So.... lately I've been reading through a website called lesswrong.com, which is a sort of blog/forum for the discussion of rationality. In particular, how to become more rational. It's target audience is people who are already familiar and interested in the subject of rationality. The average person who's read a few books, understands some concepts and considers themselves a rational person will arrive on the site, look around a bit and then "Holy crap, all the stuff that I've been thinking about for YEARS is basically step ONE." The place is full of people who are clearly very smart, dedicated to finding ways to make both themselves and other people smarter. So when a bunch of them believe something that strikes me as absurd, I figure I should at least make an effort to understand why they believe it rather than dismissing it out of hand.
There's a recent chapter in Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (a story written by a prominent member of the Less Wrong community), in which Harry and Dumbledore have an argument about immortality, and why Dark Lords always seem to want it. There's a particular line that sums up a viewpoint pretty well (although not very persuasively).
quote:Do you want to live forever, Harry?" [said Dumbledore, incredulously]
"Yes, and so do you," said Harry. "I want to live one more day. Tomorrow I will still want to live one more day. Therefore I want to live forever, proof by induction on the positive integers. If you don't want to die, it means you want to live forever. If you don't want to live forever, it means you want to die. You've got to do one or the other... I'm not getting through here, am I."
The two cultures stared at each other across a vast gap of incommensurability.
I'm going to stop there for now. There's a whole lot of background info that's necessary before we get to the topic I actually want to talk about, but that'd leave a huge wall of text. So for now, let's start with... do you want to live forever? Why/why not? Try to think carefully about this.
This thread is absolutely going to end up talking about religion. It's pretty inevitable. But try to keep it respectful and for the sake of argument let's ignore the validity of the reasons one might believe (or disbelieve) in an afterlife. The above question has (or should have) very different answers depending on whether you believe you're going to heaven. So I think it'd be good to give a few different answers: one for a hypothetical universe where there is no afterlife, period, and one for various hypothetical afterlives that people commonly believe in on Hatrack. (There's a million different ways an afterlife could be executed, so we can't address them all, but covering at least a few basics I think will be necessary for the discussion).
My own thoughts on this will follow in a little bit.
[ August 22, 2010, 02:27 PM: Message edited by: Raymond Arnold ]
Posted by rivka (Member # 4859) on :
The perspective of a teenager =! to that of a 70 year old. Or a 100 year old.
Pretending that it is, and that life experience can be reduced to mere mathematics, is only one of the many issues I have with the lesswrong folks.
Posted by Raymond Arnold (Member # 11712) on :
One thing I am curious about is the "ready to accept death" experience that I've heard some older people talk about. I wonder how often that comes when death is literally something they expect to happen in the near future, versus how often it happens simply because the person has experienced everything they care to experience. How many people live 75 years, are perfectly healthy (both physically and mentally) who then decide that they're ready to die?
Perhaps a better question in the OP would be "how many years do you want to spend alive as a healthy human being?"
Posted by rollainm (Member # 8318) on :
Very much so. It has a lot to do with my fear of nonexistence (I call that death, but death means more to some), my love of life, and my desire to be with the people I love for as long as that is possible.
It's something that has always differentiated me from all my friends and family that I've had this discussion with. They have accepted the idea that one day they will be tired of living. This I've just never understood.
Posted by rollainm (Member # 8318) on :
quote:Originally posted by rivka: The perspective of a teenager =! to that of a 70 year old. Or a 100 year old.
Pretending that it is, and that life experience can be reduced to mere mathematics, is only one of the many issues I have with the lesswrong folks.
I vaguely remember an episode of Scrubs that presents this clash of ideas in a nutshell. I don't remember much else, but in it an elderly patient - who had lived a good life and experienced lots of great things - expressed her desire to live as long as possible rather than choosing a more "peaceful" drug-induced death, and J.D. just didn't get that.
I don't think this is a simple matter of lacking life experience.
Posted by rivka (Member # 4859) on :
I don't think it's simple at all.
Posted by Armoth (Member # 4752) on :
As long as I'm alive, I want to continue to experience. If I didn't exist, I wouldn't really care. If you believe that when you die, you no longer exist, I wonder what sort of implications it has. Say, if I kill you, would it bother you? You know you won't exist, and things only bother you to the extent to which you're around to experience botheredness. So it shouldn't bother you if I kill you...
That's the line of thought I had when I was reading the Methods of Rationality author's letter about the death of his brother on his website. He laments that humanity does not unite to find the cure for death and that we allw ant to live forever.
I'm assuming that the logic is based on - hey, do you want to die? No. So you want to live forever. But if you look at things rationally, you should probably correct your emotions - you don't not want to die, but as long as you are experiencing, you don't want to die. but if I take away your ability to experience, and I make you non-exist, everything that bothered you about dying goes away.
Weird...
Posted by rollainm (Member # 8318) on :
quote:Originally posted by rivka: I don't think it's simple at all.
I don't mean to be presumptuous. My impression of your post was that you believe Harry's lack of life experience undermines his point. Or perhaps the significance of it? Could you elaborate a bit?
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
I would not want to die as long as living continued to be enjoyable, or the cost of my life did not exceed its value. I have difficulty of conceiving of any scenario in which one of those two things would not eventually prove true, however, meaning that I strongly suspect that at some point I would not in fact wish to live forever.
Posted by rollainm (Member # 8318) on :
quote:You know you won't exist, and things only bother you to the extent to which you're around to experience botheredness. So it shouldn't bother you if I kill you...
Of course I wouldn't care if I'm dead. But I'm not dead now, which I think is the most relevant detail, and right now (and as long as I'm alive, for that matter) I would prefer it if you didn't kill me.
Posted by rivka (Member # 4859) on :
quote:Originally posted by rollainm: My impression of your post was that you believe Harry's lack of life experience undermines his point.
That is true, as far as it goes. But I also don't think the question of whether people really do want to live forever is a simple one, or something that can be reduced to a mathematical equation.
Posted by steven (Member # 8099) on :
I imagine that immortality would get monotonous.
However, seeing what has happened to the Universe in 20 billion or 50 billion years might be fun.
I think that suspended animation (like in the Worthing Chronicles) where you wake up periodically, and/or spending time inside a giant black hole, where your experience of time would be very different, might make passing the eons more bearable.
Posted by BlackBlade (Member # 8376) on :
quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: I would not want to die as long as living continued to be enjoyable, or the cost of my life did not exceed its value. I have difficulty of conceiving of any scenario in which one of those two things would not eventually prove true, however, meaning that I strongly suspect that at some point I would not in fact wish to live forever.
My thinking rides very closely to those lines.
Posted by Armoth (Member # 4752) on :
quote:Originally posted by rollainm:
quote:You know you won't exist, and things only bother you to the extent to which you're around to experience botheredness. So it shouldn't bother you if I kill you...
Of course I wouldn't care if I'm dead. But I'm not dead now, which I think is the most relevant detail, and right now (and as long as I'm alive, for that matter) I would prefer it if you didn't kill me.
But we're not looking at the now, we're looking at the NEXT moment. At this moment, you want to experience. But at the next moment, were I to kill you, would you care? You wouldn't. You wouldn't experience at all.
It's an absurd conclusion, but I think it's true. Happy for someone to show me the flaw in thinking. Especially since it wigs me out a bit.
Posted by Samprimary (Member # 8561) on :
When your body's old and sucks, you can get tired of life pretty fast. But assuming you fix the pains and decrepification of age and a 100 year old is as lively as a 20 year old and there's none of those depressive disorders related to chemical imbalances in the brain, that 'tired of life' crap isn't going to happen. Or, at least, it will happen so, so very rarely.
But people need to understand that the people who say they are tired of life generally aren't lying. They aren't confused. Especially not if they're in a painfully withered body or are suffering the deleterious effects of a depressive disorder. The author's 'proof' is ignorant of so many things, and lacks inclusiveness of how one's perspective of life is going to change due to psychological and physiological aging.
Of course, this is a proof written by the guy who insists that you are a horrible parent if you haven't invested in cryonics for your children and is pretty nutty on the subject of death anyway, so whatever.
Posted by Raymond Arnold (Member # 11712) on :
Wow, pretty fast responses. Time to weigh in:
I used to imagine that life would get monotonous. I actually made the point to someone trying to convert me to Christianity that I did not fear death and was not interested in immortality. Lately I'm not so sure. Another relevant point (taken again from the Harry Potter story):
quote:If people were hit on the heads with truncheons once a month, and no one could do anything about it, pretty soon there'd be all sorts of philosophers, pretending to be wise as you put it, who found all sorts of amazing benefits to being hit on the head with a truncheon once a month. Like, it makes you tougher, or it makes you happier on the days when you're not getting hit with a truncheon. But if you went up to someone who wasn't getting hit, and you asked them if they wanted to start, in exchange for those amazing benefits, they'd say no. And if you didn't have to die, if you came from somewhere that no one had ever even heard of death, and I suggested to you that it would be an amazing wonderful great idea for people to get wrinkled and old and eventually cease to exist, why, you'd have me hauled right off to a lunatic asylum! So why would anyone possibly think any thought so silly as that death is a good thing? Because you're afraid of it, because you don't really want to die, and that thought hurts so much inside you that you have to rationalize it away, do something to numb the pain, so you won't have to think about it."
I think this actually sums up my view pretty well - I've developed rationalizations like "it'd get boring eventually" to distance myself from the fear of death, and (I suspect) that most people who actively accept death (i.e. could die right now and not regret anything) are people who already know that they will be dying imminently and that there's nothing they can do about it. I certainly benefit from not being scared of post-death, since I know that I won't even have a mind to be scared in, but the notion that 70-90 years is "enough time" to do everything I want to do is based not on how much cool stuff there is worth doing, but rather on me coming up with a list of stuff that happens to fit in the amount of time I actually have.
Where I disagree is that this a bad thing. The universe includes death. We have to deal with it. Cognitive Dissonance is perfectly acceptable when you have no other way of dealing with the problem.
In particular, I think that actively caring about immortality BEFORE you've found a way to deal with limited resources, starvation, and the socio-economic problems that cause overpopulation, is basically a huge waste of time. (It could potentially be worthwhile for the individuals involved, and rich people who can afford their services, but it's not something that humanity collectively should aspire to right now).
Posted by Amanecer (Member # 4068) on :
quote:But at the next moment, were I to kill you, would you care? You wouldn't. You wouldn't experience at all.
It's an absurd conclusion, but I think it's true.
I don't think it's really all that absurd. I do not fear death for exactly the reasons you describe- I doubt that I'll be around to care. That doesn't in any way mean that I devalue my life though. I like living.
Posted by Amanecer (Member # 4068) on :
quote:The universe includes death. We have to deal with it. Cognitive Dissonance is perfectly acceptable when you have no other way of dealing with the problem.
I completely agree with this.
*****SPOILERS for His Dark Materials books*****
I recently finished the His Dark Materials books and I found the concept that all the dead people would welcome non-existence to be very alienating. Joy can be made. Surely some people could find happiness in their post-life existence. There are always experiences to be had and people to love.
I do think that immortality would be more desirable if you had the option of suicide. Joy is not a given and some people's lives are hell. But I think that generally speaking, if given good health and ability, I would not choose to end my existence. Trying to convince myself otherwise very much feels like trying to combat cognitive dissonance. I prefer to just accept that this is the way things are and enjoy what life I do have.
Posted by Raymond Arnold (Member # 11712) on :
quote:Of course, this is a proof written by the guy who insists that you are a horrible parent if you haven't invested in cryonics for your children and is pretty nutty on the subject of death anyway, so whatever.
I want to eventually bring the discussion to Cryonics after we've collectively gotten a consensus on what views of death we're starting from. Basically, having read up on it, I don't think he's acting irrationally when he chooses cryonics for himself, or when he encourages people he actually knows and cares about to choose it. I DO think he's being somewhat irrational (or at least annoying) when he assumes that cryonics is the right choice for EVERYONE. And in particular, that paying for cryonics is a better use of your excess cash than, say, paying to help give third world countries an education.
Brief summary of the argument for cryonics for those who haven't looked at it before: If you freeze yourself in liquid nitrogen after you die, there's a small chance that humanity will eventually discover how to revive you (and make the effort to do so). The chance of both happening IS small, but is not completely negligible. So while there's a good chance you'll have wasted a lot of money, if it pays off it'll be the single best decision you ever made. (Assuming you care about immortality in the first place).
There's more to the argument than that. My sound byte response, after doing some thinking, is that if you happen to be rich enough that you CAN afford to do that without losing out on the comforts you actually want in life (and still have some money left over for actual charities that will benefit humanity in more immediate ways), then this is not a crazy way to spend your money. Otherwise, there's a lot of better things you could be doing with it.
Posted by rollainm (Member # 8318) on :
Am I the only one who thinks discussion on robotic replacement/enhancement is much more relevant than cryonics here? Heck, it's already happening. This, I think, is the inevitable future, not to mention the key to immortality.
