This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for the week of September 3rd. It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:
- Established a useful new habit
- Obtained new evidence that made you change your mind about some belief
- Decided to behave in a different way in some set of situations
- Optimized some part of a common routine or cached behavior
- Consciously changed your emotions or affect with respect to something
- Consciously pursued new valuable information about something that could make a big difference in your life
- Learned something new about your beliefs, behavior, or life that surprised you
- Tried doing any of the above and failed
Or anything else interesting which you want to share, so that other people can think about it, and perhaps be inspired to take action themselves. Try to include enough details so that everyone can use each other's experiences to learn about what tends to work out, and what doesn't tend to work out.
Thanks to everyone who contributes!
There is more to life (extension) than cryonics and nanotechnology. You've overlooked the world of research going on in biology. That is where to focus your attention if you're interested in survival without suspension. Try on the outlook that total rejuvenation is possible using only biological means - stem cells, RNA nanodevices, an ecology of special bacteria in your body rather than a nanobotic immune system. Not only is that sort of research something you can engage with that's already happening on a huge scale - so you don't have to do the impossible and invent nanobots in your basement - it's actually easier to see how it's relevant. The stereotype of a nanobot is a rigid diamondoid mechanism which engages in precise positional manipulation of similarly rigid bodies. A cell is a floppy set of nested membranes populated with self-organizing "soft machines" living in a gel of water and ions. Just trying to get a rigid nanobot to function in that environment would be a problem. It makes more sense to take maximum advantage of the flexible, powerful, and dynamic entities that already live and thrive there.
Two of your specific propositions about death are, first, so long as you're at risk of death, you should spend every moment trying to stave it off, and second, that actually dying renders your life retrospectively meaningless. The first looks like it is supposed to follow from the second. But as for the second - please define "meaning".
Once dead it doesn't matter what happened or didn't happen. This thought has been disturbing me for around 3 years now.
The context was this : it was the first week of medical school. We went to the anatomy lab, and looked at the cadavars. Practically from day 1 we had to do dissections that felt incredibly wrong and disturbing (chopping deep into the person's back). So, while in the lab with the corpses, seeing everyone else around me cheerfully talking about various things, I could not understand everyone else's irrational points of view. THIS was wh... (read more)