Evidently, you know, talking to people of average intelligence we are always going to sound deep, especially on social occasions when we tailor our conversation to the listener. But that has nothing to do with the particular view you defended. Someone defending that death gives meaning to life with better arguments than those people had would elicit the same response.

See also: the chapter entitled "A different box of tools" in "Surely you're joking, Mr Feynman".

g, yes, Feynman's differing calculus tools example came to my mind as well when reading this.

bw, I think I concur with Eliezer's diagnosis in another thread of Stockholm syndrome, or something like it. If you find it too easy to achieve all your goals because you have so many opportunities, then find harder goals.

(Perhaps I'm just, like, a seething cauldron of negativity or something, but that particular problem seems to me rather remote from my own experience, or from that of anyone else I know enough about.)

For "harder", please feel free to read "less frequently achievable".

Well, please feel free to explain with absolute clarity and necessity; perhaps you'll do so in that great philosophy book. I regret that, at least for me, you haven't at all managed to do so yet. I can see that, e.g., writing a good philosophy book might seem more valuable to you if you only have one shot at it (though, er, it seems to me that it's not unheard of for philosophers to write more than one good book in their lives), but I can't imagine how you can think that's not outweighed by being able to write more and better books. And if your expected pr... (read more)

"I had one opportunity to kiss the girl I loved the most and I blew it. " And that makes your life better than if you had more opportunities?

Huh?

It seems noteworthy that the first known story (Gilgamesh), and the second well known one (Eden), and the dominant global religions (Christianity, Islam), are all about yearning for immortality.

"And if your expected productive lifespan were a thousand years, there would still be challenges big enough that you'd only get one shot at them. They'd just be bigger, harder challenges."

Good point. I have nothing againt extending it to a thousand years after we have very carefully thought up a new life to go with the new lifespan. We haven't even done that for the current four score and ten years, for christs sake! Of course that makes my life better. Compare that moment of the missed opportunity with buying a pair of jeans. It is better because it cannot be iterated. And if religion talked about it so much, I would suggest transhumanists smoke out their cached religious thoughts more fully.

(Sorry to continue dragging off-topic:)

that we should have just one moment in time to do something, or the opportunity will be lost.

Look on the 'bright' side: no matter how long you live, the exact same opportunity will never come again.

But life should never have second chances? How awful!

I have nothing againt extending it to a thousand years after we have very carefully thought up a new life to go with the new lifespan.

But so much better to extend your life first and then tackle the challenge of creating meaning! Not only is this more likely to work (who ... (read more)

I don't think anyone is qualified to judge, based on theory alone, whether true immortality is meaningful or worth achieving, since no one has lived much longer than 120 yrs. Maybe the human consciousness would throw up its hands and scream 'to hell with it all!' after 300 years, maybe not. Maybe our children will be lacksidasical losers because they have no impetus to get off their asses and on with their lives (lord knows how many ppl get a move on because they fear getting too old for girlfriends/marriage/children). But we don't know that, and it's a... (read more)

bw,

Had we but world enough, and time, This coyness, lady, were no crime.

The grave's a fine and private place, But none, I think, do there embrace. --Andrew Marvell

John

That no matter how long you live, the exact same opportunity will never come again is a view I fear depends on the existence of death and would disappear without it; that is the nub; so there may some be anthropic bias in your view, Nick.

I can understand the reasoning behind the saying that death gives meaning to life. But I've never been able to fully agree with that sentiment. If I could I would live forever. Death certainly gives me reason to want to do as much as I can while I am still able. But that desire doesn't give my life any more meaning than if it was not there. I can agree that death makes life precious, for without death life would be abundant.

I often imagine what it'd be like to live 200 years or 1000 years. I know like Eliezer I would do so if able (assuming my mind was sti... (read more)

In think the "death gives meaning to life" meme is a great example of "standard wisdom". It is apparently paradoxical (right form to be "deep"), it provides a comfortable consolation for a nasty situation. But I have seldom seen any deep defense for it in the bioethical literature. Even people who strongly support it and ought to work very hard to demonstrate to fellow philosophers that it is a true statement seem to be content to just rattle it off as self-evident (or that people not feeling it in their guts are simply superf... (read more)

bw: Maybe our disagreement is superficial in that case, except for Nick's proposed change in order of operation and your misuse of the concept of anthropic bias. I have no commitment to the idea of living indefinitely, just to the idea of not committing to dying at any particular time just out of custom. There are some things that I'd like to do or seen done that seem very hard by human standards. They should provide plenty of challenge for quite a few centuries with my current capabilities if they are not outright impossible. Maybe there really isn't... (read more)

This post suggests another good reason why it is hard to distinguish between intelligence levels above your own.

