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Dying is concerning. Like other panicked easy marks, I'm signed up for cryonics. Although I think it's very unlikely to work - call it a 1% chance - it still beats the baseline.
I engage in moderately risky activities and if my death occurs in the next 5-ish years it will almost certainly be due to an accident. Most scenarios kill or incapacitate me from meaningful decision making outright. Some don't, however, and it's possible that I could be mortally injured while retaining my basic decision making abilities.
Assuming that I find myself in one of these's rare scenarios, let's say I'm offered a choice. Without emergency treatment I will die. This treatment has an around 20% chance of causing significant additional damage to my brain. Damage that could not be undone even under best sci-fi medical advancements should the cryonics process work. Even with the treatment I have suffered irrevocable damage and it's unknown if it may be progressive.
My instinct is to request that doctors treat me as if I had died in the accident and begin the cryonics process in as controlled and ideal fashion as possible. I know that in practice that's a request that's unlikely to be granted, I'm just not sure if it would be the right choice.
Would you make the same decision? Should anyone be allowed to make that kind of trade-off with the assistance of medical staff?
For me, cryonics is yet another attempt to fill the God-shaped hole in society. You need to learn to accept your mortality; even if cryonics worked freezing yourself wouldn't save you from a bullet or a skydiving accident or anything else.
That said, I'd put your chances at far, far less than 1%. Most cryogenic places have trouble simply avoiding going bankrupt, and even those that stay afloat seem wildly mismanaged and/or incompetent. Best case your head will be frozen to a bunch of tuna cans like Ted Williams.
I will "accept" my inevitable mortality at Heat Death, assuming we can't find a solution for that minor problem.
I genuinely cannot understand the drive to "accept" what might well be the worst possible thing to happen to you, personally, or the people you love. Death sucks, we should be doing everything possible to avoid it. If it's "inevitable", we should first begin by trying even harder to actually check if that's actually the case.
Is cryonics the optimal arrangement? Probably not. But we're not spending the majority of global GDP on curing aging, which is what a sensible civilization would be doing.
You can do quite a bit to reduce your risk of being shot or dying in a physical misadventure.
But the correct solution, in my humble opinion, is to push back even harder against death. We need to figure out a way to scan and upload human brains, alongside means of running our minds in-silico. Once that's an option, we can trivially ensure that nothing short of vacuum decay or the end of the universe poses a meaningful risk. That might not be the platonic ideal of immortality, but I'll take living so long that I need scientific notation as a decent consolation prize.
Only if you assume a priori that there is no afterlife, or even if there isn't, you assume that there are actual ways to significantly extend life or outright prevent death.
That's not cheating death, that's making a shitty copy of yourself but it isn't even you. How does that avoid death whatsoever?
Again, this is all madness caused by people who have rejected God and are trying to replace Him with themselves (or technology, or any number of substitutions). It is the destiny of all men to die, kings and vagabonds alike, and you cannot and will not escape it. Run from it, cry about it, rage against the dying of the light, squander your children's inheritance trying to defeat it, but you will always fail. And even worse, you'll make the life you do get to live worse by worrying needlessly about what you cannot change.
In your post a few weeks ago you talked about how you oneshotted yourself with an AI image of what your children could have looked like. Even from a purely secular point of view, children are the preferred method of achieving immortality for most of history. If you want immortality, have a big family. That option is closed off to me due to infertility, but I've made peace with that. But instead of chasing useless pipedreams of immortality, do something that will leave your indelible mark on the future of the world.
These are pretty reasonable assumptions to make. Besides, as a doctor, my job usually involves extending life or preventing death. We could do better at it, but that's an engineering challenge, not a logical impossibility.
It's not that I "assume" such things, but rather that no life after death is the null hypothesis, and religious thinking to the contrary is hardly convincing. We might all reincarnate as Boltzmann Brains after eons, but I still prefer concrete, present-day solutions.
And why exactly would it have to be a "shitty" copy? The human body, including the human brain, runs on the laws of physics. The laws of physics can be simulated on a computer to arbitrary accuracy. A game of chess is still a game of chess, all relevant parameters are conserved whether using wood, plastic or bits. No reason we can't say the same for human brains.
My conception of personal identity is pretty flexible, but it is in no way stretched beyond breaking point by the notion that a digital copy of me is - for my purposes - interchangeable with me. In many aspects, it's nothing but a straight upgrade. If I want to be stronger, faster, more durable, more intelligent, it helps to be an entity in-silico rather than a meat computer.
