Comments on: We Agree: Get Froze

By: Charles

Charles — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 19:38:05 +0000

In every discussion I find about cryonics, I never see anyone talking about the one factor that weighs most heavily (in my opinion) on my decision… The effect that cryopreservation has on your loved ones, friends, and family that you (hopefully temporarily) leave behind. For anyone who has ever stood at the bedside of a loved one as that loved one passed away, you know how difficult and painful it is to let go. Even after the person has most certainly passed, you need to hold that person’s hand and come to terms, for your own sake, with that person’s passing. This takes time — different amounts of time for each individual — and should not be rushed. And the process is not over when you finally physically let go. It continues through the wake and the funeral and for months thereafter. It is the grieving process, it is natural, it is essential to emotional health, and it cannot be suppressed or mitigated by logic. It happens within each of us, no matter what science, religion, or other coping mechanism we may have.

And so, when I think of cryonics, I am torn. I believe in it. I believe it can work. I believe we will, in the “near” future, cure aging and most diseases. We will have the medical technology to un-freeze those who have been preserved. We will have the technology to repair at least some of the damage done by the anoxia of death and the cryopreservation process, such that a substantial portion of identity and memory is restored. (even if not all)

And yet… when I think about my family standing at my bedside, grieving as I pass, I do not want a small army of technicians looking over their shoulders, impatiently tapping their watches, knowing that every second of delay means further damage to my brain. My family will need to grieve. They will need to let go in their own time, at their own pace. And they probably will not understand, despite my best efforts to explain it and prepare them, why these guys in white coats so desperately need to interrupt their grieving RIGHT NOW to drain my blood and put me on ice. And their necessary process of grieving will be muddled and confused — because even as they conduct my funeral and bury a box somewhere, they will all know that it is empty, and they will wonder… What are we doing?? Is he dead or what? Do we let go now, or what? The potential for psychological and emotional trauma is huge. I love my family, and I do not want to put them through that.

I really don’t care about what the future will look like when I wake up. I don’t care if there’s a super-AI running everything, or if I’m uploaded to a simulator headed for Gliese, where I only get 1 subjective year of processing every 200 actual years, due to power constraints. Whatever. It’s so utterly unpredictable, I don’t even try. As others have explained, the cost is not an issue, either. No… really, the only hangup in my cryonics calculus is how it will affect my family.

I guess it’s all on me to prepare them for it. But I worry that it’s simply not possible, no matter how hard I try. It is my love for them, and my desire to never put them through the pain of grieving (or make it worse than it already is), that paradoxically makes me hope they all die before me. If I was alone in this world, cryonics would be a no-brainer. (haha, get it? “no-brainer”…)

By: Overcoming Bias : Forget 9/11

Overcoming Bias : Forget 9/11 — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 13:12:23 +0000

[...] to smoke less or exercise more, and collective choices like allowing more immigration. And cryonics might have saved most of [...]

By: Debating Cryonics – Lone Gunman

Debating Cryonics – Lone Gunman — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 12:35:25 +0000

[...] We Agree: Get Froze (Robin Hanson, Overcoming Bias) Even with modern anti-freezes, freezing does lots of damage, perhaps more than whatever else was going to kill you. But bodies frozen that cold basically won’t change for millennia. […] Since most folks who die today have an intact brain until the rest of their body fails them, more likely than not most death victims today could live on as (one or more) future ems. And if future folks learn to repair freezing damage plus whatever was killing victims, victims might live on as ordinary humans. [...]

By: Aaron Agassi

Aaron Agassi — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 08:57:43 +0000

Miguel, you do not absolutely need to live (or die) near a Cryonics facility local to you. Cryonics patients are shipped from all around the world. And now the logistics have just become far simpler: http://www.engadget.com/2011/01/25/federal-excess-fedex-introduces-liquid-nitrogen-cooled-biotech I recommend http://www.KrioRus.ru for the most competitive terms and pricing.

