Well, the historical reason for us not wanting to jump off a cliff is that you don’t have many offspring (or amplitude of having offspring) if you go around jumping off cliffs. So that’s a neat anthropic demonstration that we come from a high-amplitude world.
I believe that I’ve misphrased my question. The question I should have asked is: what makes death undesirable to us as we are now, regardless of why (causally, historically) we have this preference, and does this phenomenon of being aware of only those branches which we can observe qualify as undesirable or not?
You may as well ask why I don’t like being hit on the head with a baseball bat.
I note that you’re using the word “undesirable” as a property of dying, or of the anthropic principle, rather than a fact about human preferences. Not sure if this is linguistic convenience or the mind projection fallacy.
But there is a question to dissect, even in this most basic of preferences. For example, I suspect that a large portion of your dislike for the prospect of being hit in the head with a baseball bat is the pain. Your objection, I assume, is not to the fact that wood (or aluminum, or whatever) will be touching your head, or to the proximity of an artificial object to your brain.
There is an aspect of the experience—being hit in the head with a baseball bat—which makes it undesirable where similar experiences are not. For example, I have far fewer objections to being hit in the head by an inflatable baseball bat, particularly if I am forewarned and the situation is appropriate.
Similarly, I would guess that there are particular parts of the experience of dying which persons like us would find undesirable (I clarify to distinguish rationalists from persons who may attach more superstition to death; we do not fear, for example, having our hearts weighed against a feather by the Egyptian deity Osiris) more than others.
In this case, I find it valuable to clarify: do we wish to avoid the experience of dying (which occurs with increasingly high probability in one’s lifetime, even assuming quantum immortality), the limitations on the amount of fun we can have in a finite lifespan, or some combination of these and other properties of dying?
And yes, I did attach the adjective “undesirable” to death as a matter of linguistic convention. Thank you for pointing that out.
Well, the historical reason for us not wanting to jump off a cliff is that you don’t have many offspring (or amplitude of having offspring) if you go around jumping off cliffs. So that’s a neat anthropic demonstration that we come from a high-amplitude world.
I believe that I’ve misphrased my question. The question I should have asked is: what makes death undesirable to us as we are now, regardless of why (causally, historically) we have this preference, and does this phenomenon of being aware of only those branches which we can observe qualify as undesirable or not?
You may as well ask why I don’t like being hit on the head with a baseball bat.
I note that you’re using the word “undesirable” as a property of dying, or of the anthropic principle, rather than a fact about human preferences. Not sure if this is linguistic convenience or the mind projection fallacy.
But there is a question to dissect, even in this most basic of preferences. For example, I suspect that a large portion of your dislike for the prospect of being hit in the head with a baseball bat is the pain. Your objection, I assume, is not to the fact that wood (or aluminum, or whatever) will be touching your head, or to the proximity of an artificial object to your brain.
There is an aspect of the experience—being hit in the head with a baseball bat—which makes it undesirable where similar experiences are not. For example, I have far fewer objections to being hit in the head by an inflatable baseball bat, particularly if I am forewarned and the situation is appropriate.
Similarly, I would guess that there are particular parts of the experience of dying which persons like us would find undesirable (I clarify to distinguish rationalists from persons who may attach more superstition to death; we do not fear, for example, having our hearts weighed against a feather by the Egyptian deity Osiris) more than others.
In this case, I find it valuable to clarify: do we wish to avoid the experience of dying (which occurs with increasingly high probability in one’s lifetime, even assuming quantum immortality), the limitations on the amount of fun we can have in a finite lifespan, or some combination of these and other properties of dying?
And yes, I did attach the adjective “undesirable” to death as a matter of linguistic convention. Thank you for pointing that out.