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MixedNuts comments on Female Test Subject - Convince Me To Get Cryo - Less Wrong
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Comments (176)
See disability arguments on the other comment for personality-preserving brain damage.
Well, no. You'd just be dead. There'd be a Schiavo-like body looking like yours, or a new person in a body looking like yours, but that doesn't seem to add much to the horror of death.
That sounds like a weird change. Right now the DSM allows a depression diagnosis two months after a traumatic event, less if it gets really bad, and even less in practice. How prolonged are you thinking of?
People who age often get depression, and get the worst disabilities because they can't adapt fast and their disabilities keep increasing. Do you accept "I should kill myself now, so I don't run that risk"? If not, how is that different.
This thing that would not die though, this ability to know pain and pleasure, this continuing experience, it would remain in the event that my memories were all gone, presumably. THAT is the part I'm worried about. That the part of me that feels could wake up and have to go through the experience of realizing that who I am has been lost to brain damage.
Is this supposed to rebut my objection? I don't see where you're going with this at all.
Right now, there isn't a guarantee that I'm going to go through a medical procedure anytime soon. Going through a medical procedure, especially one that is new, or one that few people have been through, is likely to cause some sort of horrible side effects. We have no reason to assume that this technology will be flawless by the time we get to use it, no reason to believe it won't turn us into horrors.
It's different because not killing myself right now leaves me with a reasonable chance to have some number of happy years ahead whereas going through a medical procedure with unexpected side effects and risks may have a much greater chance of making me completely miserable for a long time.
I think our disagreement may have a lot to do with how much faith we place in the medical establishment.
If you haven't got experience with it, you can't know how bad it can be. Have you ever looked into how incompetent and horrible medical professionals and treatments can be?
I have a pile of statistics if you want a shock.
Okay, that's freaky. Only a little freakier than "The child I was has been replaced by an adult", but point taken.
If medicine when you wake up if anything like it is now, after a couple months at most you'll be able to say "Doc, I feel utterly miserable" and the doc will answer "One box of magic future antidepressants, coming right up!", not (only) "Well duh it's future shock".
Only in specific cases (medical errors, psychiatric hospitals, nursing homes). Can I haz stats?