= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
daenerys comments on On "Friendly" Immortality - 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 (103)
"Life sucks" Discussion Thread
I'm not sure I understand the practical impact of this objection. Right now, massive life extension (routine 100+ yr lifespans) and solving serious permanent medical conditions (regrowing lost limbs, curing Down syndrome) are both significantly beyond our capacity. Any research into either topic easily qualifies as basic research and I would predict that increasing our knowledge towards curing permanent medical conditions would be useful in life extension, and vice versa. Put slightly differently, how would you expect our basic research funding to change if we abandoned research into massive life extension?
And even if Down Syndrome occurs in the same frequency after 1000 yr lifespans are common, isn't that an improvement for most people?
As utterly basic as this response is, it must be made:
as much as life sucks now, I cannot expect it to suck for the entirety of the next thousand years. Therefore, I will attempt to live those thousand years. If life still sucks, then I cannot expect that it will definitely suck for the next ten thousand years. Therefore, I will attempt to live those ten thousand years.
In other words: I'd like to be around when life stops sucking, thank you very much.
That is why I am still alive right now. The suck has to go away some time, right. Right?
We live in an uncaring universe, do the math.
But don't kill yourself because that will make life worse for me and I can't kill myself because I have plenty of people who refuse to kill themselves who care about me!
Relevant Onion article. (Part of the reason I'm still alive.)
The universe contains caring people, and various mechanisms they have created.
And what are our best rationally cleaned up estimates for how long those caring people and their mechanisms are likley to stick around?
Well, sympathy (at least for ingroup members) is a human universal, so at least until we start with the brain modifications. And then unless we're in a horrific dystopia we can remove a bunch of sources of suck.
Some mechanisms are historical accidents (say, the dole and suicide hotlines), but things like civilisations, economies, medical systems, and technological progress look unlikely to go away unless we all do.
That's what I was aiming for with my previous comment. An actuarial table for our civilization given the best rationalist estimates we have is a depressing sight.
Then we don't need to kill ourselves, that's taken care of for us! (Note: previous sentence neglects the cost of suck spent waiting for the apocalypse.)
Basically. :)
Pascal's wager with the future.
Can't see why you should mercy-kill people in a hundred years but shouldn't mercy-kill them tomorrow.
Sometimes I think destroying the world sounds like a pretty good idea.
Please don't destroy the world. I'm still using it.
But all my stuff is there.
A similar idea was discussed several months ago, in the post: On the unpopularity of cryonics: life sucks, but at least then you die.
Yes, that's where I got the phrasing from. I chose that particular wording because I figured LW-ers would recognize it. Slightly different application here, though.
Okay, cool. I did not see an explicit link, and I figured that some may benefit from looking over the previous discussion.
Rebuttal of the rebuttal:
Suicide is already effectively illegal. Many easy, painless methods are outlawed or not given to the mentally ill (drugs, guns, assisted suicide). Suicide-attempters are force-treated. There is tremendous social pressure to not commit suicide, including inflicted guilt. (For detailed arguments, just read Sister Y's linked blog.)
Personally, I'm not interested in life-extension until life is actually worth living. Several problems (like the harsh, maybe-even-negative-sum social hierarchy) seem unfixable without a major re-engineering of humanity, so I don't expect it to happen anytime soon, if ever.
Having said that, I don't know how bad life in general is. Maybe some people actually have lives worth living. They can extend their lives if they want. I'm not interested in arguing other people into pessimism, and I have no reference point to understand their preference anyway.
However, I think it's credible that 30% or more don't have worthwhile lives. Having more people alive for longer seems like it will only bring back the Malthusian era much faster.
Even if suicide is discouraged, no-one is likely to compel unhappy people to extend their lives. Most people think life extension is immoral; they won't object to anyone turning it down.
Feeding tubes are life extension technology and we force those on people all the time. It ends up being really hard to enforce battery causes of action against forced medical care when you'd die without the intervention.
Assuming it is necessary, is there some particular reason we should think this major re-engineering of humanity is unfeasible?
Assuming away any externalities, why would "life sucks" (i.e., life is worse than average/ideal) be a reason to think life is worse than death?
Edit: I see now that my objection is the same as Normal Anomaly's, at the end of the OP.
Because life with negative utility may be more common than we think (pdf warning.) Longer lifespans could even make this more pervasive if Grognor's reasoning upthread is common.
This is a problem we can fix with cryonics. Actually, hypothermic hibernation tech, or even a plain old anesthetic coma should suffice. There's no reason anyone should be forced to stay awake in intense psychological pain while they await a cure.
(1) I can't do PDFs, unfortunately, so could you explain what you mean here? (2) I think Grognor is talking about people's expectations of future utility. If these are positive enough, then it makes sense to endure present hardship (because by enduring it, the agent creates larger benefits on net--just in the future, that's all). That is, as long as the future will be bright enough, people shouldn't choose to die now. Such lives therefore suck, but less than death, right? And if such better-than-death lives are common, then that hardly supports "life sucks worse than death."