Of course if I could become immortal and not change anything else I would welcome it. There is not even any point arguing about that and I don't think anyone denies it would be desirable. The question is whether you can do that, because mortality is the most fundamental fact about us. Nothing will be the same afterwards, so it is rather touching but fundamentally misguided to speak how we would do the same things but have more time to do them well, etc. I for one do not see what the point would be in acquiring knowledge if I never died, which rather speaks... (read more)

"I for one do not see what the point would be in acquiring knowledge if I never died"

? Why do you acquire knowledge now? I do it because it's fun/interesting/useful toward accomplishing some goal.

What is the postulate of objectivity as for instance someone like Monod describes it? Seeing the world as if you were dead, as if you were not there to see it, seeing the world as it would be without your seeing it. Without death this possibility is not even conceivable. That in broad strokes. More generally, you simply cannot talk about what life will be like without death using a concept of life that only makes sense when death exists. Don't you see the bias, the radical bias, in this approach?

"Seeing the world as if you were dead, as if you were not there to see it, seeing the world as it would be without your seeing it."

This is an analogy. You might as well say we couldn't attempt objectivity without "veils" (of ignorance). Without the existence of veils, such a concept is unthinkable.

Does anybody really think of objectivity as seeing the world as if you were dead?

Bw: This is my last response on this thread, but it might be of use to you to consider that several posters here, myself included, already expect to live forever without it detracting from our lives at all. Furthermore, ALL children under some age lack a concept of death without obvious and dramatic impoverishment of their lives. On occasion one can encounter an adult who claims to remember learning about death, though this could be, in every case, a false memory for all I know. What one never encounters is an adult who says that finding out about death was what gave life meaning for them.

It is not a question of what you expect. Christians in the past expected to live forever and that did not detract from their lives. Thank you for your kind responses to my views.

Unknown Healer:

Maybe he means that his expected value for his lifespan diverges to +infinity.

(Me too.)

Christians may claim to believe in eternal life, but in their behavior they do not act like it. I thought I remembered a good post here mentioning how Muslim armies should never surrender if they actually believed death in battle guaranteed eternal life in paradise, but the historical record shows they were perfectly capable of it. Unfortunately google has not been able to find that page for me.

Doesn't that assume that their only motivation is to achieve an optimal eternity for themselves? I'd have thought it quite possible to believe both "Surrendering will slightly decrease my chance of ending up in paradise" and "I should surrender".

I could much more readily believe that Muslims' readiness to surrender appears greater than one would expect if they really believed that. (For this it isn't necessary that the expected readiness to surrender be 0.)

Immortality seems to me like a meaningless concept, because the only hypothetical event that could define it (the end of time) would also deny it.

A more useful concept is actuarial life expectancy. To make that middling long, we need to defeat aging. That's all but certain, and I don't expect it to seriously alter humanity. To make it really long, we need to defeat such civilization-ending mischances as a local supernova. That means uploading and backups at minimum. To make it indefinite, we need a way to laugh in the face of entropy and duck away from str... (read more)

"What one never encounters is an adult who says that finding out about death was what gave life meaning for them." I beg to differ. Many people have had close calls with death that have been pivitol, life-changing experiences. A friend of mine changed careers and got married after his plane nearly crashed. "I realized we don't have that much time on this earth to be wasting it in board meetings," or some such.

I still would NOT argue that this is evidence that life needs death to have meaning, but death certainly IS a strong motivator to get on with life.

I must be hanging with a very different crowd: I had never heard of anyone saying that death is what gives meaning to life. It seems such an obviously stupid notion that I can only imagine someone cooked it up to make him/herself look deep - and failed because everyone else cried "sour grapes!" P.S. I do think that I will grow old and die. I don't like it, but there are worse things (eg, I could die before I grow old).

I enjoyed this discussion very much and hope that Eliezer will excuse the distraction from the main topic, since he is after all very much interested in this. Will make one last point. What I find extraordinary is that most of you seem to assume the sophisticated, critical, elaborate thesis is that death should not be accepted, and that the contrary opinion is somehow primitive. This is silly. There is no living creature on earth who does not have the level of intelligence necessary to conclude that death is bad. Which of course does not mean the opinion is wrong. It could be right, but what it certainly is not is a testimony to great intelligence.

BW, read the aforementioned Transhumanism as Simplified Humanism.

Sometimes, life doesn't need to be complicated.

