= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
LucasSloan comments on Normal Cryonics - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (930)
I believe that the acts of creation and destruction are not equivalent. Creating a life in the instant you murder does not absolve you of the latter. I do not believe that it is okay to eat meat, because you are allowing an animal to live, if only for a short while. Does that make sense? Maybe it is necessary to have children, and certainly I cannot prevent children from being born, but that does not mean that I have to like the fact that children are being born into intolerable situations, where they can never rise to the level of achievement, fulfillment and happiness I think all humans should. I was not joking when I said that, but I was comparing this world to a nowhere-place (utopia). Does that clarify my position?
I can afford cryonics, but I think I wouldn't want to vitrify children for the same reasons you are criticizing parents for having children. If it is ethical to bring children into the world only if you can care for them, protect them and provide for them, how could it be ethical to send a helpless, dependent child to an indeterminate future? We can make a decision to have a child in the present with lots of relevant information about the present. Sending a child to the future might be negligent.
Are they better off dead?
Yeah, maybe.
I would like to imagine a post-cryonic life for my child that is positive.
However, what if it isn't positive? What if my child thinks I abandoned her, as she is exploited or abused or neglected? Better to know that she experienced a few happy years, and accept that that is all there is, then risk a horrible future she can't get away from.
If there was one person I trusted that she would be in the custody of, it would make a difference. If she was old enough to reason on her own, and know the difference between right and wrong, it would make a difference. She's just so helpless. I shouldn't send her there without someone who loves her, but I can't guarantee that someone who loves her would be there.
Can't you sign yourself up too, and go with her?
Yes, of course. My husband would sign up too, and the grandparents, and aunts and uncles and grown siblings and their descendants. However, in this future beyond my control, they may not have any meaningful custody or be woken up at all.
I might offer that what I am imagining most vividly is a splintered, trans-humanist society that might value small human children but not the things that human children need to be happy.
So what you're concerned about is that if your entire family signed up, they might wake up your child but not any of her relatives, or wake all of you up and then not let you actually take care of her?
Yes.
I should add that I don't think my husband and I think cryonics is "creepy". We would sign up, whatever that means.* And if my kids want to sign up when they're old enough to make that decision, then I would let them sign up. It's just not something I feel comfortable doing to a small child; sending them someplace I haven't been and can't imagine.
.* I think the "would" means that so far it sounds OK, but we realize we haven't worked through all the angles and anticipate some oscillations in our POV.
If your children were about to leave for a strange country without you - or for that matter with you, to some place that none of you had ever been - would you, in your pity, shoot them?
WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE? WHY IS YOUR BRAIN NOT PROCESSING THIS? IT'S YOUR KIDS' FUCKING LIVES NOT A FAIRY TALE YOU'RE WRITING. You don't get to be uncomfortable with the fairy tale and so refuse to write it. All you can do is kill your kids. That's it. That's all refusal means.
The visceral reaction to "kill your kids" comes from imagining that you're actually killing them, not letting them go about a normal life. You can argue that it comes down to the same thing, but if they were really the same thing, you could use the less emotionally-loaded language.
What you're saying: What kind of terrible parent lets their kids live a life slightly better than they had?
The world is largely a pretty normal place. I've lived in Africa and Europe and have spent time in Central America and almost every type of place in the United States. I feel like I could begin to assess the risk to some extent.
What do I know about a future with alien minds? I thought it was you who argued that we can't possibly know their motives and values.
(Take the horrible/awfulness of me wanting to kill my kids and project that onto the future society that might revive them. If it's in me, why can't it be in them?)
This. This so god-damn hard.
It looks to me like you have the choice between running a small risk of your daughter thinking you abandoned her (to a scary future that won't leave you in a satisfactory family unit)... or running a slightly larger risk of actually abandoning her (to the gaping maw of death). The ideal is that she gets to be 18 without dying and then decides she wants to sign up, of course (and you and other relatives are still alive and ready to join her with stacks of paperwork at the ready), but we're talking about managing risks, here, not the best case.
I hope you don't mind the clarification, but I think you've underestimated the extent to which I negatively value a scenario in which my daughter comes to mental anguish that I cannot experience with her. (For example, I'm not too concerned about the satisfactory family unit, as long as my daughter is psychologically healthy.)
This compared to death, which is terrible for reasons other than "death". Terrible because I will miss her and because of all the relationships disconnected and because her potential living this life won't be fulfilled -- nothing that cryonics will give back.
It seems like the stream of consciousness of a person is greatly valued here on Less Wrong, for its own sake independent of relationships. Could you/someone write something to help me relate to that?
First, I doubt that an future which would revive my child would be any worse than today. Second, my position is that cryonics can ameliorate the creation of a child, not obviate the inherent problems. I would ask you to read all of the replies about the preferably of cryo over dying - If it's good enough for me, then it's good enough for my child.