The overpopulation argument doesn't make sense at all. Imagine a hypothetical world in which aging has been conquered, there are no terminal diseases, and life is safer and more peaceful than it is in our world. Eventually, this world's population would get too high, and the populace would have to decide what to do: Should the government impose a one-child rule? Should some of the population be shipped out into the cosmos? Should we let the price of food rise until the market resolves the issue? One thing is clear: the option "let's kill everyone over 80" would not even be on the table, because it's so barbaric that no one would give it much consideration. Furthermore, the policy doesn't even solve the population problem—the growth rate would still be roughly exponential, and the population at a given generation would only be decreased by a constant factor.
The point is this: if we had never heard of death, we would not take it on as a way of stabilizing the population.
Should we let the price of food rise until the market resolves the issue?
I honestly can't see the difference between doing that and "let's kill arbitrary group #27". Or is the market going to provide some third alternative other than not feed the people with the least money?
Let it be noted, as an aside, that this is my first post on Less Wrong and my first attempt at original, non-mandatory writing for over a year.
I've been reading through the original sequences over the last few months as part of an attempt to get my mind into working order. (Other parts of this attempt include participating in Intro to AI and keeping a notebook.) The realization that spurred me to attempt this: I don't feel that living is good. The distinction which seemed terribly important to me at the time was that I didn't feel that death was bad, which is clearly not sensible. I don't have the resources to feel the pain of one death 155,000 times every day, which is why Torture v. Dust Specks is a nonsensical question to me and why I don't have a cached response for how to act on the knowledge of all those deaths.
The first time I read Torture v. Dust Specks, I started really thinking about why I bother trying to be rational. What's the point, if I still have to make nonsensical, kitschy statements like "Well, my brain thinks X but my heart feels Y," if I would not reflexively flip the switch and may even choose not to, and if I sometimes feel that a viable solution to overpopulation is more deaths?
I solved the lattermost with extraterrestrial settlement, but it's still, well, sketchy. My mind is clearly full of some pretty creepy thoughts, and rationality doesn't seem to be helping. I think about having that feeling and go eeugh, but the feelings are still there. So I pose the question: what does a person do to click that death is really, really bad?
The primary arguments I've heard for death are:
I think that overall, the fear most people have about signing up for cryonics/AI/living forever is that they do not understand it. This is probably true for me; it's probably why I don't grok that life is good, always. Moreover, it is probable that the depictions of death as not always bad with which I sympathize (e.g. 'Lord, what can the harvest hope for, if not for the care of the Reaper Man?) stem from the previously held to be absolute nature of death. That is, up until the last ~30 years, people have not been having cogent, non-hypothetical thoughts about how it might be possible to not die or what that might be like. Dying has always been a Big Bad but an inescapable one, and the human race has a bad case of Stockholm Syndrome.
So: now that I know I have and what I want, how do I use the former to get the latter?