I mean, all well and good, but your attempt to convince me that I'm making unreasonable assumptions is rather undercut by the fact that you're making far bigger ones. God is a really poor candidate for ontological simplicity, and even worse as health insurance.
Like, the reasons to believe in your God are not very convincing, and even I concede that we might be unavoidably hard-capped by ever diminishing supply of negentropy in the universe. If he's real, and also timeless, I'm sure he won't mind if he was to wait a few quadrillion years for my immortal soul as opposed to this century. Since Christians believe in medical care and extending healthy lifespan, there are no downsides I can see.
Having children is better than nothing, when it comes to leaving your mark on the world. But it is still a pale imitation of actually staying alive and healthy to tell people about it. I do intend to have kids, and I'm sorry to hear about your fertility issues. But doesn't change the fact that my kids would also like to have me around too. When I talk about life extension, it's not just me being selfish, but thinking about my parents, and my grandfather, and all the other humans alive who would like to keep on being with their loved ones.
I am rather familiar with the technical challenges of human life extension. When I claim that it is possible, I can only hope it is a semi-informed claim. This is not at odds with it being incredibly difficult, which it is. Difficult isn't insurmountable, we went to the moon and will be back. That was as much of a "pipe dream" for almost as much of recorded human history.
It was the destiny of all men to experience half of their children dying before adulthood. You couldn't save them, whether you were a king or a pauper. And yet, look at us today. Soon, any death might well be the same kind of tragedy that is the passing of a child. We can all live for so much.
There’s people on the frontiers of whole brain emulation (WBE’s) already, but even they don’t seem to think a copy of you is a continuation of the present day you in the same sense that today is a continuation of the you of yesterday.
Your ontology of identity may be flexible, but that’s exactly what most people don’t want. They want a continuation of themselves for tomorrow that feels pretty much like today, only either extended perhaps in another added faculty of perception, or as a backstop or guarantee of their ordinary present day consciousness in case something (like death) happens to them.
This is why Buddhist and Hindu philosophy has never drawn or inspired any real attraction or attention from me, though I’ve read their religious texts. If I was someone in a past life, and even if the wheel of karma went on in both directions forever and there was something in me that never died, why would I care, if there’s no concrete mental and physical continuity between that life and my present life today? The two are causally disconnected. If it was me, it’s not me in any sense I regard as interesting or that I should care about. It’s about as meaningful as saying the person standing across from me is also me. I can’t see out of his eyes as well as my own. I can’t feel what he feels and I can’t think what he thinks.
I think John Polkinghorne was the only theologian I’ve ever read that made a case similar to this. Even as a Catholic myself, most of the arguments I’ve seen Christian philosophers make against transhumanism are incredibly weak.
Most people don’t consciously decide to have children because they want to extend their biological footprint into the future, although we know evolution programmed that drive into us for that specified purpose. But it’s incidental to our conscious processing. I want to have children because family is what I find meaningful and fulfilling. Hedonism is empty and a dead end and even if transhumanism could extend my life a million years into the future, lack of a family would still ultimately leave me feeling unsatisfied. Even in my life right now, I would never be in a relationship with someone who wouldn’t consider or has already decided against having a family of their own. That’s a completely worthless relationship as far as I’m concerned.
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/reincarnation
This comic is perfect. I have as little truck with Buddhist/Hindu notions of reincarnation as I do for the Abrahamic belief in eternal life or the dead rising again. There is no real reason to believe in a soul, at least in a soul that does anything useful like carry across memories or personality, and even that would be insufficient.
This is the exact reason why a mind upload is the antithesis of reincarnation, and why I find the former so compelling and the latter so meaningless.
Most people really haven't thought very hard about the ontology of identity. Which is fine, it doesn't come up a lot in practical contexts between birth till someone issues a death certificate on your behalf.
I think this relies on a folk intuition about personal identity that, while comforting, doesn't stand up to scrutiny. What does "continuation" truly mean? You go to sleep every night, and for several hours, your continuous stream of consciousness ceases to exist. The "you" that wakes up is a reconstruction, a new instance of a pattern that has access to the memories stored in your brain from the previous day. We accept this without a second thought because the process is familiar and the fidelity is extremely high. The physical substrate is contiguous, but the conscious experience is not.
I will try and explain my personal understanding as best as I can:
This is the absolute core of it. Personal identity isn't a binary state of "me" vs "not me." It's a spectrum of informational fidelity. There is a threshold of similarity below which I no longer consider the entity to be a functional continuation of myself. A zygote has my DNA, but none of my memories or personality; it's a potential precursor, not me. A dementia-addled version is a degraded, corrupted file; the core data has been lost.
