Shelly Kagan considers: why is death bad?: Maybe … death is bad for me in the comparative sense, because when I’m dead I lack life—more particularly, the good things in life. … Yet if death is bad for me, when is it bad for me? Not now. I’m not dead now. What about when I’m dead? But then, I won’t exist. … Isn’t it true that something can be bad for you only if you exist? Call this idea the existence requirement. …
I think Kagan's argument is like saying there is nothing wrong with my computer monitor breaking because once the function is lost, the function...is lost and so isn't there to matter any more. Though in this example I am here to experience the loss, but in the sense of the function itself either existing or not existing, I think it's the same.
The reason it matters is because sentient beings value it. If the monitor's function had value, then it's bad for the sentient beings. I don't see how replacing monitor's function with brain/body's function would change this in any fundamental way. Why, just because I won't be able to value it any more? That's specifically the reason why it's bad, not a reason why it therefore doesn't affect us.
As Hanson points out, mourning not yet existing people is not much different from me mourning the fact that I don't have 10 computer monitors, or a massive wall-sized monitor with a supercomputer powering it to run Skyrim at a gazillion resolution on my private blimp/casino.
Sons and daughters of Abraham. or anyone else, can easily be created (but not by me) from the rocks on the side of the road. Do you think your pet can have eternal life? Either you can do that for your pet or you can't. If you can't, then maybe an angel can take your pet to heaven with it. Think of the multiple trillions of insects. Are they outnumered by angels? If there is less than one moth per angel,, then a moth meeting with an angel could easily participate in eternity. Why couldn't an angel bring a moth it had communicated with into its eternal world? If there is more than one moth per angel, but there were angels who really enjoyed the company of moths, something less than eternity would suffice to rescue all the moths. Ditto for the potential children of Abraham, or of everyone else, who you have so kindly considered in this post.
Not really, because if you are dead, and there is no afterlife, then you have no values since you don't exist. As I mentioned in a comment on LW a month or so ago, "death is the one thing you can be sure won't regret."
You're attempting to criticize the soundness argument you think I'm making, not the validity. It might be a good idea to learn the technical meaning of such terms before sneering about others' reading comprehension.
(In fact, I've made and will make no argument, so it's impossible that I've made an invalid or unsound one. I'm simply saying: fuck you and the horse you rode in on.)
"An appeal to nature in the subtext is still an appeal to nature."
There is no appeal to nature anywhere. Again, you assume that the conclusion we bioconservatives reach (that we should stick to nature) is our premise. It is not. It will be good if you actually familiarize with the arguments of your opponents if you do not want to sound like the morons from a randomly chosen Critical Race Studies programme.
"Feel free to quote me asserting a conclusion not entailed by my premises."
Right away. "I hold that allegiance to evolution is allegiance to senseless waste and untold suffering. "
Adjectives used imply a strong utilitarian position. If it is your conclusion, then it does not follow from any argument you have made (actually, it does not follow from any argument that can be made). If it is your premise, then you are just asserting as a premise something that is not apriori true and thus cannot be a premise in such an argument(every value judgement requires both apriori validity and empirical justification - you have provided none).
If you have actually read what I wrote, you would have seen that I do not make explicit appeal to nature (you just assume that all bioconservatives do). What I did was ask you why utility should be considered more important than nature - something you did not (and could not) justify with sensible arguments. There goes in the bucket the notion that transhumanists are capable of reading comprehension/
"I hold that allegiance to evolution is allegiance to senseless waste and untold suffering."
And, this is true, of course, only if you are an utilitarian. But utilitarianism is not an objectively necessary moral philosophy so your argument is invalid.
Every life is an experiment in a giant genetic algorithm. To the extent we extinguish without a trace our experiment was a failure. If we think we haven't left anything behind, and have some kind of potential legacy within us, we feel sad, like we failed or were rejected by life. Thus non-beings are not sad, nor are we sad for them, because they weren't judged, so didn't fail.
