thomblake comments on That Magical Click - Less Wrong
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At the risk of revealing my stupidity...
In my experience, people who don't compartmentalize tend to be cranks.
Because the world appears to contradict itself, most people act as if it does. Evolution has created many, many algorithms and hacks to help us navigate the physical and social worlds, to survive, and to reproduce. Even if we know the world doesn't really contradict itself, most of us don't have good enough meta-judgement about how to resolve the apparent inconsistencies (and don't care).
Most people who try to make all their beliefs fit with all their other beliefs, end up forcing some of the puzzle pieces into wrong-shaped holes. Their favorite part of their mental map of the world is locally consistent, but the farther-out parts are now WAY off, thus the crank-ism.
And that's just the physical world. When we get to human values, some of them REALLY ARE in conflict with others, so not only is it impossible to try to force them all to agree, but we shouldn't try (too hard). Value systems are not axiomatic. Violence to important parts of our value system can have repercussions even worse than violence to parts of our world view.
FWIW, I'm not interested in cryonics. I think it's not possible, but even if it were, I think I would not bother. Introspecting now, I'm not sure I can explain why. But it seems that natural death seems like a good point to say "enough is enough." In other words, letting what's been given be enough. And I am guessing that something similar will keep most of us uninterested in cryonics forever.
Now that I think of it, I see interest in cryonics as a kind of crankish pastime. It takes the mostly correct idea "life is good, death is bad" to such an extreme that it does violence to other valuable parts of our humanity (sorry, but I can't be more specific).
To try to head off some objections:
I offer this comment, not in an attempt to change anyone's mind, but to go a little way to answer the question "Why are some people not interested in cryonics?"
Thanks!
Going to quote this.
And this.