This is precisely where mind uploading comes in. The "continuation of themselves for tomorrow that feels pretty much like today" that you describe is simply what happens when the information loss between two points in time is negligible. You wake up, your brain's memory access is intact, the pattern is conserved, and so you "feel" like the same person.
A high-fidelity mind upload is designed to be the ultimate act of this conservation. It’s not a "copy" in the sense of a blurry photocopy but a photo taken with tomographic electron microscopy and {more speculation}. The goal is to capture the pattern with such precision that the informational difference between pre-scan bio-SMH and post-instantiation digital-SMH is far, far smaller than the difference between me today and me a year from now. And even if it wasn't that perfect, well, my essence is robust to minor perturbation. It's the major ones that kill the "me".
(In the limit:)
The digital version would wake up with a perfect, uninterrupted stream of my memories, feeling exactly as continuous as I do waking from a nap. It would remember typing this very comment. From its perspective, the transition would be seamless. To object to this on the grounds that the substrate changed from carbon to silicon is pure sentimentality - a preference for the original, increasingly faulty hardware over a superior, backed-up system running the exact same software.
The choice isn't between "the real you" and "a fake copy." The choice is between:
Given those options, the preference seems self-evident to me. It's the most robust way to guarantee a "continuation of yourself for tomorrow that feels pretty much like today," indefinitely.
We can grade proposed procedures by fidelity of memory, stability of values, and preservation of personal style. I have laid out elsewhere the sort of blinded behavioral and circuit-level tests I would want. If a method passes those with no more variance than I display across years, it counts. If it fails, it does not.
Caring is allowed to be indexical. I care about versions of me in proportion to their connectedness to this one. That is a sane policy even if you are conservative about what “counts.” It also recommends cooperation between forks, which solves the alleged problem where copies become rivals. They are far more natural allies than almost any other agent in the universe.
On the theology line: I appreciate Polkinghorne’s attempt to reconcile persistence with physicalism (I must admit I've only skimmed it), but I do not need it to ground my choices. From a secular starting point the null hypothesis is no afterlife, and the world hands us ordinary cases that already break naive essence talk. Neurons turnover. Sleep erases consciousness for hours. Anesthesia erases it for longer. Memory is reconstructive and highly lossy. Yet prudential concern flows across these gaps because causal structure and stored information persist. Uploads aim to preserve that structure more faithfully than biology eventually will.
We do not really disagree. Family is one of the big sources of value. The move I am making is not “replace family with silicon.” It is “keep the goods you care about for longer and more reliably.” My parents would like me around. I would like them around. My future kids would like both of those. Dying, in contrast, represents permanent separation. It is the end of both me and most of my dreams, and the connection I have with those I love.
This isn't selfish either. My grandfather is dying. He had a good life, it's hard to imagine better. He spent almost all of the last of his days surrounded by his kids and grandkids, loved and cherished even when there's so little of him left. I know that he will die without regrets, content in the knowledge that being a good person and doing all the right things paid off right until his body and mind decayed on him. He has long stated that he's old, and so very tired, and that death would be a relief.
No. I do not accept this wish, precisely because I love him. I do not love him selfishly, I would not hook him up to life support indefinitely while his organs, the brain being the most important, decay into ruin. I want him to be healthy, and happy, the kind man I once knew should stay. I can't save him, despite being a doctor. He couldn't save himself, despite being an even better one.
What I can only look forward to is the distinct possibility that this never happens to me, and that my kids and grandkids will have me around as long as they care to have me. Then I can tell them, with my recollection intact, just how much one old man really meant to me.
Longevity multiplies time available for the very commitments you name. Choosing survival is not hedonism. I want kids for a multitude of different reasons, and I very much intend to have them. I can fuck around with women without the intention of having kids, but every day, my desire to put a ring on someone and then have kids with them only grows stronger. It's probably better than even odds that I'll be married in a year or two.
I might as well tag @Rosencrantz2 and @HereAndGone, since this lengthy reply probably captures the answers to many of their questions.
Eh, I've always found SMBC to be a little too self-satisfied. As for memories, how much do you remember from when you were one year old? Or from when you were twelve? Every single day, not just a few highlights? And yet there is continuity of personality here. The idea of reincarnation is that the atman, the eternal part, the 'soul', has all the memories of past lives, it is the incarnation at this particular time does not remember (those past lives are like the early years of childhood).
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