Anecdotal reason for the small ratio of sign ups: I tried to do that from the UK, and after several months, it proved to be ~impossible (the combination of paperwork required by Alcor and the inability to get the correct life insurance here). In general, the process is quite complicated. So, my bet is that the friction is the biggest limiting factor by a large margin (compared to a situation in which I could just fill a form on a website, put my card for recurring payments, and forget about it).
IMO not comparable, people are usually just auto-enrolled by the state or by the employer, and, having insurance, can simply go see a doctor without issues (in most cases). (Comparing to ordinary medicine is unfair for other reasons as well - eg social acceptance, required agency, the time discounting).
Checkout Tomorrow Biostasis for the EU. It should be easy to signup and finance, at least for me it was super simple and I am in Italy which is not the most straightforward country when it comes down to this sort of thing.
You only do death with dignity (not the same as doctor assisted suicide) in certain states. Alcor would never have physicians in their employ sign the forms for assisted suicide or death with dignity for obvious conflict of interest reasons.
Are you sure that's true of Alcor? In my experience (almost ten years as CEO) instructions by neuro members was to cremate the remains and send them to the family member specified. I don't recall anyone asking for their body-minus-head to be send to relatives. It's hard to imagine many people wanting to do that. They do have the cremated remains to scatter, bury, or display.
I'm not sure I understand your middle paragraph. If the organization fails you want them to bury your head rather than burn it? I don't see how that helps. Ah, perhaps I'm looking at it from a preservation POV but you mean that you would, in those circumstances, want your family to be able to bury your head. (Have you asked them how they would feel about that?) Much better would be for the failing organization to transfer your head or brain to another organization, if there was funding for doing so.
If you don't like the options Alcor offers, look into Tomorrow Biostasis. They just announced expansion into the USA. I'm seriously considering switching to TB from Alcor.
Burial is disappearing in many countries but certainly some people and religious groups prefer it. If it is Alcor's policy never to return a headless body, I can understand it but think it should be changed. Tomorrow Biostasis is doing brain-only cases. Done the way they do it, this has the advantage of leaving the entire body including the skull. A decent embalmer can make the body look undisturbed. Brain-only is also better than "neuro" (really head) because people have less of an aversion to a brain than to a severed head. I hope Alcor adopts this approach for neuro patient. However, they seem to have little interest in making changes these days.
One advantage of the liquid nitrogen preservation is that it's DEMONSTRABLY reversible for living organisms (for insects, embryos, and the like), and routinely achieved. I don't think that's true of fixation.
Sure, but without a proof-of-concept like cryopreservation has, the median ESTIMATE of the success probability for step 3 for fixation might take a catastrophic hit.
We spoke several times over the weekend, as you are aware I am a longtime cryonicist activist and I am intrinsically motivated by cryonics, and I have spent some time thinking about how to make this work properly. Over the years, the stakes have only grown with my board positions, as such I must continue to educate myself.
Unless you want to become the Forrest Fenn of cryonics, I don’t understand your stance of wanting your brain in a jar buried in a mine.
Aldehyde Stabilized Cryopreservation is promising, and I might have to revise my views in favour of that technique being implemented by major organizations. However, at the present time, I still favour traditional methods of cryoprotection for the following reasons:
1. Practically implementing ASC requires faster response times to de-animation, bodies must be perfused by ASC within 20 minutes in a surgical setting while in traditional cryoprotection, the surgery does not start until the body is cooled down lower than 20 degrees and that buys the patient more time to arrive at the operating theatre. Since ASC requires faster response times it is only practically possible to do this within a Medically Assisted in Dying (MAID) framework which presents more social challenges for family members. I have confirmed this information about ASC with Borys Wrobel, but it is generally understood by other researchers in the field.
2. To break the strong covalent bonds formed in the process of fixation require profound improvements in nanotechnology. This is not an insurmountable problem but there is no roadmap to implement this, while traditionally cryoprotected organs have been reversed using today’s technology. Rewarming small mammal organs have been done in a lab setting and merely requires scaling, so I perceive this situation to be more reversible with technology that exists today. I understand that this only matters in the framework of attempting to preserve biological viability which you may not care about at all (but I do).
3. ASC is probably better for mind uploading but uploading someone’s consciousness is not proven and it is not clear to me that consciousness is substrate independent. We are close to implementing empirical methods of confirmation that our minds can be transferred onto different mediums, but those experiments have not been run. Using Brain Computer Interfaces (BCI) we can see if we can project our first-person ontology into a machine interface but seeing is believing to me as an empiricist.
