= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Kindly comments on The Brain Preservation Foundation still needs money - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (69)
The emotions are irrational in the sense that they are not supported by anything - your brain generates these emotions in these situations and that's it. Emotions are valuable and we need to use rationality to optimize them. Now, there are two ways to satisfy a desire: the obvious one is to change the world to reflect the propositional content of the desire. The less obvious one is to get rid of or alter the desire. I'm not saying that to be rational is to get rid of all your desires. I'm saying that it's a tradeoff, and I am suggesting the possibility that in this case the cost of placating the desire to not die is greater than the cost of getting rid of it.
What worries me is this. It could well be that I am wrong and that the cost of immortality is actually lower than the cost to get rid of the desire for it. But I strongly suspect that this was never the reason for people here to pursue immortality. The real reason has to do with preservation of something that I doubt has value.
If I get rid of my desire to do something, then I've replaced myself by a possibly less frustrated person who doesn't value the same things as I do. This is obviously a trade-off, yes.
On the one hand, it's not that I'm ridiculously frustrated by our lack of immortality, I've kind of gotten used to it. I recognize that things could be better, yes.
On the other hand, a version of me that doesn't care if people die or not seems very different from me and frankly kind of abhorrent. I don't even know if I even want that version of me to exist, and I'm certainly not going to have it replace myself if I can help it.