My attitude towards death

I find it difficult to know what you mean by “fear”. What I mean by it is a certain physical and emotional response to danger, involving elevated heart rate, heightened alertness, and readiness for strong exertion to overcome whatever the danger is. My most intense experiences of this have been in nightmares. In waking life, all that comes close is the flash of alarm when crossing a road and I realise that a car I failed to notice is bearing down on me. And watching the “Alien” films.

In this sense, fear and my own death have nothing to do with each other. Of course I would prefer not to die, but to call mere preference “fear” is like calling a dog’s tail a leg. The dog won’t start walking on it just because you pointed and said “leg”. Despite my preference, it is very likely that I will be dead in a few decades, but to me this is just a fact about the world.

What are other people pointing at when they point at their fear of death?

I don't experience very much fear of death in my daily life, possibly because there isn't much that would trigger it. I would feel it if I was trapped in a burning building. I also feel something like a fear of death when I imagine being very old, or AGI being developed, though I think that I'm more afraid of poor health or pain or facing the deaths of the people I care about. I expect to feel a fear of death more acutely when AGI seems close, or once I am old.

I remember that there was a time when I felt afraid of death more regularly. As a teenager, I felt agitated by the thought that continuity of self might not survive sleep. Or for that matter a full waking day, because by evening, events that happened early in the day would already feel like they almost happened to someone else. Later on, I read thought experiments about personal identity and did meditation, and became less concerned about continuity of self being a real thing in the first place. Then I also stopped worrying about losing it to things like sleep.

I think I also have a preference for life whose reason isn't mentioned in your post. It's something like an aesthetic preference for the person who I am. I think it's cool that a person like me exists. I'd like him to continue existing, the way I'd like to see the continued existence of all the other people who I like. I approve of his aesthetic choices - in fact, I would make exactly the same choices myself.

Sometimes for my end of the course advice for my students at Smith College, I suggest that my students sign up for cryonics.  Students are not hostile, they are amused.  They frequently think I'm joking despite my efforts to be as serious as possible and despite the fact that they have had a full course with me.

For myself, there's an element of acceptance and reducing the power of "negative emotions", which I've practiced and gotten better at with age.  It's not that I no longer fear death, it's just that I'm OK with fearing death, and the fear doesn't cause me ongoing pain nor interfere with the joy of life.  I try to do this with hunger, body aches, and the like as well - put some attention to whether there's anything I'm going to do about it, then move on.

But there’s also a significant utilitarian motivation - which is relevant here because utilitarianism doesn’t care about death for its own sake, as long as the dead are replaced by new people with equal welfare. Indeed, if our lives have diminishing marginal value over time (which seems hard to dispute if you’re taking our own preferences into account at all), and humanity can only support a fixed population size, utilitarianism actively prefers that older people die and are replaced.

I strongly disagree with this. I think the idea of human fungibility is flawed from a hedonistic quality of life perspective. In my view, much of human angst is due to the specter of involuntary death. There has been a lot of academic literature on this. One famous book is Ernest Becker's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Denial_of_Death/ 

Involuntary death is one of the great harms of life. Decreasing the probability and inevitability of involuntary death seems to have the potential to dramatically improve the quality of human lives. 

It is also not clear that future civilizations will want to create as many people as they can. It is quite plausible that future civilizations will be reticent to do this. For one, those people have not consented to be born and the quality of their lives may still be unpredictable. There is a good philosophical case for anti-natalism as a result of this lack of consent. I consider anti-natalism totally impractical - and even problematic - in today's world because we need the next generation to continue the project of humanity. But in the future that may not be an issue anymore. Whereas people who have opted for cryonics/biostasis are consenting to live longer lives. 

(As a side note, I'm a strong proponent of brain preservation/cryonics and I'm consistently surprised others are not more interested in it.) 

(updated from a previous comment I made on this topic here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/vqaeCxRS9tc9PoWMq/why-are-some-eas-into-cryonics) [EA · GW] 

Very interesting topic. When I was a child I was terrified of death: it seemed like the worst possible outcome to me, and I imagined that I would rather live being tortured for eternity rather than die (although it's unlikely I would have maintained this preference in practice).

At one point I got very into Stoicism and for a summer I imagined at the start of every day that I, and all my loved ones, might die today, and used this as motivation to be grateful for each day and make the most of each interaction. About a year later I almost drowned - for about 20 seconds I thought I was going to die, but I didn't feel any fear. It's possible that this is how I survived, as I was able to stay calm and think my way out of the situation. Of course I still feel fear related to many dangers, and I haven't done any exercises like these in a while, so the effects aren't as strong.

