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Morendil comments on Abnormal Cryonics - Less Wrong
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It's certainly best to accept that death is inevitable if you know for a fact that death is inevitable. Which emotion should accompany that acceptance (calm, depression, etc.) depends on particular facts about death - and perhaps some subjective evaluation.
However, the premise seems very much open to question. Death is not "inevitable", it strikes me as something very much evitable, that is which "can be avoided". People used to die when their teeth went bad: dental care has provided ways to avoid that kind of death. People used to die when they suffered infarctus, the consequences of which were by and large unavoidable. Fibrillators are a way to avoid that. And so on.
Historically, every person who ever lived has died before reaching two hundred years of age; but that provides no rational grounds for assuming a zero probability that a person can enjoy a lifespan vastly exceeding that number.
Is it "inevitable" that my life shall be confined to a historical lifespan? Not (by definition) if there is a way to avoid it. Is there a way to avoid it? Given certain reasonable assumptions as to what consciousness and personal identity consist of, there could well be. I am not primarily the cells in my body, I am still me if these cells die and get replaced by functional equivalents. I suspect that I am not even primarily my brain, i.e. that I would still be me if the abstract computation that my brain implements were reproduced on some other substrate.
This insight - "I am a substrate independent computation" - builds on relatively recent scientific discoveries, so it's not surprising it is at odds with historical culture. But it certainly seems to undermine the old saw "death comes to all".
Is it rational to feel hopeful once one has assigned substantial probability to this insight being correct? Yes.
The corollary of this insight is that death, by which I mean information theoretical death (which historically has always followed physical death) holds no particular horrors. It is nothing more and nothing less than the termination of the abstract computation I identify with "being me". I am much more afraid of pain that I am of death, and I view my own death now with something approaching equanimity.
So it seems to me that you're setting up a false opposition here. One can live in calm acceptance of what death entails yet fervently (and rationally) hope for much longer and better life.
Good arguments and I largely agree. However postponable does not equal evitable. At some point any clear minded self (regardless of the substratum) is probably going to have to come to accept that it is either going to end or be transformed to the point where definition of the word "self" is getting pretty moot. I guess my point remains that post-death nonexistence contains absolute zero horrors in any case. In a weirdly aesthetic sense, the only possible perfect state is non-existence. To paraphrase Sophocles, perhaps the best thing is never to have been born at all. Now given a healthy love of life and a bit of optimism it feels best to soldier on, but to hope really to defeat death is a delusional escape from the mature acceptance of death. None of those people who now survive their bad teeth or infarctus have had their lives "saved" (an idiotic metaphor) merely prolonged. Now if that's what you want fine - but it strikes me as irrational as a way to deal with death itself.
Let's rephrase this with the troublesome terms unpacked as per the points you "largely agree" with: "to hope for a life measured in millenia is a delusional escape from the mature acceptance of a hundred-year lifespan".
In a nutshell: no! Hoping to see a hundred was not, in retrospect, a delusional escape from the mature acceptance of dying at fourty-something which was the lot of prehistoric humans. We don't know yet what changes in technology are going to make the next "normal" lifespan, but we know more about it than our ancestors did.
I can believe that it strikes you as weird, and I understand why it could be so. A claim that some argument is irrational is a stronger and less subjective claim. You need to substantiate it.
Your newly introduced arguments are: a) if you don't die you will be transformed beyond any current sense of identity, and b) "the only possible perfect state is non-existence". The latter I won't even claim to understand - given that you choose to continue this discussion rather than go jump off a tall building I can only assume your life isn't a quest for a "perfect state" in that sense.
As to the former, I don't really believe it. I'm reasonably certain I could live for millenia and still choose, for reasons that belong only to me, to hold on to some memories from (say) the year 2000 or so. Those memories are mine, no one else on this planet has them, and I have no reason to suppose that someone else would choose to falsely believe the memories are theirs.
I view identity as being, to a rough approximation, memories and plans. Someone who has (some of) my memories and shares (some of) my current plans, including plans for a long and fun-filled life, is someone I'd identify as "me" in a straightforward sense, roughly the same sense that I expect I'll be the same person in a year's time, or the same sense that makes it reasonable for me to consider plans for my retirement.
Perhaps my discomfort with all this is in cryogenic's seeming affinity with the sort of fear mongering about death that's been the bread and butter of religion for millennia. It just takes it as a fundamental law of the universe that life is better than non life - not just in practice, not just in terms of our very real, human, animal desire to survive (which I share) - but in some sort of essential, objective, rational, blindingly obvious way. A way that smacks of dogma to my ears.
If you really want to live for millennia, go ahead. Who knows I might decide to join you. But in practice I think cryonics for many people is more a matter of escaping death, of putting our terrified, self-centered, hubristic fear of mortality at the disposal of another dubious enterprise.
As for my own view of "identity": I see it as a kind of metapattern, a largely fictional story we tell ourselves about the patterns of our experience as actors, minds and bodies. I can't quite bring myself to take it so seiously that I'm willing to invest in all kinds of extraordinary measures aimed at its survival. If I found myself desperately wanting to live for millennia, I'd probably just think "for chrissakes get over yourself".
Please, please, please don't let the distaste of a certain epistemic disposition interfere with a decision that has a very clear potential for vast sums of positive or negative utility. Argument should screen off that kind of perceived signaling. Maybe it's true that there is a legion of evil Randian cryonauts that only care about sucking every last bit out of their mortal lives because the Christian background they've almost but not quite forgotten raised them with an almost pitiable but mostly contemptible fear of death. Folks like you are much more enlightened and have read up on your Hofstadter and Buddhism and Epicureanism; you're offended that these death-fearing creatures that are so like you didn't put in the extra effort to go farther along the path of becoming wiser. But that shouldn't matter: if you kinda sorta like living (even if death would be okay too), and you can see how cryonics isn't magical and that it has at least a small chance of letting you live for a long time (long enough to decide if you want to keep living, at least!), then you don't have to refrain from duly considering those facts out of a desire to signal distaste for the seemingly bad epistemic or moral status of those who are also interested in cryonics and the way their preachings sound like the dogma of a forgotten faith. Not when your life probabilistically hangs in the balance.
(By the way, I'm not a cryonaut and don't intend to become one; I think there are strong arguments against cryonics, but I think the ones you've given are not good.)
I'm not so sure that if it's possible to choose to keep specific memories, then it will be impossible to record and replay memories from one person to another. It might be a challenge to do so from one organic brain to another, it seems unlikely to be problematic between uploads of different people unless you get Robin Hanson's uneditable spaghetti code upolads.
There still might be some difference in experiencing the memory because different people would notice different things in it.
Perhaps "replay" memories has the wrong connotations - the image it evokes for me is that of a partly transparent overlay over my own memories, like a movie overlaid on top of another. That is too exact.
What I mean by keeping such memories is more like being able, if people ask me to tell them stories about what it was like back in 2010, to answer somewhat the same as I would now - updating to conform to the times and the audience.
This is an active process, not a passive one. Next year I'll say things like "last year when we were discussing memory on LW". In ten years I might say "back in 2010 there was this site called LessWrong, and I remember arguing this and that way about memory, but of course I've learned a few things since so I'd now say this other". In a thousand years perhaps I'd say "back in those times our conversations took place in plain text over Web browsers, and as we only approximately understood the mind, I had these strange ideas about 'memory' - to use a then-current word".
Keeping a memory is a lot like passing on a story you like. It changes in the retelling, though it remains recognizable.