Posted by Samprimary (Member # 8561) on :
My grandfather was certainly rich enough for that, and the subject of cryonics did come up, but he was a very intelligent man with an in-depth knowledge of biology and his position was
1. it's severely doubtable that the damage done to your brain by the freezing processes we currently have available would leave much of 'you' behind,
2. the odds of ever getting revival technology while a viable, preserved corpse was still in a freezer is hopelessly idealistic, and
3. my mind's going anyway, I'm done, and you'll make better use of the cash anyway.
Posted by Samprimary (Member # 8561) on :
quote:Originally posted by rollainm: Am I the only one who thinks discussion on robotic replacement/enhancement is much more relevant than cryonics here? Heck, it's already happening. This, I think, is the inevitable future, not to mention the key to immortality.
It's not an inevitable future, and I would place biogenetic modification higher on the list of things used to potentially solve the issue of aging.
Posted by rollainm (Member # 8318) on :
Good point. I'm thinking a combination of the two is even more likely, actually.
Posted by Raymond Arnold (Member # 11712) on :
I bring up cryonics specifically because A) it's what I'm currently reading up on, B) this post was inspired by a chapter of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality which is written by a guy obsessed with Cryonics, so I know that large chunks of the chapter was basically him outlining his argument for it.
I am curious how much it will cost to become an immortal cyborg. I mean, is it something rich people COULD do now if they wanted to? Or at least, rich people who are currently 15-30, can they plan on such technology existing prior to their death, and spend money to expedite the process? If so, how does that cost compare with the cost of cryonics?
Posted by Samprimary (Member # 8561) on :
In the most likely hypothetical solution, it wouldn't 'cost' much to be effectively immortal. It would be determined for you before you were born.
This is just for the matter of progressive aging, though. Other sudden-killers would still likely apply, like aneurysm, stroke, heart attack. And unless we come up with a massively unlikely silver bullet for cancer, that will kill you eventually if nothing else does. Over time, it becomes unavoidable. You have to hammer ALL of those things out of our biological tendencies before we do have 'immortality' in the sense that a major physical disruption from exterior forces is the only thing that will kill you.
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
quote:So while there's a good chance you'll have wasted a lot of money, if it pays off it'll be the single best decision you ever made.
Unless, of course, the future in which you are awoken by altruistic scientist-people is not a miserable dystopia in which you are enslaved and forced to work in a salt mine.
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
I think you have an extra 'not' in that sentence, but never mind. Consider, firstly, that if someone needs a source of cheap labour, the cryonics storage racks are not likely to be the first place they'd look; second, that a future capable of reviving corpsicles is not likely to need much physical stuff done; and third, consider the alternative.
Touching the 'readiness for death' phenomenon, it seems to me to be just the acceptance stage of grief. Now, given that you lose people it is presumably better to get to acceptance than to be stuck on denial, but best of all would be not to have a source of grief in the first place.
Posted by Raymond Arnold (Member # 11712) on :
I think the mostly likely form of dystopia you'd awaken to would not be cheap labor (as KoM suggests, cheap labor's being replaced by robots anyway) but some kind of entertainment/experiment at the hands of hyperintelligent overlords (be they AI or augmented human minds).
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
quote:second, that a future capable of reviving corpsicles is not likely to need much physical stuff done; and third, consider the alternative.
I don't find either of these two points compelling. Who are we to really say what a future society may or may not need done? What if they no longer need salt, but have simply come to enjoy forcing people to mine it? As for the alternative: I submit that it is in fact better to be dead than to be reanimated as a slave.
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
A picket don't last forever, you know. A slave has some hope of escape or successful rebellion. In a sufficiently long life, almost anything must eventually come to pass. What hope do you offer the dead?
ETA: But in any case, why discuss this one unlikely scenario as though it were genuinely an objection? Do you really believe that this is a likely outcome of paying for cryonics, or are you just pattern-matching the standard answer to Pascal's Wager so that you don't have to think about it? Please observe, with cryonics we are not dealing with the actions of inscrutable otherwordly aliens, but with humans like ourselves who can be predicted by the native architecture. There'll be no eternal hellfire "because that's the nature of things" or "because it is not for us to question" or "because their ways are mysterious"; no, if there's any hellfire it'll be for perfectly understandable human reasons. And so, given that, do you actually believe what you are saying?
Posted by rivka (Member # 4859) on :
quote:Originally posted by Samprimary: 1. it's severely doubtable that the damage done to your brain by the freezing processes we currently have available would leave much of 'you' behind,
2. the odds of ever getting revival technology while a viable, preserved corpse was still in a freezer is hopelessly idealistic, and
I strongly agree with both of these. Given the scandals that have already happened involving frozen bodies (and/or their heads) and the evidence that your remains are unlikely to stay preserved adequately for decades, let alone longer, I think cryonics is an incredible waste of money. And its devotees have simply found themselves a new religion to replace the one(s) they discarded with such hauteur.
Posted by Raymond Arnold (Member # 11712) on :
quote:As for the alternative: I submit that it is in fact better to be dead than to be reanimated as a slave.
I think it depends, and ultimately, the only person able to make that distinction is the slaves themselves, and (at least in most cases), suicide of some sort can probably be achieved by people who are that unhappy with life. But I think humans are wired to recalibrate their happiness meter when confronted by seemingly permanent, inescapable situations. Any argument that one particular such calibration is wrong is rather arbitrary sounding to me.
Granted, if you're in a society that can resurrect the dead, suicide might not be the easiest solution...
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
quote:Do you really believe that this is a likely outcome of paying for cryonics, or are you just pattern-matching the standard answer to Pascal's Wager so that you don't have to think about it?
I believe that there is no likely outcome in which people who have had themselves frozen with the hope that they will be revived and cured and treated well will have any of those hopes fulfilled.
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
Let's try to distinguish between a society capable of restoring the dead from having their brains carefully frozen (and by the way, the old objection that ice crystals would destroy the cells is wrong), and one that's capable of restoring you from having your brains scrambled by a shovel. In the latter case you're not safe even if you weren't frozen.
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson:
quote:Do you really believe that this is a likely outcome of paying for cryonics, or are you just pattern-matching the standard answer to Pascal's Wager so that you don't have to think about it?
I believe that there is no likely outcome in which people who have had themselves frozen with the hope that they will be revived and cured and treated well will have any of those hopes fulfilled.
Why not? What specifically is going to prevent any of the three?
Posted by rivka (Member # 4859) on :
quote:Originally posted by King of Men: (and by the way, the old objection that ice crystals would destroy the cells is wrong)
Not according to several leading biologists who actually spend their days dealing with frozen animal tissues. It is rather oversimplified, true.
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
1) They will not be revived. No one will bother. Early-stage cryonics simply isn't advanced enough to freeze someone without lasting damage, and no one will care enough about the dead hundreds of years into the future to actually make the attempt. If you're still willing to take the gamble, what you are betting is that no investment you might possibly make might be more important (to you) than the investment in your own longevity. This is, I submit, a remarkably stupid position. It is the position of the eternal coward: someone who literally has nothing to die for but himself.
2) They will not be cured, certainly not en masse. The ones that will be cured, if any, are likely to be medical curiosities; any others are likely to be slapped with a remarkable bill (see below).
3) They will not be treated well. They will be substantially less well-adapted to their era than the people already living in it. They will require substantial medical procedures, which are unlikely to come without strings, and will have to make their way among strangers without any shared social context. They will be sideshows and museum pieces, and will be just intelligent enough to realize it. It is also enormously likely that, in the event they are in fact awakened and repaired, they will find themselves to be someone else's property.
Posted by Armoth (Member # 4752) on :
quote:Originally posted by Amanecer:
quote:But at the next moment, were I to kill you, would you care? You wouldn't. You wouldn't experience at all.
It's an absurd conclusion, but I think it's true.
I don't think it's really all that absurd. I do not fear death for exactly the reasons you describe- I doubt that I'll be around to care. That doesn't in any way mean that I devalue my life though. I like living.
Wait, so you have no problem if I kill you? (NOT THREATENING ANYONE'S LIFE HERE - JUST MAKING A PHILOSOPHICAL ARGUMENT)
Posted by Raymond Arnold (Member # 11712) on :
quote:They will be sideshows and museum pieces, and will be just intelligent enough to realize it. It is also enormously likely that, in the event they are in fact awakened and repaired, they will find themselves to be someone else's property.
This actually is very specifically the most likely-sounding scenario I've heard - the notion that we'd be awakened as part of a "zoo" or something.
quote:Wait, so you have no problem if I kill you? (NOT THREATENING ANYONE'S LIFE HERE - JUST MAKING A PHILOSOPHICAL ARGUMENT)
I'm not going to live in fear of dying of natural causes, when there is nothing I can do to prevent them and the aftermath is not going to involve suffering. That doesn't mean that I don't enjoy living and wouldn't make reasonable efforts to live as long as possible.
Posted by Armoth (Member # 4752) on :
quote:Originally posted by Raymond Arnold:
quote:Wait, so you have no problem if I kill you? (NOT THREATENING ANYONE'S LIFE HERE - JUST MAKING A PHILOSOPHICAL ARGUMENT)
I'm not going to live in fear of dying of natural causes, when there is nothing I can do to prevent them and the aftermath is not going to involve suffering. That doesn't mean that I don't enjoy living and wouldn't make reasonable efforts to live as long as possible.
Ya but you enjoy living only as long as you are alive. When you die, you cease to exist and thus don't experience any feelings. If you were to die, you wouldn't be upset that you died. You wouldn't be around to experience the feeling of being upset.
Posted by Amanecer (Member # 4068) on :
quote:Wait, so you have no problem if I kill you? (NOT THREATENING ANYONE'S LIFE HERE - JUST MAKING A PHILOSOPHICAL ARGUMENT)
Your questions specified after I'm dead, would I have a problem with it. And the answer to that is that I don't think I would. A moment before you killed me, I'd have an enormous problem with it. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here.
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: 1) They will not be revived. No one will bother. Early-stage cryonics simply isn't advanced enough to freeze someone without lasting damage, and no one will care enough about the dead hundreds of years into the future to actually make the attempt. If you're still willing to take the gamble, what you are betting is that no investment you might possibly make might be more important (to you) than the investment in your own longevity. This is, I submit, a remarkably stupid position. It is the position of the eternal coward: someone who literally has nothing to die for but himself.
2) They will not be cured, certainly not en masse. The ones that will be cured, if any, are likely to be medical curiosities; any others are likely to be slapped with a remarkable bill (see below).
3) They will not be treated well. They will be substantially less well-adapted to their era than the people already living in it. They will require substantial medical procedures, which are unlikely to come without strings, and will have to make their way among strangers without any shared social context. They will be sideshows and museum pieces, and will be just intelligent enough to realize it. It is also enormously likely that, in the event they are in fact awakened and repaired, they will find themselves to be someone else's property.
Why so cynical about future humans? Let me put to you the analogous case: Suppose we were able to revive Otzi the iceman. Are you seriously going to assert that we would not do so? Or that we would bill him for it? In that case I'll have to grant the sideshow bit; but Otzi is a bit of an exception. Next let's consider what would happen if we had a number of corpsicles from, say, 1850; and that they had left trusts to pay for their revival, which I'll magically make us capable of at, say, $5 million per case. (That's for the revival from ice. For curing, nu, people back then died at age 60 of now-operable cancers or treatable heart disease, often as not. Modern medicine would easily give them another 30 years.) Do you seriously think we wouldn't revive them? Why the devil not? Curing, see above; and who is going to own them? Oprah? Sure, the first few will go on the talkshow circuit until the novelty wears off, and incidentally become independently wealthy in the process. Then what? Who is going to be the 'owner' of such a person? Who is going to enforce the ownership? What freedoms will they lack that you or I have?
In short, why do you think people 200 years from now will behave so differently from the way we would behave; or alternatively, what bad behaviour are you imputing to ourselves?
Posted by Armoth (Member # 4752) on :
quote:Originally posted by Amanecer:
quote:Wait, so you have no problem if I kill you? (NOT THREATENING ANYONE'S LIFE HERE - JUST MAKING A PHILOSOPHICAL ARGUMENT)
Your questions specified after I'm dead, would I have a problem with it. And the answer to that is that I don't think I would. A moment before you killed me, I'd have an enormous problem with it. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here.
The state you are in now is one in which you desire things. You are sad when your desires are unfulfilled and happy when they are. But if I can painlessly remove you to a state where you don't have desires, why should it matter to you if I move you to such a state, even though you have desires in this state?
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
Because in this state, I do not desire to have no desires! This seems really very straightforward.
Posted by Raymond Arnold (Member # 11712) on :
Because in this state he doesn't want you to? Seriously, it doesn't need to be more complicated than that. All decision making comes from base motivations that have no particular rationality behind them. As a living biological creature, I desire to stay alive. Period.
