I wanted to like this essay, but ultimately I think you should "write a second draft." The core idea is important, and I want 101 content like this to feel really rock-solid, instead of "unfinished and anti-climactic."
Various notes, some of which are just nitpicks:
> And I know that the utilitarian calculus is off, here—that I am revealing some confusion in my own internal beliefs. More on that below.
Did you ever get to this? I don't see where. I also agree with (the other) Max's comment that it feels a bit like a distraction.
> Classically, this is referred to as “Occam’s Razor.” Another way to say this is “beliefs are for true things.”
Occam's Razor is a heuristic for picking between equally-explanatory models by choosing the simplest, but I wouldn't describe the classical notion of Occam's Razor as directly commenting on whether comforting fictions should be abandoned.
> When I hold something up and let it go, it always falls (even if it falls interestingly, the way a paper airplane does).
Balloons don't.
> By reality is lawful, what I mean is that, as far as we can tell, the whole wide universe can be explained by matter and energy following just a small number of relatively simple laws. We don’t fully understand those laws yet, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there, and it doesn’t mean they aren’t working.
I generally think the "Reality is lawful" section should be rewritten as "Reality is not a story" and emphasize the way in which human narrative conventions are not what govern what actually happens (except sometimes via affecting human behavior).
When I imagine an intelligent theist reading this section, I imagine them saying something like "Yes, God's creation is very elegant!" and sort of bouncing off the point. You spend a bunch of time rallying against supernatural stories, but I think from the inside people who believe in heaven don't see the afterlife as being similar to stories about werewolves--they see it as being similar to stories about how the light from distant stars, being older than the light from nearer stars, tells us that gravity worked the same way billions of years ago. Like, I believe that the standard narrative in physics is that things that are often taken as "fundamental" such as electromagnetism emerged from symmetry-breaking in the moments after the big-bang in a fairly arbitrary way. Someone like me, without the physics chops to evaluate that in mathematical detail, is at risk of seeing it as a very similar story to "when God created the universe, he arranged things so that life would one-day form on Earth."
The key property that distinguishes these narratives is not their lawfulness. There's a whole slew of theologians throughout the ages building lawful models of the relationship of the material and the divine. Rather, I claim that the core distinction is that the physicist's model is *mechanical* as opposed to *narrative.* Stories have a logic to them (we use this logic to guess what's going to happen), but this logic is (usually) shaped around what's satisfying emotionally and psychologically, rather than being machine-like (or math-like).
> And there’s never yet been—in my sight—anything that didn’t make sense.
Again, this feels like a straw-man that misses the core point. To people who believe in souls which go to an afterlife, that makes sense to them. What "doesn't make sense" (from a certain angle) is a meaningless universe that emerged randomly only to have everyone in it die.
The idea you're pushing towards is, I think, that there's *no room* for a force that shapes the whole universe towards goodness and meaning and love, because the non-narrative, mechanistic explanation already crowds it out by explaining the data and being simpler. But notably this requires people to already have a good feel for what the mechanistic explanation looks like, and for them to agree that it really does explain things and that it is in fact simpler. All of these probably need to be addressed, if you're going with the idea of building up anti-deathism from first-principles.
And for the record, I really don't think our current worldview does a good job explaining everything. I've seen *lots* of things that don't make sense, and I'm still confused by them. If I heard a convincing story about how angels in heaven obviously still have mass, despite not interacting with normal matter in standard ways, and that's what's going on with dark matter, it'd bring me a meaningful amount of the way towards believing in heaven.
> I’ve seen things that confused me, but every confusion that has been solved had a mundane answer, and I bet that the ones I’m still mulling over had mundane answers, too.
This feels like a semantic trick. What makes karma "not mundane" but nuclear fusion "mundane"?
> All of which is to say that reality does not compel me to believe in ghosts. The brain is the soul— (The body helps, too; I’m rounding off.) —and there’s not some other non-physical thing behind it doing the driving that survives after the brain goes away.
I think you believe the brain holds the soul, but is not the soul, as evidenced by your later words about uploading. In general I wish you spent more time talking about people being patterns of information.
> If you believe that the destruction of your brain is the destruction of you, then you have to believe that everyone around you will one day vanish, that all of their will and whimsy and taste and beauty will cease to be a part of this universe, cease to be a part of what paints your life such bright colors. Which is a recipe for misery or nihilistic ennui, both of which erode your own soul.