4. The only organization offering ASC, Oregon Brain Preservation is a reputable organization with an excellent research team. However, they do not appear to have a Patient Care Trust which puts them at odds with what most signed-up cryonicists want for themselves (unless those who truly have no money). I am puzzled about your AGI timelines exceeding 70 years, if we do not live in a post-scarcity world in 70 years then money still matters, in that case Alcor’s current 18 million dollars in their patient care trust might grow to be enough to revive their patients. If there is zero money to revive a brain in a jar found somewhere then why would anyone revive them? If money doesn’t matter, then cryonics patients are fine but if money still matters then having a Patient Care Trust with a mission for revival makes sense. So, it is a wager, but it is more rational to want some mechanism in place to revive yourself. Well-off cryonicists set up their own Patient Care Trusts. It is very cheap to get liquid nitrogen so the cost will never be an issue within the current organizations.
For these reasons I am still with traditional cryoprotection, but I might update my views in the next decade if ASC reversibility is shown or if BCI shows that our minds are substrate independent.
I imagine what it would be like if we had the technology to revive preserved brains today, and there's a huge warehouse of preserved people from the 14th century or whenever. How many would we resurrect? Surely we would revive some - at least for a while - out of historical curiosity. But we would quickly discover that most of those people are pretty boring and, moreover, unable to do anything useful in modern society.
Maybe the better gamble is to bury gold somewhere out of the way, and commit the precise GPS coordinates to memory. Along with your preserved brain is a set of instructions: If you resurrect me into a durable and self-directed state, I'll split the gold with you evenly. Give the future resurrectors a reason to help you.
Members have a legal agreement with their cryonics organization that requires that they be revived when/if possible. If patient care funds are invested well, over decades the amount of real dollars available to pay for revival grows greatly. If that's not enough, you can set up an asset preservation fund that could also add financial incentives to revive you. So, there are contractual and financials reasons to revive patients. It has nothing to do with how interesting they are.
If any group out there wishes to spend the money to pay for the reanimation, then it would get done. Some groups that may wish to do this would be historical societies, sociologists, cultural anthropologists, linguists, and probably a dozen more groups that would be interested in just speaking with them.
And if they were reanimated, why would they be "boring"? I'd wager they'd be 100 to 1000x more interesting than the average random person you meet on the street. Just think how great they'd be at renfaire!
The real problem isn't whether someone would pay for reanimation or if they'd be boring, the real problem would be if some government agency with jurisdiction claims it is illegal to reanimate the people in stasis and/or decides to destroy the bodies before reanimation. Once they're reanimated, however, any normal human society would treat them like any other normal human with normal human rights within their society, so the hard part is making sure they wake up in the first place.
I agree that fixation is a good idea. This is the method we are pursuing at Oregon Brain Preservation: https://www.oregoncryo.com/services.html. Here are what I consider the main advantages of fixation:
1. Better average structural preservation quality
2. More robust to organizational failures (the advantage you correctly point out)
3. Has the potential to make the cost lower, by decreasing the expected costs of long-term storage
Hi Andy, good to hear from you, Oregon Brain Preservation, ASC is an excellent low-cost option for people who cannot afford traditional cryopreservation. However, there is no patient care trust at Oregon Brain Preservation (according to Max More). There is no roadmap for biological revival with currently understood technologies. It is true that there is better average ultrastructure preservation quality, however this technique requires faster response (even faster than traditional cryoprotection techniques). When I spoke to Borys Wrobel, ASC was only workable within a MAID framework and that might present further challenges to some people's families and loved ones.
You're right that there is not currently a patient care trust at Oregon Brain Preservation.
I agree that there is no roadmap for biological revival with currently understood technologies. However, I think that this is also the case for current methods using cryopreservation with cryoprotectants. Simple rewarming would not be possible in these cases because the damage -- both to molecules and to the higher-level structures they form -- is too great. There would need to be significant advances in some other field such as molecular nanotechnology. If I mistaken about this, please let me know.
I personally disagree that aldehyde fixation requires faster responses than pure cryopreservation. I think that fixation is slightly more flexible on this (although minimizing the ischemic interval to the extent legally and ethically possible is always of the utmost importance), because it offers the possibility of immersion fixation. In my understanding, this is why immersion fixation is used by Tomorrow Biostasis in cases where perfusion is not possible.
I think the limiting factor on getting the general public to sign up are cultural issues ensuring people just don't take the prospect seriously yet, rather than strong technological or economic arguments that it is in principle infeasible. It won't be until it stops seeming so weird, and has endorsements from academics/doctors/celebrities/elites that people generally pursue the notion.
