My standard response to the overpopulation issue, is that "immortality" will not happen spontaneously once the science gets that far; some sort of "immortality serum" will have to be distributed to the masses, and the painfully obvious thing to do is include a permanent (albeit temporarily reversible) contraceptive function in the "immortality serum".
I don't want to die but I'm OK with other people dying. In most cases, to put it bluntly, I don't think it is a significant loss (although it might be a personal loss to me). There are some people in the world I'd fight very strongly to see them remain alive for as long as possible, even if they were reluctant (I speak here not of friends and family but of valuable contributors). But I've never understood the desire to save every life. It seems obvious to me that only a few people are here for the Life's Great Adventure and most are killing time until they kick the bucket. I take some issue with that (I think they're falling short of the Good) but it's not a problem that would be fixed by convincing them to change their attitudes towards death (the problem is their attitude towards life). The reason I want to live indefinitely is straightforward: I have some really longterm goals.
Funny. I feel the opposite way: I'm okay with dying, but don't want other people to die.
While I do tend toward suicidal thoughts, even when I'm feeling pretty great the idea of my life continuing is at best of low value. I would hate to die because I know it would hurt lots of people that I'm close to, and I'm also averse to the pain of the process of dying, but nonexistence is generally an attractive concept to me. If I could get away with dying in a manner that didn't hurt me or others, I probably would.
On the other hand, I would be and have been very pained at the death of others, or even at the thought of them dying. I would react very selfishly to keep people close to me from dying, and attempt to extend that near-mode behavior to far-mode action as well.
I don't want other people to die, and don't especially want to die myself. I do consider it fairly inevitable (in a competition between the sum total of mind design-space's most intelligent possible agents and statistics and entropy, my money's still on the latter, though I could be ignorant of some means of gaining write-access to reality's substrate that might make it possible) either way, but something worth resisting where and how you can.
It seems obvious to me that only a few people are here for the Life's Great Adventure and most are killing time until they kick the bucket.
It seems obvious to you. You might want to scrutinize your intuitions more closely, because unless you believe in some telos to history then this doesn't make sense. It also prompts me to wonder whether you might possess some of the cluster of traits attributable to diagnosed sociopaths (as that word is often very loaded, let me note that sociopathy seems to just be a normal part of human variation comprising about 3 percent of the population, most of them neither particularly-accomplished nor particularly dangerous to others); there are other factors I can think of that might tweak your intuitions thus, but it certainly enters the picture there.
Who do you think counts as someone here for "Life's Great Adventure?" How do you distinguish these people, and on what basis do you conclude that this explains the traits they display rather than something else (statistical normalization acting on population genetics, circumstantial factors, spandrels of history, meddling deities, them being the ones the Simulation is about, or almost anything else...)
As a virtue ethicist, I do believe in a moral telos of sorts. I believe that somebody who's here for Life's Great Adventure is working towards a greater good, exhibits a high level of self-discipline and shuns the kind of apathetic hedonism that characterises most of modern Western society. Generally I base my assessment on testimony.
Life may not be intrinsically good but goodness seems to at least depend on it in the same way that a canvas may not be beautiful but beauty depends on it. (and BTW, Torture vs Dust Specks had nothing directly related to death)
No, it didn't. It feels related to me in that I can't scan 155,000 deaths in the same way I can't scan 3^^^3 people. (As directly demonstrated by me feeling that the numbers are in any way alike, good grief.)
This. Life may not be intrinsically good, but it's pretty darn instrumental.
Although I've seen a lot of beautiful things that don't involve canvas... so the metaphor has its limits.
It is Against Nature/God's Will/The Force to live forever. Nature/God/the Force is going to get humankind if we try for immortality.
Do you mean Star_Wars::The_Force? Because my research shows it is actually supported of certain forms of immortality, so long as they are non-corporeal.
Let it be noted, as an aside, that this is my first post on Less Wrong and my first attempt at original, non-mandatory writing for over a year.
I've been reading through the original sequences over the last few months as part of an attempt to get my mind into working order. (Other parts of this attempt include participating in Intro to AI and keeping a notebook.) The realization that spurred me to attempt this: I don't feel that living is good. The distinction which seemed terribly important to me at the time was that I didn't feel that death was bad, which is clearly not sensible. I don't have the resources to feel the pain of one death 155,000 times every day, which is why Torture v. Dust Specks is a nonsensical question to me and why I don't have a cached response for how to act on the knowledge of all those deaths.
The first time I read Torture v. Dust Specks, I started really thinking about why I bother trying to be rational. What's the point, if I still have to make nonsensical, kitschy statements like "Well, my brain thinks X but my heart feels Y," if I would not reflexively flip the switch and may even choose not to, and if I sometimes feel that a viable solution to overpopulation is more deaths?
I solved the lattermost with extraterrestrial settlement, but it's still, well, sketchy. My mind is clearly full of some pretty creepy thoughts, and rationality doesn't seem to be helping. I think about having that feeling and go eeugh, but the feelings are still there. So I pose the question: what does a person do to click that death is really, really bad?
The primary arguments I've heard for death are:
I think that overall, the fear most people have about signing up for cryonics/AI/living forever is that they do not understand it. This is probably true for me; it's probably why I don't grok that life is good, always. Moreover, it is probable that the depictions of death as not always bad with which I sympathize (e.g. 'Lord, what can the harvest hope for, if not for the care of the Reaper Man?) stem from the previously held to be absolute nature of death. That is, up until the last ~30 years, people have not been having cogent, non-hypothetical thoughts about how it might be possible to not die or what that might be like. Dying has always been a Big Bad but an inescapable one, and the human race has a bad case of Stockholm Syndrome.
So: now that I know I have and what I want, how do I use the former to get the latter?