Sorry to go on on this topic, but it seems to me that a false dichotomy has been developed in this thread between two ideas:

1) Death gives meaning to life.

2) Immortality is worth attempting/achieving.

I do not see why these ideas are at all mutually exclusive. Of course the idea that death gives ALL of the meaning to life would be incompatible with immortality, but certainly some of the transhumanists here must concede that it gives some meaning. Maybe the confusion is with the word "meaning." Many of the things that humans find meaningful in l... (read more)

Laura, I think you're right that there's a distinction not being made, but I'm not sure it's the one you say it is. Rather, "death gives meaning to life" could mean (1) "some of the things we find meaningful have meanings that are as they are partly because of death" or (2) "it's because of death that life has meaning". #1 is probably true, but doesn't give much grounds for disagreeing with Eliezer about death. #2 is a different matter entirely. There's also (3) "it turns out that for some people the prospect of imminent ... (read more)

The movie Mystery Men makes fun of this with a character called The Sphinx. He appears as a mysterious mentor to the group of wannabe comic book heroes that the story focuses on. For a while, he appears to be saying things of great wisdom, but then it becomes apparent that he uses a simple algorithm for generating his profound-seeming sayings.

I agree with you, g, and I hope I made that clear, but some of the comments and I believe even the mention of stockholm syndrome seem to imply that the idea that death is meaningful does not qualify as rational, lies at a subrational level, instead of taking it, as I believe it deserves to be taken, as an idea that could be right or wrong.

Elizer- Thanks for the links. I think people are sour-grapes, because it's so much easier to recognize what they might lose than imagine what they could gain through immortality. It's such an unknown. But choosing death to avoid such unknowns would be a poor form of risk minimization, since it's irreversible. Do you have a link to material about why you believe you will achieve immortality?

Believe is too strong a term, especially for "real immortality".

But one who fully mastered the Way could shape the power to burn outside a human mind, and this would be strength enough to accomplish many things that modern folk consider difficult.

"""For your expected lifespan value to diverge to +infinity, it is necessary to place only

.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001

probability on your chance of living forever, and I don't think you can realistically defend assigning a probability lower than that."""

I can assign a nonzero probability to any number less than infinity, but in infinite time, the probability that even a godlike being will earn a Darwin is 1, no matter how unlikely it is n the next year.

"""For your expected lifespan value to diverge to +infinity, it is necessary to place only

.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001

probability on your chance of living forever, and I don't think you can realistically defend assigning a probability lower than that."""

I can assign a nonzero probability to any number less than infinity, but in infinite time, the probability that even a godlike being will earn a Darwin is 1, no matter how unlikely it is n the next year.

Eliezer, I'm just wondering what the current best available options are for would-be immortals. I've heard about cryogenics, but it seems like an obvious pipe dream, because cosmic rays will ravage the body so badly in a short time, which is something we don't have to think about much while alive since the damage is being constantly repaired.

Uhm, cosmic rays a threat to cryonics? Where the heck did /that/ come from?

BW,

Based on your comments here, I've increased my subjective probability that you will not write a great philosophy book significantly.

"Uhm, cosmic rays a threat to cryonics? Where the heck did /that/ come from?"

From my biophysics professor, who is somewhat eccentric and goes off on a lot of random tangents, and who once basically started mocking people who go in for cryonics, for not seeing this obvious problem.

Cosmic ray damage isn't going to matter except over 10 KYear+ time periods, and even a million years worth would almost certainly be repairable by mature nanotechnology. Cryonics is supposed to get you to 2050 or whenever. I can't even find this question in standard cryonics FAQs, it's so bizarre.

bw: Whose opinion does matter?

Eliezer, I couldn't find it in standard cryonics FAQ either.... that's why I asked you! I have wondered in the past about the accuracy of some of the things that this prof. has said in his freewheeling way, so I'm glad you could clear that up for me. Thanks for answering my question, but you could have left out the condescension. The last sentence of your answer adds nothing of value.

My condescension was directed toward your biophysics professor. Seriously, what the hell gives senior scientists the idea that they can stop using science and still form accurate beliefs?

I see ... sorry for taking your answer the wrong way. Thanks again for answering my question.

Tiiba:

The hypothesis is actual immortality, to which nonzero probability is being assigned. For example, suppose under some scenario your probability of dying at each time decreases by a factor of 1/2. Then, your total probability of dying is 2 times the probability of dying at the very first step, which we can assume far less than 1/2.