1. Death is not bad for the dead person, but2. Death in the future - the knowledge of it - affects live person's current state. Usually badly, although sometimes beneficially.3. Anyone's death, future or current, is always bad for their loved ones.
You can't compare existence to nonexistence or evaluation to nonevaluation because there is no basis for comparison. People often use shallow analogies to express their idea that there is something death "feels" like, such as sleeping or being anesthetized. Those are totally without justification. Does death really feel like "nothing"? How do we know what "nothing" feels like in the first place? It's just blatant projection, if you really think about it it's impossible to comprehend and internalize the idea of nonexistence without actually not existing. Knowledge comes from experience and none of us are Zombie Jesus so we have no basis for really saying that the "experience" of being dead is worse than the experience of being alive.
There's no real reason to prefer one end state or the other. However, I inherently value life more because that's the way I'm neurologically wired, which is the tie breaker. I also expect that the process of dying would be in itself unpleasant in almost all cases. So I do my best to avoid it.
That is a rather shallow and stupid attempt to derive ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. Read Hume and comment afterwards.
You don't get to give me orders what to read and not to read, especially after you called me stupid and shallow. The psychological reality of empathy creates an ought in people's minds (e.g. the feeling that this person ought not to be in pain). It does not create an ought from is for a person who does not feel empathy, such as a sociopath or maybe you. I have not claimed the converse, so you can cut the crap right now and leave the insults out.
Sometimes, keeping someone who wants to die is better because that person will agree with you in the future and be happyThis contradicts your first claim, that death is bad because you don't want to die. Maybe sometime in the future you will regret that you didn't die so according to the above logic, killing someone who doesn't want to die is good.
Furthermore, whenever you are asleep, you don't not want to die, just like a non-existent person. This would imply it's ok to kill you in your sleep.
I think Kagan's argument is like saying there is nothing wrong with my computer monitor breaking because once the function is lost, the function...is lost and so isn't there to matter any more. Though in this example I am here to experience the loss, but in the sense of the function itself either existing or not existing, I think it's the same.
The reason it matters is because sentient beings value it. If the monitor's function had value, then it's bad for the sentient beings. I don't see how replacing monitor's function with brain/body's function would change this in any fundamental way. Why, just because I won't be able to value it any more? That's specifically the reason why it's bad, not a reason why it therefore doesn't affect us.
As Hanson points out, mourning not yet existing people is not much different from me mourning the fact that I don't have 10 computer monitors, or a massive wall-sized monitor with a supercomputer powering it to run Skyrim at a gazillion resolution on my private blimp/casino.
Sons and daughters of Abraham. or anyone else, can easily be created (but not by me) from the rocks on the side of the road. Do you think your pet can have eternal life? Either you can do that for your pet or you can't. If you can't, then maybe an angel can take your pet to heaven with it. Think of the multiple trillions of insects. Are they outnumered by angels? If there is less than one moth per angel,, then a moth meeting with an angel could easily participate in eternity. Why couldn't an angel bring a moth it had communicated with into its eternal world? If there is more than one moth per angel, but there were angels who really enjoyed the company of moths, something less than eternity would suffice to rescue all the moths. Ditto for the potential children of Abraham, or of everyone else, who you have so kindly considered in this post.
I think that "It was, but now isn't, and I miss it" is sadder. Largely because I think most people's "might have beens" couldn't really have been.
There are a LOT more people that could have been born and weren't than have actually been born.
Not really, because if you are dead, and there is no afterlife, then you have no values since you don't exist. As I mentioned in a comment on LW a month or so ago, "death is the one thing you can be sure won't regret."
You're attempting to criticize the soundness argument you think I'm making, not the validity. It might be a good idea to learn the technical meaning of such terms before sneering about others' reading comprehension.
(In fact, I've made and will make no argument, so it's impossible that I've made an invalid or unsound one. I'm simply saying: fuck you and the horse you rode in on.)
