Life is Good, More Life is Better

"I don't ever want to die" is not an attitude you need to take today. All you need is "for the foreseeable future, I want the choice on whether to remain alive or die". Who knows? Maybe some day, I'll want to die. But not today, so I don't want a decaying body making that choice for me.

The overpopulation argument doesn't make sense at all. Imagine a hypothetical world in which aging has been conquered, there are no terminal diseases, and life is safer and more peaceful than it is in our world. Eventually, this world's population would get too high, and the populace would have to decide what to do: Should the government impose a one-child rule? Should some of the population be shipped out into the cosmos? Should we let the price of food rise until the market resolves the issue? One thing is clear: the option "let's kill everyone over 80" would not even be on the table, because it's so barbaric that no one would give it much consideration. Furthermore, the policy doesn't even solve the population problem—the growth rate would still be roughly exponential, and the population at a given generation would only be decreased by a constant factor.

The point is this: if we had never heard of death, we would not take it on as a way of stabilizing the population.

The primary arguments I've heard for death are:

Don't worry so much about what arguments are used to support a policy. Arguments appeal to values. Figure out what you value, and write the important things out. Include a category for things you don't value valuing (e.g. love of sugar) separate from the rest. Then, for each value, ask if your dying or living would make the state of the world more in accord with your values. But since you mentioned a specific argument, I will mention an analogous one I have heard:

"The world is overpopulated and if nobody dies, we will overrun and ultimately ruin the planet."

"The world is becoming ever less religious, and atheists don't have enough children to replace themselves. If we don't fight secularism, humanity will die out."

immortal

If someone uses the "i-word" when you simply talk about living longer than a hundred or so, I recommend rolling up a newspaper, swatting them on the nose once with it, and repeating "No" several times, clearly and firmly.

"I look forward to the experience of shutting down and fading away," which I hope could be easily disillusioned by gaining knowledge about how truly undignified dying is, bloody romanticists.

I agree that people under this illusion could definitely benefit from knowledge of deconstructing death into it's component bits.

In case anyone wants to have a list of some of the top worldwide causes of death, all of which seem difficult to argue for, I've put Wikipedia's below: (Note, due to how Wikipedia has displayed this information, some of these are subsets of each other, such as Ischemic heart disease being a type of Cardiovascular disease):

1: Cardiovascular diseases

2: Infectious and parasitic diseases

3: Ischemic heart disease

4: Malignant neoplasms (cancers)

5: Cerebrovascular disease (Stroke)

6: Respiratory infections

7: Lower respiratory tract infections

8: Respiratory diseases

9: Unintentional injuries

10: HIV/AIDS

11: Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

12: Perinatal conditions

13: Digestive diseases

14: Diarrhea diseases

Dying has always been a Big Bad but an inescapable one, and the human race has a bad case of Stockholm Syndrome.

This seems right. Every pro-death argument I've heard either veers into the supernatural, or has the texture of rationalization. So I don't think that's where the real argument lies.

What you want to ask, is, what makes life good? And, frankly, life is good so long as it's comfortable, interesting, satisfying, presents an amount of novelty that suits your tastes, contains time with other people whose company you enjoy, and so on, and so on. To vastly oversimplify, life is good when it's sufficiently Fun.

Plenty of folks won't agree with this, but for the sake of argument, suppose that: If a life is mainly Fun, it's good, and if a life is instead mostly Unfun, then it's bad.

Suppose that Alice believes this, and Alice is fairly intelligent. Moreover, Alice has had a mostly unpleasant life, and there's actually no one in the world who cares if Alice is alive or dead. In a hypothetical flash, Omega appears and offers Alice a choice: immediate, painless death, or thousands of years of life without mental or physical degredation. What should she do?

I'd suggest she take the long life, and here's why: even if Alice's life, up to now, has been pretty crappy, a life of thousands of years is probably going to be pretty good. Alice should have plenty of time to learn what she enjoys: how to make the world around her more comfortable, and who to surround herself with, and how to do interesting and satisfying things, and so on and so on. If Alice sets herself to it, she should be able to make her life good, and for quite some time.

(Yes, you can imagine unlikely scenarios where Alice will be forever prevented from enjoying her life, but they're unlikely. Tiny probabilities of very bad things need to be counterbalance by tiny probabilities of very good things when you're computing expected outcomes.)

So: if you don't have a sense that life is good, perhaps you should spend more effort making it so.

I suppose you could try the abstract route. What sort of properties would cause a utility-maximizing agent to be okay with dying? What sort of utility functions could lead to an agent choosing, say, $500 and a 100 year lifespan over immortality? What sort of agent could extract an infinite amount of utility from living an infinite life? What sort of agent would only get a finite amount of utility from a finite life?

These problems are a bit tricky.

And then of course the subjective part. Which agent are you most like?

Presently, entertainment media worth consuming seems to be being produced at a faster rate than one individual could consume it. (Entertainment media not worth consuming is, of course, produced at a faster rate still per Sturgeon's law, but that's not really relevant). It is easy to find something to do with excess time that would be better than not existing, even if you don't want to work hard at anything and are limited to your current mental abilities, for the foreseeable future; removing those restrictions will add vastly more options.

My mind/human minds are meant to exist for longer than one generation."

Was that supposed to be aren't meant to exist?

So I pose the question: what does a person do to click that death is really, really bad?