It's to that end that I wrote a book on the topic for a general audience (coming out in November) that makes the case for preservation (specifically, fixation), and have gone to the effort of publishing through a mainstream publisher for a generalist audience. Hopefully it's these sorts of things which increase uptake rates, despite lacklustre interest over the past few decades!
The Future Loves You: How and Why We Should Abolish Death (Allen Lane, 28 Nov 2024)
I look forward to your book. I agree cultural issues are key obstacles, but I'm not sure elite endorsement is very feasible here. There are other cultural paths to consider.
Oh I agree that we should be pursuing as many cultural paths as possible, but I don't think elite endorsement is out of the question as of yet. There have been fairly sudden shifts in elite thinking on similarly controversial topics in the past (gay marriage in the 2000s, anaesthesia in childbirth in the late 19th century, arguably AI at the moment), and I don't think we can be so sure that cryonics/biostasis/preservation won't necessarily have its moment too.
The advanced benevolent civilization already exists. They have reached out to some of us to spread the word that there is actually a component of our bodies made of technology beyond the capability of our current science that will survive the physical death, something like a cloud storage memory chip. In their benevolence, they have informed us that it is already their plan to create new and enhanced bodies to house this memory chip (at least for those whose revival won’t pose a great risk to the rest). A lot of people like this idea, and no messy cryonics or mummification is needed.
How did you arrive at a median probability of 109.5% for step 7? I asked an LLM (Claude 3.5) for help, giving it the numbers from your poll, and it thinks you made a mistake ;-)
A lognormal model has two param: median and sigma. Each such model predicts the poll % in each of the four option ranges. I search among param values for the model that gives the least squared error with the actual poll %s.
I think instead of a lognormal distribution for the probability p (which as you acknowledge allows impossible probabilities greater than one) you might want to use a lognormal distribution for the likelihood ratio p/(1-p). This reduces to p for small p where (so behaves the same as your current system) but has sensible behavior for p near 1. It’s also symmetric under p->1-p, so isn’t sensitive to flipping the way questions are asked.
If the reason you don't use the actual poll %s is so that high reported probabilities don't overwhelm the low ones in the average, you could just use the median.
Or if the median doesn't provide enough information due to the limited number of poll options, you could treat each poll option as a uniform distribution over a range, and the overall distribution is a mixture distribution of each poll option distribution, and then you take the median of that. This would give results that could be fractionally between two poll options.
And it wouldn't give results over 100%, nor would it be excessively affected by the higher reported probabilities.
I'm baffled as to why anyone would want to be frozen and revived into an unfamiliar world. Besides, if even only 1% of the world's population chose the option, that would increase an already growing population. Unless, of course, a cataclysmic event has killed enough people so the revived are not a drain on earth's resources. If we still have an earth live on. But let's say you wake in 2090 when eg cancer and dementia have been obliterated. What if there is a new disease challenge that no one foresaw? Just look at Covid.
Population is already shrinking in many places. Global population growth is projected to stop and reverse in a few decades. Life extension and revived cryonics patients can help slow the drop in population, which would be a good thing. Contrary to your thinking (and that of most people), more people (in a largely market-based economy) means *more* resources, not fewer. There are plenty of good books on this. A recent and comprehensive one being Superabundance. Also check out humanprogress.org
For me I think it's rational procrastination. I'm in my 30s and healthy, so I am unlikely to need it for several decades. I'm also wealthy enough that if I were diagnosed with a terminal disease tomorrow, I could just pay for cryonic preservation out of pocket. So why deal with it now, instead of waiting until I am substantially older and/or sicker?
Certainly not trying to convince you to do it or not, but one argument commonly made here is that people often want to deal with the sign up process even less when they are older and less enthusiastic about life. It seems to me that the modal person who does actually sign up (as opposed to just talking about it) does so when they are relatively young and maintains it into old age. However, I agree that the fees of signing up and paying membership fees at many organizations can be a significant deterrent. In that case, you might be interested in signing up with one of the organizations with small or non-existent fees.
If rational procrastination is a deterrent to signing up when you're young, perhaps the deterrent when you're old is lack of desire. My grandma was a very vibrant and happy person but in her mid-90s, in a moment of candor, she confessed to me that she was tired and it was time for her to go. She explained that her husband was long dead, all her friends were gone, and everything she remembered fondly about the world had changed. She died shortly thereafter.
I've also seen older people care a lot more (relative to their younger selves) about the tangible legacy (money, property) that they will give to their descendants when they die. They start to see frivolous spending as taking money away from their heirs, not coming out of their own pocket. All of which would discourage them from making a gamble on cryopreservation which is, after all, a selfish act.
