On making peace with death:
It's usually a good idea in the short term to make peace with what you can't change, but when it turns out you can change it, it sort of bites you in the ass. This is true of all forms of learned helplessness, not just accepting death. See what people do to cope with abuse: enormous gain while the abuse lasts, enormous handicap for getting back to life.
On life:
Usual phrasings treat life as neutral and death as insanely bad. I think more of death as neutral and life as insanely good. (Utility is relative, so it makes no difference.) It's not always (or even often) pleasant and enjoyable, but it's always interesting. That's my main problem with pain: it's bad that it hurts, but it's worse that it fills your mind and won't let you focus on something new. Obviously some lives are worse than death (torture, long-term sensory deprivation) and some are better (cake, books). What I'm trying to get at is that "neutral" in terms of pleasure and pain isn't "neutral" in terms of existence.
Life is full of things; taking in everything about even a tiny detail of a perfectly ordinary object is enough to send you into sensory overload, even before you abstract away curves and colors to categorize the pattern as a single solid object with a given shape, recognize this particular object it as a tin and start getting curious about what it contains and how it's made and why light reflects off metal that way and a thousand other things about this tin and your model of tins. I don't spend all my waking hours in childlike wonder over everything, though I can whenever I want if I'm not feeling horrible, but I constantly get tiny slices of novelty. That's why I value life so highly; the cake is just icing.
(All this sounded a lot less confused in my head.)
I try to feed "not existing" into my brain's utility evaluation module (a.k.a. the "how would I feel if this happened" test) and all it returns is confusion. On the pleasure-pain hedonism scale, not existing doesn't evaluate to zero, it evaluates to "syntax error". I can easily calculate that my sudden death would make the world a worse place, but I can't figure out if I should prefer a world in which my mom had a genetically different child (who would then grow up to be a person that isn't "me") to one in which &quo...
I heard that women are difficult to convince when it comes to signing up for cryo. In mentioning cryonics to a dying person, there seems to be a consensus that it's not going to happen. I encountered a post: Years saved: Cryonics vs VillageReach, which addressed my main objection (that the amount of money spent on cryo may be better spent on saving starving children, especially considering that you could save multiple children for that amount of money with high probability whereas you save only one life with low probability by paying for cryo). Now I'm open to being persuaded.
My first instinct was to go read a lot about cryo, but it dawned on me that there are a lot of people here who will want to convince family members, some of them female, to sign up - and these people may appreciate the opportunity to practice on somebody. It has been argued that "Brilliant and creative minds have explored the argument territory quite thoroughly." but if we already know all of the objections and have working rebuttals for each, why is it still thought of as extra difficult to get through to women? If there were a solution to this, it would not be seen as difficult. There must be something that pro-cryo people need for persuading women that they either haven't figured out or aren't good enough at yet.
So, I decided to offer myself for experiments in attempting to convince a woman to sign up for cryo and took a poll in an open thread to see whether there was interest. I don't claim to be perfectly representative of the female population, but I assume that I will have at least some objections in common with them and that persuading me would still be good practice for anyone planning to convince family members in the future. Having a study on persuading women would be more scientific but how do you come up with hypotheses to test for such a study if you have no actual experience persuading women?
So, here is your opportunity to try whatever methods of persuasion you feel like with no guilt, explore my full list of objections without worrying about it being socially awkward, (I will even share cached religious thoughts, as annoyed as I am that I still have them.), and I will document as many of my impressions and objections as I can before I forget them.
I am putting each objection / impression into a new comment for organization. Also, I have decided to avoid reading anything further on cryo, until/unless it is suggested by one of my persuaders.
Well, have fun getting inside my head.