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byrnema comments on Normal Cryonics - Less Wrong
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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?
Mere framing, depending simply on what your brain thinks is normal. Visit a convention of cryonicists and talk to the kids signed up for cryonics. Those parents wouldn't think very highly of themselves if they didn't pay to sign up their kids. If their children died and were lost, they would hold themselves at fault. They're right.
Huh? How about:
seems more fair.
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?)
Your children are standing in front of the boat. You can send them on the boat. You can go with them on the boat. Or you can cut their throats. That's it. There's nothing else.
I hand you the knife.
What do you do?
I think I'm starting to understand what the absence of clicking is. People who click process problems as if they're in the real world. If they wouldn't cut their child's throat, then they sign their kid up for cryonics.
People who don't click don't process the problem like it's the real world. Strange reactions rise up in them, fears of the unknown, fears of the known, and they react to these fears by running away within the landscape of their minds, and somewhere on the outside words come out of their lips like "But who knows what will happen? How can I send my kids into that?" It's an expression of that inner fear, an expression of that running away, words coming out of the lips that match up to what's going on inside their heads somehow... the dread of losing control, the feeling of not understanding, the horror of thinking about mortality, all of these are expressed in a flinch away from the uncomfortable thought and put stumblingly into words.
So they kill their children, because they aren't processing a real world, they're processing words connected to words, ways of flinching and running away and giving vent to those odd internal feelings.
And the clickers are standing in front of that boat.
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?
I realize this is probably weird coming from me, considering my own cryonics hangup, but we're already assuming they won't revive anyone they can't render passably physically healthy - I think they'd make some effort to take the same precautions regarding psychological health. My psychological need is weird and might be very hard to arrange to satisfy or predict what would be satisfactory; generic needs for care and affection in a small child are so obvious I would be astounded if the future didn't have an arrangement in place before they revived any frozen children.
I'll try, but I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "the stream of consciousness" or "independent of relationships". I value me (my software), I value you (your software), I prefer that these softwares be executed in pleasant environments rather than sitting around statically - but then, I'd probably cease to value my software in an awful hurry if it had no relationships with other software, and I'd respect a preference on your part to end your own software execution if that seemed to be your real and reasoned desire.
Why do I have these values? Well, people are just so darned special, that's all I can say.
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.