Universal counterargument against “badness of death” is wrong

All these questions are not boredom or overpopulation – they are something like a protection from a new idea. Or protection against fear of death. Its like a Stockholm syndrome, where a victim take the side of a terrorist.

FWIW: This is part of the standard immortalist memetic immune system response. It's stuff like this happening in my own head for decades that prevented me from really listening to people.

At the risk of being really annoying to you, here are a few related elements to point at what I mean:

• I basically said that these counterarguments weren't really about boredom or overpopulation. See the analogy with the partner nominally talking about groceries. So why say that?
• It's pretty important which new idea they're encountering. It's not a generic response. Most people don't respond to first hearing the idea of blockchain with "But what if you get bored?"
• The thing about protection against fear of death is an assumption. It's a super duper common one in immortalist circles. Likewise with deathist arguments being about Stockholm Syndrome. It's a clear hypothesis. But that's not how it's used. It's not presented to stir curiosity and exploration of the deathist psyche. The default reason for saying things like this is to dismiss the deathist concerns as basically delusional. (Speaking from decades of personal experience of enacting this disrespect.)

If people were really afraid about overpopulation, they should ban sex first. 

Well, if the single thing they cared about was overpopulation, then sure. The math checks out.

I think it's a combination of (a) they don't really care about overpopulation per se, (b) they're bad at exponential reasoning, and (c) they care about a whole system of things that are all interconnected but typically don't notice the system as a whole.

But that's just my guess.

You are right: they feel that something is amiss.  The idea of immortality without an image of paradise is really boring. Becoming immortal without becoming God and without living in galactic size paradize is wrong and they feel it. 

Well…

Okay, so: If I could eliminate aging in my body as is, right now, I would.

I'm totally fine with not having an image of paradise that this leads me to. I'm fine with not clearly seeing how this makes me God. That's fine.

I'm happy to live as this human for a few centuries. Wandering the Earth.

Even if I'm the only one.

I don't intuit anything deeply wrong with that. Maybe I'm numb and stupid here. Maybe whatever that intuition others get was burned out of me by my immortalist family.

But my guess is, the deathist cringe isn't to a lack of vision of paradise or of becoming God.

Like, another deathist counterargument goes along the lines of "But people I love will die. I'd have to deal with that again and again, forever."

It's curious how often this shows up when talking about ending aging for everyone. It doesn't make logical sense given the thought experiment: those loved ones would have their aging cured too.

And yet.

So what's up with that? If I had to hazard a guess, it's that they're carrying collective (and maybe personal) trauma from losing loved ones. The burden of the mortality of those who came before us across the aeons. And they just don't know how to orient to that titanic burden.

I don't think offering them a vision of Heaven would address that. What of the scar that Yehuda left? There's a soul-rending agony and grief here to reconcile with. The engineering question is important too, but on its own it comes across like the stereotypical "man fixes women's feelings" scenario.

I think this whole scenario is way more intricate and nuanced than immortalist narratives tend to allow for.

Also, is there even any evidence for this assertion? If we stipulate that absolutist monarchies are about as bad as a dictatorship then how did that assertion work out historically? Over the last 10'000 years when lifespans were much shorter dictatorships and related systems flourished. The ascent of democracy has paralleled an increase in lifespans. Correlation does not imply causation, but at least it makes it more likely, whereas the dictator argument is just speculation as far as I can tell.

You don't have to imagine, you already read Dagon [LW(p) · GW(p)] in this comment section, who writes: "Death is neither bad nor good, it's just a part of the world which has formed our ideas of identity and experience".

Virtue ethics places intrinsic value in virtues, and deontology places intrinsic value in rules, so straight-forwardly neither of those ethical frameworks places intrinsic value in life and death as states of the world. That is a majority of philsophers, per this 2009 EconLog survey.

Also, religions that view death as a reunification with a higher power can place intrinsic positive value in death, or at least not place negative value in death. Or religions can place intrinsic value directly and solely in the higher power. Likewise, I roughly model Buddhism as placing intrinsic value on ending suffering and rebirth, with human life instrumentally valuable to achieve those goals.

If everyone placed positive intrinsic value on immortality, in addition to the convergent instrumental value of avoiding death, I imagine that immortality wouldn't be a topic of debate like this.

Quotes from H.P. Lovecraft's Nietzscheism and Realism (full text):

It must be remembered that there is no real reason to expect anything in particular from mankind; good and evil are local expedients—or their lack—and not in any sense cosmic truths or laws. We call a thing "good" because it promotes certain petty human conditions that we happen to like—whereas it is just as sensible to assume that all humanity is a noxious pest and should be eradicated like rats or gnats for the good of the planet or of the universe. There are no absolute values in the whole blind tragedy of mechanistic nature—nothing is good or bad except as judged from an absurdly limited point of view. The only cosmic reality is mindless, undeviating fate—automatic, unmoral, uncalculating inevitability. As human beings, our only sensible scale of values is one based on lessening the agony of existence. That plan is most deserving of praise which most ably fosters the creation of the objects and conditions best adapted to diminish the pain of living for those most sensitive to its depressing ravages. To expect perfect adjustment and happiness is absurdly unscientific and unphilosophical. We can seek only a more or less trivial mitigation of suffering.

It is good to be a cynic--it is better to be a contented cat--and it is best not to exist at all. Universal suicide is the most logical thing in the world--we reject it only because of our primitive cowardice and childish fear of the dark. If we were sensible we would seek death--the same blissful blank which we enjoyed before we existed.