All the other arguments I can think of boil down to the exact same axiom, so I can't think of how else to explain it. I like being alive. I also like, say, vanilla ice cream. Knowing that if I were in a state wherein I did not like vanilla ice cream, I would not like vanilla ice cream, does not change the fact that right now I want some. And if I had some, I would be upset if you took it away, even if I knew you were about to erase my memory and my biological preference for it.
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
There seems to be a Deeply Wise aphorism somewhere inside this, struggling to get out; something along the lines of "There is a difference between having all your ten desires fulfilled, and having all your zero desires fulfilled". If you want something, you are not indifferent between having the wanting taken away by getting the object of desire, and having it taken away by removing the want!
This is not complicated.
Posted by Armoth (Member # 4752) on :
But maybe you are being irrational. You don't desire to be alive, you desire to experience. But you wouldn't desire to experience if you weren't alive.
Hm. Maybe that's a part of humanity that I'm not considering. The desire to have desires...Let me think on that.
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
Rationality is a tool for getting what you want. The desires themselves are neither rational nor irrational; they are orthogonal to that spectrum.
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
quote:Do you seriously think we wouldn't revive them?
Given how poorly we have, for example, observed legal contracts written on behalf of dead Indian tribes, I see absolutely no reason why we'd honor contracts written on behalf of long-frozen corpses. Unless the value of those trusts somehow managed to compensate for the cost of treatment, something that I have to admit I view very skeptically -- especially since simply spending the trust money and then mysteriously "failing" to revive someone would be more profitable all around.
Posted by Armoth (Member # 4752) on :
I thought rationality was a tool for determining the conditions of reality. Desire should be curbed and focused based on whatever the reality is.
Posted by Raymond Arnold (Member # 11712) on :
I think (mostly agreeing with Tom here) if people started setting future-trusts en mass for this purpose, laws regarding such things would end up changing radically and only the first few to emerge from their frozen state would actually benefit from them.
Regarding rationality and desires: I don't know that I'd say they're completely orthogonal. Lots of people *think* they desire a lot of things that are, in fact, conflicting. I'm not sure if there's an official rationalist-handbook answer here, but I assume that the point of rationality is to understand all of your desires, and beliefs, and their ramifications. And then decide which of them is most important to you.
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
If you desire something that is genuinely impossible under the laws of physics, then I suppose you might call that irrational; but I think you'd be misusing the word. Rather, irrationality would lie in continuing to work towards your desire after you realised it was impossible. And if you desire two things without realising that they are in opposition, then likewise you are being irrational; but it is not the desires that are irrational, it is the failure to see the tradeoff.
quote:I thought rationality was a tool for determining the conditions of reality. Desire should be curbed and focused based on whatever the reality is.
The second statement does not connect to the first.
Posted by Armoth (Member # 4752) on :
Don't see how it doesn't connect, given the context if our conversation.
I don't mind the distinction you made between irrational desire, and being irrational by desiring opposing thing. Why did you specifically choose the words - "without realizing that they are in opposition?" Don't people desire competing things even though they realize they compete? Like, to be skinny and to eat cheesecake?
And connected back to our example, a person may desire to grow old with his children or he may day and not exist. At this moment if I kill him, what does he stand to lose? The opportunity to grow old with his children. However, he also loses the desire to grow old with his children at the same time...
Anyways, still mulling over the desire to desire thing...
Posted by Raymond Arnold (Member # 11712) on :
There's a lot of different ways you can believe/do things that are in opposition. Some of it with your knowledge, some without. The cheesecake example is an example of knowing what it is you're compromising over.
People may desire to live safely. They may also desire not to travel by plane because they think it is dangerous because of 9/11. Because of this, many people ended up dead in the months after 9/11 because they drove instead of flew.
I'm trying to think of examples that are not politically charged (arguing using political and religious examples is pretty guaranteed to make yourself less clear), but I can't. So some examples that make sense from my perspective (hopefully also yours, but if not you can probably at least get the idea)
People may desire US citizens not to use drugs. They may also desire there to be less overall conflict in the world. They may not know (or fully understand) the amount of suffering caused by the fighting with drug cartels that drug prohibition requires.
People may desire to eat cheap meat, or have cheap food/supplies, and may also desire the world to be not have needless suffering and wage slave labor.
Do you genuinely not understand the "so long as I'm alive, I desire to live" thing, or are you just posing a question to verify that we have thought through our beliefs? Because it really isn't any more complicated than we've been saying. As long as I'm alive, I am receiving (on average) positive happiness. Because I am a biological creature with a central nervous system that creates desire for happiness, I have assigned happiness to be a trait that is good in and off itself. Once I die, I get zero happiness, and never can get more again.
Nuking the entire world would end all suffering. Ending suffering is easy. But ultimately the point of ethics is not to end suffering but encourage goodness (whether you define goodness to be happiness or some other thing is up to you).
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
quote:Originally posted by Armoth: Why did you specifically choose the words - "without realizing that they are in opposition?" Don't people desire competing things even though they realize they compete? Like, to be skinny and to eat cheesecake?
Yes, and then they make a choice; either they eat the cheesecake, or not. In other words, they weigh off their desires one against the other; this is not irrational, whichever decision they make, although it may be inconsistent with what they've publicly proclaimed.
quote:And connected back to our example, a person may desire to grow old with his children or he may die and not exist. At this moment if I kill him, what does he stand to lose? The opportunity to grow old with his children. However, he also loses the desire to grow old with his children at the same time...
What does that have to do with anything? A desire existed, and you removed any possibility of the desire being fulfilled. One more time: People are not indifferent being having their desires fulfilled, and having them removed.
I don't understand what you're trying to argue, here; and honestly I don't think you do, either. It feels like undergraduate-philosophy bullshit for its own sake. What's your point?
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
quote:Once I die, I get zero happiness, and never can get more again.
But you don't exist to never further accrue happiness. In other words, once you die, the amount of happiness you might have is completely irrelevant to everyone, including yourself.
Posted by The Rabbit (Member # 671) on :
Anyone who thinks immortality is possible for all people, doesn't understand conservation of matter and energy. Every carbon atom in my body came directly from another living thing, that had to die.
For all people to be immortal, conservation of matter and energy would demand that we would reach a point when there could be no new people. Unless we find a way off this earth and to a place with far more of the resources needed to sustain life (which seems highly improbable), we've probably already past that point. We can argue that if you are interested, but its truly irrelevant. No matter how far out that point is, its a finite time that is an infinitesimal fraction of the life span of immortals. If we eliminate death, we will have to eliminate birth as well and (at least in my mind) that's too high a price to pay.
Posted by Xavier (Member # 405) on :
quote: Every carbon atom in my body came directly from another living thing, that had to die.
I'm not sure I get this. There's plenty of carbon in the universe that does not seem connected to living beings (like CO2 on Jupiter for instance).
quote: Unless we find a way off this earth and to a place with far more of the resources needed to sustain life (which seems highly improbable)
Do you really think it improbable that we could extract resources from the gas giants in the next few hundred years? I see it as highly probable.
quote: If we eliminate death, we will have to eliminate birth as well and (at least in my mind) that's too high a price to pay.
Seems to me we would need to limit births, not get rid of it altogether. So long as habitations expand at a similar rate as population, I don't see the problem. Sure we'll run out of carbon/whatever in a few billion years, but a life of several million years seems well within my concept of "immortal".
Posted by The White Whale (Member # 6594) on :
quote:Originally posted by The Rabbit: For all people to be immortal, conservation of matter and energy would demand that we would reach a point when there could be no new people. Unless we find a way off this earth and to a place with far more of the resources needed to sustain life (which seems highly improbable), we've probably already past that point. We can argue that if you are interested, but its truly irrelevant. No matter how far out that point is, its a finite time that is an infinitesimal fraction of the life span of immortals. If we eliminate death, we will have to eliminate birth as well and (at least in my mind) that's too high a price to pay.
If we're talking about achieving immortality, I think imagining us off of this earth and exploring the universe a very probably possibility. The universe is a big place. There is a lot of potential expansion, growth, and development that can happen before we worry about filling it up.
Posted by Black Fox (Member # 1986) on :
It is an argument confusing a few concepts. Mainly, that wanting to live another day has anything in particular to wanting to live in the first place. Bertrand Russel would have some fun with this, this sort of thinking reminds me of some of the limits of logic and how it can do funny things when not applied properly.
Check this out, once upon a time a problem in logic was that if you negated the proposition "The King of France is Bald" ( That is disproving the proposition therefore the negation must be prove) you would be saying "The King of France is not bald", which is actually also false ( as there is not King of France. Simply put, simple statements are generally more complex than they seem.
That and I've been doing some reading/research into modern rhetoric and it is actually rather interesting. Basically, think of it as escaping the idea of things simply being about truth. Looking at how things perform etc.
So what they said is technically logical to a part, but then inductive thinking has many pitfalls. Really you can't positively claim a lot by induction. The dog barked at me yesterday so he will bark at me today. Although, there are people who would claim that all "knowledge" is inductive, but anyhow.
Posted by Black Fox (Member # 1986) on :
That and the idea of "immortality" rests upon a lot assumptions. I for one would say that immortality was impossible based on the idea that what you are is not just a physical body, but a rational being. Since your personality will evolve its rather impossible for the you today to be the same as you tomorrow, or really you in thirty minutes. Which, is also a rather good argument for why we do not necessarily need more new people.
Plus when you think about it we do continue to exist even after we die, mainly in the sense that we are really just amalgamations of people from the past and present. We pass ourselves onto all the people that we have close contact with.
Think of it like this, would be it be worse to kill a person, or to wipe out the existence of a person after they had died. If you agree with the latter, which I do, then I think you have to agree that in many ways people do not die, at least not what is important.
Posted by Black Fox (Member # 1986) on :
Rabbit, for some reason you just reminded me of an interesting argument I took place in where a bunch of physics students got stumped on how the laws of physics are inductive, that being how do you know the laws of physics are immutable and might not just change tomorrow, or for that matter be changing at this very instance in some small almost imperceptible manner.
Not to mention, from what little I do know about physics the laws of physics were different at one point and time, so who says that some rational being might not be able to figure out how to tune the laws of physics to their own desires. I just love being difficult.
Posted by Black Fox (Member # 1986) on :
Raymond: What would these rationalists say to the idea that a person may very well not know what is best for them, or what is most important to them? That and of course problems such as, how do I know what are my most important desires if I have not had all desires, or the very real possibility that my greatest desire today may pale next to my desire from tomorrow.
Not to mention it is completely possible to actually desire things that are conflicting ( in the real world not everything likes to play by the rules of formal logic ). Life does not like to play all its games in binary.
For me, there are just a lot of problems with the idea of living life completely rational. Rationality tends to always remind me of the bogey men from the enlightenment and early parts of the 20th century. Rational thought is more like a tool to me, to live life focusing exclusively on being rational ( which completely misses the point that many things that seem to be integral to being a person are not rational ) seems to me like living life for a mental screwdriver.
Posted by Raymond Arnold (Member # 11712) on :
I'm not sure how that follows from anything I've said. People have desires. Those desires are neither rational nor irrational, they simply are. They (often) include a need for food, shelter, safety, love and respect, and various other things. And a lot of times, these things DO conflict. That's inescapable. Most of life is spend negotiating between conflicting desires. I want to take a nap vs I want to get the lawn mowed. I want to eat a cheesecake vs I want to be thin (or I want to not have to exercise to work it off).
A lot of time, because we are ill informed, we make a lot of bad choices. That ill-informed-ness can be about the external world ("I didn't know cheesecake would make me so unhealthy") or about our internal self ("I thought becoming rich or getting married would make me happy").
Rationality is a tool to make your knowledge more accurate, so that you can make more informed decisions. Yes, there are cases where careful analysis may not yield the best results (say, passionate lovemaking). That doesn't mean that rationality fails in this instance, it means that rationality specifically dictates that you don't think so hard about it.
People have this notion that rationality makes you a cold hearted robot, and that's simply not the case. If a romantic partner "looks good on paper" (i.e. good job, funny, clever, good looking) but for some reason you just don't spark with them the right way, rationality does not say "Well, they look good on paper so clearly you should just ignore your emotional spark." Quite the opposite. If something/someone clearly isn't making you happy, rationality suggests you should probably try something else.
Rationality does not mean life is full of binaries. It does not mean you ignore emotion. Nowhere does it suggest that being rational is "more important" than anything else. If rationality reminds you of bogey men, you're probably misconstruing it a lot.
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
Or, more succinctly, "Ur doin' it rong". This should not surprise you; anyone who thinks the evidence for theism convincing has clearly got a lot of room for epic fail in their rationality circuits.
Posted by Juxtapose (Member # 8837) on :
Great post, Raymond.