But I certainly believe now that there are many things worse than death, and I probably take a bit more of a epicurean view of the badness of death than most EAs (I would measure the badness of death purely in foregone positive experiences and the negative impact it has on loved ones).

But there’s also a significant utilitarian motivation - which is relevant here because utilitarianism doesn’t care about death for its own sake, as long as the dead are replaced by new people with equal welfare. Indeed, if our lives have diminishing marginal value over time (which seems hard to dispute if you’re taking our own preferences into account at all), and humanity can only support a fixed population size, utilitarianism actively prefers that older people die and are replaced.

This is an interesting amalgam of different views from utilitarianism and common-sense morality. It seems to require:

• 1. welfare is defined over lives instead of person-moments,
• 2. death isn't a bad part of life, it is simply an ending,
• 3. welfare has diminishing marginal returns with length-of-life, because that's the preferences you'd get if you asked people alive today.

I think (2) makes sense insofar as you define welfare as a function of person-moments. But under assumption (1), it wouldn't be crazy to treat a death-event as an intrinsically bad thing, that made your total welfare somewhat worse, in which case you might want to keep people alive in order to avoid too many death-events.

I'm also not sure about (3). Sure, people today care more about living 10 more years than they care about the difference between living for 100 and 110 years. But once they've lived for 100 years, their preference for living another 10 years might still be just as strong. In that case, I don't see why we should defer to the earlier person's view.

It could also be the case that

• people strongly prefer to extend their lives from 30 to 40 years over creating a new 10-year long life,
• that this desire diminishes for adding 10 years to longer lives,
• but that their desire to add an additional 10 years to an arbitrarily long life asymptotes to still being slightly above the value of creating a new 10-year long life.

(If you allow death events, it seems pretty easy to construct functions like this. I think it's possible without death events, too, if the first few years of your life has relatively low welfare.)

fearing death, and loving life. [...] The latter was particularly dominant when I was in primary school, when a part of me emerged that was very afraid of death

Should that have read, "The former ..."?

I strongly feel that dying is contextual. I do not fear death in any sense which is meaningful, in terms of the part about personally being dead. I am afraid of certain consequences of my death; biggest by far is that my family would go without my support or protection.

In the matter of dying, there's preferences: I'd rather die fighting than fleeing for example, unless fighting would be really stupid; it's not fear exactly, but no one wants to be tortured to death. The fearful options are things like Alzheimer's and assorted madnesses, wherein I lose the things that make me, me.

These last couple of examples introduce a 'death is preferable' category. There's lots of conditions like this, which are mostly a matter of choosing between dying or suffering pointlessly and expensively and then dying anyway. 

Speaking to your suppressed vs. resolved fear question: my prior is very strongly on suppressed. This shows up vividly at end-of-life events: I have observed families where someone was dying of cancer, was deeply ambivalent about getting medical treatment because of the discomfort, and then so averse to thinking about death that no arrangements were made for their passing. This left the whole family to only really begin the process once the sick person died, which was further obstructed by the aversion at least one other family member had to death. This resulted in what was already an emotionally fraught decision process being disorganized and traumatic well into the zone of grim comedy. From the other end of the same kind of event, consider the case of people demanding their loved ones receive treatment to the point of medical torture. These seem to me like cases where people are suppressing the fear so hard they would cause object-level harms to other people rather than confront it.

Regarding blended/borderless minds losing identity, I don't think this will necessarily eliminate the fear of death, or mean that death isn't still happening: I've partaken in an egregore that feared its own dissolution more than I typically feared my own (albiet, that is not very much). The fracturing of groups can be quite a sad thing. I do think that a time will come (though, yes, probably a fair bit after we become post-human, quite a while, in subjective time) when death becomes more of a... re-arranging of parts, but it will still be the end of something. The admission that continuing this project could no longer be justified, yielding to the cries of the unborn.

(By the way, dear Richard, we're planning a session of our podcast called The Steelman, about Death. It might be nice to have you along? I don't know. The cryopets guy is on board for it, but hasn't given a date. Must be busy.)

Let’s first distinguish two broad types of reasons for wanting to avoid death: fearing death, and loving life. Perhaps these seem like two sides of the same coin - but, psychologically speaking, they feel very distinct to me. The latter was particularly dominant when I was in primary school, when a part of me emerged that was very afraid of death (in a way that wasn’t closely linked to fear of missing out on any particular aspects of life).

I think in the third sentence you meant "former", not "latter"?  I might be reading it wrong though, if you meant that the latter was dominant before that part emerged.