Search Results for: cryonics

Immortality Distracts

By Robin Hanson · August 1, 2010 5:45 pm · Comments (56)

A recent NYT book review:

In his new book, “Long for This World,” Weiner makes similar use of another brilliant theoretical scientist, the English gerontologist Aubrey de Grey, a tireless proselytizer for radical life extension. … The inspiration for de Grey’s scientific quest for immortality came in a flash one sleepless night: “What these [aging] troubles all have in common is that they fill the aging body with junk. Maybe we can just clean up all the scree and rubble that gathers in our aging bodies.” The beauty of this view is that “curing” aging requires no special knowledge of design, or any understanding of just how the cellular junk got there in the first place. It only requires that we get rid of it. As de Grey sees it, there are seven types of cellular junk. … De Grey’s dream of conquering death may seem far-fetched and unreal, but Big Pharma is already at work on some of these ideas. …

As Weiner points out, there is a big problem with immortality. Traditionally, we have viewed our lives as unfolding in stages: … Immortality could wind up being a terrible stasis. “A huge part of the action and the drama in the seven ages comes from the sense of an ending, the knowledge that all these ages must have an end,” Weiner writes. We might live forever in a state of unending boredom. And the technology might benefit the wrong people: … Mao Zedong might still be alive.” … My patients were dying young and felt cheated out of their best years. They did not want immortality, just the chance to live the life span that their peers could expect. What de Grey and other immortalists seem to have lost sight of is that simply living a full life span is a laudable goal.

As with cryonics, a proposal to extend life substantially is greeted with bizarre concerns about living too long, or the wrong people living longer. Why not apply such complaints to ordinary medical gains?

A big part of the problem, I think, is that talk of “immortality” invokes an extremely far view. But finite increases in lifespan really have little to do with immortality. Immortality means you never die, ever. But forever is a really really long time! In fact, nothing you can imagine is remotely as long.

De Grey seems to be part of the problem here. Some times he say things like:

I have a lot of problems with the use of the word immortality to describe what I do because it’s taken by religion. Immortality means inability to die; it means inability to actually be killed by anything, and I don’t work on that. I work on stopping people from getting sick. I do not work on stopping people from being hit by trucks.

But if you search for his name and “immortality” you will find he is associated with that word quite often, including in the title of many interviews of him.  He’s even listed as an advisor to the Immortality Institute. And you’ll find things like:

De Grey says he is talking about the “indefinite extension of longevity.” “Average life spans would be in the region of 1,000 years,” he says. “Seriously.” … So humans will be just as spry at 500 as we were at 25? “If you have difficultly imaging this, think about the situation with houses. With moderate maintenance they stay up, they stay intact, inhabitable more or less forever. It’s just that we have to do a bit of maintenance to keep them going. And it’s going to be the same with us,” says de Grey. …

“The first generation [of new med tech] will give us maybe 30 extra years of healthy lifespan,” says de Grey. “So, beneficiaries of those first therapies will still be around to benefit from improved therapies that will give them another 30 or 50 years and so on. So this is basically staying one step ahead of the problem.” … De Grey acknowledges that immortality will not be cheap. “We are talking about serious expenditure here.”

Are houses immortal? Very few (no?) thousand year old houses still function, and maintenance costs probably makes them cost more overall than just building a new house. Old houses are even more expensive if you want to retrofit them with modern conveniences, such as lights or air conditioning, or if you consider the opportunity cost of the land on which they sit. And even if, with sufficient expenditure, houses could last a thousand years, that should be little comfort to those who can’t possibly afford such expense. Furthermore, lasting a thousand years is nothing like being immortal!

A thousand year lifespan would be fantastic, relative to our lifespan. I want it! But it is nothing like immortality. It would have clear stages, and a very real end to anticipate. Anyone with a halfway decent imagination couldn’t remotely run out of new interesting things to do, places to visit, people to see, etc. Yes they’d have time for twenty times as many careers, hobbies, marriages, and vacations as we do now, but it should only take a moment’s reflection to realize you there are far more than twenty times as many things to do than we manage in our lives. For example, any decent library holds twenty times more books than you’ve ever read.

Yes it may be logically possible to live forever, and yes you can’t do that if you die now, so not dying now keeps open that logical possibility. But I expect each new scale of lifespan to offer new novel, difficult, and expensive obstacles to living that long.  If you agree, you should seriously doubt your ability to keep beating such odds forever.

Yes, keep trying to live if you love life, and rage, rage against the dying of the light. Do better; live longer. But why confuse everyone by talking as if you expect to achieve the literally infinite success of “immortality”? It is fine to say “let’s extend lives as much as we can.” But must you really talk as if nothing less than infinite success will do?  Can’t you see that makes you sound rather crazy?