I feel vaguely averse to the framing here. I think it'd feel better if it was framed as potentially disturbing, rather than necessitating misery. I know it's played up for rhetorical effect, but I think that maybe works better if it feels like "some people flinch away because they can't take it" and less like "everyone who looks at this is doomed to suffer, so it makes sense that some people would choose to ignore it."
> ...there is nothing you can do to comfort your weeping friend at the funeral...
Same as above. In fact there are plenty of things I can do to offer comfort at funerals, and I don't like the implication that comfort=lies, even for rhetorical effect.
> But I do think that there’s some kind of penetrating insight, some kind of innocent candor, in the beliefs of children, and I think that it is telling that this belief in particular is one we as a culture are only able to wash away with sustained and deliberate effort.
I might change this from "in the beliefs of children" to "in the value judgements of children." (I appreciate the asterisk you provided on this, btw. Thank you.) Notably, children tend to naturally believe all sorts of nonsense (such as dualism) which seems straightforwardly unimportant, since it's out of touch with reality. But the raw value judgements of children can't be wrong per-se (wrongness is for beliefs, not values), and in them we can see things that people care about that many adults deaden themselves towards.
> There is nothing which demands death
The second law of thermodynamics does.
> Death gives life meaning—
You fail to steelman this one, but I enjoyed a reframe (that I got from Val, IIRC) wherein death is the shocking wake-up call that causes people to reconnect with pursuit of meaning. It seems pretty plausible that the typical person's life is more meaningful and they notice meaning more in the (non-immediate) aftermath of the death of a loved one.
> Thanos is a villain. No one in their right mind would consider that the best solution, just as you would not consider “kill everyone over 30” to be the answer to today’s social and environmental problems.
This section feels weirdly rhetorical, as opposed to substantive. While I believe that overpopulation concerns are mostly overblown, it seems pretty true that throughout most of human history (e.g. 1650) if you'd make everyone immortal, there'd very shortly afterwards be extreme scarcity. (I'd be happy to double-click on this if it feels important.) And if your society *has* to stay small to thrive, it seems pretty reasonable to kill off the oldest as opposed to, say, not having any children, or having a death lottery. It doesn't feel like you've rebutted the idea that a society without death would be terrible for social/economic problems, and are simply asserting that it would be fine because technology (and implying that anyone who thinks otherwise is a villain).
---
Okay, that's all of my reactions. Just to emphasize "obvious" points, I like your writing and I am happy you exist and are sharing things like this. My showing up on this particular essay to complain is a result of caring both about the specific topic and wanting you in particular to have the best anti-death essay on the web. :)
Aw man I somehow feel like I'm not going to get around to updating this on my own but if you want to do a new version with a co-author credit I could probably volley drafts back and forth.
(Er. Implicit in this is "much of your commentary above strikes me as valid.")
I keep going back and forth on this. If it's cool with you, rather than commit to doing a revision or say "no" I'll keep it as an open opportunity in case I get inspired over the next month. 🙂
I like this as a reference / intro for the argument for why death is uncomplicatedly a bad thing with no redeeming qualities.
But I think this part:
> I don’t think that’s enough. I am extremely opposed to death. I think it is one of the very worst possible things. If I were going to be tortured forever, I would probably choose death, but if some demon or genie told me that I was going to be tortured for a million years and then after that I would get a hundred years of happy and healthy life, I would take that option.
Is mostly unrelated to the main point, and possibly distracts from it? Like, something can be 100% downside, pure and simple dead-weight loss, without being a special-case sacred Bad with a capital B; one of the worst possible things imaginable.
I think in terms of what values people are likely to have upon sufficient reflection, introspection, experience, etc. a super-majority would conclude that (unwilling) death _is_ unreservedly terrible with no redeeming qualities, and worth spending resources to eliminate ASAP.
But _how_ bad it is relative to lots of other bad things seems like something that people could come to pretty different answers on, and that seems... totally fine? Like, I agree with basically every point in this post, but I wouldn't take the torture, probably not even for a few days let alone a million years, depending on how bad it is. That feels like mostly just a difference in preferences though. I say "mostly", because I can imagine learning or experiencing stuff in the future that changes my mind about this in the future, e.g. about how much I personally can tolerate torture or what the nature of consciousness is like in more detail.
Personally, I find the increasing evidence that aging is genetically programmed to be more convincing of this point than artificial cells etc. (That's different from convincing people that we can prevent our own deaths, for which the artificial cells are more convincing.) The example I use when discussing with laypeople is lobsters: they show no signs of aging-related degradation, but rather just keep growing every year.
I wanted to like this essay, but ultimately I think you should "write a second draft." The core idea is important, and I want 101 content like this to feel really rock-solid, instead of "unfinished and anti-climactic."
