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I'll be there! At least the downtown part. :) Also, I got a new job just in time for the shake up, and it has an erratic schedule, but I'll make it to all the ones I can. Cheers!
In response to
You Only Live Twice
I have a standard answer for cryonics advocates: ask me in 10 years.
In 10 years, I'll be 32, and if all goes well I'll have my life together, I'll be able to point to a few successes, and I'll be able to say that my life isn't a waste. If I like being alive at 32, I'll probably like being alive hundreds of years from now. On the other hand, if I'm 32 and everything has gone wrong, and I'm down and out, and I wake up every morning wishing I hadn't, then I'm probably not going to want to live one more year, let alone hundreds.
In the meantime, I really don't know. I'm in limbo. Sometimes I want to be around to see what happens next, sometimes I really don't. Sometimes I'm crazy excited about planning for my future and how great it's going to be, and sometimes I feel certain that I'll never make it, and all I want is to have never been born, and anyone who thinks well of me must either be lying or must be a loser himself.
So... call me in ten years.
In 10 years, I'll be 32 as well. My main reason for trying to put off procrastinating is because I know I'd be kicking myself (metaphorically) if I died when I was 31 due to some stupid accident.
I'm in the process now of trying to figure out how to spend my first few decades in a way that will be most conducive to making the future an even better place to live.
For me, I really can't see the downside to signing up. Life insurance is something most people sign up for anyway and the additional ~120 bucks for cryonics is pocket change. I mean, common people; That's like the cost of Netflix!
Life rocks and I want to go on living for as long as I want. If I get bored in 2 million years, I'll reserve the option to check myself out. Or, more likely, I'll just change what I'm doing.
As far as I'm concerned, if it only costs twice as much as an X-Box live subscription and it might (with varying degrees of hopefulness - I'm at the high end) procure my immortality, worst case scenario it's money well wasted.
In response to
You Only Live Twice
Even if the probability of being revived is sub-1%, it is worth every penny since the consequence is immortality
By that logic, one should pay to have prayers said for one's soul.
One could make a Drake's-Equation-style estimate of that "sub-1%" probability, but the dominant term is this: what are the odds that evolution, with no selection pressure whatsoever, has designed the brain so that that none of its contents are stored in a volatile way? Why write everything to disk if the computer never gets turned off?
Without hard evidence that the brain does that, I don't see any reason to rate the probability of revival significantly higher than zero. That's without even getting into whether it's really practical to extract what information there is.
Maybe there is such evidence and I just haven't seen it. I repeat: can anyone point me to some?
I don't think it takes an degree in nano-tech or cutting edge medicine to be more confident in the power of future technology than in the power of praying for souls. Even if it is granted that there aren't great reasons for supposing cryonic preservation is viable, it is a huge and unwarranted leap to say that is as intellectually vacuous as the ideas of prayers affecting souls.
It's likely we'll be doing more things in addition to the regular Wednesday meetups.
I'll be sure to announce here.
Sounds great! I'm looking for a new job now anyway. Depending on what I find, Wednesday nights might open up for me. :)
In response to
Meetup : Loveland CO (Fort Collins) 3D printer tour
I live in Fort Collins and have to work during the biweekly meetup here. This showed up on twitter like 15 minutes ago and I missed it. :-/
In response to
Avoid misinterpreting your emotions
Good post and a good lesson. Paying attention to your feelings and reasons for them is an indespensible ingredient to good mental health.
In response to
Interlude with the Confessor (4/8)
Well... would you prefer a life entirely free of pain and sorrow, having sex all day long?
False dilemma.
Good point. I was thinking the same thing. It became a false dilemma right after the coma.
Also, nice name. :)
Still very much enjoying the story! Love the background of the Confessor!
In response to
The Super Happy People (3/8)
Loving this fic so far! It's really stretched my space of imagined possible alien minds. I attended a conference this summer called TAM 9 and several of the talks were on possible alien life, but none of them had this kind of imagination.
The best solution I could think of (and yes, I did sit and think about it for a few minutes) would be to modify the baby eaters so that the children want to be eaten and/or don't suffer their end at the hands of their parents. Haven't thought about the current conundrum yet.
In response to
What Would You Do Without Morality?
Not having read the other comments, I'd say Eliezer is being tedious.
I'd do whatever the hell I want, which is what I am already doing.
I think the point of this post is that people are already doing what they want and, lo and behold, people are behaving morally (for the most part) with or without the permission of moral philosophers. To me, and I'm pretty sure all of you, would still act morally. I would still abstain from murdering people and I'd still tip delivery drivers. We already know (at least the gist) of what morality is.
I think the other point of this post is that even if the relativists were right, we'd still act the same.
(Although, I would be remiss if I didn't mention that I have heard religious people outright say that they would kill and steal if they learned god didn't exist. This is the only silver lining that I am willing to concede to those who say that religion has indespensible social utility; that it keeps leashes on these psychopaths.)
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Just to be clear, are we still meeting up in spite of the parade?