"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.
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?