Various notes, some of which are just nitpicks:
> And I know that the utilitarian calculus is off, here—that I am revealing some confusion in my own internal beliefs. More on that below.
Did you ever get to this? I don't see where. I also agree with (the other) Max's comment that it feels a bit like a distraction.
> Classically, this is referred to as “Occam’s Razor.” Another way to say this is “beliefs are for true things.”
Occam's Razor is a heuristic for picking between equally-explanatory models by choosing the simplest, but I wouldn't describe the classical notion of Occam's Razor as directly commenting on whether comforting fictions should be abandoned.
> When I hold something up and let it go, it always falls (even if it falls interestingly, the way a paper airplane does).
Balloons don't.
> By reality is lawful, what I mean is that, as far as we can tell, the whole wide universe can be explained by matter and energy following just a small number of relatively simple laws. We don’t fully understand those laws yet, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there, and it doesn’t mean they aren’t working.
I generally think the "Reality is lawful" section should be rewritten as "Reality is not a story" and emphasize the way in which human narrative conventions are not what govern what actually happens (except sometimes via affecting human behavior).
When I imagine an intelligent theist reading this section, I imagine them saying something like "Yes, God's creation is very elegant!" and sort of bouncing off the point. You spend a bunch of time rallying against supernatural stories, but I think from the inside people who believe in heaven don't see the afterlife as being similar to stories about werewolves--they see it as being similar to stories about how the light from distant stars, being older than the light from nearer stars, tells us that gravity worked the same way billions of years ago. Like, I believe that the standard narrative in physics is that things that are often taken as "fundamental" such as electromagnetism emerged from symmetry-breaking in the moments after the big-bang in a fairly arbitrary way. Someone like me, without the physics chops to evaluate that in mathematical detail, is at risk of seeing it as a very similar story to "when God created the universe, he arranged things so that life would one-day form on Earth."
The key property that distinguishes these narratives is not their lawfulness. There's a whole slew of theologians throughout the ages building lawful models of the relationship of the material and the divine. Rather, I claim that the core distinction is that the physicist's model is *mechanical* as opposed to *narrative.* Stories have a logic to them (we use this logic to guess what's going to happen), but this logic is (usually) shaped around what's satisfying emotionally and psychologically, rather than being machine-like (or math-like).
> And there’s never yet been—in my sight—anything that didn’t make sense.
Again, this feels like a straw-man that misses the core point. To people who believe in souls which go to an afterlife, that makes sense to them. What "doesn't make sense" (from a certain angle) is a meaningless universe that emerged randomly only to have everyone in it die.
The idea you're pushing towards is, I think, that there's *no room* for a force that shapes the whole universe towards goodness and meaning and love, because the non-narrative, mechanistic explanation already crowds it out by explaining the data and being simpler. But notably this requires people to already have a good feel for what the mechanistic explanation looks like, and for them to agree that it really does explain things and that it is in fact simpler. All of these probably need to be addressed, if you're going with the idea of building up anti-deathism from first-principles.
And for the record, I really don't think our current worldview does a good job explaining everything. I've seen *lots* of things that don't make sense, and I'm still confused by them. If I heard a convincing story about how angels in heaven obviously still have mass, despite not interacting with normal matter in standard ways, and that's what's going on with dark matter, it'd bring me a meaningful amount of the way towards believing in heaven.
> I’ve seen things that confused me, but every confusion that has been solved had a mundane answer, and I bet that the ones I’m still mulling over had mundane answers, too.
This feels like a semantic trick. What makes karma "not mundane" but nuclear fusion "mundane"?
> All of which is to say that reality does not compel me to believe in ghosts. The brain is the soul— (The body helps, too; I’m rounding off.) —and there’s not some other non-physical thing behind it doing the driving that survives after the brain goes away.
I think you believe the brain holds the soul, but is not the soul, as evidenced by your later words about uploading. In general I wish you spent more time talking about people being patterns of information.
> If you believe that the destruction of your brain is the destruction of you, then you have to believe that everyone around you will one day vanish, that all of their will and whimsy and taste and beauty will cease to be a part of this universe, cease to be a part of what paints your life such bright colors. Which is a recipe for misery or nihilistic ennui, both of which erode your own soul.
I feel vaguely averse to the framing here. I think it'd feel better if it was framed as potentially disturbing, rather than necessitating misery. I know it's played up for rhetorical effect, but I think that maybe works better if it feels like "some people flinch away because they can't take it" and less like "everyone who looks at this is doomed to suffer, so it makes sense that some people would choose to ignore it."
