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bgrah449 comments on That Magical Click - Less Wrong
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It seems to me that you can't be more specific because there is not anything there to be more specific about.
What the hell, I'll play devil's advocate.
Right now, we're all going to die eventually, so we can make tradeoffs between life and other values that we still consider to be essential. But when you take away that hard stop, your own life's value suddenly skyrockets - given that you can almost certainly, eventually, erase any negative feelings you have about actions done today, it becomes hard to justify not doing horrible things to save one's own life if one was forced to.
Imagine Omega came to you and said, "Cryonics will work; you will be resurrected and have the choice between a fleshbody and simulation, and I can guarantee you live for 10,000 years after that. However, for reasons I won't divulge, this is contingent upon you killing the next 3 people you see."
Well, shit. Let the death calculus begin.
You make a valid theoretical point, but as a matter of contingent fact, the only consequence I see is that people signed up will strongly avoid risks of having their brains splattered. Less motorcycle riding, less joining the army, etc.
Making people more risk-averse might indeed give them pause at throwing themselves in front of cars to save a kid, but:
Snap judgments are made on instinct at a level that doesn't respond to certain factors; you wouldn't be any less likely to react that way if you previously had the conscious knowledge that the kid had leukemia and wouldn't be cryopreserved.
In this day and age, risking your life for someone or something else with conscious premeditation does indeed happen even to transhumanists, but extremely rarely. The fringe effect of risk aversion among people signed up for cryonics isn't worth consigning all of their lives to oblivion.
I don't worry about this for the same reason that Eliezer doesn't worry about waking up with a blue tentacle for his arm.
Thanks for that generous spirit. But fine: You see a woman being dragged into an alley by a man with a gun.
Scenario A) You have terminal brain cancer and you have 3 months to live. You read that morning that scientists have learned several new complications arising from freezing a brain.
Scenario B) Your cryonics arrangements papers went through last night. You read that morning that scientists have successfully simulated a dog's brain in hardware after the dog has been cryogenically frozen for a year.
Now what?
Obviously, you dial 911 on your cell phone. (Or whatever the appropriate emergency number is in your area.)
The generous spirit overfloweth. You don't have a cell phone. Or it's broken.
Well, it's not like I have much of a chance of saving the woman. He has a gun, and I don't. Whether the woman gets shot is entirely up to the man with the gun. If I try to interfere (and I haven't contacted the police yet), I think that I'm as likely to make things worse than I am to help. For example, the man with the gun might panic if it seems like he's losing control of the situation. I'm also physically weaker than most men, so the chances of my managing to overpower him with my bare hands are pretty small.
So, either way, I probably won't try to be Batman.
This strikes me as purposefully obtuse. Does cryonics increase the present value of future expected life? I think it does. Does that increase affect decisions where we risk our life? I think it does; do you agree?
Yes, I basically agree; I was mostly nitpicking the specific scenario instead of addressing the issue.
If I modify the scenario a bit and say that the assailant has a knife instead of a gun (and my phone's batteries are dead), then things are different. If he has a knife, intervening is still dangerous, but it's much easier to save the woman - all I need to do is put some distance between the two so that the woman can run away. I might very well be seriously injured or killed in the process, but I can at least count on saving the woman from whatever the assailant had in store for her. (This is probably the least convenient possible world that you wanted.)
So, yes, I'd be much more likely to play hero against a knife-wielding assailant if I had brain cancer than if I were healthy and had heard about a major cryonics breakthrough.
This seems unusual. You are much more likely to be injured against a knife than you are against a gun. I am moderately confident that I can take a handgun away from someone before they shoot me, given sufficiently close conditions; I am much less confident in my ability to deal with a knife.
He was just responding to the specific scenario you posited. The fact that you had the broader issue of the effect of cryonics on the value of life at the forefront of your mind does not mean that his failure to comment on it is evidence of purposeful obtuseness.
Commenting in this thread, on this post, and it's unrecognizable to someone that the effects of cryonics on the value of life is what's being discussed? I'm not buying it.
if you live in the sorts of neighborhoods where women get dragged into alleys not having a gun seems pretty negligent.