By: Overcoming Bias : Get Eggs Froze

Overcoming Bias : Get Eggs Froze — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 21:42:10 +0000

[...] few years back I endorsed an unfairly-neglected tech to extend life: cryonics. Yesterday, Amara Graps reminded me of an [...]

By: Richard Bruns

Richard Bruns — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 17:21:31 +0000

I do not understand how your belief in the effectiveness of cryonics is compatible with your prediction of a hyper-competitive em economy. Your vision of the future is one where ems are constantly being evicted from their bodies because they cannot generate enough value to pay for their hardware rental. Under this situation, why would anyone ever pay to run an em of you? You could not possibly compete against highly trained and specialized and optimized ems.

The only way for you to be revived as a free person is if you have sufficient capital invested to pay for everything yourself, and for the legal system to respect your wishes and your property rights to that capital. The former is plausible, assuming your investments do not get wiped out in one of the economic shocks between now and the time they learn how to make an em out of a cryopatient. But the legal problems seem insurmountable at the present time; if there is a chunk of capital sitting unclaimed for the purpose of doing something to a person who is legally dead, someone will hire a lawyer to figure out how to appropriate it.

Suppose that we found several thousand primitive hominids frozen in ice in a condition that would allow for revival. Suppose further that these people had somehow managed to accumulate, store, and protect enough wealth to pay for their revival and maintain a decent standard of living for the rest of their lives. What kind of life would they live? They would not be able to function as members of society; they would not have the intellect or training to understand or follow the basic rules of our legal and social system. The best they can hope for is to be put on some kind of reservation, a walled garden, where they interact with each other, an artificial environment, and the occasional anthropologist.

By: Jai_C

Jai_C — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 12:37:02 +0000

re. Fork
“he knows there will be two people, one of whom is an upload that remembers being him, and the other a physical person who remembers being him.”

The upload and the physical person in addition to remembering being him, will each also have the memory of the original thinking or knowing there may be 2 of him in the future, ie. they will know about a probable existence of another copy, they will know of a possible fork.

By: Jake

Jake — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 08:25:00 +0000

I actually started the process of signing up for cryonics but the insurance requirements have changed recently and it’s no longer possible to do any of the labwork outside of the United States (or even within NY apparently). I guess this will have to wait until the next time I cross the pond.

By: Manon de Gaillande

Manon de Gaillande — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 17:50:00 +0000

homunq: Most of this falls into two standard patterns with standard answers , “We should spend resources on something less selfish.” – we should start by cutting on luxuries like going to the cinema and buying new clothes before vital expenses – and “I want to die at some point for reason X.” – why in a few decades instead of in a million years or tomorrow? Life expectancy is not optimized for Fun, just for genetic fitness. “Death ends selfishness” is a good argument, though; it’s a benefit of death we can’t emulate without dying (because of akrasia). Still, if it justifies not signing up for cryonics, then it justifies killing yourself right now.

By: homunq

homunq — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 17:06:00 +0000

Is there really nobody here taking the position that the deal we get without cryogenics (a lifetime, then we are survived by our works and descendents, physical and intellectual) is not so bad? I understand that such a position is suspect because of stockholm-syndrome like biases, but there are also biases at least as large and silly for me-me-me-me-me.

I think about it this way: let me just consider the utility of the last millenium with or without reincarnation having some truth. I get almost exactly the same number, in fact slightly less for reincarnation. I think I would even get the same number if I'd been born at the start of it, and was facing the prospect of either a millenium of people I don't know, or one of myself and those I love constantly being reborn in new situations. (I focus on the last millenium to avoid unimaginable near-infinities. I'm actually seriously skeptical about a singularity or any very strong transhumanism, but that's not the point at debate, so 1000-2000 is a good slice.)

So that's my objection. Sure, it'd be fun to resurrect, for me, but is that the best use of those resources? (Even in a singularity, resources only multiply unimaginably, they are not infinite.) I doubt it. And the nice thing about death is it lets me stop being so selfish, so I can really worry about the resources and the fun, and not about me.