The main reason behind this is that what gives my life value are my social connections, without them I am just another ‘I’, no different than any other.
Suppose that due to political upheavals you suddenly had to emigrate on your own. If you stay you will die, and if you leave you will lose your connections. Would you not leave, with regret certainly, but make new connections in your new home? In the present day world, many people have to do this.
Cryonics is like emigration. You leave this time and place because otherwise you die, get into a flimsy boat that may well sink on the trip, and possibly emerge into a new land of which you know nothing. To some it is even a desirable adventure.
Hmm...I wonder to what extent emigrating a relative ‘lot’ has formed my ideas about identity. Especially when I was younger, I did not feel like my identity was very robust to abrupt and discordant changes, usually geographic, and just accepted that different parts of my life felt different.
I did enjoy change, exactly as an adventure, and I have no wish to end experience.
However, with a change as discontinuous as cryonics (over time and social networks), I find that I’m not attached to particular components of my identity (such as gender and profession and enjoying blogging on Less Wrong, etc) and in the end, there’s not much left save the universal feeling of experience—the sense of identity captured by any really good book, the feeling of a voice and a sympathetic perception.
To illustrate, I would be exceptionally interested in a really realistic book about someone being resuscitated from cryonics (I find books more immersive than movies), but I wouldn’t feel that ‘I’ needed to be the main character of that book, and I would be very excited to discover that my recent experience as a human in the 21st century has been a simulation, preparing me in some way for revival tomorrow morning in a brave new world...as a former Czech businessman.
Suppose that due to political upheavals you suddenly had to emigrate on your own. If you stay you will die, and if you leave you will lose your connections. Would you not leave, with regret certainly, but make new connections in your new home? In the present day world, many people have to do this.
Cryonics is like emigration. You leave this time and place because otherwise you die, get into a flimsy boat that may well sink on the trip, and possibly emerge into a new land of which you know nothing. To some it is even a desirable adventure.
Hmm...I wonder to what extent emigrating a relative ‘lot’ has formed my ideas about identity. Especially when I was younger, I did not feel like my identity was very robust to abrupt and discordant changes, usually geographic, and just accepted that different parts of my life felt different.
I did enjoy change, exactly as an adventure, and I have no wish to end experience.
However, with a change as discontinuous as cryonics (over time and social networks), I find that I’m not attached to particular components of my identity (such as gender and profession and enjoying blogging on Less Wrong, etc) and in the end, there’s not much left save the universal feeling of experience—the sense of identity captured by any really good book, the feeling of a voice and a sympathetic perception.
To illustrate, I would be exceptionally interested in a really realistic book about someone being resuscitated from cryonics (I find books more immersive than movies), but I wouldn’t feel that ‘I’ needed to be the main character of that book, and I would be very excited to discover that my recent experience as a human in the 21st century has been a simulation, preparing me in some way for revival tomorrow morning in a brave new world...as a former Czech businessman.