I believe that opting for cryopreservation is unselfish. It involves donating one's body to science, helping decrease social stigma for a stigmatized decision, and using resources that could be spent on selfish things -- such as travel, expensive possessions, etc -- instead on subsidizing research & development in a field that could greatly benefit humans and other animals.
There's a similar argument made in EA circles about taking the GWWC pledge - that one's values may drift over time and so we should lock ourselves in to our current altruistic values. I don't buy that argument either and thus have not taken the GWWC pledge, despite having come very close to fulfilling its terms over the last 3 years or so.
One of the advantages of being in my 30s rather than my 20s is that I can look back on my adulthood so far, and see that my values have improved! I make better decisions now than I did in my 20s. And I expect that trend to continue. So I trust my future self to make better decisions than my current self. If my future self decides not to be preserved, I trust that there will be good reasons for that and it will be the right decision.
How often do people check up on their loved ones dead bodies to make sure they're still in good condition? For all we know they've been putting them in the dumpster.
A few people have legal representatives who visit Alcor periodically to check on their continued maintenance. (I know this from personal experience. I had lunch a couple of times with one such representative.) Organizations have to keep the containers full of liquid nitrogen because they can be checked easily at any time. It cost no more to keep a person in the container, so there is no incentive to "put them in the dumpster." Not to mention that doing the latter would lead to lawsuits and probably the end of the organization.
With an *arbitrarily* advanced civilization, step 3 should be about 100%. As long as the synapses are there, it doesn't matter if they are shredded by ice.
But will there be an *arbitrarily* advanced civilization?
I wonder if faster freezing to prevent ice crystals from growing would be possible if the person is first injected with many fine syringes, and then in a single step the liquid nitrogen is pumped through all of the syringes, so the cold gets deep inside very quickly.
The perfusate (anti-freeze) passes through the circulatory system very quickly. And you do not pump liquid nitrogen into the patient. That would be a terrible thing to do. You first introduce chilled cryoprotectant (at +4C to -4C) and *then* gradually lower temperature to liquid nitrogen temperature.
I have heard that we can cryogenically preserve small animals like insects because their surface area is large compared to their mass, which allows them to be frozen so quickly that ice crystals do not form, and that the challenge with larger animals is that we can't freeze them quickly enough so that ice crystals do not form. Is that not the case?
We cannot yet reversibly cryopreserve insects or small animals. It is true that the smaller the organism, the faster you can cool it. But fast cooling won't prevent ice formation. Some creatures naturally produce cryoprotectant (glycerol), such as some frogs, and can survive partial freezing. The trick to preventing ice formation is not speed of cooling but the introduction of cryoprotectant. Once cryoprotected, you can (and should!) cool a patient gradually without ice formation. You should slow down to about 1 degC per hour once you approach the glass transition point (around minus 120 C).
The microscopic worm C. elegans has been reversibly cryopreserved. The difficulty in making the process reversible is that ice crystals can form as you warm up. Sounds odd, but this "devitrification" happens. Speed *does* matter here. Tissue samples, sperm, eggs, embryos, and some mammalian organs have been successfully cryopreserved and rewarmed by doing it rapidly. The cutting edge is research is HIFU (high intensity focused ultrasound).
It’s unlikely this is a major reason, but I backed off of it because I didn’t want to spend $7,000/year on the whole life policies (which are almost university considered terrible investments that mainly exists to earn commissions) Alcor recommend and that their recommended-but-not-technically-recommended insurance salesman was in a hurry to sell me.
What I’m likely to do now is get a much cheaper term policy. Then when I’m older, if I have the cash, which I expect to, then I’ll do it. If not then I won’t. But to get a whole life policy you have to be really committed to it financially to a degree I just don’t want to at this point in my life.
A better approach is probably an indexed universal life policy combined with a personal investment plan. Wealth built with the latter can later either be paid to the cryonics organization or put in a truth that pays out on legal death.
Anecdotal reason for the small ratio of sign ups: I tried to do that from the UK, and after several months, it proved to be ~impossible (the combination of paperwork required by Alcor and the inability to get the correct life insurance here). In general, the process is quite complicated. So, my bet is that the friction is the biggest limiting factor by a large margin (compared to a situation in which I could just fill a form on a website, put my card for recurring payments, and forget about it).
Ordinary medicine has a great many customers even though it often has needlessly difficult paperwork as well.
IMO not comparable, people are usually just auto-enrolled by the state or by the employer, and, having insurance, can simply go see a doctor without issues (in most cases). (Comparing to ordinary medicine is unfair for other reasons as well - eg social acceptance, required agency, the time discounting).