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Unincorporated War

By Robin Hanson · July 25, 2010 4:15 pm · Comments (10)

In April I reviewed the The Unincorporated Man, a sf novel that last week won the Libertarian Futurist Society’s Prometheus Award.  The novel is set several centuries hence, in a rich peaceful hi-tech society of forty billion folks, spread across the solar system. On the plus side, war, crime, death, and religion are very rare, and a minimal world government is funded only by a 5% income tax. On the minus side, virtual reality is an illegal sin, and parents help kids far less than now; parents own 20% of kids’ future income, and force kids to sell more income shares to pay for school, etc. Most kids end up owning less than 50% of their income, which reduces their ability to control their job, home, etc.

A cryonics patient from our time is revived, refuses to sign paperwork to pay his 5% income tax, and inspires a mass movement blaming corporations (not parents!) for the “slavery” of having to pay installment payments on voluntarily purchased and consumed school, etc. In April I complained:

[It] is widely praised for its thought-provoking premise. Yet I find no evidence that it provoked thought about its premise. … Among the 70+ reviews/comments on the book I’ve read, a few take a position on this idea (all against), but none engage the idea, i.e., offering arguments for or against it based on details of the book. … In the book’s 500 pages no one ever resents parents; it is all those conniving corporations. … Also, the book never even considers the possibility of non-voting [income shares].

The sequel, The Unincorporated War, is “action-packed”, and readers seem to like it, but alas it inspires even less thought. Spoilers below the fold. Continue Reading "Unincorporated War" »

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Cryonics is Very Far

By Robin Hanson · July 17, 2010 6:45 pm · Comments (28)

Kajta is right; cryonics is very far:

Cryonics is about what will happen in a *long time* when you *die*  to give you a *small chance* of waking up in a *socially distant* society in the *far future*, assuming you *widen your concept* of yourself to any *abstract pattern* like the one manifested in your biological brain and also that technology and social institutions *continue their current trends* and you don’t mind losing *peripheral features* such as your body (not to mention cryonics is *cold* and seen to be the preserve of *rich* *weirdos*).

You’re not meant to be selfish in far mode! Freeze a fair princess you are truly in love with or something.  Far mode livens our passion for moral causes and abstract values.  If Robin is right, this is because it’s safe to be ethical about things that won’t affect you yet it still sends signals to those around you about your personality. It’s a truly mean person who won’t even claim someone else a long way away should have been nice fifty years ago.

But I disagree with what Katja says here:

If this theory is correct, does it mean cryonics is unfairly slighted because of a silly quirk of psychology? No. Your desire to be ethical about far away things is not obviously less real or legitimate than your desire to be selfish about near things, assuming you act on it. If psychological distance really is morally relevant to people, it’s consistent to think cryonics too selfish and most other expenditures not. If you don’t want psychological distance to be morally relevant then you have an inconsistency to resolve, but how you should resolve it isn’t immediately obvious.

I say psychological distance is less morally relevant than people take it to be:

  1. We think of actions as near or far depending on how they are described to us, and where/when we are when we think about them.  But the morality of an act should not depend on how that act is framed or who thinks of it when/where, if it is the act (not the thought about the act) that is moral or not.
  2. If doing right is just making good (i.e., consequentialism), then the morality of acts shouldn’t depend much on who exactly does them when/where; what should matter is how the act changes the universe.
  3. The tendency of far thought to be more hypocritical and less influential to our important actions does weigh somewhat against it.

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Hail Survivalists

By Robin Hanson · July 15, 2010 3:40 pm · Comments (40)

Two recent articles on survivalists:

  1. “From the outside, Jerry Erwin’s home … is a nondescript house … But tucked away out of sight in his backyard are the signs of his preparations for doomsday, a catastrophic societal collapse that Erwin, 45, now believes is likely within his lifetime. … Erwin and others like him in the United States and elsewhere see political upheaval and natural disasters as clear signs that civilization is doomed.” (more; HT J Hughes)
  2. “Vivos goes all out by promising a survival shelter stocked with power generation, water wells, filtration systems, sewage disposal, a year’s supply of food, security devices and medical equipment. Of course, you’ll need all that if you believe disaster may strike at any moment because of a polar shift, super volcano eruptions, solar flares, nuclear war, and `even the return of Planet X (known as Niburu or Nemesis),’ Vivos cheerfully states. Did we mention that there’s a 2012 countdown clock on the company website?” (more)

Sadly, as with cryonics patients, while survivalists do society a great good, the media mostly snickers at them. This makes sense when you realize: Charity Isn’t About Help. Given a choice between praising acts that show devotion and loyalty, or acts that actually help, humans usually praise loyalty.

