Re:Cemeteries are landfills, and can contain all sorts of po...
by garmaine on Sunday November 04, 2018 @01:25PM
(#18377282)
Or sign up for cryonics and try not dying in the first place.
[ Parent
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Re:Cemeteries are landfills, and can contain all sorts of po...
by nwatson on Sunday November 04, 2018 @07:48PM
(#18378977)
Technology to resurrect [them] won't be around for 200 years and at that point the now current nation-state and international contracts won't have any standing. Welcome to being part of a convenient un-rights'ed anonymous forever-slave underclass. It would be interesting to know how best those who select cryonics now will be exploited then. Rich enough to afford it and optimistic and gullible enough to think it will turn out right.
Re:Cemeteries are landfills, and can contain all sorts of po...
by wild_preference on Sunday November 04, 2018 @02:56PM
(#18377776)
Great way to piss away your estate for no reason.
Re:Cemeteries are landfills, and can contain all sorts of po...
by ben_w on Sunday November 04, 2018 @04:28PM
(#18378155)
It’s not like you can spend it on anything else at that point.
If the odds are 1%, or 0.01%, it’s still personally worthwhile.
Re:Cemeteries are landfills, and can contain all sorts of po...
by philwelch on Sunday November 04, 2018 @08:53PM
(#18379251)
If you're wiling to take Pascal's wager like that, you could just practice a religion for free.
Re:Cemeteries are landfills, and can contain all sorts of po...
by ben_w on Monday November 05, 2018 @01:19AM
(#18380262)
Many aren’t free, but a bigger problem is that many are mutually exclusive. Which one do you go for? It’s not as easy to say “the one I grew up with” as it was in Pascal’s era.
Re:Cemeteries are landfills, and can contain all sorts of po...
by philwelch on Monday November 05, 2018 @11:50AM
(#18383785)
Declining Pascal’s Wager just because two religions are equally probable makes you Buridan’s ass (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buridan%27s_ass): a donkey who starves to death because he can’t choose between two identical bales of hay. But I think there are probably decision-theoretic ways of even refining Pascal’s Wager; not every religion is mutually exclusive, or holds mutually exclusive beliefs about the afterlife, and not every set of religious beliefs is equally probable. Also, from both an EV and a pure probability perspective, I would tend to avoid religions that seem designed to extract as much money as possible from its followers.
Re:Cemeteries are landfills, and can contain all sorts of po...
by ben_w on Monday November 05, 2018 @01:45PM
(#18384768)
Good points. Can you go into more detail about “not every set of religious beliefs is equally probable”?
Re:Cemeteries are landfills, and can contain all sorts of po...
by philwelch on Monday November 05, 2018 @05:37PM
(#18386637)
That would literally be a religious argument, so I won't name examples, but many religious beliefs can either be tested empirically, have implications that can be tested empirically. If the religion exists in a social or organizational context where there are obvious vested worldly interests for the leaders of an organization to further certain beliefs (money, power, etc.) and those beliefs are designed to further those worldly interests, that would be a signal of improbability as well. Furthermore, for two sets of religious beliefs that share the same base texts and doctrines, the theological and exegetical doctrines can be judged on their own logic and decide between the two.
To put it bluntly (and give a contrived, fictitious example), a religion that believes in a flat earth that rests on the back of a unicorn that was created by a committee of gods 34 months ago (complete with false evidence and memories of what happened before) based on an idiosyncratic interpretation of the New Testament that demands that you give 75% of your money to The Glorious Spiritual Leader and then have sex with him, would be particularly improbable compared to almost any other religion.
Re:Cemeteries are landfills, and can contain all sorts of po...
by ben_w on Friday November 09, 2018 @05:54AM
(#18413625)
Thanks. Would it be reasonable for me to assume that you have a religious belief? I ask because your explanation seems like the kind of reasoning I would have used before I came to believe that no spiritual afterlife was plausible, and that all religions which claimed one were equally untrue (Boltzmann brains and digital afterlives are not spiritual in this sense, as they do not presume a nonphysical soul).
Re:Cemeteries are landfills, and can contain all sorts of po...
by thaumasiotes on Sunday November 04, 2018 @06:18PM
(#18378592)
...assuming you never had children?
Re:Cemeteries are landfills, and can contain all sorts of po...
by enraged_camel on Sunday November 04, 2018 @07:10PM
(#18378808)
Even if I never have children, I'd rather donate my estate to a worthy cause than spend it on cyrogenically freezing my body with the hope of eventual resurrection.
Re:Cemeteries are landfills, and can contain all sorts of po...
by garmaine on Monday November 05, 2018 @05:02AM
(#18381117)
There is this thing called life insurance which nearly all cryonicists use to fund their suspension and storage.
Re:Cemeteries are landfills, and can contain all sorts of po...
by thaumasiotes on Monday November 05, 2018 @12:34PM
(#18384156)
That doesn't make any sense. Life insurance isn't cheaper if you promise to spend it on cryonic storage. It's just a part of your estate, and there are better things you can do with that.
Re:Cemeteries are landfills, and can contain all sorts of po...
by garmaine on Monday November 05, 2018 @10:11PM
(#18388023)
Well it's technically not part of the estate, but a policy held by the cryonics organization. But that's missing the point. You can pay for cryonics without writing people out of your will.