You appear to have completely abandoned your original reason
I was answering the question that Martin asked. I stand by my old reason for not signing up.
Actually, it’s not so much that I have a reason for not signing up, as that I have no reason for signing up. So in my original post, I addressed what seemed to be the obvious reason for signing up: that one would hold long life of value in itself, which I don’t. Then Martin suggested another reason (that on any given day, I would want to live another day), so I addressed that one.
If you were signing up for a health-insurance program which included coverage for cryonics by default, along with other available treatments for severe injuries, would you opt out of that part of the coverage, and ask to be embalmed or cremated rather than frozen? What if it cost extra to do so?
Probably not. I wouldn’t seek out such a plan, and the way things are now, such a plan would cost far more than other plans, so I wouldn’t buy it. But things may be different in the future.
What I mean is, if the plan which otherwise provided all the benefits you wanted for the least cost also included cryonics (as some sort of silly package deal, due to market forces otherwise beyond your understanding) how much would it be worth to you to have the opportunity to randomly get hit by a bus someday and not wake up at all?
Not much, and possibly a negative amount (meaning that I’d prefer the cyronics coverage); I’ll have to think about it when the time comes.
Really, a lot depends on whether my relatives and friends have also signed up for cyronics. If the situation you describe ever exists, it will probably only be when cryonics has become normal, in which case it’s much more likely that I will want it for myself, thanks to having friends waiting for me in the future.
Heck, getting involved in Less Wrong meet-ups might be enough! I find that hard to predict (and unlikely to be tested soon, given where I live and how full my social life is now).
I no longer desired to live forever. I didn’t even desire to live longer than about a century.
And then when Martin asked if you foresee a day in the future where you would prefer to die than live another day you said:
I can also easily imagine that I will never want to die. I can easily imagine that, as health care improves ahead of my aging, many of the people who are alive now will live forever, and I will also. That would be fine.
Which suggests that you either do now desire to live forever or are at least comfortable with the idea of doing so. It looked to me like you changed your mind on the question of whether you would actually want to live forever after all but maybe this was a misinterpretation of your position.
You almost seem to be viewing the question of whether you value a long life as fundamentally different to the question of whether you would want to continue living on any given future day. This seems bizarre to me.
I no longer desired to live forever. I didn’t even desire to live longer than about a century.
That’s just part of my history. I carefully put it in the past tense.
Then I wrote a paragraph saying that I no longer had any particular opinion as to how long I should live, that I would just see it day by day. Actually, the paragraph covered more than that, including how I transitioned from a feeling that a century was about right to the idea that it was silly to judge such things. But then, on proofreading my original post, I cut that paragraph. So now my original post reads
[…] I didn’t even desire to live longer than about a century.
And since I no longer desire to live so long, […]
The transition from past tense to present tense is not very clear there, for which I apologise.
But currently I have no particular desire about my length of life. I could make a prediction, based on what is likely to happen in the future and what I am likely to want, as to whether I will always want to live a bit longer, and if I predict that I will, then I could say now that I want to live forever. But signing up for cryonics now would not help me achieve any of the wishes that I anticipate having in the future, because that’s not how I’ll want to live longer. (And if this prediction is wrong, then I can sign up later.)
You almost seem to be viewing the question of whether you value a long life as fundamentally different to the question of whether you would want to continue living on any given future day. This seems bizarre to me.
In that case, taboo wanting to live forever. For some people, that seems to be a value for its own sake; I think that it was for me once. But now I’m rational like you, and I only want to live forever if I’ll forever want to live. So the only question is whether I want, assuming that I get hit by a bus today, to wake up a hundred years later. And I don’t particularly.
But once upon a time, I really wanted to live forever, because I liked the idea of living forever. In holding this idea, wasn’t thinking about whether some day I would like to die; it was, if not a terminal value in its own right, something close to that. Furthermore, death was scary and unknown, and I was taught about Heaven and Hell; even after I realised that this was a fairy tale, I harbored an idea that death was bad in and of itself. There are probably good evolutionary reasons why somebody would feel this way.
Once I was cured of all that, however, anything that might have made cryonics inviting was gone. That was the point of my original post.
The only question is whether I want, assuming that I get hit by a bus today, to wake up a hundred years later. And I don’t.
