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beriukay comments on You Only Live Twice - Less Wrong
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I think the resources spent on cryonically preserving yourself would be better spent on other things. Yes, one of those things is "having children and raising them properly", but it seems likely that one would soon see diminishing returns if one 'overinvested' in one's children. Happily, there are plenty of other worthy causes to take up the slack e.g. donating money to charity, building a garden shed, putting extra insulation in your loft, etc.
Actually, I think cryonically preserving yourself has negative value unless there's some way in which you will be 'interesting' or 'useful' to future generations. For some people this will be true, but not very many.
I think that if people could somehow 'stand back' from their own biased perspective on the world, they would realize that there isn't anything preferable about "one of the people in the far future having distant memories of being me" as opposed to "no-one in the far future having such memories."
Aye. I wasn't thinking when I wrote that bit, so as you can see, I've edited my original comment.
Wouldn't that exact same argument apply to having kids and replacing "is descended from" instead of "having distant memories of"?
Or even replacing "the far distant future" with "now" and "distant memories" being "currently remembered"?
That might be true for some people, but most people have a 'part to play': If you 'delete' such and such a person then you typically cause 'damage' to their social circle and perhaps even the wider world - grief, loss of valuable skills, unique stories, insights etc. which may have considerable local value, and thereby help to keep the human race going, even if they're subsequently forgotten.
However, if you look far enough into the future, any given person alive today (with a few exceptions, like a great artist or scientist) becomes 'obsolete' - all of the things in the here and now that make them 'valuable' gradually disappear. At best they become an interesting relic of a bygone age.
Therefore, if I let go of the idea that there's something intrinsically valuable about the psychological continuity between my dying self and my post-cryonic, reanimated self, then cryonically preserving myself doesn't seem to have any purpose.
(ETA: It's not that "death is good", but that what makes death bad has already happened by the time your frozen corpse is reanimated.)
Isn't arguing about having a 'part to play' inconsistent with talk of intrinsic value? Or are you arguing some form of expiration-date-labeled intrinsic value?
It seems that any loss of intrinsic value are a decay, and not an immediate severance. One might make the argument that your continued self was exactly as valuable until the day your last friend/family member dies. For surely, your loss caused damage to them and the wider world. So would you be willing to cryo-preserve yourself under stipulation that you are thawed and buried with your last living relative who personally knew you, but to bring you back if possible before then? Of course, arguing about likelihood is a different matter.