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.
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.