= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
datadataeverywhere comments on Life is Good, More Life is Better - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (54)
I don't want to die but I'm OK with other people dying. In most cases, to put it bluntly, I don't think it is a significant loss (although it might be a personal loss to me). There are some people in the world I'd fight very strongly to see them remain alive for as long as possible, even if they were reluctant (I speak here not of friends and family but of valuable contributors). But I've never understood the desire to save every life. It seems obvious to me that only a few people are here for the Life's Great Adventure and most are killing time until they kick the bucket. I take some issue with that (I think they're falling short of the Good) but it's not a problem that would be fixed by convincing them to change their attitudes towards death (the problem is their attitude towards life). The reason I want to live indefinitely is straightforward: I have some really longterm goals.
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.