-Buddhist proverb
A followup thought from the previous post (below).
This advice was given to me in grad school by my advisor and was one of the few things he said that actually turned out to be useful. Birthday 41 is next week and, to be frank, I didn't expect to live this long so my expectations of additional years is 0. I've been clinically dead twice and, after the last time, I've always tried to live with the expectation that if I need to get something done, I'd better do it sooner rather than later. Much sooner. It's a philosophy which really helps prioritize the important things and helps brush away the seemingly important but long term trivial (e.g. filling out forms at work vs. actually fixing people's security problems). It also encourages a higher level of risk taking than average, leading me to travel to around the world, quit jobs I don't like, ignore people who waste my time etc.
It's good advice and I highly recommend it. There is never a guarantee the sun will rise tomorrow.
There is also an interesting paradox here with religion, although I may be conflating personality with religious tenants. I'm an atheist and don't believe in an afterlife, so it would seem that my priority should be extending my lifespan at all costs. Instead I've opted for the "enjoy it while you can" model, which has led (immodestly said) to a richer more interesting life than the alternative.
OTOH, many Christians I know, who are as certain of the afterlife as they are of the sunrise, tend to go to greater lengths to avoid some risks and are strong advocates of life extension/digital uploading etc. in order to keep living as long as possible. Given that Heaven is supposed to be.. well... heaven, I've never understood the mania to avoid death. I went to UMass with an astronomer/born-again who spent hours each day trying to eliminate any possibility of consuming food she might have been allergic to, biking 50 or 60 miles and in general going to great lengths to extend her human life as long as possible. And I never got a very convincing reason why. She didn't think she was going to Hell, that much was certain.
Dunno. I'm not saying one way is better than the other in general, I am saying I know what works for me.
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2 comments:
Okay, I might buy that. The argument be persuasive to me iff a) I thought there was a non-zero probability of the existence of god, b) I thought there was a non-zero probability of an afterlife and c) (assuming a and b are not 0) that there is a non-zero probability that b has a Bayesian dependency on a).
Also, you have explicitly (and I think correctly) rejected Pascal's super-dominance argument that the value of any time in Heaven is infinite.
OTOH, there is some question as to the relative value of days spent as an Extropian vs. days spent in Purgatory. Also, you've assumed that days spent as an Extropian do not cause more days spent (in a presumed lower value) Purgatory at a rate greater than or equal to 1:1. I’m not sure I buy this.
On one hand there is the Church’s penchant for keeping folks alive at (almost) all costs by mechanical means. This would suggest that future Extropian technology would not be a sin. OTOH, that technology might be increasingly at odds with the Church’s socialist tendencies as an increasingly older, resource consuming population begins to lower the overall quality of life. {assuming scarcity, which I’ll address in a minute}. Further, the older people get, and the more comfortable with creature comforts, the more of them will tend toward eventual agonisticism or atheism (or other, less drastic sins as they get older and bored and develop more flexible attitudes toward things which are currently sins, e.g. divorce). So the Church might take a dimmer of view of life extension.
At best I think this is a wash and would have to say I’m putting my money on the idea that the time in Purgatory would at best equal and probably exceed the total value of the extra life provided by technology.
The wildcard is the scarcity problem. If scarcity isn’t a concern, I might grant that time as an Extropian might approximately equal the prorated value of Heaven such that the combination of Life + Heaven > Purgatory. If however it isn’t solved, (and I don’t see how you can solve it except for short bursts of a few thousand years, based strictly on overall entropy arguments), then this doesn’t seem like a winning hand to me.
What Travis said. But I don't speak as an Extropian Catholic (wow) but as a lapsed Episcopal.
Something else to consider in this year of grace 2005. Live long enough and medical advances might be just quick enough to keep a body alive, hale and hearty for increasingly long spans of time.
I don't know that I _want_ to live for (say) the next thousand years but the idea that it might be possible is fascinating.
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