Of course, H.P. Lovecraft was not suicidal, but that might be because (a) death is inevitable so there's no reason to rush the road to blissful oblivion, and (b) he's human just like everyone else, so he is just as valuable as everyone else. But note that he is in favor of the mitigation of suffering, and attaches no intrinsic value with life itself. He probably would be okay with life extension, but only if you are able to mitigate suffering in the process. If you can't do that, he'll probably complain. Conversely, if you do find a way to convince people to give up their "primitive cowardice" and thereby ease humanity's suffering that way...well, he may consider it.

Just to add to the above: even without (massive) cognitive decline in the aged, just knowing you only have a few years left likely has an effect on someone's decisions.  Most changes and improvements, in technology and institutional processes, cause initial short term problems.  They only pay off long term.  If you're in the last 5 years of your career, or your life, there's no expected payoff for learning most new things, or for seeing a major change in how the institution you work in works.  

If you can reasonably expect to live for many more centuries (since with a perfect cure for aging you'd have a life expectancy of several thousand years), you might as well start adopting new things now, maybe you'll see a net payoff in 50 years.  Or maybe you'll procrastinate first.  Could go either way.

(sorry for the late reply)

Wow, many assumptions about me here. And what a tone. I didn’t expect this in LW. And that such a response gets so many votes and no pushback. It really looks like Valentine is spot on in her or his comments.

To start, note that I never say or imply that anybody should use “~conservatism” to argue against the badness of dead, nor do I do it myself. Yet, your answer focusses on that.

Then, I’m not speaking about the political ideology. For example, although they may prefer most things to be done as they have always been done, many conservatives advocate for fast scientific advancement. That’s why I wrote “~conservatism”. Probably I should have been clearer. I’m bad at finding the right words. But I think that typing “~X” is a clear signal that I don’t mean X. If the meaning is not clear one can ask.

That a humanity without (human) dead would be much more “~conservative” seems a zero controversial statement to me. I don’t care if being older does or does not guarantee unproductivity. The point is that being older, on average, guarantees a much lower inclination to change one own’s mind and a huge tendency of doing things as previously done*.

In addition, science does not only advance one paper or one citation at a time; it advances when the scientific community adopts the better-than-previous ideas in those papers. I would be very surprised if you’d argue that a much older scientific community won’t have a much tougher time adopting the new better ideas, particularly the game-changing ones. And probably not in the short-run, but in the long-rung this would surely slow technological development.

I point out that there is a huge overlap between advocates of technological and cultural advancement and advocates of eliminating dead and, as for me it is plainly obvious that a society without dead would be much more “~conservative”, I find it strange that this is never mentioned in that debate. 

I —and I think most people around here— try to be consistent with my believes and values. That’s why when some of them are in conflict, I try to acknowledge it. In part I do it for myself, probably to help me process the tension, and in part to make my ideas less confusing. I assume others would do this as well, at least some. Maybe this is the error. But I find the absolute lack of discussion about this —again, as far as I have seen, but nobody seems to contradict this observation— very strange.

And to finish: “what [I] regard as bad about the elderly”? That’s a good one. Where did I wrote about something bad about the elderly? I did zero value judgements in my comment. Please, assume less and engage more.

*[Probably there are many different causes for this and I’m not an expert, but I have some hypotheses. For example, for learning something new in many cases one has to unlearn something old, changing/breaking routines and habits requires effort, our remembered experience of time accelerates as we age… Actually, I also find it strange that this last point is barely mentioned in the debate.]
 

(sorry for the late reply)

Ok, but this only works with “posthuman uploads” not with bodily humans. A large portion of the current work for eliminating dead is focussed on keeping our bodies healthy. And, as far as I have seen, many people seem to support eliminating dead by keeping our bodies healthy.

So, it may not be strange that the disjunction is not spoken about when the debate is explicitly about eliminating dead by uploading human brains or the like, but not in a general setting, right?

In any case, thanks for engaging.

Yup, most people don't think clearly.  Most public arguments are bad.  It's not unreasonable to transform the common argument into "other people should die because I (and my in-group) will have a better future without them". 

This is a VERY hard thing to argue against, as there's some truth in it.  Even if you extend it to "and I accept that I will die in the future, as part of this equilibrium", it's pretty strong, as we have an actual working example, unlike any counter-proprosal.  You can point out that it's not utilitarian (as it values different individuals differently).  To me, that's a truth-derived feature, not a bug - people are not, in fact, equal.  

Not all humans have that preference at all times in their life - I've known a few who chose to die (including some who I understood and supported the choice), and MANY who didn't choose to suffer more in order to live longer.  Your induction is invalid.  

Many people have preferences and revealed preferences that I'm willing to ignore or actively prevent.  I like having laws against assault, for instance.  So pure preference adhesion is not a sufficient definition of altruism to apply here.  

Also, I'm only altruistic on some topics, and not perfectly so.  I like many people, and I like people as a concept, and all else equal, I prefer that even strangers be happy, all else equal.  But all else is NEVER equal, and I honor some other-peoples-preferences far less than others, and I care more about people closer to me than further.  

I suspect that attempts to generalize on these topics are doomed to fail.  Most people don't have consistent utility functions, let alone values.  And there's LOTS of behavioral data showing that a very large number of people don't care very much about distant strangers.