On the good: The world faces existential risk, i.e., a risk that the world will die.  Such a death is bad not only for those who live here now, but also for vast future generations who might descend from us now.  Cultures and ethnicities face related risks.  By preparing to save themselves under various disaster scenarios, survivalists also tend to make their culture, ethnicity, and world a bit less likely to die.  An effort for which future generations should be quite grateful.

On snickering:  On average, survivalists tend to display undesirable characteristics. They tend to have extreme and unrealistic opinions, that disaster soon has an unrealistically high probability.  They also show disloyalty and a low opinion of their wider society, by suggesting it is due for a big disaster soon.  They show disloyalty to larger social units, by focusing directly on saving their own friends and family, rather than focusing on saving those larger social units.  And they tend to be cynics, with all that implies.

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Space Ash Vs. Cryo

By Robin Hanson · July 14, 2010 9:07 am · Comments (69)

Celestis, Inc. says it did:

  • the first ever private launch into outer space (1982),
  • the first private, post-cremation memorial spaceflight (1997),
  • the first lunar burial (1999)

Its prices range from $12,500, for standard service to put “one gram of cremated remains, first priority, into deep space,” to $40,000 for “preferred services” to put “seven grams of cremated remains, first priority, into deep space.” They currently have the cremated remains of 115 men and 21 women launched or waiting to launch.  (Thanks to Sun Cho for doing the count.)

Compared to cryonics, the ashes-into-space industry has over half as many delivered customers, collected in a far shorter time and with far less free publicity. While cryonics is on average more expensive, the cheapest cryonics option, $28,000 via CI, is cheaper than the most expensive ash launch.

While space-ash customers are even more male dominated, and probably just as tech nerdy, my intuition guesses they suffer far less “hostile-wife phenomena” than cryonics. (Will someone please check?)  And I’d guess this reduced hostility has much less to do with costs than image – cryonics freaks folks out more. Why?

The obvious explanation is that people think cryonics might actually work – frozen folk might actually live again someday. This is what elicits ghoulish feelings and objections – that cryo wannabes are selfish and arrogant, that it blocks closure, that the future won’t want them, that immortality is immoral, that population is already too large, etc.   Since they don’t fear space-ash folks will live again, wives don’t object as much to space-ash plans.

If so, this really is modern male sati – it is the prospect of their husbands living longer than they that most upsets hostile cryo wives.

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Cryonics As Charity

By Robin Hanson · July 12, 2010 4:45 pm · Comments (51)

Products and services (i.e., “goods”) can be divided into two types: those that on net suffer from congestion effects, and those that instead benefit from scale effects. For congestion goods, the more that one person consumes of the good, the harder it gets for others to consume it. For scale goods, in contrast, the more that some consume, the easier it gets for others to consume.

Creating a new person with a demand for some good, or raising an existing person’s demand for that good, has very different effects on others, depending on whether it is a congestion or scale good. Adding new demand for congestion goods hurts others, while adding new demand for scale goods helps others.

For example, an increase in your demand for limited beachfront property, or for food prepared personally by today’s most famous chef, hurts others who also demand those goods. Your increased demand for certain computer chips could also hurt others, if such chips required a special metal in limited supply.

Chips, however, are usually net scale goods: bigger chip plants make chips cheaper, and larger demand justifies higher fixed costs such as in chip design, and induces faster innovation in chip design, manufacture, use, etc. Larger communities of users for a good can also benefit from network externalities, such as when a phone or IM system becomes more valuable because more other folks can be contacted via them. Note, however, that apparent “network” gains via more folks following a new fashion are usually negated by the harm to those following older fashions.

Tyler recently said the world would be better if tech nerds donated to charity instead of buying cryonics (he didn’t explain why this isn’t just as true for most consumption.) But while many dislike cryonics because they see it as especially selfish, in fact cryonics has such huge scale effects that buying cryonics seems to me a pretty good charity in its own right. Consider:

  1. The main risk for cryonics failure, and the reason I usually only give it a >5% chance of success, is social — it will be hard for small disliked marginal organizations with only thousands of scattered customers to survive for a century or two. With millions or more supporting customers, however, such survival would be far more likely. Reputation, regulation, and reinsurance would more effectively ensure that cryo orgs kept their commitments.
  2. Cryonics cost is now dominated by fixed costs, such has to maintain skilled teams ready to do procedures. With millions of customers, the cost to freeze could fall to a few thousand dollars.
  3. The marginal cost to store another frozen person in liquid nitrogen is dominated by the cost of liquid nitrogen, which goes as the surface area of the containers used. Larger containers have a smaller surface area relative to enclosed volume, and so cost less per person.
  4. Millions of customers would induce a better adapted regulatory treatment, making it legally easier to freeze folks, and especially for frozen folks to save and grow assets to use decades later for revival and reintegration into society. With enough customers who cared enough, interest rates could even fall.
  5. Another major cryonics risk is that a rich powerful future able to revive frozen folks may never arrive. But the more folks hope to use cryonics to live in such a future, the more folks will care more about that future and try harder to make sure it happens.  Which will of course could greatly benefit innumerable future generations.
  6. One possible cryonics congestion effect is that the future may have a limited capacity to absorb workers not trained in then-current techniques. But this effect seems minor relative to the others here; enough savings can pay for retraining.
  7. New fashionable goods, that gain users status, hurt others by making them look less fashionable.  Cryonics is not only not in fashion, it tends to make users worse.  This effect adds to its status as a charity.

OK, even if consuming cryonics helps others, could it really help as much as direct charity donations? Well it might be hard to compete with cash directly handed to those most in need, but remember that most real charities suffer great inefficiencies and waste from administration costs, agency failures, and the inattention of donors.

If cryonics does ever succeed, the failure of humanity to actually use it much until many decades after it was possible will seem like one of humanities greatest failures, and those the who opposed it as some of histories greatest villains.

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Don’t Stab Corpses

By Robin Hanson · July 11, 2010 10:35 am · Comments (29)

Imagine you visit in a foreign land, and are invited to attend a local funeral. At the funeral, you are shocked to see that the viewing line is also a stabbing line; each attendee stabs the corpse as he passes by.  Your host explains this custom: Back in the bad old days, in rare cases the dear departed at a funeral was not actually dead. Anticipating this possibility made loved ones anxious, as they did not have full closure on the death.  The spouse could not be as sure they could safely remarry, etc. People found they could rest easier if they each made very sure the dear departed was definitely dead.

So what do you think of this culture?  Do you nod approvingly at how wise custom can sometimes be, or do you run in horror at their willingness to sacrifice loved ones on the altar of certainty.

Me, I run.  Many have offered a similar argument against cryonics, that the small chance of life it offers is just not worth the added anxiety it induces in loved ones, who can’t as cleanly get on with their lives.  This seems horrid logic to me.

Consider another example: warships lost at sea. Usually, many sailors die, and most survivors are discovered within a month.  In rare cases, however, survivors might not be discovered for years.  Should navies adopt the policy of killing all sailors they discover three months after a ship is lost, so that loved ones can more cleanly get on with their lives?

[Note: There are many arguments for and against most interesting claims.  Short blog posts can usually only deal thoroughly with one such argument.]

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Picking On Cryo-Nerds

By Robin Hanson · July 10, 2010 3:30 pm · Comments (31)

Tyler Thursday on cryonics: “My question is: why not save someone else’s life instead?”  Today, Tyler elaborates:

[Some] asked why I compare cryonics (unfavorably) to acts of charity, rather than comparing other acts of personal consumption (I enjoy the gelato here in Berlin) to charity. My view is this: the decision to have one’s head frozen is not primarily instrumental but rather expressive. Look at the skewed demographics of the people who do it, namely highly intelligent male readers of science fiction, often with tech jobs. … It’s a chance to stand for something and in a way which sets them apart … for instrumental rationality, for Science, … for the conquering of limits, … and for the notion that the subject sees hidden possiblities and resources which more traditional observers do not. …

People interested in cryonics are often highly meritorious. … So I’m … happy to endorse laissez-faire for the practice but still I don’t find myself settling into really liking the idea. … The world would be better off, and the relative status of the virtuous nerds higher, if instead the cryonics customers sent more signals which were perceived as running contrary to type. Ignoring cryonics, and promoting charity, would do more to raise the status of intelligence and analytical thinking than does cryonics.

Tyler’s argument is hard to follow here. Is he merely saying the world is better if anyone acts more contrary to type, expresses less relative to instrumenting, or donates more to charity? If so, why pick on cryonics and tech nerds in particular, why not just rail in general against all expressing, typed-acts, and non-charity? If the argument is that the world gains unusually more from tech nerds acting against type, expressing less, and giving to charity, then we need to hear an argument for that. It certainly seems odd to complain that tech nerds, usually critiqued for being overly practical, are actually overly expressive.

