shminux comments on Thoughts on Death - Less Wrong Discussion
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Having lost all my parents and grandparents in the last few years to various causes, from Alzheimer's to cancer to accident, I suppose I am partially qualified.
First, I dislike the locally popular term "deathism", as it has built-in negative connotations, like "slut" and so thwarts your rationality before you even start thinking.
Second, there is a big difference between growing old, weak and sickly before checking out for good, or having one's life interrupted by a freak accident, and staying healthy and capable for a predictable fixed number of years and then discontinuing in an orderly fashion. Most would agree that the former is strictly worse than the latter. It is debatable, however, whether fixed-duration youthful and healthy life is necessarily worse than eternal life, as far as the continuing prosperity of the human race is concerned. I commented about it before, and got downvoted severely, presumably by the anti-deathist crowd.
Negative connotations of "deathism" seem to me to flow entirely from the negative connotations of "death" (or, almost-entirely. Adding "ism" onto anything makes it sound a little evil, but most philosophies are named with an "ism" and that doesn't thwart our rationality). Mostly, the negative connotations flow from our actual utility functions. The idea of replacing it with a word designed not to arouse these emotions brings to mind this paragraph from Orwell's Politics and the English Language:
Negative connotations of "Slut" on the other hand seem to flow from the utility functions of people who aren't me, and from the expectation that their utility functions are common in society, and from the self-reinforcing classification of the word as an insult as a result.
I think this depends a lot on how cheaply you can train the new productive individual. If I died but you could create me again without cost at will, what's the loss?