This is a really pithy and compelling way of putting this. I definitely have, at a gut level, a desire to wake up tomorrow. But I don’t even have at that same gut level a desire to come out of a coma 20 years from now. Cryonics presses my survival instinct even more gently.
(Edit: I see that Bartels made the coma analogy a few comments up. Excuse the redundancy, or take it for emphasis.)
I was answering the question that Martin asked. I stand by my old reason for not signing up.
Actually, it’s not so much that I have a reason for not signing up, as that I have no reason for signing up. So in my original post, I addressed what seemed to be the obvious reason for signing up: that one would hold long life of value in itself, which I don’t. Then Martin suggested another reason (that on any given day, I would want to live another day), so I addressed that one.
If you were signing up for a health-insurance program which included coverage for cryonics by default, along with other available treatments for severe injuries, would you opt out of that part of the coverage, and ask to be embalmed or cremated rather than frozen? What if it cost extra to do so?
Probably not. I wouldn’t seek out such a plan, and the way things are now, such a plan would cost far more than other plans, so I wouldn’t buy it. But things may be different in the future.
What I mean is, if the plan which otherwise provided all the benefits you wanted for the least cost also included cryonics (as some sort of silly package deal, due to market forces otherwise beyond your understanding) how much would it be worth to you to have the opportunity to randomly get hit by a bus someday and not wake up at all?
Not much, and possibly a negative amount (meaning that I’d prefer the cyronics coverage); I’ll have to think about it when the time comes.
Really, a lot depends on whether my relatives and friends have also signed up for cyronics. If the situation you describe ever exists, it will probably only be when cryonics has become normal, in which case it’s much more likely that I will want it for myself, thanks to having friends waiting for me in the future.
Heck, getting involved in Less Wrong meet-ups might be enough! I find that hard to predict (and unlikely to be tested soon, given where I live and how full my social life is now).
Originally you said:
And then when Martin asked if you foresee a day in the future where you would prefer to die than live another day you said:
Which suggests that you either do now desire to live forever or are at least comfortable with the idea of doing so. It looked to me like you changed your mind on the question of whether you would actually want to live forever after all but maybe this was a misinterpretation of your position.
You almost seem to be viewing the question of whether you value a long life as fundamentally different to the question of whether you would want to continue living on any given future day. This seems bizarre to me.
That’s just part of my history. I carefully put it in the past tense.
Then I wrote a paragraph saying that I no longer had any particular opinion as to how long I should live, that I would just see it day by day. Actually, the paragraph covered more than that, including how I transitioned from a feeling that a century was about right to the idea that it was silly to judge such things. But then, on proofreading my original post, I cut that paragraph. So now my original post reads
The transition from past tense to present tense is not very clear there, for which I apologise.
But currently I have no particular desire about my length of life. I could make a prediction, based on what is likely to happen in the future and what I am likely to want, as to whether I will always want to live a bit longer, and if I predict that I will, then I could say now that I want to live forever. But signing up for cryonics now would not help me achieve any of the wishes that I anticipate having in the future, because that’s not how I’ll want to live longer. (And if this prediction is wrong, then I can sign up later.)
In that case, taboo wanting to live forever. For some people, that seems to be a value for its own sake; I think that it was for me once. But now I’m rational like you, and I only want to live forever if I’ll forever want to live. So the only question is whether I want, assuming that I get hit by a bus today, to wake up a hundred years later. And I don’t particularly.
But once upon a time, I really wanted to live forever, because I liked the idea of living forever. In holding this idea, wasn’t thinking about whether some day I would like to die; it was, if not a terminal value in its own right, something close to that. Furthermore, death was scary and unknown, and I was taught about Heaven and Hell; even after I realised that this was a fairy tale, I harbored an idea that death was bad in and of itself. There are probably good evolutionary reasons why somebody would feel this way.
Once I was cured of all that, however, anything that might have made cryonics inviting was gone. That was the point of my original post.
This is a really pithy and compelling way of putting this. I definitely have, at a gut level, a desire to wake up tomorrow. But I don’t even have at that same gut level a desire to come out of a coma 20 years from now. Cryonics presses my survival instinct even more gently.
(Edit: I see that Bartels made the coma analogy a few comments up. Excuse the redundancy, or take it for emphasis.)