> ...there is nothing you can do to comfort your weeping friend at the funeral...
Same as above. In fact there are plenty of things I can do to offer comfort at funerals, and I don't like the implication that comfort=lies, even for rhetorical effect.
> But I do think that there’s some kind of penetrating insight, some kind of innocent candor, in the beliefs of children, and I think that it is telling that this belief in particular is one we as a culture are only able to wash away with sustained and deliberate effort.
I might change this from "in the beliefs of children" to "in the value judgements of children." (I appreciate the asterisk you provided on this, btw. Thank you.) Notably, children tend to naturally believe all sorts of nonsense (such as dualism) which seems straightforwardly unimportant, since it's out of touch with reality. But the raw value judgements of children can't be wrong per-se (wrongness is for beliefs, not values), and in them we can see things that people care about that many adults deaden themselves towards.
> There is nothing which demands death
The second law of thermodynamics does.
> Death gives life meaning—
You fail to steelman this one, but I enjoyed a reframe (that I got from Val, IIRC) wherein death is the shocking wake-up call that causes people to reconnect with pursuit of meaning. It seems pretty plausible that the typical person's life is more meaningful and they notice meaning more in the (non-immediate) aftermath of the death of a loved one.
> Thanos is a villain. No one in their right mind would consider that the best solution, just as you would not consider “kill everyone over 30” to be the answer to today’s social and environmental problems.
This section feels weirdly rhetorical, as opposed to substantive. While I believe that overpopulation concerns are mostly overblown, it seems pretty true that throughout most of human history (e.g. 1650) if you'd make everyone immortal, there'd very shortly afterwards be extreme scarcity. (I'd be happy to double-click on this if it feels important.) And if your society *has* to stay small to thrive, it seems pretty reasonable to kill off the oldest as opposed to, say, not having any children, or having a death lottery. It doesn't feel like you've rebutted the idea that a society without death would be terrible for social/economic problems, and are simply asserting that it would be fine because technology (and implying that anyone who thinks otherwise is a villain).
---
Okay, that's all of my reactions. Just to emphasize "obvious" points, I like your writing and I am happy you exist and are sharing things like this. My showing up on this particular essay to complain is a result of caring both about the specific topic and wanting you in particular to have the best anti-death essay on the web. :)
Aw man I somehow feel like I'm not going to get around to updating this on my own but if you want to do a new version with a co-author credit I could probably volley drafts back and forth.
(Er. Implicit in this is "much of your commentary above strikes me as valid.")
I keep going back and forth on this. If it's cool with you, rather than commit to doing a revision or say "no" I'll keep it as an open opportunity in case I get inspired over the next month. 🙂
I like this as a reference / intro for the argument for why death is uncomplicatedly a bad thing with no redeeming qualities.
But I think this part:
> I don’t think that’s enough. I am extremely opposed to death. I think it is one of the very worst possible things. If I were going to be tortured forever, I would probably choose death, but if some demon or genie told me that I was going to be tortured for a million years and then after that I would get a hundred years of happy and healthy life, I would take that option.
Is mostly unrelated to the main point, and possibly distracts from it? Like, something can be 100% downside, pure and simple dead-weight loss, without being a special-case sacred Bad with a capital B; one of the worst possible things imaginable.
I think in terms of what values people are likely to have upon sufficient reflection, introspection, experience, etc. a super-majority would conclude that (unwilling) death _is_ unreservedly terrible with no redeeming qualities, and worth spending resources to eliminate ASAP.
But _how_ bad it is relative to lots of other bad things seems like something that people could come to pretty different answers on, and that seems... totally fine? Like, I agree with basically every point in this post, but I wouldn't take the torture, probably not even for a few days let alone a million years, depending on how bad it is. That feels like mostly just a difference in preferences though. I say "mostly", because I can imagine learning or experiencing stuff in the future that changes my mind about this in the future, e.g. about how much I personally can tolerate torture or what the nature of consciousness is like in more detail.
> Death is not inevitable.
Personally, I find the increasing evidence that aging is genetically programmed to be more convincing of this point than artificial cells etc. (That's different from convincing people that we can prevent our own deaths, for which the artificial cells are more convincing.) The example I use when discussing with laypeople is lobsters: they show no signs of aging-related degradation, but rather just keep growing every year.
On "death gives meaning to life", I always liked Eliezer's take on this: The Meaning That Immortality Gives to Life (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hFTkZjPiAyQ9RtCQf/the-meaning-that-immortality-gives-to-life).