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blacktrance comments on Why I haven't signed up for cryonics - Less Wrong
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So, life is valuable until it is no longer valuable?
If your life is valuable and adding more of it doesn't make its value negative at any point, then more of your life is better than less of your life.
The math seems much clearer to you than I, so let me ask: Is it possible that immortality as an option would dilute life's value when compared to a more tradtional human existence (75 years, dies of natural causes)?
I can imagine a 150-year lifespan being preferable to 75; 300 to 150; 1000 to 300; etc. And even when the numbers get very large and I cannot imagine the longer lifespan being better, I chalk it up to my weak imagination.
But what about infinite life? does the math break down if you could live -- preserve "your" consciousness, memories, etc. -- forever?
Very large but non-infinite numbers are more likely to be what's on the table, I think. Given that something is likely to catch up with a future human society, even one capable of reviving frozen people–even if it's just the heat death of the universe.
It may be important to explicitly distinguish between "could live forever" and "have to live forever", as the former excludes having to float in outer space for eternity, which would certainly be a life of negative value.
I don't see why the math would break down. As long as you anticipate your life continuing to have a net positive value, you should want to continue it. And I don't see why that would change just from your lifespan increasing, as long as you stay healthy.
The distinction you mention is very important, and it is one I tried to communicate I was aware of. Of course we can conceive of lots of circumstances where life "having" to continue would be bad...
The question is whether unlimited life renders everything valueless? It seems to me that some big chunk of life's value lies in it's novelty, and another big chunk in relatively rare and unique experiences, and another big chunk in overcoming obstacles... eternal life ruins all of that I think.
Mathematically, wouldn't every conceivable possibility be bound to occur over and over if you lived forever?
I doubt that novelty, rarity, or overcoming obstacles have any value by themselves, only that they are associated with good things. But supposing that they had a value of their own - do they encompass all of life's value? If novelty/rarity/obstacles were eliminated, would life be a net negative? It seems implausible.
Not if new possibilities are being created at the same time. In fact, it's probable that an individual's proportion of (things done):(things possible) would decrease as time passes, kind of like now, when the number of books published per year exceeds how much a person would want to read.
Given that curiosity seems to be a hardwired-in biological urge, I would expect that novelty and rare experiences do have value by themselves.
Fulfilling a biological urge need not be something of value. For example, eating when you're hungry feels good, but it may be good to abolish eating food altogether.
Your frontal cortex might decide it's not something of value, but the lower levels of your mind will still be quite sure it is. Hardwired is hardwired.