Letter to Eliezer
By Michael F Dickey

Eliezer,

Thank you for your words, and I am sorry for the tragic event which has brought them out.

You have captured what makes me an extropian and I think you capture the motivating principle behind each of us here. We love life, and we want to live it. Whatever we all may disagree on, it is only the means to achieve this end. We love life, and we hate its cessation.

There is no greater horror or travesty of justice than the death of someone. All the intricacies of the universe can not compare to the beauty and value of a single sentient being.

I have seen enough death of friends and loved ones myself. Everyone who will listen I try to convince them to be cryogenically suspended, on the premise that they want to live. But most grope for excuses not to, disguising their disregard for their own existence with appeals to mysticism or dystopian futures.
All ideologies prescribe these self delusional condolences and practices, it can be no more clear than what Adrian said: a terror so deep and profound that most people can't even acknowledge it, but just go ever so slowly insane trying to deal with it.

When faced with the death of a loved one, most people get through it by hiding reality, by doing whatever they can to *not* think about the obvious. Death is eternal and final, and when faced with such a thing people can not come up with any answer that goes beyond any self doubt. To take the pain of death away, they must devalue life. One is faced with a choice, acknowledge you love life and death is abhorrent, be indifferent to life and thus indifferent to death, or despise life and welcome death, there are no other alternatives, the view of one precludes the inverse on the other. There seems to be an active effort to create and spread a nihilistic world view. Consider the Buddhist mantra of ‘life is suffering’ consider it’s widespread modern appeal, and then consider its negation, ‘death is joy’ Indeed, Nirvana is the absence of a desire for existence. This nihilistic movement is not acting volitionally, its scared and confused and stumbling through philosophy. All they know is they don’t like death, and through its stumbling come to find that to deal with that it must not care about life. Socrates last words come to mind “I have found the cure for life, and it is death”

I think this is a major part of the reason we have such difficulty spreading our ideas and values. Why in the very secular European area of the world does Cryonics have little to no support? If people accept our worldview, that life is good and technology can help us extend it indefinitely, then they must come to full terms with the finality and horror of death. That is what they have difficulty in doing. I think at some level they know that, it is the logical extension of their beliefs, and as such is manifested as a very negative emotional visceral reaction to our ideas, because of our implied valuation of life.

But just as many of us here put up a great deal of money and effort for a non-zero chance of defeating our first death through cryonics, we need to acknowledge the non-zero possibility of doing something about past deaths. In this I am very fond of Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov’s “The Common Task”. Even though it is derived from his religious background, the motivation, a deep appreciation for the intrinsic value of life, and the goal, bringing back the past dead with technology, I share. The application of science to ‘resurrect’ the past dead. Is it possible? If it is, it should be our ultimate goal. Some here devote their efforts to the development of a singularity AI, and others toward defeating aging biologically, I devote my efforts to the great common task. It is my ultimate goal to find out if it is possible, to learn everything I need to know to determine that, and more, and then to do it, one person at a time if necessary.

I can find no words to offer to ease that suffering, there are none, and it is not possible. I can only say that it is my life goal, and I think others, and eventually the goal of any sentient being who loves life, singularity AI or otherwise, to do what they can to accomplish this common task, if the laws of physics allow it.

Regards

Michael F Dickey

My little brother, Y.N.Y., is dead.

He died November 1st. His body was found without identification. The family found out on November 4th. I spent a week and a half with my family in Chicago, and am now back in Atlanta. I've been putting off telling my friends, because it's such a hard thing to say.

I used to say: "I have four living grandparents and I intend to have four living grandparents when the last star in the Milky Way burns out." I still have four living grandparents, but I don't think I'll be saying that any more. Even if we make it to and through the Singularity, it will be too late. One of the people I love won't be there. The universe has a surprising ability to stab you through the heart from somewhere you weren't looking. Of all the people I had to protect, I never thought that Y. might be one of them. Y. was born July 11, 1985. He lived 7053 days. He was nineteen years old when he died.

The Jewish religion prescribes a number of rituals and condolences for the occasion of a death. The rituals are pointless and tiring; the condolences are religious idiocies. Y. has passed to a better place, God's ways are mysterious but benign, etc. Does such talk really comfort people? I watched my parents, and I don't think it did. The blessing that is spoken at Jewish funerals is "Blessed is God, the true judge." Do they really believe that? Why do they cry at funerals, if they believe that? Does it help someone, to tell them that their religion requires them to believe that? I think I coped better than my parents and my little sister C..

I was just dealing with pain, not confusion. When I heard on the phone that Y. had died, there was never a moment of disbelief. I knew what kind of universe I lived in, and I knew what I planned to do about that. How is my religious family to comprehend it, working, as they must, from the assumption that Y. was deliberately murdered by a benevolent God? The same loving God, I presume, who arranges for millions of children to grow up illiterate and starving; the same kindly tribal father-figure who arranged the Holocaust and the Inquisition's torture of witches. I would not hesitate to call it evil, if any sentient mind had committed such an act, permitted such a thing. But I have weighed the evidence as best I can, and I do not believe the universe to be evil, a reply which in these days is called atheism.
Maybe it helps to believe in an immortal soul. I know that I would feel a lot better if Y. had gone away on a trip somewhere, even if he was never coming back. But Y. did not "pass on". Y. is not "resting in peace". Y. is not coming back. Y. doesn't exist any more. Y. was absolutely annihilated at the age of nineteen. Yes, that makes me angry. I can't put into words how angry. It would be rage to rend the gates of Heaven and burn down God on Its throne, if any God existed. But there is no God, so my anger burns to tear apart the way-things-are, remake the pattern of a world that permits this.