"An appeal to nature in the subtext is still an appeal to nature."
There is no appeal to nature anywhere. Again, you assume that the conclusion we bioconservatives reach (that we should stick to nature) is our premise. It is not. It will be good if you actually familiarize with the arguments of your opponents if you do not want to sound like the morons from a randomly chosen Critical Race Studies programme.
"Feel free to quote me asserting a conclusion not entailed by my premises."
Right away. "I hold that allegiance to evolution is allegiance to senseless waste and untold suffering. "
Adjectives used imply a strong utilitarian position. If it is your conclusion, then it does not follow from any argument you have made (actually, it does not follow from any argument that can be made). If it is your premise, then you are just asserting as a premise something that is not apriori true and thus cannot be a premise in such an argument(every value judgement requires both apriori validity and empirical justification - you have provided none).
An appeal to nature in the subtext is still an appeal to nature.
"Invalid argument"? Feel free to quote me asserting a conclusion not entailed by my premises.
If you have actually read what I wrote, you would have seen that I do not make explicit appeal to nature (you just assume that all bioconservatives do). What I did was ask you why utility should be considered more important than nature - something you did not (and could not) justify with sensible arguments. There goes in the bucket the notion that transhumanists are capable of reading comprehension/
"I hold that allegiance to evolution is allegiance to senseless waste and untold suffering."
And, this is true, of course, only if you are an utilitarian. But utilitarianism is not an objectively necessary moral philosophy so your argument is invalid.
That is a rather shallow and stupid attempt to derive ‘ought’ from an ‘is’.
...says the one making the appeal to nature.
I hold that allegiance to evolution is allegiance to senseless waste and untold suffering. Fuck that.
Every life is an experiment in a giant genetic algorithm. To the extent we extinguish without a trace our experiment was a failure. If we think we haven't left anything behind, and have some kind of potential legacy within us, we feel sad, like we failed or were rejected by life. Thus non-beings are not sad, nor are we sad for them, because they weren't judged, so didn't fail.
1. Death is not bad for the dead person, but2. Death in the future - the knowledge of it - affects live person's current state. Usually badly, although sometimes beneficially.3. Anyone's death, future or current, is always bad for their loved ones.
==> On average, death is bad.
You can't compare existence to nonexistence or evaluation to nonevaluation because there is no basis for comparison. People often use shallow analogies to express their idea that there is something death "feels" like, such as sleeping or being anesthetized. Those are totally without justification. Does death really feel like "nothing"? How do we know what "nothing" feels like in the first place? It's just blatant projection, if you really think about it it's impossible to comprehend and internalize the idea of nonexistence without actually not existing. Knowledge comes from experience and none of us are Zombie Jesus so we have no basis for really saying that the "experience" of being dead is worse than the experience of being alive.
There's no real reason to prefer one end state or the other. However, I inherently value life more because that's the way I'm neurologically wired, which is the tie breaker. I also expect that the process of dying would be in itself unpleasant in almost all cases. So I do my best to avoid it.
That is a rather shallow and stupid attempt to derive ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. Read Hume and comment afterwards.
You don't get to give me orders what to read and not to read, especially after you called me stupid and shallow. The psychological reality of empathy creates an ought in people's minds (e.g. the feeling that this person ought not to be in pain). It does not create an ought from is for a person who does not feel empathy, such as a sociopath or maybe you. I have not claimed the converse, so you can cut the crap right now and leave the insults out.
Sometimes, keeping someone who wants to die is better because that person will agree with you in the future and be happyThis contradicts your first claim, that death is bad because you don't want to die. Maybe sometime in the future you will regret that you didn't die so according to the above logic, killing someone who doesn't want to die is good.
Furthermore, whenever you are asleep, you don't not want to die, just like a non-existent person. This would imply it's ok to kill you in your sleep.
I wonder if Kagan remains against murder.