The deathism of this thread, on a site read by technically-oriented people, where problably many agree with the computational theory of mind really makes me lose hope in the human kind.
It's not thinking that cryonics is not worth it. That's a reasonable position. I'm undecided myself. It's that response, that fighting death is somehow unethical or naive. That Death is Good, Part of the Cosmos, Don't You Dare, whatever.
Man, talk about Stockholm syndrome. Well, fuck it:
>>> DEATH IS BAD. <<<<
Yes it is. We die because we don't know how to avoid it, not because is good, natural, right or proper. Our bodies are machines that we don't know how to repair. That's all. We may invent lies to make ourselves feel better and maybe that's a natural strategy to cope with the HORROR that is death, but we are still fooling ourselves, and most likely keeping the problem from being solved.
The reason people are uncomfortable with talk of paying for immortality is that it can lead to obscene scenerios potentially thousands of times worse than the 1% debates we are having now. You think accumulation of power is bad when people pass money on to their children, think about how much worse it is if they simply live forever and accumulate it indefinitely. And now imagine what happens if only the top ecehlon gets to live forever, and the less wealthy or simply poor just die.
Immortality is not something our society can simply add to its current socio-economic make-up. Some fundamental changes would have to be made in order for the situation to be at all morally satisfactory and not utterly revolting and depressing. And no doubt any attempted change would take at least 50 years for the wild oscillations to even out.
Let's talk about the computational theory of mind. Is it bad to turn off a computer? I have a process running that will continue to do productive work forever. Is it bad to suspend it? If I resume it later, is that not bad? If I intend to resume it later, but forget, is that bad again?
There are some things that happened to my physical body that I cannot now, nor never will remember. Is that bad? There are memories I have that my physical body never really experienced. Is it bad that that person never existed? If I forget those, will that be bad?
Suffering is bad. Death is the ultimate destiny of all which was once alive. It is tempting for a brain state looking ahead to its demise to say that one or ten or one hundred years is too few, and if we had one thousand, or one million, or one million million, that would be enough. But I know no reason that should be true.
I look forward and see a descendant of humanity surviving to witness, in itself, the heat death of the universe. As every resource has been expended to maintain its consciousness, while the last holes fill in with entropy, it remembers everything that has ever happened, and it is looking forward with its dying thoughts to an infinity times an infinity as many lifetimes of nothingness which will follow, and I do not want it to weep that it will cease to be. I want it to stride boldly into oblivion, knowing that it has done its best, and with some glimmer of hope and pride for what, in some yet unconceived corner of possibility space, might be.
And I want that peace for every consciousness and form of consciousness, however transient, that experiences itself from now until then, be they animal, vegetable, or mineral.
Of course we should fight aging, with every resource we can muster, because aging is suffering. But we should not hate death, because that too is suffering.
To bring it back around... Iain M. Banks will die, very soon. Many people here are extremely distraught about this, and I am one of them. He has a choice to make, whether to make some attempt to extend his life at some expense to his remaining quality of life. It sounds as if he will choose not to. Many will, in grief, hate him for that choice. They are grieving, and it is natural, but that idea abstracted is selfish and it is evil. Iain Banks will die, and he will be fine. It is we who grieve who deserve peace, and I and others feel that peace is contained in this truth:
Death is okay.
It is not great. We do not love it. We can and will work to destroy it. But we will not succeed, and that is -- that must be -- okay.
I love people like you, who claim so fervently to be rational but still hold onto this childish, egotistical hope for immortality.
To put it bluntly, any machine becomes harder to repair over time, and some machines become so out of date as to become worthless except as curiosities anyway. People are no different. What would we ever do with 100 million nineteenth century people? The 23rd century should have as little use for us.
The deathism of this thread, on a site read by technically-oriented people, where problably many agree with the computational theory of mind really makes me lose hope in the human kind.
It's not thinking that cryonics is not worth it. That's a reasonable position. I'm undecided myself. It's that response, that fighting death is somehow unethical or naive. That Death is Good, Part of the Cosmos, Don't You Dare, whatever.
Man, talk about Stockholm syndrome. Well, fuck it:
>>> DEATH IS BAD. <<<<
Yes it is. We die because we don't know how to avoid it, not because is good, natural, right or proper. Our bodies are machines that we don't know how to repair. That's all. We may invent lies to make ourselves feel better and maybe that's a natural strategy to cope with the HORROR that is death, but we are still fooling ourselves, and most likely keeping the problem from being solved.