posted
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 ]
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posted
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.
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posted
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?"
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posted
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.
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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.
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posted
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.
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?
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posted
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.
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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.
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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.
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posted
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.
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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.
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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.
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posted
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.
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posted
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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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posted
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.
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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.
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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.
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posted
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?
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posted
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.
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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.
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posted
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.
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posted
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).
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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.
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posted
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?
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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.
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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...
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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.
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posted
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.
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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?
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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.
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posted
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.
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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)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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?
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Because in this state, I do not desire to have no desires! This seems really very straightforward.
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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.
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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.
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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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.
Posts: 1604 | Registered: Mar 2003
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Rationality is a tool for getting what you want. The desires themselves are neither rational nor irrational; they are orthogonal to that spectrum.
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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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.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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I thought rationality was a tool for determining the conditions of reality. Desire should be curbed and focused based on whatever the reality is.
Posts: 1604 | Registered: Mar 2003
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