The most common way I know is having someone close to you die. If that hasn't happened to you, try to imagine waking up one morning and learning that the person you care about the most has died unexpectedly and that you will never see them again. And if you do manage to imagine that with sufficient detail to get an emotional reaction (ie you don't flinch away from the painful thought), realize that all the other people in the world are that valuable to someone.

"I've read science fiction stories about being immortal, and in those stories immortality gets really boring, really fast. I'm not interested enough in reality to be in it forever." I can't see where this perspective could come from other than mind-numbing ignorance/the unimaginable nature of really big things (like the number of languages on Earth, the amount of things we still don't know about physics or the fact that every person who is or ever will be is a new, interesting being to interact with.)

We should avoid generalizing from fictional evidence, but fiction can give us insight. I suspect that this sort of statement generally is not a person's true rejection, though. On the off chance that this does comprise some portion of the thinking behind a person's deathism, you could try recommending science fiction stories where being "immortal" doesn't get boring. An example: Peter F. Hamilton's series, the Commonwealth Saga and the Void Trilogy. The latter series takes place over a thousand years after the former, which takes place several hundred years in the future relative to the present day. Some characters who were born in the 21st century appear in all of the books, having lifespans over a millennium, and they are far from bored.

"I can't imagine being immortal. My idea about how my life will go is that I will watch my children grow old, but I will die before they do. My mind/human minds are meant to exist for longer than one generation." This fails to account for human minds being very, very flexible. The human mind as we know it now does eventually get tired of life (or at least tired of pain,) but this is not a testament to how minds are, any more than humans becoming distressed when they don't eat is a testament to it being natural to starve, become despondent and die.

It's a valid point that we would have to make some improvements to the human brain in order for longer lifespans to be enjoyable. Neuroplasticity decreases as we get older, and advanced age can bring Alzheimer's, dementia, and other such disorders. As with overpopulation, though, this is another problem to solve, not an absolute objection.

I would disagree with the proposition that people are in any way actually OK with death. I don't think the problem is that people are at peace with death too much; instead, it's an issue that people are so afraid of death that they don't talk or even think realistically about it at all. The quotes you listed above sound like people were speaking hypothetically; if they were in an actual situation where their life was medically threatened but an intervention would likely save them I'm sure they would take the intervention without much consideration (barring depression). Instead, I believe the fear of death is so great, rational thinking about it is pushed aside. It's worse than Stockholm Syndrome, it's learned helplessness. People don't buy cryonics plans for the same reason they don't buy life insurance in the first place or even write a will, in that they're procrastinating in putting together concrete plans for something that makes them feel extremely uncomfortable.

The cryonics specific sales pitch doesn't have any happy early adopters running around saying "Thank Hanson I signed up! A cure was right around the corner, just 3 years away from being on the open market. If I hadn't enrolled I'd be...DEAD!" We're obviously not at that point yet, but if a Peter Thiel (to pull a name out of the air) were to use cryonics and successfully return to the land of the thawed, a hypothetical would become an actual, and people would become much more interested.

Its not an argument in favor of death, but one thing I still struggle with is the notion of identity - what does it really mean to say that I might live for a thousand years if there is nothing in that future mind that I would recognize now as my own? I'm not advancing this as an argument as I know there are problems with drawing any conclusions from it but I cannot dismiss it entirely either. Yes there is not a single day that I'd say I wasn't me yesterday, or that I don't expect to be me tomorrow. But I also wouldn't put any money on myself retaining a single aspect of myself that I would presently describe as essential to my personal identity.

I don't believe in personal identity. As such, death is just an arrangement of observer-moments. It's not that different from birth.

I also don't see why it would be bad if I did. Pleasure is good. Pain is bad. Death tends to involve pain in some way, but it isn't in of itself pain. As such, there's nothing wrong with it. More life is better, but you can do that by creating more people instead of having them last longer.

That said, death is expensive. It costs a lot to raise someone from childhood to replace people that died.

My standard response to the overpopulation issue, is that "immortality" will not happen spontaneously once the science gets that far; some sort of "immortality serum" will have to be distributed to the masses, and the painfully obvious thing to do is include a permanent (albeit temporarily reversible) contraceptive function in the "immortality serum".

I don't want to die but I'm OK with other people dying. In most cases, to put it bluntly, I don't think it is a significant loss (although it might be a personal loss to me). There are some people in the world I'd fight very strongly to see them remain alive for as long as possible, even if they were reluctant (I speak here not of friends and family but of valuable contributors). But I've never understood the desire to save every life. It seems obvious to me that only a few people are here for the Life's Great Adventure and most are killing time until they kick the bucket. I take some issue with that (I think they're falling short of the Good) but it's not a problem that would be fixed by convincing them to change their attitudes towards death (the problem is their attitude towards life). The reason I want to live indefinitely is straightforward: I have some really longterm goals.

Life may not be intrinsically good but goodness seems to at least depend on it in the same way that a canvas may not be beautiful but beauty depends on it. (and BTW, Torture vs Dust Specks had nothing directly related to death)

It is Against Nature/God's Will/The Force to live forever. Nature/God/the Force is going to get humankind if we try for immortality.

Do you mean Star_Wars::The_Force? Because my research shows it is actually supported of certain forms of immortality, so long as they are non-corporeal.