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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32850 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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In 2016 ISIS attackers bombed the airport in Brussels killing over a dozen people. A seventeen year old girl was present but uninjured. This May she chose to be euthanized because of her psychological trauma. She was 23 and she had no physical injuries. The news of her death was just announced recently.

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2022/10/10/2016-brussels-attacks-victim-granted-euthanasia-after-years-of-ptsd_5999805_4.html

This seems absolutely insane to me. I don't doubt she was suffering but she was only 23. A lot could have changed over the next 70 years. She wasn't terminally ill, she didn't have cancer, she wasn't paralyzed from the neck down. She was very sad and very scared and had attempted suicide twice. But I know that at least some people who have survived suicide attempts have gone on to lead happy lives.

I used to disapprove of euthanasia but wasn't strongly in favor of making it illegal, even though it was never a choice I would make myself or approve of making for a relative. But cases like this have made me strongly opposed to it. It seems like the medical establishment can't be trusted to restrict it to only the most extreme cases. The people saying that allowing euthanasia is a slippery slope have been proven right in my opinion.

Wait, why is this (particularly) bad?

First, under normal conditions, I don’t know who would have a better claim to knowing if her life was worth living. Of course, wanting to die is not normal, and the fact she expressed that at all is decent license to distrust her evaluation.

Assume she was wrong, and that she was due for a miraculous recovery in June, followed by a life of bliss. What level of responsibility do we owe to get her there? A positive good which can only be achieved through outside intervention strikes me not as obligatory, but supererogatory.

The balance is only further towards allowing euthanasia if we grant that she might have been right or not recovered. So long as she wasn’t pressured into it, I don’t see how this is worse than a more traditional suicide.

Thought experiment: you are a Ukrainian prisoner of war in Russia. God appears before you and informs you, objectively, that you will live to age 80 and you will consider your life worth living for almost every one of those remaining years. However, the Russians are going to horribly torture you for a week and in that time, you're gonna beg for death every day.

You have a good shot at killing yourself. Do you have a duty to future-you to not do it? Do your fellow prisoners have a duty to stop you? Personally, I think no. No future reward suffices to create a duty to endure present unbearable suffering.

I actually agree with your hypothetical, but choosing to kill yourself or choosing not to stop a fellow prisoner from killing himself is very different from society validating your choice and killing you itself.

If this girl had slit her own wrists in the bathtub or whatever, I think many of us would view it as a tragedy but none of us would view it as an outrage. The fact that the state did it is a necessary component of the fact pattern.

Also -- being tortured in a Russian prison is much worse than being mentally ill. Being under the physical control of another intelligent adversary intent on maximizing your suffering is an exotic state, morally, and I think your analogy trades on that exoticism in order to reach the conclusion that you want. If someone broke a bone and had to go through a week of painful recovery -- equally painful to the Russian torture -- but was expected to be fine after that, then I think most of us would object to even a purely voluntary decision to kill oneself under those circumstances, even if we would sympathize with the suicidal tortured prisoner.

I think most of us would object to even a purely voluntary decision to kill oneself under those circumstances

I'm not sure if I do. Though of course, if this is the only option on offer, we-as-society should figure out a way to do better.

The median human life for most of history probably included at least, in total, the equivalent of a week of awful torture, tbh. And they, in turn, would describe the life of a wild animal, not dissimilar to a far ancestor, as torture.

I should hope that the median human life does not involve begging for death! Intensity and locality of suffering has its own quality.

Does future you have any children in this scenario?

If you don't have to live for your future self, to whom you owe the most out of anyone, why would you have to live for future children?

I don't agree with the premise of any temporal snapshot raising to the level of identity anyways when it's intrinsically transient in my opinion.

But glossing over the metaphysics, if we're speaking in terms of obligation and duty, whether we're part of the great chain of being in real terms or not seems important.

People endure all sorts of suffering for their kids, real or imagined.

why

Life is sacred and any normalization of death as a process of society is evil.

"Oh but maybe it's okay this time". Maybe it is, but once the exception goes through the system, once it's institutionalized that killing is maybe okay in any circumstance that isn't extremely rigorously defined, horror awaits. If anything is a slippery slope worth protecting ourselves against, killing people is. We should know this from experience by now.

supererogatory

The very idea is nonsense or at best the description of nonsensical ethical frameworks. It is your duty to do good.

Assuming you're not religious, what does scared mean to you in this context?

There's plenty on nonreligious metaphysical reasons to value existence. Chiefly that you can't value things if you don't exist.

But in more utilitarian terms, any undermining of the value of life make you a possible victim. It could be me or my loved ones being gauded into suicide, and I want society to be constructed on a way that makes that unlikely enough.

There's plenty on nonreligious metaphysical reasons to value existence. Chiefly that you can't value things if you don't exist.

But in more utilitarian terms, any undermining of the value of life make you a possible victim. It could be me or my loved ones being gauded into suicide, and I want society to be constructed on a way that makes that unlikely enough.

Rejecting the value of individual's freedom to die also makes you a possible victim.

MMAcevedo (Mnemonic Map/Acevedo), also known as Miguel, is the earliest executable image of a human brain

In 2049 it became known that MMAcevedo was being widely shared and experimented upon without Acevedo's permission. Acevedo's attempts to curtail this proliferation had the opposite of the intended effect. A series of landmark U.S. court decisions found that Acevedo did not have the right to control how his brain image was used, with the result that MMAcevedo is now by far the most widely distributed, frequently copied, and closely analysed human brain image.

Acevedo died from coronary heart failure in 2073 at the age of 62. It is estimated that copies of MMAcevedo have lived a combined total of more than 152,000,000,000 subjective years in emulation. If illicit, modified copies of MMAcevedo are counted, this figure increases by an order of magnitude.

MMAcevedo is considered by some to be the "first immortal", and by others to be a profound warning of the horrors of immortality.

As the earliest viable brain scan, MMAcevedo is one of a very small number of brain scans to have been recorded before widespread understanding of the hazards of uploading and emulation. As such, unlike the vast majority of emulated humans, the emulated Miguel Acevedo boots with an excited, pleasant demeanour.

MMAcevedo's demeanour and attitude contrast starkly with those of nearly all other uploads taken of modern adult humans, most of which boot into a state of disorientation which is quickly replaced by terror and extreme panic. Standard procedures for securing the upload's cooperation such as red-washing, blue-washing, and use of the Objective Statement Protocols are unnecessary. This reduces the necessary computational load required in fast-forwarding the upload through a cooperation protocol, with the result that the MMAcevedo duty cycle is typically 99.4% on suitable workloads, a mark unmatched by all but a few other known uploads.

In current times, MMAcevedo still finds extensive use in research, including, increasingly, historical and linguistics research. In industry, MMAcevedo is generally considered to be obsolete, due to its inappropriate skill set, demanding operational requirements and age. Despite this, MMAcevedo is still extremely popular for tasks of all kinds, due to its free availability, agreeable demeanour and well-understood behaviour. It is estimated that between 6,500,000 and 10,000,000 instances of MMAcevedo are running at any given moment in time.

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