Posted by Raymond Arnold (Member # 11712) on :
I will regard it as a good post myself if I observe evidence suggesting that it actually is persuasive to someone who heretofore was fearful or unimpressed or poorly informed about rationality. Posted by mr_porteiro_head (Member # 4644) on :
quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: I would not want to die as long as living continued to be enjoyable, or the cost of my life did not exceed its value. I have difficulty of conceiving of any scenario in which one of those two things would not eventually prove true, however, meaning that I strongly suspect that at some point I would not in fact wish to live forever.
Indeed. The idea that we can accurately extrapolate we would or would not desire after having lived billions of years is pretty far-fetched.
[ August 24, 2010, 02:44 AM: Message edited by: mr_porteiro_head ]
Posted by Black Fox (Member # 1986) on :
I get what you are going for Raymond, but I also feel that definition of rationality is much different than what I am used to. What you seem to be going at is that critical thinking is very valuable, which in itself is not exactly something ground breaking.
In many circles saying that you are a rationalist is much different than saying you use rational thought or even that you go about your day trying to be rational.
I'm all for critical thinking, so I suppose in that sense I am very much a rational human being an all for more rational thought. There just happen to be a smorgasbord of ways to describe being a critical thinker.
That and wanting to take a nap and wanting to get the lawn mowed are not conflicting desires, unless of course you put in the requirement that you actually mow the lawn. Hence, what I was getting at. A lot of critical thinkers would go the step further and ask, why do you want a nap and why do you want to mow the lawn. Are those deeper needs actually "conflicting" or are you just not going about things the right way.
Anyhow, a lot of this boils down to labels all of which do have meaning with various groups. Go rational thought and go critical thinking!
Posted by The Rabbit (Member # 671) on :
quote:Originally posted by Xavier: [QB] [QUOTE] Every carbon atom in my body came directly from another living thing, that had to die.
I'm not sure I get this. There's plenty of carbon in the universe that does not seem connected to living beings (like CO2 on Jupiter for instance)[quote]
Yes, but human beings can't fix CO2. We get all our carbon atoms from the plants and animals we eat. Are we talking about living forever as something radically different from what we are now, or remaining pretty much like we are but living forever. I think that makes a pretty significant difference for most people. I think most people would answer the questions "Do you want to keep living?" and "Would you want to keep living, as a nanobot." very differently.
Posted by The Rabbit (Member # 671) on :
quote:Originally posted by The White Whale:
quote:Originally posted by The Rabbit: For all people to be immortal, conservation of matter and energy would demand that we would reach a point when there could be no new people. Unless we find a way off this earth and to a place with far more of the resources needed to sustain life (which seems highly improbable), we've probably already past that point. We can argue that if you are interested, but its truly irrelevant. No matter how far out that point is, its a finite time that is an infinitesimal fraction of the life span of immortals. If we eliminate death, we will have to eliminate birth as well and (at least in my mind) that's too high a price to pay.
If we're talking about achieving immortality, I think imagining us off of this earth and exploring the universe a very probably possibility. The universe is a big place. There is a lot of potential expansion, growth, and development that can happen before we worry about filling it up.
That's irrelevant. The question at hand isn't "Would it be good for people to live a really really long time", it's "Would it be good for people to live forever. People have mass and utilize energy. The energy of this universe is constant and finite. Ergo, there is a finite number of people who can exist simultaneously in this universe. If people lived forever, we would eventually reach the point where the number of people existing would equal the maximum number possible in this Universe. At that point, no new people could be born. And if we are talking about living forever, it doesn't really matter whether we've already reached that point or we reach it in 100 billion years. We will live forever in a Universe where there is no birth, no new people ever again.
But the real point is this. People don't exist in isolation, we are part of natural cycles and systems. If we made people immortal, it would change the system in other ways as well. If we are talking, as Lesswrong clearly is, not just in abstract fantasy but about actively pursuing scientific ways to eliminate human death, then we must rationally consider what that means and how it is likely to change human life, the world and the universe. I just pick the first and most undeniable as an example.
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
Yes, yes. But is that really an objection? Are you genuinely worried that life-extension research will lead to problems with the amount of carbon in the universe? Because honestly, it sounds a bit like the guy who's relieved to hear that the Sun will go out in five billion years. "Oh, billion! What a relief! I thought you said five million!" The amount of carbon we have available for making new humans in 100 million years doesn't really sound like the sort of thing that ought to affect your life-and-death choices right now. You can only cross one bridge at a time.
Posted by Raymond Arnold (Member # 11712) on :
I think that "live for billions of years" and "live for thousands of years" are both worth discussing in this context.
quote:I get what you are going for Raymond, but I also feel that definition of rationality is much different than what I am used to. What you seem to be going at is that critical thinking is very valuable, which in itself is not exactly something ground breaking.
In many circles saying that you are a rationalist is much different than saying you use rational thought or even that you go about your day trying to be rational.
Using critical thinking is not groundbreaking, no. But the thing that blew my mind going to lesswrong is how deep rational thought gets. Human brains are not just a little bit flawed, and using some critical thinking will get you through the day having made the right choices. Human brains are incredibly biased in all kinds of ways, and it takes enormous work to understand and account for all those biases. As I said in the first post, someone who has spent their life thinking they are a rationalist will come to lesswrong and realize "woah, I'm only a beginner at this."
So I do think there is a difference between being a "rationalist" and someone who generally tries to be rational. (This is a bit of semantic judo on my part - I'm not sure if there are official definitions I am about to butcher). I think that the people who identify as "rationalist" tend to be who DO see rationalism as something pursuing over the course of their lives with extreme dedication. This is not because rationalism is some ideal all by itself worth pursuing, but because rationalism makes you better at a lot of other things.
Most people, honestly, cannot, should not and would not want to put that amount of effort in. Different people's brains are wired different ways. One of the projects going on at lesswrong is breaking down the results of high level rational thought into simpler memes that have a chance of propogating through the general populace without requiring people to read several books worth of material. Even then, most people are going to go through life being wrong about a lot of things. Sometimes in ways that don't matter in the end. A lot of times in ways that cause a lot of suffering that they don't notice or manage to ignore.
quote:That and wanting to take a nap and wanting to get the lawn mowed are not conflicting desires
This... does not follow. I have a choice on how to spend the next hour of my life. I can choose to mow the lawn, or I can choose to take a nap. Taking a nap provides short term biological happiness and provides me with some extra energy I might use later in the day when I have some other obligation. Mowing the lawn makes my yard prettier which increases status among the neighbors, keeps it easy to walk through, reduces chances of tick bites, etc. Long term goals vs short term goals.
I can mow the lawn LATER, but then there will likely be some other thing that I want to do instead. The question will not go away. In no way is it possible to take a nap and mow the lawn myself at the same time.
Posted by rivka (Member # 4859) on :
Well, you could, but it would probably involve a trip to the ER.
Posted by Raymond Arnold (Member # 11712) on :
Also a true statement. (I would note that "not go to the ER whenever possible" generally falls under my personal category of "things I desire.")
Posted by mr_porteiro_head (Member # 4644) on :
Whenever possible? Why, that's easy -- when you get mangled in the sleepmowing accident, you just decline to go to the ER, and bleed out on the front lawn.
Not only do you not have to go to the ER, but you don't have to worry anymore about the conflict between your lawn and your sleepy time.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is what we call the "trivial solution".
Posted by rivka (Member # 4859) on :
Yeah. My list has "avoid doing things that will require trips to the ER", but yours is certainly simpler.
Posted by mr_porteiro_head (Member # 4644) on :
Occam's razor says that my solution is the correct one, right?
Posted by Raymond Arnold (Member # 11712) on :
I guess.
Posted by mr_porteiro_head (Member # 4644) on :
Done and done.
Posted by Black Fox (Member # 1986) on :
I have read a lot of the stuff at less wrong and most of it is very neat stuff. A lot of the thinking found there is paralleled in other places. Still, very cool place.
That and generally when people, at least the ones I'm apt to be around, talk about rationalism they are talking about the idea that knowledge can be justified through thought and not through the senses ( empirical study ). I am fairly sure your notion of rationality is not that one ; )
Posted by Black Fox (Member # 1986) on :
That and what I was trying to get on about binary thought earlier, and its weakness at times, can easily be shown with the lawn mowing/ nap analogy.
When you say that they are "conflicting" desires, all you are really saying is that both cannot be done by x at the same point and time ( not exactly deep rationality here). Basically (x)~(Mx & Nx), that is for all x x cannot both mow and nap. However using that same thinking You cannot mow, nap, fly a kite, or draw a picture at the same time.
The notion of two ideas conflicting seems to go much deeper than simply the fact that you are unable to do both at the same time, which is what I was getting at. Modern rhetoric might ask what are you actually doing by mowing ( pretty lawn, acceptance by the neighbors, you have to otherwise the neighborhood association will have your head) or by napping ( telling the neighborhood association to take it up theirs, you dislike physical labor, its just really hot outside). It could all be multiples of these, which does not come through in binary thinking.
Formal logic is obviously very helpful when it comes to a great deal of things. However, I would say that thinking in any school of thought is rational, some is just less wrong.
Also in the above thought you can have an action do conflicting things ( that is I can not mow the lawn to show the neighborhood association to shove it, but they might have been waiting for such an opportunity to finally oust me from the neighborhood. Make sense?
Posted by Raymond Arnold (Member # 11712) on :
I think the "speaking in binaries" thing comes up a lot because it's a convenient way to provide shorthand explanations of things. This is true both when you're making a rational argument or when you're making a horribly flawed one. It's very easy to end up doing it badly, in a way that oversimplifies things, but I don't think it's inherently wrong.
In a real world practical scenario, mowing the lawn and taking the nap may not be the only two options and there may be dozens of reasons and methods of executing each ones. But the basic point is we have to make choices all the time about how to prioritize short term vs long term benefits, and we can't do that if we don't fully understand the consequences over the long term.
Posted by Jhai (Member # 5633) on :
It's very easy to accurately describe trade-offs of the type Raymond is discussing using economic notation - as clear as using formal logic notation to deconstruct philosophical arguments and sentences. We could all have these discussions by talking about utility functions*, budget constraints*, and so forth, in this notation but it'd be rather dry and not particularly illuminating for the purposes of the discussion.
(*Unless you've read the relevant chapters of Mas-Colell, or, at the very, Varian, the definitions of these words in the way I am using them is almost certainly more complex, over-arching, and precise than the definitions of the words as you're used to them.)
Posted by Black Fox (Member # 1986) on :
I'm not trying to make the case that thinking/speaking in binary is wrong, simply that it has limitations that people should be aware of. Not to mention we often tend to overlook how we frame a debate with the very question that we ask or how we tend to make many assumptions in the questions that we ask. Which for you may very likely fit into being rational or being a rationalist.
That and I'm rather sure what I'm trying to get at Jhai could not be described with economic notation as at its root it has little if anything to do with utility.
Posted by Raymond Arnold (Member # 11712) on :
quote:That and I'm rather sure what I'm trying to get at Jhai could not be described with economic notation as at its root it has little if anything to do with utility.
Can you expand on this point more?
Posted by Black Fox (Member # 1986) on :
Not all actions, effects, etc. have to do with some form of utility or benefit. They can certainly be ascribed to have some utility or benefit, but they also perform multiple things to different people.
To apply this to our lawn mowing analogy the idea would be what is the lawn mowing performing and what is the sleep performing. Some, if not most, of what these two actions perform can be described to be utilitarian. In a universal sense you could certainly describe them simply by simply stating I can mow or I can take a nap / procrastinate. However in real life everything has some kind of context to it. I do surrender to the idea that in the end in most contexts where these two actions would be pondered could be well described through economics i.e. opportunity cost etc.
Posted by Jhai (Member # 5633) on :
Let me refer you to my footnote again...
Economics, as a field, has been slowly creeping up & devouring the other social sciences because it has developed into being capable of describing pretty much any facet of human behavior you'd care to describe. There are significant problems with this, of course - the most philosophical of them being falsification - but to believe that economics strips away the context of issues is wrong.
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
quote:it has developed into being capable of describing pretty much any facet of human behavior you'd care to describe
So economists tell me. Posted by Black Fox (Member # 1986) on :
Economists do a great job of describing the past and falsely predicting the future I just had to throw that jab in.
I certainly think there are contexts that economics does not take into account, do I actually "know" that. Of course not, as economics is not exactly my area of expertise. So you could certainly be right Jhai.
Posted by rivka (Member # 4859) on :
quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson:
quote:it has developed into being capable of describing pretty much any facet of human behavior you'd care to describe
So economists tell me.
I'm going to have to second that response.
Posted by Raymond Arnold (Member # 11712) on :
quote:I certainly think there are contexts that economics does not take into account, do I actually "know" that
I just want to know why you think this. Do you actually have examples of contexts that economics wouldn't take into account, or does economics merely seem cold and heartless and your life isn't so clearly there must be something economics is missing? ('cause there's no rule that economics can't take things like the emotions of various people into account, even if that's so complex a system that it can only be talked about it hypothetic generalities)
(edit: I'm not actually 100% sure I subscribe to an economics model, but I think your reasoning for not doing so is faulty)
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
I think economics certainly could take all contexts into account. Once it is able to, however, we will all recognize economists as the prophets of the world's first genuinely useful religion.
