How do people who sign up to cryonics, or want to sign up to cryonics, get over the fact that if they died, there would no-longer be a mind there to care about being revived at a later date? I don’t know how much of it is morbid rationalisation on my part just because signing up to cryonics in the UK seems not quite as reliable/easy as in the US somehow, but it still seems like a real issue to me.
Obviously, when I’m awake, I enjoy life, and want to keep enjoying life. I make plans for tomorrow, and want to be alive tomorrow, despite the fact that in between, there will be a time (during sleep) where I will no-longer care about being alive tomorrow. But if I were killed in my sleep, at no point would I be upset—I would be unaware of it beforehand, and my mind would no-longer be active to care about anything afterwards.
I’m definitely confused about this. I think the central confusion is something like: why should I be willing to spend effort and money at time A to ensure I am alive at time C, when I know that I will not care at all about this at an intermediate time B?
I’m pretty sure I’d be willing to pay a certain amount of money every evening to lower some artificial probability of being killed while I slept. So why am I not similarly willing to pay a certain amount to increase the chance I will awaken from the Dreamless Sleep? Does anyone else think about this before signing up for cryonics?
I wonder what probability epiphenomenalists assign to the theory that they are themselves conscious, if they admit that belief in consciousness isn’t caused by the experiences that consciousness brings.
The more I think about it, the more absurdly self-defeating it sounds, and I have trouble believing that ANYONE could hold such views after having thought about it for a few minutes. The only reason I continue to think about it is because it’s very easy to believe that some people, no matter how an AI acted and for how long, would never believe the AI to be conscious. And that bothers me a lot, if it affects their moral stance on that AI.