It’s neutral from a point of pleasure vs suffering for the dead person
It forgets opportunity costs. Dying deprive the person of all the future experience (s)he could have, so of a huge amount of pleasure (and potentially suffering too).
I feel like being revived in the future would be a new project I am not yet emotionally committed to.
I think I would be / will be very motivated to extend my life, but when it comes to expending effort to “come back”, I realize I feel some relief with just letting my identity go.
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. It seems just as well that there be another, independent birth than my own revival. One reason I feel this way is from reading books—being the ‘I’ in the story always feels the same.
This would all of course change if my family was signing up.
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.
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.
I think you’re going too far when saying it’s “no different than any other”, but I agree with the core idea—being revived without any of my social connections in an alien world would indeed significantly change “who I am”. And it’s one of the main reason for which while I do see some attraction in cryonics, I didn’t do any serious move in that direction. It would be all different if a significant part of my family or close friends would sign too.
I think you’re going too far when saying it’s “no different than any other”, but I agree with the core idea—being revived without any of my social connections in an alien world would indeed significantly change “who I am”.
Hmm..actually, you have a different point of view.
I feel like I would have the same identity even without my social connections; I would have the specific identity that I currently have if I was revived.
My point was more along the lines it doesn’t matter which identity I happened to have—mine or someone else’s, it wouldn’t matter.
Consider that you have a choice whether to be revived as a particular Czech business man or as a particular medical doctor from Ohio (assuming for the hypothetical, that there was some coherent way to map these identities to ‘you’). How would you pick?
Maybe you would pick based on the values of your current identity, kilobug. However, that seems rather arbitrary as these aren’t the values exactly of either the Czech business man or the doctor from Ohio. I imagine either one of them would be happy with being themselves.
Now throw your actual identity in the mix, so that you get to pick from the three. I feel that many people examine their intuition and feel they would prefer that they themselves are picked. However, I examine my intuition and I find I don’t care. Is this really so strange?
But I wanted to add … if the daughter of the person from Ohio is also cryonicized and revived (somewhat randomly, I based my identities on the 118th and 88th patients at Alcor, though I don″t know what their professions were, and the 88th patient did have a daughter), I very much hope that the mother-daughter pair may be revived together. That, I think, would be a lot of fun to wake up together and find out what the new world is like.
I feel like being revived in the future would be a new project I am not yet emotionally committed to.
I think I would be / will be very motivated to extend my life, but when it comes to expending effort to “come back”, I realize I feel some relief with just letting my identity go.
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. It seems just as well that there be another, independent birth than my own revival. One reason I feel this way is from reading books—being the ‘I’ in the story always feels the same.
This would all of course change if my family was signing up.
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.
I think you’re going too far when saying it’s “no different than any other”, but I agree with the core idea—being revived without any of my social connections in an alien world would indeed significantly change “who I am”. And it’s one of the main reason for which while I do see some attraction in cryonics, I didn’t do any serious move in that direction. It would be all different if a significant part of my family or close friends would sign too.
Hmm..actually, you have a different point of view.
I feel like I would have the same identity even without my social connections; I would have the specific identity that I currently have if I was revived.
My point was more along the lines it doesn’t matter which identity I happened to have—mine or someone else’s, it wouldn’t matter.
Consider that you have a choice whether to be revived as a particular Czech business man or as a particular medical doctor from Ohio (assuming for the hypothetical, that there was some coherent way to map these identities to ‘you’). How would you pick?
Maybe you would pick based on the values of your current identity, kilobug. However, that seems rather arbitrary as these aren’t the values exactly of either the Czech business man or the doctor from Ohio. I imagine either one of them would be happy with being themselves.
Now throw your actual identity in the mix, so that you get to pick from the three. I feel that many people examine their intuition and feel they would prefer that they themselves are picked. However, I examine my intuition and I find I don’t care. Is this really so strange?
But I wanted to add … if the daughter of the person from Ohio is also cryonicized and revived (somewhat randomly, I based my identities on the 118th and 88th patients at Alcor, though I don″t know what their professions were, and the 88th patient did have a daughter), I very much hope that the mother-daughter pair may be revived together. That, I think, would be a lot of fun to wake up together and find out what the new world is like.