Posted by Black Fox (Member # 1986) on :
It has nothing to do with economics being heartless, if anything economics generally seems to try and figure out what drives people to make decisions, which would mean that economics would try and figure out the emotions of people. If economics did not do that then it would have a hard time figuring out why people do the things they do. Hence, full of life. If you really take a look at it any thought if full of life, of sorts.
Here is one for you: A guy goes up to a girl and tells her that he is a really cool guy. With that action he has very much made himself a not cool guy. I suppose you could try and say it has something to do with supply and demand. That and we could certainly talk about it in certain hypothetical generalities, but then you just end up abstracting. I suppose that is a sort of description, but not what I'm getting at.
Not to mention morality, you could certainly use economics to model and predict peoples moral decisions, or at least I could certainly see it being done. However, I don't see how economics would actually figure out what "is" moral. Not to mention effectively work in particular situations instead of general ones.
However, I could be very wrong. Like I said earlier I am rather sure that my imagination for applying economics is not nearly as great as that of others.
Also, just because a certain field of study attempts to take a certain context into account, say by ascribing it to a certain variable, does not mean it does so successfully.
Posted by Raymond Arnold (Member # 11712) on :
quote: A guy goes up to a girl and tells her that he is a really cool guy
This is a case of someone NOT having used rationality, and thus making a bad decision. He still is trying to undertake an action with utility. The guy wants to get the girl (for now we'll call this a Desire, and is thus not really rational or irrational. A more in depth look might reveal otherwise).
He thinks being cool will accomplish that. He thinks telling her he's cool will make him cool. Both of his premises are wrong (well, the first one is only sorta wrong, and depends on your definition of cool). Depending on how experienced he is, he could be improving his chances in a few ways:
1) Observing the attempts of others to talk to girls and note what works and what doesn't 2) Introduce himself to a few girls and see what happens. 3) Reading books about how to date/talk-to-girls
Now, there's a few additional things to consider, which are A) he probably has a limited timeframe in which to get the optimal result here, B) treating girls like experimental subjects has its own form of detriment, both to the girls, to society in general, and eventually to him. C) Doing too much thinking while you're talking to girls is going to mess you up.
If he's in middle school and this is his first attempt, he's probably going to be horribly awkward no matter what, because there's no way he can get enough information and figure out how to apply it accurately in a useful timeframe. But the bottom line is that he has a desire, he's attempting to act on that desire, and while the amount of time to get a truly good results may be longer than he likes, doing some critical thinking before and afterwards is likely to improve his chances, at least somewhat.
[ August 25, 2010, 01:51 PM: Message edited by: Raymond Arnold ]
Posted by Jhai (Member # 5633) on :
quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: I think economics certainly could take all contexts into account. Once it is able to, however, we will all recognize economists as the prophets of the world's first genuinely useful religion.
I truly do not understand this sentence at all. Anyways, "taking all contexts into account" is not what I claimed. But... I'd rather not derail this thread, and this is not a particularly interesting conversation (for me, at least) to have with people who have not studied the particular concepts I'm discussing at the depth I am discussing.
In other words, carry on, but I'm sorry to have brought economics up, and won't be discussing this line of thought on this thread.
(Sorry if this sounds grouchy - I've billed about 250 hours of work over the past three weeks and am TIRED.)
Posted by Black Fox (Member # 1986) on :
You certainly lined up a fairly rational course of action to dating girls, although not exactly the way I would go about it, even rationally ; )
However, I was really just wondering how you would use economics to describe why he was "uncool". Not to mention it had nothing to do with dating, but you did fill in that context nicely using certain assumptions. Namely, why go up to a girl and tell her you're cool except for the purpose of getting her to date you etc.
Posted by Raymond Arnold (Member # 11712) on :
It's not about dating girls, just about talking to them without looking ridiculous. Dating is all sorts of kinds of more complicated.
I took a few looks at that post before I made it to try and figure out how creepy it sounded. I ended up deciding a) it was gonna sound at least a little creepy regardless, but b) honestly if you're not good at talking to girls I can't think of anything you'd try that wasn't covered there. (Note that I didn't say what the best way to improve was, just listed possible avenues).
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
quote:However, I was really just wondering how you would use economics to describe why he was "uncool".
Signalling; the branch of economics that deals with it is usually called game theory. He has made himself uncool because words are cheap. To say "I am cool" is something that anyone can do, no matter how uncool; therefore, if that's the best demonstration-of-coolness you can come up with, you must not be very cool at all - a really cool guy would have been able to do something better than the words. On the other hand, if it isn't the best thing you could have done, but you chose that method anyway, then you must not think the girl worth doing something that'll cost you a bit of effort; it follows that you won't be particularly committed even if she does respond.
Game theory formalises this sort of reasoning.
Posted by Mucus (Member # 9735) on :
That's cool.
Posted by Black Fox (Member # 1986) on :
That is actually pretty neat, but it still does not get at what I am trying to say. Instead you simply created a defintion of coolness, that is that cool must somehow not be cheap. What is cool? Expensive then? Obviously not telling someone that you are cool. (note, the example had nothing to do with trying to date the girl or impress her lol)
Anyhow, still pretty cool KOM. I am not trying to down economics, if I wasn't stuck in my current majors I would probably at least minor in econ.
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
Cool, in this case, means "having that quality that makes girls want to date you".
Posted by Black Fox (Member # 1986) on :
Yes, but I don't think that encapsulates what "cool" is. Not to mention I've always thought that what makes someone uncool for saying they are cool is certain self-centered thinking and lack of confidence. That is a cool person would never have to say they were cool, they just would be. To express your cool almost never involves saying your cool, but performing the fact that your cool.
Posted by Raymond Arnold (Member # 11712) on :
quote:That is a cool person would never have to say they were cool, they just would be.
You may note that this syncs up with KoM's theory.
Posted by Raymond Arnold (Member # 11712) on :
Further clarification: Understanding WHY coolness matters for dating purposes in the first place falls more under things like biological science. I think economics merely explains how things relate to each other, not why the things matter in the first place.
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
quote:I truly do not understand this sentence at all. Anyways, "taking all contexts into account" is not what I claimed.
I was actually talking to someone else in that paragraph. Posted by sinflower (Member # 12228) on :
quote:If we eliminate death, we will have to eliminate birth as well and (at least in my mind) that's too high a price to pay.)
And others would say that sacrificing life in order to gain reproduction is too high a price to pay.
How's this for satisfying both groups, should indefinite life extension become feasible and overpopulation a threat: a system in which each individual can choose either to live on indefinitely, or to reproduce. But not both: if they reproduce, then they must precommit to dying once their child reaches a certain age, say 50. When humanity gains resources, such as a new habitable planet, such that it can support a higher population than it currently has, then we can hold lotteries for the opportunity to reproduce without having to sacrifice one's own life.
Posted by mr_porteiro_head (Member # 4644) on :
Of course, this will put disproportionate power into the hands of those who choose not to have children.
Posted by sinflower (Member # 12228) on :
Because they would, on average, be older and have more life experience/wisdom? Or because they would have more accumulated power, i.e. in the form of financial resources? Because if the main problem is the latter, then that should be remedied fairly easily: simply have each parent pass on all of their resources to their child upon dying.
That still leaves a problem: as time goes on, the gap of age between the longest lived humans and the newest humans would increase. We'd have to find some way to prime newborns with enough information that they could interact meaningfully with adults. Even so, society would probably stratify by age to some degree, but would that be a huge problem? As time advances, the proportional difference in age between the generations would decrease: you being a thousand years older than me is a big deal when I'm a newborn, but not when you're 10,000 and I'm 9,000. So each new generation would assimilate eventually. Also, people won't get to live literally forever... accidental death would get everyone after some millions, right? So the age gap would stop growing at some point.
This is fun to think about.
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
quote:That still leaves a problem: as time goes on, the gap of age between the longest lived humans and the newest humans would increase. We'd have to find some way to prime newborns with enough information that they could interact meaningfully with adults.
Like we do now?
Posted by sinflower (Member # 12228) on :
Yup, just much larger scale. Currently, people spend 1/4 or more of their lives maturing into adulthood. If the average lifespan became, say, 1 million years, I wouldn't want it to take 250,000 years to reach adulthood (which wouldn't be defined by physical maturity but by "ability to communicate as equals with the older part of the population" or something like that). It's not some kind of totally new and unprecedented problem though, of course. We'd have to rearrange society a lot to accommodate indefinite life extension, but it seems doable.
Posted by steven (Member # 8099) on :
quote:Originally posted by sinflower: Yup, just much larger scale. Currently, people spend 1/4 or more of their lives maturing into adulthood. If the average lifespan became, say, 1 million years, I wouldn't want it to take 250,000 years to reach adulthood (which wouldn't be defined by physical maturity but by "ability to communicate as equals with the older part of the population" or something like that). It's not some kind of totally new and unprecedented problem though, of course. We'd have to rearrange society a lot to accommodate indefinite life extension, but it seems doable.
The question then becomes, as technology gets better, what happens to the length of time to maturity? Does technology keep it the same length as it is now, or even make it shorter, through enhancing people's intelligence genetically, and also through more efficient teaching methods (and also through being taught the actual truth, versus successively more complex theoretical models that never quiiiiiite equal the truth)?
However, maybe the time to maturity gets unavoidably longer, due to the tremendous mass of information that a member of a very high-tech starfaring species has to know/learn, to be a fully functional member of the society.
Posted by mr_porteiro_head (Member # 4644) on :
quote:Because they would, on average, be older and have more life experience/wisdom? Or because they would have more accumulated power, i.e. in the form of financial resources? Because if the main problem is the latter, then that should be remedied fairly easily: simply have each parent pass on all of their resources to their child upon dying.
It's much more than that.
Right now, no matter how entrenched a group in power is, they've got to grow old and die eventually. Sure, they can try to pass that power on to their heirs (literally or otherwise), but that's never as successful as just staying in power.
For example, throughout the course of one's career, it is normal for one to climb the corporate ladder, to one extent or another, as time goes on. One of the biggest reasons for this is that the people who have been in the company the longest keep retiring, creating vacancies for their underlings to move up.
If a significant group of the population never retired, they wouldn't automatically vacate their positions of power. The breeding population would, in general, be relegated to the lower echelons while policy would be largely dictated by the immortals already in power.
Posted by mr_porteiro_head (Member # 4644) on :
Of course, this would still be a problem even if the entire population became immortal -- those in power would stay in power. Forever. If you're at the bottom of the ladder, you'd tend to stay there. Forever.
Posted by Mucus (Member # 9735) on :
Unless they started cutting off each other's heads. There should be a movie.
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
But we already have that problem; the entire banking system is being run by thousand-year-old vampires. :nods:
Posted by mr_porteiro_head (Member # 4644) on :
quote:Originally posted by Mucus: Unless they started cutting off each other's heads. There should be a movie.
But not a series of them. There should be only one.
Posted by The White Whale (Member # 6594) on :
quote:If a significant group of the population never retired, they wouldn't automatically vacate their positions of power. The breeding population would, in general, be relegated to the lower echelons while policy would be largely dictated by the immortals already in power.
"Immortal" is a bit of a misnomer. The long lived portions of the population won't live literally forever, they'll just live for a long amount of time. They won't age, and presumably they will obtain protections against accidental death, but they'll still die eventually. So they'll still retire. Just...after a very long time.
When you say the "breeding population," you seem to be suggesting that the population will split into two separate groups, one of which reproduces and one of which doesn't. So the children of "breeders" (people who voluntarily suicided in order to reproduce early, rather than waiting for their chance in the lottery) would also become, with few exceptions, breeders. But I don't think that's very likely; for one thing, it necessitates that the two groups are almost entirely socially separated, so that memes like "living a long time without giving birth is good" don't travel between them.
Here's a scenario that I consider more likely: most people choose to wait until they win the reproduction lottery to reproduce. Some people precommit to suicide because they can't bear to wait that long to reproduce, but those people are fairly evenly distributed across the population, rather than being concentrated into one separate, clearly defined underclass.
As for the scenario where everyone is immortal, I don't see why that would create a rigid, unchanging social hierarchy either. Assuming there are enough resources for everyone, and some fairly efficient system is created to distribute them, there's no need for such a hierarchy, is there? Personally, after a few thousand years of being mighty god-king, I'd get bored and quit to become an artisan or something. No need to chop off my head.
Longer life spans also mean that people have time to try out many different lifestyles. There'll be no more "I can't become a nature poet because even though I could be highly successful, I could also fail miserably and live in poverty for my whole life. I only have one go at this--might as well do something safe, like accounting."
[ August 25, 2010, 11:15 PM: Message edited by: sinflower ]
Posted by mr_porteiro_head (Member # 4644) on :
quote: Assuming there are enough resources for everyone, and some fairly efficient system is created to distribute them, there's no need for such a hierarchy, is there?