Let’s be concrete. Tyler goes way out of his way to be, and call attention to his being, a “foodie” – his eating a gelato in Berlin, and then mentioning on his blog, clearly has a big expressive component. Being a foodie lets Tyler join a high status community and stand for art, culture, etc. in a way that sets him apart and supports the notion he can see hidden food quality that the rest of us do not see. (I like “great” food, but honestly not much more than ordinary food.) Does Tyler think the world would be equally better off if foodies were to act contrary to type, express less via buying less fancy food, and give the difference to charity? If so, why has he never mentioned it in his hundreds of food posts?

Could it be Tyler knows that tech nerds are low status in our society and fair game for criticism? Is this really any different than rich folks complaining about inner city kids who buy $100 sneakers instead of saving their money or giving it to charity, even while they buy $1000 suits and dresses instead of saving their money or giving it to charity?

Added:  Tyler responds, sort of.

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Modern Male Sati

By Robin Hanson · July 8, 2010 10:00 am · Comments (133)

To most feminists, the practice of sati, where a wife is burned alive on her husband’s funeral pyre, is iconic of patriarchy’s disrespect of women. Even though the practice was always rare (<0.1%), and mostly happened in higher social castes, the fact that a society would even consider it was called a terrible indictment.

Sati is now illegal. So have we have cast off the yoke of patriarchy, just papered it over a bit, or what? Here’s an interesting clue: a large fraction (>10%) of wives today are inclined to divorce husbands who try to live longer than they via the unusual med tech of cryonics, i.e., freezing in the hope of future revival. Today at NYT:

“Cryonics has been known to frequently produce intense hostility from spouses who are not cryonicists.” The opposition of romantic partners … is something that “everyone” involved in cryonics knows about … To someone who believes that low-temperature preservation offers a legitimate chance at extending life, obstructionism can seem as willfully cruel as withholding medical treatment. Even if you don’t want to join your husband in storage, ask believers, what is to be lost by respecting a man’s wishes with regard to the treatment of his own remains? …

Cryonicists have created support networks with which to tackle marital strife. … (The ratio of men to women among living cyronicists is roughly three to one.) “She thinks the whole idea is sick, twisted and generally spooky,” wrote one man … The air of hurt confusion stems, in part, from the intuition among believers that cryonics is a harmless attempt at preserving data, little different from stowing a box of photos. … “If you have a hard drive on a computer with a lot of information that is important to you, you save it,” says J.S., a 39-year-old cryonicist and software engineer who lives in Oregon and who will not allow his full name to be used out of fear that his wife would divorce him. … A small amount of time spent trying to avoid certain death would seem to be well within the capacity of a healthy marriage to absorb. The checkered marital history of cryonics suggests instead that a violation beyond nonconformity is at stake, that something intrinsic to the loner’s quest for a second life agitates against harmony in the first. …

James Hughes, the executive director of … a nonprofit organization enamored of life extension … has chosen not to participate in what he considers a worthy experiment. “Although it’s a rather marginal bet for a potentially huge payoff,” he says, “I value my relationship with my wife.” … “If you don’t tell your wife you’re involved with cryonics, you don’t really love her,” says S.B., … who reports that his marriage is suffering and that two of his previous relationships failed because of cryonics.

The article features my wife Peggy and I: Continue Reading "Modern Male Sati" »

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Philosophy Kills

By Robin Hanson · November 29, 2009 2:10 pm · Comments (148)

Philosophy is often presented as a rather useless, if perhaps interesting, type of thought.  Arguably, however, defective philosophies of mind are a leading cause of death today!  Exhibit one, Bryan Caplan:

What disturbed me was when I realized how low he set his threshold for [cryonics] success.  Robin didn’t care about biological survival.  He didn’t need his brain implanted in a cloned body.  He just wanted his neurons preserved well enough to “upload himself” into a computer.  To my mind, it was ridiculously easy to prove that “uploading yourself” isn’t life extension.  “An upload is merely a simulation.  It wouldn’t be you,” I remarked.  …

“Suppose we uploaded you while you were still alive.  Are you saying that if someone blew your biological head off with a shotgun, you’d still be alive?!” Robin didn’t even blink: “I’d say that I just got smaller.” … I’d like to think that Robin’s an outlier among cryonics advocates, but in my experience, he’s perfectly typical.  Fascination with technology crowds out not just philosophy of mind, but common sense.

Bryan, you are the sum of your parts and their relations.  We know where you are and what you are made of; you are in your head, and you are made out of the signals that your brain cells send each other.  Humans evolved to think differently about minds versus other stuff, and while that is a useful category of thought, really we can see that minds are made out of the same parts, just arranged differently.  Yes, you “feel,” but that just tells you that stuff feels, it doesn’t say you are made of anything besides the stuff you see around and inside you. Continue Reading "Philosophy Kills" »

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