People have apparently argued for a 300 to 30,000 years storage limit due to free radicals due to cosmic rays, but the uncertainty is pretty big. Cosmic rays and background radiation are likely not as much a problem as carbon-14 and potassium-40 atoms anyway, not to mention the freezing damage. http://www.cryonics.org/1chapter2.html has a bit of discussion of this. The quick way of estimating the damage is to assume it is time compressed, so that the accumulated yearly dose is given as an acute dose.

In 30,000 years you get 6000 rems worth of cosmic rays. This would be fatal (in a day or an hour) if a living human received it all at once.

But it's not nearly as much damage as is done by vitrifying someone to the temperature of liquid nitrogen, which would kill you instantly if it happened all at once.

There's a difference between functional damage to living systems (on which basis the cryonics folk are calculating that it will take at least 3000 years); versus the informational damage required to disrupt the relative structure of neurons frozen at liqui... (read more)

Of course, the professor in question might not have had any idea of when revival is expected to be feasible. Cryonics in popular culture tends to be portrayed as "people get frozen in the hopes that people in the distant, distant future might be able to revive them", making the position a bit more understandable.

Not to mention unconstrained optimization....

This is extremely interesting to me because I am such a person; I have had significant difficulty throughout my life with uderstanding the existing state of other people. I've luckily found a mate who is much better at it than I am, and can therefore pull me ... (read more)

On seeming (but not being) deep: http://nedroid.com/comic/comics/2009-09-29-beartato-sowise.gif

Thanks for informing me of another bias you are triggering. You're one of the first people (maybe the first person?) I've found who explains in a convincing way how not to be fooled by people speaking in a convincing way.

(Sorry if I got that from you. I know it's a cached thought, but I can't seem to trace it.)

Thank you for this post Eliezer, it was deep :). (I will learn to pronounce your name correctly before i meet you, just you wait.)

Another great post. Much of the philosophical discussion I have with people consists of them 'pretending to be wise'. Whenever I am giving a fragmentary repitition of someone else's conclusion (usually when talking about something complex in science that I know only a little about) I'm at least up front with them. I'll say something thing like "I don't understand this nearly as well as [insert some experts or a specific field], but here is the little bit I do know.

This deep-seeming by violating expectations reminds me of the great quote from Niels Bohr, that there "two sorts of truth: trivialities, where opposites are obviously absurd, and profound truths, recognised by the fact that the opposite is also a profound truth."

I think that this works for two reasons: firstly, people tend to assume that everyone else is working from the same cache as themselves, so when we encounter someone working from non-standard cache, we often assume that the speaker must have thought up everything on his own; secondly, cached wisdom tend to be polished, self-contained and carefully worded for maximum rhetorical effect, whereas original thinking tends to be... not those things. Consequently, when we encounter an unfamiliar bit of cached wisdom, it seems as though the idea must have burst fully formed Athena-style from the speakers brow, when really he's just repeating something he read in a book somewhere that was gradually refined over time by others.

Next time around, I'd be more careful to link to tvtropes - that site is even more addictive than lesswrong! Ah, Eliezer, you continue to find new ways to steal time from me.

Is there any deepness, though, that you can just figure out without previously contemplating it, or is nearly all philosophy something that needs to just be explained later? And isn't then anything deep just regurgitating what we've already thought?

People have told me I was 'deep' because, in discussions, it's a habit for me to point out opposing points of view to everything that comes up, even if I agree with the original point of view, and to come up with the best arguments I can for the point of view even if I disagree with it, all while being very polite and pleasant about it. Apparently that's a good way to come across as really open to new ideas, which a lot of people seem to equate with being 'deep'.

have you succeeded in chaining these "one-inference-steps"?

that is, have you found you can take people with different beliefs / less domain knowledge, in casual conversation, and quickly explain things one inference at a time? i've found that i can only pull a few of those, even if they follow and are delightfully surprised by each one, else i start sounding too weird.

Calling someone "deep" is like calling someone "articulate"...It's a statement of unwillingness or inability to discuss what was said. I'm not offended by being called "deep" because I'll outlive the deathists who tend to call me that.

This is why I love LessWrong. I'm new to this but I feel my thinking ability improve every day. Thank you.

I've never heard of Transhumanism until now.  After reading this article, and doing some quickie research, I have to say I absolutely hate it.  Doesn't make a lick of sense to me given I'm pro-death positivity, and know death from an Anthropological standpoint.  If nothing died the land would become barren, the dead provide nutrient rich mulch that can fertilize hundreds of plants, important bacteria and creatures that live off decay would die out.  Whale Fall is the term used for when a whale dies and sinks to the bottom of the sea, it... (read more)