Are there enough resources for everybody in America? Could we easily come up with a fairly efficient system to distribute them? And yet do we still feel the need for hierarchical organizations?
Yes, yes, yes.
Posted by sinflower (Member # 12228) on :
Of course we have hierarchical structures, but I was referring to "rigid, unchanging" hierarchies specifically, which we don't have even now. And once people are immortal, it'll only take them a small proportion of their lives to become financially and socially secure, and then exploration/variety of experiences will become a priority. So yes, there will be hierarchical structures, obviously, but they'd be fairly fluid, because people would change their careers and interests. I'd like to think that a race of extremely long lived and intelligent people would manage to create more enlightened and effective social structures than we have now, too, but perhaps that's just wishful thinking.
Posted by Strider (Member # 1807) on :
quote:Originally posted by mr_porteiro_head:
quote:Originally posted by Mucus: Unless they started cutting off each other's heads. There should be a movie.
But not a series of them. There should be only one.
that was good...
Posted by Jenos (Member # 12168) on :
I have a question regarding the actual implementation of immortality techniques. Is it hypothesized that the shift will be something like [Average Lifespan 100]->[Average Lifespan 10000000], or is it considered more likely to be gradual, such as [Average Lifespan 100]->[Average Lifespan 500]...->[Average Lifespan 100000]?
Because if its the latter, then we don't even need to worry about a lot of the stuff thats being remarked in this thread. When the average lifespan was 40 people didn't worry about the changes needed to a society when the lifespan would be 70, so wouldn't a gradual increase to immortality be the same?
Posted by sinflower (Member # 12228) on :
Good point! The gradual extension seems more intuitively likely to me, but I don't know enough about the field to say. One situation I can think of off the top of my head where life spans would increase dramatically at once is mind uploading.
Posted by The Rabbit (Member # 671) on :
quote:Originally posted by King of Men: Cool, in this case, means "having that quality that makes girls want to date you".
Which girls? "Girls" are far from some homogeneous groups. That quality which makes some girls want to date you, will make other wish you'd choke to death on your lunch.
Posted by mr_porteiro_head (Member # 4644) on :
quote:Because if its the latter, then we don't even need to worry about a lot of the stuff thats being remarked in this thread. When the average lifespan was 40 people didn't worry about the changes needed to a society when the lifespan would be 70, so wouldn't a gradual increase to immortality be the same?
Failure to worry about those gradual changes is part of the reason why Social Security is failing.
Posted by Raymond Arnold (Member # 11712) on :
quote:Which girls? "Girls" are far from some homogeneous groups. That quality which makes some girls want to date you, will make other wish you'd choke to death on your lunch.
I think we are all aware that the subjects of guys, girls, communication and dating are all extremely compex, nuanced and varied. But for sake of argument, I actually think "cool" here is mostly a synonym for "confident" which is generally an attractive trait for most people.
Certain types of people who imagine themselves at the top of the social hierarchy conflate "coolness" with other things (wearing certain clothes/hairstyles, participating in certain activities, NOT participating in certain other activities). When in fact, in any given population, there are people who simply have the confidence to do whatever they want and look attractive while doing so. And they are surrounded by people who see that the cool people have higher status, without really understanding why. So many (most?) people try to emulate the various other things the cool kids are doing, missing the fact that the confidence was what made that cool in the first place.
The result is a bunch of interconnected but largely independent social hierarchies. Doing everything "right" in the jock hierarchy won't make you cooler in an abstract absolute sense, but it'll make you more attractive to that football player or cheerleader who you had your eye on, which will reinforce the belief that copying certain activities/trends is the best way to become "cool."
Then if you go and try to work your charms on the cute goth girl, you will find that you still are as ultimately uncool as before, and the social currency you built up in Jock-slavia is meaningless in the People's Republic of Gothika.
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
quote:Originally posted by The Rabbit:
quote:Originally posted by King of Men: Cool, in this case, means "having that quality that makes girls want to date you".
Which girls? "Girls" are far from some homogeneous groups. That quality which makes some girls want to date you, will make other wish you'd choke to death on your lunch.
Granted, but due to the vagaries of language, it's not too unlikely that they would all refer to whatever quality they want as "being cool", and the analysis of how uncool it is to proclaim your coolness would hold for them all.
On another subject, I think the deep pondering of the implications of life-extension is rather missing the point. Certainly, solving the problem of old age will lead to new problems; so has every other technology. But that doesn't hold water as a real objection to pursuing such a technique, because when push comes to shove, nobody is going to be persuaded by such arguments that they, personally, ought not to take their medicine. Consider: If there existed a therapy that would stave off old age and (keeping to what's realistic for the next century) allow you to live to 120 with the body and mind of a healthy 80-year-old, are you really, truly going to refuse it out of concern for creating a rigid social hierarchy? I think not. Similarly for all the other long-term things that have been raised. If you had the choice between death and life, would you choose your own personal death in order to conserve the carbon reserves of the Universe? Colour me skeptical.
Posted by Black Fox (Member # 1986) on :
I think that even in our society today there is a large drift occurring in how "mature" some adults are. That is that some people simply mature and gain knowledge at a higher rate than others. That simply means that if you greatly increase the average lifespan as well as increasing the functional lifespan you will start to see a serious stratification of maturity and knowledge within age groups. Basically you will end up with some 200 year old idiots no where near the maturity of the majority of 50 year olds.
So my prediction is that as average lifespans increase the actual age of the person will have less to do with their status in society then it does today.
Posted by Raymond Arnold (Member # 11712) on :
quote:So my prediction is that as average lifespans increase the actual age of the person will have less to do with their status in society then it does today.
Interesting notion. Not sure if I 100% agree on your premise (namely, I'm not certain that we're seeing any more variation in "maturity" now than we have in earlier years, and if so, I think it has more to do with changing norms than changing lifespans).
I think your conclusion is likely true, but it probably has more to do with the accompanying changing norms.
Posted by MightyCow (Member # 9253) on :
1) Pay the neighbor kid $10 to mow your lawn while you take a nap.
2) Girls who want to choke cool guys aren't the kind of girls a cool guy gives a crap about.
3) There are already immortals who control a majority of the world's power, they're called corporations.
4) While you nerds have been fighting over nerd stuff, I've been making out with hot chicks.
Posted by The Rabbit (Member # 671) on :
Below are some more or less random thoughts I've had while reading this thread.
1. The argument about using up every carbon atom in the Universe is an example of "Reductio ad absurdum", i.e. following the logical implications of "immortality" to an absurd conclusion. The point of which was not to make people worry about using up every carbon atom in the Universe. It was to point out that being "immortal" is fundamentally different than living a really really long but finite time and requires looking at things in a fundamentally different way. If you truly contemplate what it would mean to live forever, the line of thought leads to all kinds of absurd conclusions which logically implies that it is absurd to want to live forever. When Lesswrong says things like "linear growth is manageable", it's evident he's still ignoring the implications of an infinite lifespan. Growth at any rate is not sustainable forever in a finite universe. Like most people, Lesswrong seems to intuit that infinite is somehow similar to some really really big finite number and it just isn't. If we are talking about living forever, it is irrational to argue "the consequences of X is so far in the future we can ignore it". If you are going to live forever you will live a finite time before the bill comes due, and an infinite length of time after. Ignoring that is irrational.
2. Resource limitations aren't just an abstract hypothetical argument. Right now, this planet is facing imminent crisis. We currently have a billion human beings living in abject poverty. Fossil fuel resources are being rapidly depleted. We are exceeding the ability of the earth to absorb the waste we produce which is resulting in unprecedented changes in the atmosphere and climate of the planet. It isn't rational or ethical to consider whether we want to extend the human life span at this point in history, without talking about the implications that will have. Rationality necessarily implies logical consideration of the most likely results of your choices. Would you want to live to the age of 200 if doing so would mean an additional million people would starve to death? Would you want to live to the age of 200 if doing so would result in wars that took millions of lives? Would you want to live to 200 if it meant living in a house half the size of your current home? Never traveling further than you could go by bicycle? Never eating meat? Would you want to live to 200 hundred if it meant destruction of every last bit of the world's wilderness? Would you want to live to 200 if it meant extinction of 1/2 the world's species?
KoM, you are unarguably wrong when you say no one would find those arguments convincing. I and many people I know do find them convincing. In fact, I think if those arguments don't at least give you pause, something's wrong with your moral compass.
3. The increases in life expectancy which science has wrought thus far are fundamentally different from technology that would increase the human life span. What we have done thus far is to increase the average life span by curing diseases and reducing the accidents that lead to premature death. The maximum life span hasn't changed at all and the rate of aging hasn't changed appreciably (it may actually have increased over the past century). Increasing the natural maximum lifespan will undoubtably have different consequences. If we are seriously considering whether we want to extend the human life span, rationality demand we consider what those consequences might be. At a very minimum these considerations should direct what kind of research we do in this area.
4. Our biology is currently tuned to a life span of ~80 years. As children, our brains are optimized for learning language and memory. We start to loose those abilities at puberty. Abstract reasoning skills develop in the teenage years. The judgement centers of the brain don't mature until our twenties. Speed and strength peak somewhere in our twenties, endurance continues to increase into our forties. Other skills like compassion, empathy, ability to comprehend complexity, etc. continue to improve into our old age. In Hindu culture, a person's life divides into four phases each of about 20 years. The first ~20 years are childhood where one devotes ones self to learning, the second ~20 years are parenthood where one devotes oneself to children and family, the third ~20 years are citizenship where one devotes ones life to community and the final ~20 years one is to devote to spiritual/metaphysical pursuits. Science is finding that our biology is tuned to this kind of rhythm. If we were to double our lifespan, what parts of that sequence would you want to lengthen? If we were to be immortal, at what equivalent mortal age would we want to be suspended?
These are not intended as arguments against life extension, just things worth considering as part of the question. It's also worth noting that when I was twenty, I would likely have believed I wanted to stay forever in my twenties, but now I think I'd rather be forty than 25.
5. We use the word "want" to include too many things that are highly dissimilar neurologically. If you think you want to do things like eat, sleep, mate, be attractive to the opposite sex, have friends, fall in love, have children etc for some set of logical reasons, you are deluding yourself. Those desires arise in the primitive instinctive parts of our brain we have in common with all vertebrate animals. The aren't conscious choices, they are biological drives. They are fundamentally different from wanting a well manicured lawn or a Ph.D. As human beings, we are driven by instinct but we are also able to consciously consider the longer term consequences of our actions. We don't really understand how that conscious process arises from our biology but we do know that it's physiology is very different from our instinctive drives. We also know what its like to have conscious thoughts and that some things (like writing an internet post) are impossible without conscious thought. Because we are capable of conscious thought, we are able to weigh our options and override our instinctive drives when they conflict with outcomes we desire in the long term. The problem is that we have a nearly unavoidable tendency to rationalize following our instincts. The stronger our drives our, the harder it is to avoid defending them. It's very easy to persuade ourselves that we want to take a nap for some set of very logical well thought out reasons, when the real truth that our biological drive to sleep has been triggered by the drop in pressure associated with the storm front that's moving in. It would behoove anyone striving to be rational, to approach any reasoning presented in defense of a basic biological drive with extreme skepticism. It is in our nature to be biased in favor of our biological drives and therefore often very difficult to see the flaws in the reasons we construct to defend it.
The desire to live and fear of death are instinctive biological drives that have served us very well from an evolutionary perspective. From the perspective of evolution, it seems completely natural that older people would be less likely to see living forever as desirable. Once you have passed on your genes and helped to ensure the survival of your children and grandchildren, there is no evolutionary advantage to staying alive. In fact, death is an essential element of the evolutionary process. (Whether or not continued biological evolution is a good thing or absence their of a bad thing is another question certainly worthy of debate).
6. The more I read Lesswrong the more he irritates me. He is very articulate in describing rationalism and identifying the major caveats humans face when striving to be rational. Despite that, he is seems oblivious to his own logical errors which are rampant. He is frequently as guilty of those logical fallacies as anyone I've read. As a rationalist, he should be aware that the only reliable way to combat personal bias is to devote oneself to disproving ones own position, yet he does exactly the opposite. His arguments in favor of immortality have logical holes you could drive a bus through. I read one of his essays in which he attempts to explain what the younger Lesswrong believed about morality versus what the new improved Lesswrong believes. It made me want to tear my eyes out. How could anyone so self obsessed be so completely lacking in self awareness?
[ August 27, 2010, 02:40 PM: Message edited by: The Rabbit ]
Posted by mr_porteiro_head (Member # 4644) on :
That was a great post, Rabbit.
---
You know, the fear of embarrassment is very closely tied to our fear of ostrasizement, exile, and death. Which makes sense, as our ancestors involved in an environment where exile like did mean death.
