I've been trying to convince my father to support the cause, and ran into resistance on a front that I didn't expect. It's hard to tell how much he's looking for an argument and how much he actually believes what he's advocating, but he doesn't display any behavior that would contradict him believing it and several of us (LauraABJ, SarahC and Andrew) were on hand and unable to shake him.
Today he emailed me these "Thoughts on Immortality"
- Our not wanting to die is a bit of irrational behavior selected for by evolution. The universe doesn’t care if you’re there or not. The contrasting idea that you are the universe is mystical, not rational.
- The idea that you are alive “now” but will be dead “later” is irrational. Time is just a persistent illusion according to relativistic physics. You are alive and dead, period.
- A cyber-replica is not you. If one were made and stood next to you, you would still not consent to be shot.
- Ditto a meat replica
- If you believe the many worlds model of quantum physics is true (Eliezer does), then there already are a vitually infinite number of replicas of you already, so why bother making another one?
Given we'd already been over this several times I decided to try a different approach this tme, so this was my completely off-the-cuff reply:
"Are you here to have an argument? I'm sorry, this is abuse.
Terminal values and preferences are not rational or irrational. They simply are your preferences. I want a pizza. If I get a pizza, that won't make me consent to get shot. I still want a pizza. There are a virtually infinite number of me that DO have a pizza. I still want a pizza. The pizza from a certain point of view won't exist, and neither will I, by the time I get to eat some of it. I still want a pizza, damn it.
Of course, if you think all of that is irrational, then by all means don't order the pizza. More for me."
Terminal values and preferences are not rational or irrational. They simply are your preferences. I want a pizza. If I get a pizza, that won't make me consent to get shot. I still want a pizza. There are a virtually infinite number of me that DO have a pizza. I still want a pizza. The pizza from a certain point of view won't exist, and neither will I, by the time I get to eat some of it. I still want a pizza, damn it.
Of course, if you think all of that is irrational, then by all means don't order the pizza. More for me."
He's effectively an atheist so no need to worry about that angle. He would be a potentially strong asset were he to come around, and I hate to see him sit around without hope effectively waiting to die; when he tries to do good he doesn't exactly give to the Society for Cute Kittens and Rare Diseases but he's accomplishing far less than he could. I also would feel better knowing he fully supported my signing up for Alcor. More generally, I'd like to figure out how to pierce this sort of argument in a way that makes the person in question actually change his mind.
What else would you try?
Assuming that this is mostly about persuading him to save himself by participating in cryonics (is that "the cause" for which he might be "an asset"?):
Your father may be fortunate to have so many informed people trying to change his mind about this. Not one person in a million has that.
He's also already scientifically informed to a rare degree - relative to the average person - so it's not as if he needs to hear arguments about nanobots and so forth.
So this has nothing to do with science, it's about sensibility and philosophy of life.
Many middle-aged people have seen most of their dreams crushed by life. They will also be somewhere along the path of physical decline leading to death, despite their best efforts. All this has a way of hollowing out a person, and making the individual life appear futile.
Items 1 and 2 on your father's list are the sort of consolations which may prove appealing to an intellectual, scientifically literate atheist, when contemplating possible attitudes towards life. Many such people, having faced some mix of success and failure in life, and looking ahead to personal oblivion (or, as they may see it, the great unknown of death), will find it a relief to abandon hope, and to broaden their awareness beyond their private desires, to the sweep of history or the vastness of the universe.
This impersonal perspective may function as a source of calm and lucidity, and to have you urging them to abandon their resignation and grasp for more life may seem like someone asking them to rush back into the cage of self-involved personal desire and occlude their hard-won awareness of reality in favor of optimistic delusion.
Also, they may simply find life boring or wearisome. Parents may endure mostly for the sake of their children, long past the age when the child supposedly grows up and leaves home. There may be far less joie de vivre there than a younger person could imagine; they may simply be going through the motions of life, having established some routine that leaves them as much space as possible after the turmoil of a youth in which they first came into bruising contact with the demands and limitations of life; and they may be kept alive more by habit than by the desire to live.
I know nothing about your father, so all that is just meant to suggest possibilities. I'll mention one other factor, which is the story a person tells themselves about their own destiny. One person's power is so limited, that simply choosing the broad direction of one's own life is often a struggle and an accomplishment; I would even say it's rare for a person to understand what their own life is about, and what's going on in it, in a more than superficial way. A phase of life is usually understood afterwards, if at all. The powerlessness of the human individual, the sense that one's time is running out, the impositions of the external world, all of this combines with everything I mentioned earlier to favor either passivity (stop trying, roll with the punches) or stubbornness, including intellectual stubbornness (at least I can live and think as I've already decided; at least I have that freedom and that power).
In persuading him to consider cryonics as a worthy activity, I would wager that something like all that is really what you have to deal with - though of course he also has a point when he asks whether making a copy is the same thing as surviving. I am young enough, and my estimation of the rate of change is rapid enough, that I mostly think in terms of rejuvenation, rather than cryonic suspension, as my path to an open future. It remains to be seen if I will ever bother making arrangements to be frozen.
Anyway, I would suggest two practical steps. One is to think together about the logistics, financial and otherwise, that would be required if he was to sign up for cryonics. How much would it cost, is there an opportunity cost, what would the physical process be if he died now and was shipped off to suspension. The point of such discussion is to explore what difference it would make to his existing life to take this step.
The other is to think about the further future if you both were to live to see it. Perhaps it's unfortunate that we don't have a Star Trek-like TV series in which the spacefaring 22nd century is full of youthful survivors from the 20th century who happened to be last until the age of advanced nanobiotechnology; it would encourage more people to take the future personally. Anyway, the key is to try to be realistic. Don't imagine the future to be some sort of wish-fulfilment video game; try to think of it as history that hasn't happened yet. On the day-to-day level, life is full of repetition, but in modern times, even just on a scale of decades, we also see catastrophe and transformation. Try to think of the future as a series of crises and triumphs continuous with the historical stages we already have behind us, and which you might manage to personally live through. This is a way to tap into the belated wisdom and sense of reality which comes from having lived a few decades as an adult, without entirely easing back into the spectator's armchair of death.
I can't tell from your post if he's actually dying right now, or if it's just that he's older than you and so notionally closer to death. This line of thought, about staying in the game of life for a few more decades, is more suited to awakening someone's sense of personal agency with respect to the future. If he's dying right now, then it probably does come down to a debate about personal identity.
What about Futurama? Or is that not suitable because, as a comedy, it's more cynical and brings up both the way the future would be somewhat disturbing for us and that it's likely our descendents would be more interested in only reviving famous historical figures and sticking their heads in museums.
The comic Transmetropolitan also brings up the issue of cryogenics "revivals" effectively being confined to nursing homes out of our total shock at the weirdness of the future and inability to cope. It's an interesting series for transhumanists, given ... (read more)