I wonder at the strength of non-transhumanist atheists, to accept so terrible a darkness without any hope of changing it. But then most atheists also succumb to comforting lies, and make excuses for death even less defensible than the outright lies of religion. They flinch away, refuse to confront the horror of a hundred and fifty thousand sentient beings annihilated every day. One point eight lives per second, fifty-five million lives per year. Convert the units, time to life, life to time.
The World Trade Center killed half an hour. As of today, all cryonics organizations together have suspended one minute. This essay took twenty thousand lives to write. I wonder if there was ever an atheist who accepted the full horror, making no excuses, offering no consolations, who did not also hope for some future dawn. What must it be like to live in this world, seeing it just the way it is, and think that it will never change, never get any better?

Y.'s death is the first time I ever lost someone close enough for it to hurt. So now I've seen the face of the enemy. Now I understand, a little better, the price of half a second. I don't understand it well, because the human brain has a pattern built into it. We do not grieve forever, but move on. We mourn for a few days and then continue with our lives. Such underreaction poorly equips us to comprehend Y.'s death. Nineteen years of life and memory annihilated. A thousand years, or a million millennia, or a forever, of future life lost. The sun should have dimmed when Y. died, and a chill wind blown in every place that sentient beings gather, to tell us that our number was diminished by one. But the sun did not dim, because we do not live in that sensible a universe. Even if the sun did dim whenever someone died, it wouldn't be noticeable except as a continuous flickering. Soon everyone would get used to it, and they would no longer notice the flickering of the sun.

My little brother collected corks from wine bottles. Someone brought home, to the family, a pair of corks they had collected for Y., and never had a chance to give him. And my grandmother said, "Give them to C., and someday she'll tell her children about how her brother Y. collected corks." My Grandmother's words shocked me, stretched across more time than it had ever occurred to me to imagine, to when my fourteen-year-old sister had grown up and had married and was telling her children about the brother she'd lost. How could my grandmother skip across all those years so easily when I was struggling to get through the day? I heard my grandmother's words and thought: she has been through this before. This isn't the first loved one my grandmother has lost, the way Y. was the first loved one I'd lost. My grandmother is old enough to have a pattern for dealing with the death of loved ones; she knows how to handle this because she's done it before. And I thought: how can she accept this? If she knows, why isn't she fighting with everything she has to change it?

What would it be like to be a rational atheist in the fifteenth century, and know beyond all hope of rescue that everyone you loved would be annihilated, one after another, unless you yourself died first? That is still the fate of humans today; the ongoing horror has not changed, for all that we have hope. Death is not a distant dream, not a terrible tragedy that happens to someone else like the stories you read in newspapers. One day you'll get a phone call, like I got a phone call, and the possibility that seemed distant will become reality. You will mourn, and finish mourning, and go on with your life, and then one day you'll get another phone call. That is the fate this world has in store for you, unless you make a convulsive effort to change it.

Since Y.'s body was not identified for three days after he died, there was no possible way he could have been cryonically suspended. Others may be luckier. If you've been putting off that talk with your loved ones, do it. Maybe they won't understand, but at least you won't spend forever wondering why you didn't even try. There is one Jewish custom associated with death that makes sense to me, which is contributing to charity on behalf of the departed. I am donating eighteen hundred dollars to the general fund of the Singularity Institute, because this has gone on long enough. If you object to the Singularity Institute then consider Dr. Aubrey de Grey's Methuselah Foundation, which hopes to defeat aging through biomedical engineering. I think that a sensible coping strategy for transhumanist atheists, to donate to an anti-death charity after a loved one dies. Death hurt us, so we will unmake Death. Let that be the outlet for our anger, which is terrible and just. I watched Y.s coffin lowered into the ground and cried, and then I sat through the eulogy and heard rabbis tell comforting lies. If I had spoken Y.'s eulogy I would not have comforted the mourners in their loss. I would have told the mourners that Y. had been absolutely annihilated, that there was nothing left of him. I would have told them they were right to be angry, that they had been robbed, that something precious and irreplaceable was taken from them, for no reason at all, taken from them and shattered, and they are never getting it back.If there should be a monument someday, somewhere on it will be "$1800, in memoriam Y. N. Y., 1985-2004." It will not restore him to life. No sentient being deserves such a thing. Let that be my brother's true eulogy, free of comforting lies.

When M.W. heard the news, he said: "We shall have to work faster." Any similar condolences are welcome. Other condolences are not. Goodbye, Y.. There isn't much point in saying it, since there's no one to hear. Goodbye, Y., you don't exist any more. Nothing left of you after your death, like there was nothing before your birth. You died, and your family, Mom and Dad and C. and I, sat down at the Sabbath table just like our family had always been composed of only four people, like there had never been a Y.. Goodbye, Y. Y., never to return, never to be forgotten.

Love,

Eliezer

Last updated - 24-Nov-2006

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