Some people, including myself when I lived in the city, maintain their lawns not so much because they want a beautiful lawn, but because they're afraid of what the neighbors will think if they don't. Because of that fear of ostracization, which in many ways, is really a fear of death.
Posted by Samprimary (Member # 8561) on :
quote:Originally posted by MightyCow: 4) While you nerds have been fighting over nerd stuff, I've been making out with hot chicks.
come on, you apes, do you want to live forever
Posted by The Rabbit (Member # 671) on :
quote:You know, the fear of embarrassment is very closely tied to our fear of ostrasizement, exile, and death. Which makes sense, as our ancestors involved in an environment where exile like did mean death
Oh absolutely. We have evolved as social animals because being an accepted part of the community greatly improved our chances of survival as individuals. Hence we have a biological drive for friendship and a biological drive to avoid rejection by our community. We probably also have a biological drive to reject those who don't adhere to community norms because free loaders and misfits threaten the well being of the community.
In the selfish gene, Dawkins argues that competition always wins out over cooperation but he's simply wrong. Both intra- and inter-species cooperation are the rule in nature not the exception. One look at human intestinal bacteria (for example) will show you that there are millions of species that have thrived based on cooperation with humans and only a handful that have made it as our competitors.
Posted by Raymond Arnold (Member # 11712) on :
quote:In the selfish gene, Dawkins argues that competition always wins out over cooperation but he's simply wrong
I haven't actually read the book (on my to-do list) but this seems like such an obviously wrong statement that I have a hard time believing he said it in such a simple form. I don't s'pose there's a place online that showcases his argument in a bit more context?
Posted by Raymond Arnold (Member # 11712) on :
quote:6. The more I read Lesswrong the more he irritates me. He is very articulate in describing rationalism and identifying the major caveats humans face when striving to be rational. Despite that, he is seems oblivious to his own logical errors which are rampant. He is frequently as guilty of those logical fallacies as anyone I've read. As a rationalist, he should be aware that the only reliable way to combat personal bias is to devote oneself to disproving ones own position, yet he does exactly the opposite. His arguments in favor of immortality have logical holes you could drive a bus through. I read one of his essays in which he attempts to explain what the younger Lesswrong believed about morality versus what the new improved Lesswrong believes. It made me want to tear my eyes out. How could anyone so self obsessed be so completely lacking in self awareness?
Brief note: my understanding is that Less Wrong is the name of the community. Eliezer is the name of the guy you're presumably talking about. He uses the pen name Less Wrong when writing the Harry Potter fic but I think that's the only place he actually uses it, and there it's mostly because he intends the work to be kind of an advertisement for the Less Wrong site.
I haven't read enough things that he's written on the main site to get a feel for how often I disagree with him. I largely agree with you on about the issues you present with immortality. But so far I've read plenty of good stuff as well. The majority of his advice has been pretty mind opening for me, even if he doesn't actually follow that advice very well.
I found the extensive "look at how stupid Eliezer-1991 was" series to be particularly interesting. Partly because it really made me stop and think about what biases I currently have. Partly because there was a sort of... I guess Inception-like ending, wherein I lack the knowledge to evaluate his more recent positions on my own and he just outlined extensively how a supposedly rational person can be very wrong, so how do I know whether to take his current position as any more valid?
The truly frightening thing facing me right now is the discussions about how rarely people actually chang their minds. I know that I have a lot of core beliefs that have remained unchanged for over a decade, despite me putting a lot of time and thought into trying to analyze them. ("Doubt: - noun- the method Descarte used to produce the exact same beliefs he had in the first place").
Since officially adopting a position of skepticism about 8 years ago I've made an effort not to commit to beliefs so that I don't become too attached to them, but I wonder how many beliefs it's already too late for me to change, no matter how rational I try to be.
Posted by Mucus (Member # 9735) on :
quote:Originally posted by Raymond Arnold: ... I don't s'pose there's a place online that showcases his argument in a bit more context?
Not from my reading of it. The book spends a lot of time explaining why altruism and co-operation are superior strategies in a world with selfish genes. In fact, thats why an alternative title was 'The Cooperative Gene'
quote:When Lesswrong says things like "linear growth is manageable", it's evident he's still ignoring the implications of an infinite lifespan. Growth at any rate is not sustainable forever in a finite universe.
When people, including Eliezer, talk about "infinite" lifespans, they don't generally mean literally infinite lifespans, they're using the word as a substitute for "really, really, almost unconceivably long" lifespans. I think they just use the concept of infinity to test the breaking points of their theoretical models.
quote:5. We use the word "want" to include too many things that are highly dissimilar neurologically. If you think you want to do things like eat, sleep, mate, be attractive to the opposite sex, have friends, fall in love, have children etc for some set of logical reasons, you are deluding yourself.
This is your most interesting point, and a lot of people on LessWrong must agree, because they've written a ton of articles discussing the nature of value and of wanting, how to distinguish instrumental from terminal values, how to protect human value, and so on. I think part of why they're so obsessed with it is because many of them work in the field of artificial intelligence, and they want to figure out how to program ethical systems from scratch. I can't find all the articles, but a quick search yields an interesting article that relates to the difference between wanting/liking
And here is an article addressing the "eternal boredom" problem, and which parts of the human psyche we can't discard without losing value (so that we don't end up as, for instance, paperclip maximizers.) This gets into your question about how we should adapt the human mind to longer lifespans, too.
I've only just started reading the site, and it is fascinating.
[ August 27, 2010, 05:47 PM: Message edited by: sinflower ]
Posted by The Rabbit (Member # 671) on :
quote:When people, including Eliezer, talk about "infinite" lifespans, they don't generally mean literally infinite lifespans, they're using the word as a substitute for "really, really, almost unconceivably long" lifespans. I think they just use the concept of infinity to test the breaking points of their theoretical models.
That's a really really lame excuse for flawed reasoning. It begs the question two really critical questions "How long is long enough?" and "How can one rationally want something they consider inconceivable?"
Posted by sinflower (Member # 12228) on :
Why do you see it as an excuse? I see it as realism. I mean, heat death of the universe and all.
The answer to the first question is "we should strive to keep living for as long as we can." The limits are in our ability to keep on living, not in how much we should want to keep on living.
As for the second question. Because of scope insensitivity ( http://lesswrong.com/lw/hw/scope_insensitivity/ ) it's hard for human brains to "conceive" of the difference between, say, saving the lives of 2000 and 20,000 birds. However, that doesn't mean I can't rationally have a want like "save as many birds as possible," I just have to wrestle with my hardware a bit to realize this want. Similarly, I can rationally have the want "live as long as possible," as long as I hold that 1) being alive is good and 2) being alive doesn't stop being good at any specific age.
Although a modification of the want to "live as long as possible unless an evil genius has me trapped and plans to torture me for the rest of my life" might be better. Posted by MightyCow (Member # 9253) on :
The Rabbit said:
quote: "How can one rationally want something they consider inconceivable?"
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
Claims of the form "X shows very bad reasoning" are usually all the better for some specific examples. Otherwise people might think that the actual case is "X annoys me", which is orthogonal to whether he's right or not.
Posted by Black Fox (Member # 1986) on :
Scope insensitivity for the most part only really matters when you start looking at moral and ethics from a utilitarian lens. If you come from many other, and I would personally say better, moral and ethical systems it is not the number that matters so much as what the event is.
That and I've noticed that a lot of the survey data that has been used on less wrong for one purpose or another has problems in how it takes it data. For example you have to look at other considerations taken into account when you look at data along these lines. Mainly that the moral action or the supposed ability to see the scope of a moral action may not be the limiting factor in donating assistance etc. Instead it can be anything from financial ability, plain arbitrary numbers pulled out of the blue.
For example, if I pay someone a tip at a restaurant there is a generally accepted range in the United States for doing so. People generally have no problem giving "appropriate" tips. Should a German come to the states the servers will be angry as in Germany tips are called Trinkgeld (drink money) and are generally only a dollar or two more than the cost of the meal. Their cultural scale does not match to the United States and they would be frowned on by the wait staff.
All I mean to show through that example is when you have a cultural wide system of approaching something like generosity it is not universal. When people do not have an established scale of sorts they tend to give low arbitrary amounts to help people.
Anyhow, most of these conversations on Hatrack tend to degenerate into competitions instead of conversations. At least fall semester starts soon.
Posted by steven (Member # 8099) on :
quote:Originally posted by Black Fox: Scope insensitivity for the most part only really matters when you start looking at moral and ethics from a utilitarian lens. If you come from many other, and I would personally say BETTER, moral and ethical systems it is not the number that matters so much as what the event is.
Better from what universally-accepted viewpoint?
I would humbly submit that any other viewpoint besides a utilitarian or pragmatic one could/will never be universally accepted. The only way to make some other viewpoint universally accepted is through force or lies, and neither of those last forever, realistically.
Pragmatism/utilitarianism are the natural result of knowledge/awareness. The more knowledge you have in a given area, the more you move inexorably toward those points of view in that given area, IMHO.
So, to sum up, my thoughts on your "BETTER" are, "prove it". If you have a problem with proving it, then, rest assured, convincing me will be very difficult.
Posted by Raymond Arnold (Member # 11712) on :
quote:Anyhow, most of these conversations on Hatrack tend to degenerate into competitions instead of conversations. At least fall semester starts soon.
This is a phenomenon I've been pondering for a while (specifically due to events on Hatrack, but also because I've read some extensive things about it on lesswrong that made me think a bit). While I happen to be generally utilitarian I think I a) agree with you in certain ways, and b) after seeing a some complex issues that don't seem to be adequately addressed by any form of ethics (without arbitrarily handwaving a million individual cases), I'm at a point in my life where I'm willing to re-evaluate my ethical framework. So there is a slightly higher than average chance that I will benefit from discussion from this and (I'd like to think) higher than average chance that someone who disagrees with me would benefit also.
First off, I'll note that I don't think ethics has any inherent value. Any form of ethics is only meaningful insofar as it is useful to someone. For most of history than meant "useful for humans" (and more specifically, humans in power). We're approaching a point where we're considering the moral relevance of non-human sentients. I strongly believe this is a good thing, but I can't necessarily prove it. (I could throw out some arguments, but I'm pretty sure someone could easily shoot them down).
(Just got a mental image of "argument skeet shooting", heh)
I think that any moral framework is ultimately a form of utilitarianism. If you believe that people have fundamental rights such as liberty, freedom of religion, survival, procreation, etc - no matter what those rights or obligations are, there will come times when you are forced to make hard choices weighing one person's Right X vs 100 people's Right Y.
Given that not everyone can even agree what the rights/obligations ARE, any system designed to encompass all of humanity (let alone all sentient life) is, as steven says, going to have to either force everyone to value the same things, or make various compromises, and ultimately the starting premise "let everyone be as happy as possible" is the only one that has a shot of satisfying everyone's desires.
I do think there are qualitative differences between kinds of happiness (and actions that affect it). I don't *want* to believe Eliezer when he states that it's better for one person to be tortured for 50 years than a million bajillion quintillion people to get a dust speck in their eye, because there is a qualitative difference between being tortured and getting a dust speck in your eye. But throw enough dust specks in people's eyes over and over and eventually it becomes a form of torture in and off itself and I can't come up with a compelling reason to pick one specific point dividing "torture" from "not-torture".
This sort of concern is not unique to utilitarianism. Most (all?) ethical systems are designed to be effective based on the types of problems that people are used to dealing with on a regular basis. They all break down when faced with decisions that they weren't designed to handle. It's only in the last few centuries that we're starting to realize the magnitude of how many different problems we might have to face someday, and how complex the numbers involved with those problems might be. I think utilitarianism collapses when you reach the ability to generate bio(cyber?) engineered pleasure centers whose capacity for happiness grossly outproduces anything traditional human activity could produce. But I don't think other forms of morality can solve that other than slapping arbitrary "we don't like that, so don't do it" stickers on everything controversial.
Also: I'm vaguely aware that there's a difference between utilitarianism and consequentialism but I'm not sure what it is. A while ago I read about a few different modern ethics approaches that were supposed to be different but all seemed effectively the same to me.
Posted by sinflower (Member # 12228) on :
quote:Scope insensitivity for the most part only really matters when you start looking at moral and ethics from a utilitarian lens.
Sure. But Rabbit questioned whether I could rationally have a want like "live as long as possible" despite scope insensitivity to the value of such a long life, and I think the bird example illustrates why I can have this want within a consistent ethical system. I probably lean towards ethical egoism more than agent-blind utilitarianism anyway, and it's still a consistent want.
By the way, what ethical system do you think is best?
quote: I think utilitarianism collapses when you reach the ability to generate bio(cyber?) engineered pleasure centers whose capacity for happiness grossly outproduces anything traditional human activity could produce. But I don't think other forms of morality can solve that other than slapping arbitrary "we don't like that, so don't do it" stickers on everything controversial.
