Funny. I feel the opposite way: I'm okay with dying, but don't want other people to die.
While I do tend toward suicidal thoughts, even when I'm feeling pretty great the idea of my life continuing is at best of low value. I would hate to die because I know it would hurt lots of people that I'm close to, and I'm also averse to the pain of the process of dying, but nonexistence is generally an attractive concept to me. If I could get away with dying in a manner that didn't hurt me or others, I probably would.
On the other hand, I would be and have been very pained at the death of others, or even at the thought of them dying. I would react very selfishly to keep people close to me from dying, and attempt to extend that near-mode behavior to far-mode action as well.
I don't want other people to die, and don't especially want to die myself. I do consider it fairly inevitable (in a competition between the sum total of mind design-space's most intelligent possible agents and statistics and entropy, my money's still on the latter, though I could be ignorant of some means of gaining write-access to reality's substrate that might make it possible) either way, but something worth resisting where and how you can.
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?