X-Message-Number: 30137 From: Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2007 20:06:37 EST Subject: DSS points DSS wrote in part: [Ettinger wrote] >> Everyone is faced with choices, and the rational criterion is future >> happiness or satisfaction. This was abbreviated, perhaps too much. Then DSS wrote:: >Research in this area tends to show that a person's level of >'happiness' is very little changed by events, in the long run. That >is, a good event may lead to a boost in happiness, but the level >returns to that normal for the individual shortly thereafter. >Therefore, strategies to achieve happiness are not likely to make any >real changes in the individual's life. This is also abbreviated too much and misses much. As a simple example, suppose you correct your previously reckless behavior and live longer than you otherwise would have. Maybe an attempt to measure your "happiness" would show little change, but few would argue that the change in behavior didn't pay off. The sum total of future happiness depends not only on the level of happiness but also on its duration. DSS also wrote: >In fact, some argue that is >better for people to be less happy, then the good events yield a >tremendous boost in happiness and the bad ones have little effect. This is like the fellow who kept banging his head against the wall, and when asked why, he said "Because it feels so good when I stop." In any case, this seems at odds with his previous statement that choices have little long-run effect on happiness. Also DSS wrote: >A more fundamental analysis shows that the cultural constructions >that provide meaning and value to the individual and society are what >must be changed to yield improvements in the human condition. My >podcast provides a proposal that is consistent with the cryonics >movement's goals (includes a compact summary of terror management >theory in the middle section): This is a question difficult to analyze, because of the interaction between the individual and society, with society "evolving" much more than the individual. The human genome is believed to be very little changed in the last 100,000 years or more, during most of which time the culture was vastly different and communities much smaller. Agriculture and civilization (beginning roughly 10,000 years ago) brought huge changes, and the last few centuries huge further changes. The question of "meaning and value" is also complex and tricky. Some would say that, for millennia, religion gave meaning and value to life for large numbers of people, but this seems to me to be simplistic and misleading. To see the silliness, it is only necessary to notice the difference in explicit official content of the various religions and similar ideologies. To refer again to an example I may overwork, communism is (was) essentially a religion, and apparently gave relative comfort to large numbers of people, without any promise of afterlife. The operative considerations are primarily the approval of society and the indoctrinated conscience. Anyone who doubts this need merely investigate the extent to which the adherents of religion or ideology understand and agree on the principles involved. (Clue--that extent is very small.) I tried to locate DSS' referenced podcast but wasn't able to. Perhaps he could provide an easily accessed summary. In any case, what it boils down to, as far as I can see, is what I have said repeatedly. (1) We are too few to attempt a direct effort to influence the structure of society. (2) The wind is at our backs anyway, since the consistent gains of science and medicine make our thesis more and more plausible. (3) We need to husband our limited resources and apply them where they will do the most good, viz., in gaining members and improving cryopreservation procedures. Incidentally, I think it was Mark Plus who reiterated his view that recent decades have been disappointing in tech progress, with no flying flivvers yet etc. I think this is misleading. The last century has seen very important progress in biology and medicine, which continues and accelerates. If I had been born a century earlier, I would have been dead several times over. My life has been saved several times by modern medicine. This does not mean that I am a short-term optimist on nano-medicine or anything like that, but the sweep of history is on our side. Robert Ettinger **************************************See AOL's top rated recipes (http://food.aol.com/top-rated-recipes?NCID=aoltop00030000000004) Content-Type: text/html; charset="US-ASCII" [ AUTOMATICALLY SKIPPING HTML ENCODING! ] Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=30137