Greg Linster on the beauty of death

You're thinking about this the wrong way. If you took away a Terminator's ability to die, would it become less deadly? I argue that it would, in fact, become more deadly.

Sure, but Linster asked what is more deadly, not what is better. Being immortal with the option of suicide is clearly more deadly than being literally incapable of dying.

Uncontested. I wasn't writing a rebuttal to his words, but rather elaborating on the thoughts that came to my mind upon reading his words. An extension of the dialogue rather than an argument.

Surely the net value of having the option depends on the magnitude of the chance that I will, given the option, choose suicide in situations where the expected value of my remaining span of life is positive?

Well -- here's the thing. These sorts of scenarios are relatively easy to safeguard against. For example (addressing the 'wrong button' but also the transient emotional state): require the suicide mechanism to take two thousand years to implement from initiation to irreversibility. Another example -- tailored the other way -- since we're already talking about altering/substituting physiology drastically, given that psychological states depend on physiological states, it would stand to reason that any being capable of engineering immortality could also engineer cognitive states.

I would find the notion of pressing the wrong button accidentally for two thousand years to be ... possible at all, given human timeframes. Especially if the suicide mechanism is tied to intentionality. Could you even imagine actively desiring to die for that long a period, short of something akin to an AIMS scenario?

Also, please note that I later described "AIMS" as "total anti-utility that endures for a duration outlasting the remaining lifespan of the universe". So what I'm talking about is a situation where you have a justified true belief that the remaining span of your existence will not merely not have positive value but rather specifically will consist solely of negative value.

(For me, the concept of "absolute suffering" -- that is, a suffering greater than which I cannot conceive (That's kinda got echoes of the Ontological but in this case it's not fallacious since I'm not using that as an argument in favor of its instantiation rather than definition) -- is not sufficient to induce zero-value/utility let alone negative-value/utility. Suffering that "serves a purpose" is acceptable to me; so even an 'eternity' of 'absolute suffering' wouldn't necessarily be AIMS for me, under these terms.)

The point is: such a scenario -- total anti-utility from a given point forward -- has a negligible but non-zero chance of occurring. And over a period of 10^100 years, that raises such a negligible percentage individual instance occurance to an accumulatedly significant one. IF we humans manage to manipulate M-Theory to bypass the closed-system state of the universe and thereby, furthermore, stave off the heat death of the universe indefinitely, then ... well, I know that my mind cannot properly grok the sort of scenario we'd then be discussing.

Still -- given the scenario-options of possibly fucking it up and dying early, or being unable to escape a scenario of unending anti-utility... I choose the former. Then again, If I were given the choice of increasing my g quotient and IQ quotient (or, rather, whatever actual cognitive function those scores are meant to model) twofold for ten years at the price of dying after those ten... I think, right now, I would take it.

So I guess that says something about my underlying beliefs in this discussion, as well.

What if you get trapped in a loop of mind-states, each horrible state leading to the next until you are back where you started?

This is a version of Pascal's mugging.

How do you figure? I can see the relationship -- the discussion of vanishingly small probabilities. The difference, however, is that Pascal's Mugging attempts to apply those small probabilities to deciding a specific action.

There is a categorical difference, I feel, between stating that a thing could occur and stating that a thing is occurring. After all; if there were an infinite number of Muggings, at least one of them conceivably could be actually telling the truth.

And also, given what we know of the universe, I don't think there is a method of becoming trapped with zero chance of escape. Trapped for a very long period, maybe, but not eternally.

s/eternally/"the remaining history of the universe"/, then. The problem remains equivalent as a thought-experiment. The point being -- as middle-aged suicides themselves demonstrate: there is, at some level, in every conscious agent's decision-making processes, a continuously ongoing decision as to whether it would be better to continue to exist, or to cease existing.

Being denied that capacity for choice, it seems highly plausible that over a long enough timeline, nearly anyone should eventually have a problem with this state of affairs.

I'm assuming a fixed probability of occurrance per trial, with an infinite number of trials.

Doesn't associating your identity with (anything similar enough to) a set of physical parts rather than (pure magic or) a pattern of parts going through time imply a belief in non-local physics?

As your individual identity can only be associated with a specific set of physical parts at any given time, I'm pretty sure I don't follow your meaning. I also find myself confused by the concept of "non-local physics". Elaborate?

Is that what you say has a non-zero probability?

I don't care to constrain the particulars of how "And I Must Scream" is defined saving that it be total anti-utility and it be without escape. Whatever particulars you care to imagine in order to aid in understanding this notion are sufficient.

I will add that I am strongly in the anti-"immortality" camp, as that word should not be used. I am in the anti-mortality camp, that's how I'd put it.

Please elaborate on your feelings regarding the problems of the word "immortality". I am agnostic as to your perceptions and have no internal clues to fill in that ignorance.

If we should be immortal -- truly invincible, for example through a medium that is indestructible or as information that is easily stored and copied and thus disposable -- then what goals could we have? I wonder then if there would be anything to do?

From HP:MoR, Chapter 39, Pretending to be Wise, Pt. 1:

"I have lived a hundred and ten years," the old wizard said quietly (taking his beard out of the bowl, and jiggling it to shake out the color). "I have seen and done a great many things, too many of which I wish I had never seen or done. And yet I do not regret being alive, for watching my students grow is a joy that has not begun to wear on me. But I would not wish to live so long that it does! What would you do with eternity, Harry?"

Harry took a deep breath. "Meet all the interesting people in the world, read all the good books and then write something even better, celebrate my first grandchild's tenth birthday party on the Moon, celebrate my first great-great-great grandchild's hundredth birthday party around the Rings of Saturn, learn the deepest and final rules of Nature, understand the nature of consciousness, find out why anything exists in the first place, visit other stars, discover aliens, create aliens, rendezvous with everyone for a party on the other side of the Milky Way once we've explored the whole thing, meet up with everyone else who was born on Old Earth to watch the Sun finally go out, and I used to worry about finding a way to escape this universe before it ran out of negentropy but I'm a lot more hopeful now that I've discovered the so-called laws of physics are just optional guidelines."

The problem that I anticipate is one of goals and values. If we should be immortal -- truly invincible, for example through a medium that is indestructible or as information that is easily stored and copied and thus disposable -- then what goals could we have? I wonder then if there would be anything to do?

Personally, I can't think of a single goal of mine that is strictly contingent on my dying at any point in the future.

If we should be immortal -- truly invincible, for example through a medium that is indestructible or as information that is easily stored and copied and thus disposable -- then what goals could we have? [,,,] Most of our current goals regard self-preservation or self-continuation in one way or another.

If we self-consciously value the futile pursuit of self-continuation over actual self-continuation, it seems to me that something's gone seriously wrong somewhere.

I also think that some serious inferential distance problems show up for almost everyone when they start thinking about perfect immortality, ones that tend to be wrongly generalized to various imperfect forms of life extension. But that's less immediately relevant.