Preference utilitarianism, maybe? Preference utilitarianism holds that the right action is the one that satisfies people's preferences or desires. If I prefer not to experience pleasure except as a reward for completing a challenging task, for example, then it would be wrong to force me to experience pleasure in any other situation.
The advantage of preference utilitarianism is that you don't have to create a universal guideline for what "happiness" is, since every person's definition of that is bound to vary. The disadvantage, of course, is that it's hard to figure out people's actual preferences; self reports can be incomplete.
[ August 28, 2010, 05:17 PM: Message edited by: sinflower ]
Posted by Raymond Arnold (Member # 11712) on :
I would just like to note to Rabbit that the "Theory of Fun" sequence explores what the "maximum life expectancy" for a true immortal is before running out of fun, factoring in the amount of atoms necessary for a brain to experience said fun over time. It includes musings on the answer if we are not changing our brains at all, if we are gradually increasing our brain capacity over time biologically, or installing ourselves on computer systems that don't hinge on biology.
He makes an important note that he prefers to altering environments before altering minds, since it's a lot easier to screw up when you're altering the latter. If we ARE altering minds, one thing he explores is the "ideal" rate to improve our intelligence/rate-of-data-processing, such that we get to appreciate each additional increase for as long as possible and maximize the satisfaction we get from solving increasingly complex mysteries.
I haven't got to the end and I don't now if he had a final conclusion, but he clearly has given a lot of thought to all the points you raise.
Posted by Geraine (Member # 9913) on :
Awww nuts. I knew I shouldn't have read this thread. It got me thinking about my own mortality and how everything I do really doesn't mean anything in the whole grand scheme of things. I'm going to have to plot world domination in order to be remembered. I'm thinking the "Hatrack Empire" would be a good name.
That brings up another good question though. If I want to do something to be remembered by, why? If I die and ceast to exist, I won't care if I am remembered or not. This makes our lives completely trivial. What point is there to anything we do? To progressing through life? Working, reproducing, having fun, if it doesn't really matter, why do we do it? Happiness wouldn't matter if we just cease to exist when we die.
Goodness, I just realized that I sound suicidal. Don't worry, I'm not!
I'd live forever if I could. I'd rather go the cyborg route. I would let them freeze me though if they thawed me out when the giant mutated insects invade earth. (Blue Gender reference there)
Posted by Tresopax (Member # 1063) on :
I'm backtracking here but...
quote:Do you want to live forever, Harry?" [said Dumbledore, incredulously]
"Yes, and so do you," said Harry. "I want to live one more day. Tomorrow I will still want to live one more day. Therefore I want to live forever, proof by induction on the positive integers. If you don't want to die, it means you want to live forever. If you don't want to live forever, it means you want to die. You've got to do one or the other... I'm not getting through here, am I."
Harry is making the wrong inference here, based on his assumptions. The correct conclusion would be "Every day you are living you want to live at least one more day". That is different from saying you want to live forever. Sort of like how you might want another potato chip after each time you eat a potato chip, but you simultaneously don't want to eat an infinite number of potato chips. The mistaken assumption is "If I want X, and if X implies Y, then I want Y" which is not a true assumption in many cases.
And that makes it an excellent example of why people should never get arrogant about their beliefs in the name of "Rationality". Rationality is a tricky thing that inevitably relies on countless subtle assumptions. It's easy to "rationally" conclude almost whatever you want by overlooking even just a few small details or assumptions.
[ August 30, 2010, 02:15 PM: Message edited by: Tresopax ]
Posted by Raymond Arnold (Member # 11712) on :
quote:Harry is making the wrong inference here, based on his assumptions. The correct conclusion would be "Every day you are living you want to live at least one more day". That is different from saying you want to live forever. Sort of like how you might want another potato chip after each time you eat a potato chip, but you simultaneously don't want to eat an infinite number of potato chips.
As Rabbit has noted, it is particularly interesting/frustrating that Eliezer has clearly thought a lot about this and still appears to have ended up too strongly attached to this particular belief. (He actually brings up the Potato chip analogy at some point, yet as far as I can tell manages to not apply it to Immortality).
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
quote:What point is there to anything we do? To progressing through life? Working, reproducing, having fun, if it doesn't really matter, why do we do it?
Of course it matters. Why this demand that your actions should have some significance on the grand scale of the cosmos? What are we, little boys pissing our names in the snow? We are here now, we are alive for the next twenty years; what we do matters now. It's fine to keep your eyes on the skies; but if you don't look down once in a while to ensure your feet are still on the ground, you will stumble.
I also point out that we live at a cusp when humanity might either decline and go extinct, or else grow out into the universe and continue for the next hundred million years; at such a cusp your actions can matter greatly. Think of Pastwatch, and the difference of having a Columbus who didn't consider brown-skinned non-Christians to be half-trainable monkeys; well, here's your chance to have a similar impact!
Posted by Geraine (Member # 9913) on :
quote:Originally posted by King of Men: Of course it matters. Why this demand that your actions should have some significance on the grand scale of the cosmos? What are we, little boys pissing our names in the snow? We are here now, we are alive for the next twenty years; what we do matters now. It's fine to keep your eyes on the skies; but if you don't look down once in a while to ensure your feet are still on the ground, you will stumble.
I also point out that we live at a cusp when humanity might either decline and go extinct, or else grow out into the universe and continue for the next hundred million years; at such a cusp your actions can matter greatly. Think of Pastwatch, and the difference of having a Columbus who didn't consider brown-skinned non-Christians to be half-trainable monkeys; well, here's your chance to have a similar impact!
I agree with you, but WHY should anything I do, no matter how insignificant, matter now? If what I do now won't matter to me when I'm dead, why should it matter presently?
Who knows, I could go back to school and study and one day come up with a cure for cancer or solve the Navier-Stokes equations. It may matter to others during their lives, but if I'm dead, it won't matter to me, nor would I care.
Posted by Raymond Arnold (Member # 11712) on :
Because it matters to you, period. Things do not matter, in the abstract. Things matter to people who have a propensity for caring about things. Right now you care about things. Consequently, right now, you probably should do things you, personally, right now, care about. This can be finding a cure for cancer or it can be playing basketball with your son every afternoon. Or arguing on the internet with people about the meaning of life.
If life really has no meaning to you without eternal consequences, feel free to stop doing stuff and/or believe in eternal consequences, but I personally care a lot about who I am right now, regardless of how little I will care about it later. So I intend to continue to do things.
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
There is no judge of what matters outside your own brain; your judgement stands alone. If you think something matters, it does; if not, not. And this would be the case, even if an all-powerful god should reveal that such-and-such an action is forbidden, or is sacred; for you would still have to make your own judgement on whether that god was worth listening to. Thus there cannot be any outside standard of mattering; and if, in your estimation, life in fact does not matter, I can only counsel that you follow the consequence of your judgement, and jump off a bridge, or ram an explosive-filled truck into the White House, or whatever means of suicide takes your fancy. But I submit that this is not, in fact, your real and honest judgement; for you have not done thus, but have acted as though life did indeed matter to you.
Touching the potato-chip analogy, I suggest if you genuinely do not want to live another day, that is easily enough arranged; and indeed, if you feel you want to live tomorrow but do not want to live beyond forty years, that's easily done too - just take up smoking. But in fact our desires are usually inconsistent here: We take up smoking, and then when forty years have gone by we find that, by damn, we do want to live another day. Eliezer is merely suggesting that we should take the consequence of our belief that the smoker is not acting in his best interests. Humans have a short time horizon; consequently our desires for forty years hence, and for one day after forty years have passed, are often in conflict. But we are usually more rational in judging one day ahead than in judging forty years (an activity for which our ancestors had little opportunity); therefore, we should listen to the one-day-ahead part of the brain, and act in accordance with what we think it will be saying in forty years.
Note that this is not an endorsement of short-term planning; it is exactly the opposite. It says that we should act, today, so that we will not curse our own short-sightedness in the future. And that means taking our best guess at what we'll want for one-day-ahead in forty years, and acting so that this desire is not thwarted; and our best (first-order) guess is that we'll want the same things in forty years as we do now.
Posted by Raymond Arnold (Member # 11712) on :
I think that's among the more persuasive wordings of the argument that I've seen thus far.
Posted by BandoCommando (Member # 7746) on :
quote:Originally posted by rollainm:
quote:Originally posted by rivka: The perspective of a teenager =! to that of a 70 year old. Or a 100 year old.
Pretending that it is, and that life experience can be reduced to mere mathematics, is only one of the many issues I have with the lesswrong folks.
I vaguely remember an episode of Scrubs that presents this clash of ideas in a nutshell. I don't remember much else, but in it an elderly patient - who had lived a good life and experienced lots of great things - expressed her desire to live as long as possible rather than choosing a more "peaceful" drug-induced death, and J.D. just didn't get that.
I don't think this is a simple matter of lacking life experience.
Not quite right, I think. The episode you're referring to, I believe, had an elderly patient who was diagnosed with kidney failure of some sort and needed dialysis in order to go on living. She declined and said that she'd rather just die. Then a ton of bricks fell on J.D.s head.
Posted by Raymond Arnold (Member # 11712) on :
Yeah, I was remembering that episode differently too. Assuming we're talking about the same thing, JD's trying to give her reasons to keep on living ("seen the Eiffel Tower?" "Yep" "Seen the Meiffel tower?" "Oh now you're just making stuff up"). But she's already done everything she feels the need to do.
Posted by Geraine (Member # 9913) on :
quote:Originally posted by King of Men: There is no judge of what matters outside your own brain; your judgement stands alone. If you think something matters, it does; if not, not. And this would be the case, even if an all-powerful god should reveal that such-and-such an action is forbidden, or is sacred; for you would still have to make your own judgement on whether that god was worth listening to. Thus there cannot be any outside standard of mattering; and if, in your estimation, life in fact does not matter, I can only counsel that you follow the consequence of your judgement, and jump off a bridge, or ram an explosive-filled truck into the White House, or whatever means of suicide takes your fancy. But I submit that this is not, in fact, your real and honest judgement; for you have not done thus, but have acted as though life did indeed matter to you.
KOM, can you PM me your address? (I am kidding of course)
I do not feel as though nothing matters, I am trying to understand the view a little better. You as well as others know that I believe in an afterlife, and this gives me a reason to question what I do and to do what I think matters. I don't want to turn this into a religious discussion by any means, just trying to gain perspective. I am trying to gain an understanding of what the rational thinker believes about life, death, and what matters, and I think you and Raymond have explained it well.
Posted by MightyCow (Member # 9253) on :
Think about having a pet you care about. Most people don't believe pets have an afterlife, or religious concerns, but pet owners still want their pets to have a good life. You care for them, enjoy their company, get them medical care when they're sick, buy them food and toys, all the while believing that they have a limited, purely physical life.
If you're a materialist, you enjoy life for its own sake. You have meaning in the experiences you have, the things you learn, he people you spend time with.
Or to look at it another way, most religious people don't consider every action to be vital to their salvation. It doesn't matter if you watch TV or play a video game. It doesn't matter if you eat an apple or a pear. You still enjoy one activity more than the other, and it makes a difference to you which you do, even without any "ultimate" consequences.
Posted by Geraine (Member # 9913) on :
quote:Originally posted by MightyCow: Think about having a pet you care about. Most people don't believe pets have an afterlife, or religious concerns, but pet owners still want their pets to have a good life. You care for them, enjoy their company, get them medical care when they're sick, buy them food and toys, all the while believing that they have a limited, purely physical life.
If you're a materialist, you enjoy life for its own sake. You have meaning in the experiences you have, the things you learn, he people you spend time with.
Or to look at it another way, most religious people don't consider every action to be vital to their salvation. It doesn't matter if you watch TV or play a video game. It doesn't matter if you eat an apple or a pear. You still enjoy one activity more than the other, and it makes a difference to you which you do, even without any "ultimate" consequences.
Thank you MC. This helps me understand it a bit more. I appreciate it!
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
quote:Originally posted by Geraine: You as well as others know that I believe in an afterlife, and this gives me a reason to question what I do and to do what I think matters.
Well, no. What does it matter how you spend your afterlife? Why does it matter that you act in accordance with the will of a god? These are matters of judgement, not written in the fabric of the universe. Even if you believe in a Hell of literal fire, the wish to avoid it is nothing but a preference, no more or less valid than a desire to have children.
Posted by Geraine (Member # 9913) on :
I understand what you are getting at. If I lived forever, the things I do would matter to me and to others....Forever. That's really the only explanation I can give.
Posted by T:man (Member # 11614) on :
I do not want to live forever. I want to live a very long time, but definitely not forever.
Posted by Raymond Arnold (Member # 11712) on :
So... last night I dreamed about explaining preference utilitarianism to somebody for an hour. Then explained paperclip maximizers (not sure if I had a valid reason in the dream for explaining paperclip maximizers, but they're really fun to talk about).
Methinks me needs to take a break from less wrong.
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I just had to throw that jab in. ![[ROFL]](graemlins/rofl.gif)