Checkout Tomorrow Biostasis for the EU. It should be easy to signup and finance, at least for me it was super simple and I am in Italy which is not the most straightforward country when it comes down to this sort of thing.
You only do death with dignity (not the same as doctor assisted suicide) in certain states. Alcor would never have physicians in their employ sign the forms for assisted suicide or death with dignity for obvious conflict of interest reasons.
Are you sure that's true of Alcor? In my experience (almost ten years as CEO) instructions by neuro members was to cremate the remains and send them to the family member specified. I don't recall anyone asking for their body-minus-head to be send to relatives. It's hard to imagine many people wanting to do that. They do have the cremated remains to scatter, bury, or display.
I'm not sure I understand your middle paragraph. If the organization fails you want them to bury your head rather than burn it? I don't see how that helps. Ah, perhaps I'm looking at it from a preservation POV but you mean that you would, in those circumstances, want your family to be able to bury your head. (Have you asked them how they would feel about that?) Much better would be for the failing organization to transfer your head or brain to another organization, if there was funding for doing so.
If you don't like the options Alcor offers, look into Tomorrow Biostasis. They just announced expansion into the USA. I'm seriously considering switching to TB from Alcor.
Burial is disappearing in many countries but certainly some people and religious groups prefer it. If it is Alcor's policy never to return a headless body, I can understand it but think it should be changed. Tomorrow Biostasis is doing brain-only cases. Done the way they do it, this has the advantage of leaving the entire body including the skull. A decent embalmer can make the body look undisturbed. Brain-only is also better than "neuro" (really head) because people have less of an aversion to a brain than to a severed head. I hope Alcor adopts this approach for neuro patient. However, they seem to have little interest in making changes these days.
One advantage of the liquid nitrogen preservation is that it's DEMONSTRABLY reversible for living organisms (for insects, embryos, and the like), and routinely achieved. I don't think that's true of fixation.
Yes, but that's only one consideration for one of the 8 steps I list. A huge gain in step 7 seems worth a modest cut in step 3 success chance.
Sure, but without a proof-of-concept like cryopreservation has, the median ESTIMATE of the success probability for step 3 for fixation might take a catastrophic hit.
We spoke several times over the weekend, as you are aware I am a longtime cryonicist activist and I am intrinsically motivated by cryonics, and I have spent some time thinking about how to make this work properly. Over the years, the stakes have only grown with my board positions, as such I must continue to educate myself.
Unless you want to become the Forrest Fenn of cryonics, I don’t understand your stance of wanting your brain in a jar buried in a mine.
Aldehyde Stabilized Cryopreservation is promising, and I might have to revise my views in favour of that technique being implemented by major organizations. However, at the present time, I still favour traditional methods of cryoprotection for the following reasons:
1. Practically implementing ASC requires faster response times to de-animation, bodies must be perfused by ASC within 20 minutes in a surgical setting while in traditional cryoprotection, the surgery does not start until the body is cooled down lower than 20 degrees and that buys the patient more time to arrive at the operating theatre. Since ASC requires faster response times it is only practically possible to do this within a Medically Assisted in Dying (MAID) framework which presents more social challenges for family members. I have confirmed this information about ASC with Borys Wrobel, but it is generally understood by other researchers in the field.
2. To break the strong covalent bonds formed in the process of fixation require profound improvements in nanotechnology. This is not an insurmountable problem but there is no roadmap to implement this, while traditionally cryoprotected organs have been reversed using today’s technology. Rewarming small mammal organs have been done in a lab setting and merely requires scaling, so I perceive this situation to be more reversible with technology that exists today. I understand that this only matters in the framework of attempting to preserve biological viability which you may not care about at all (but I do).
3. ASC is probably better for mind uploading but uploading someone’s consciousness is not proven and it is not clear to me that consciousness is substrate independent. We are close to implementing empirical methods of confirmation that our minds can be transferred onto different mediums, but those experiments have not been run. Using Brain Computer Interfaces (BCI) we can see if we can project our first-person ontology into a machine interface but seeing is believing to me as an empiricist.
4. The only organization offering ASC, Oregon Brain Preservation is a reputable organization with an excellent research team. However, they do not appear to have a Patient Care Trust which puts them at odds with what most signed-up cryonicists want for themselves (unless those who truly have no money). I am puzzled about your AGI timelines exceeding 70 years, if we do not live in a post-scarcity world in 70 years then money still matters, in that case Alcor’s current 18 million dollars in their patient care trust might grow to be enough to revive their patients. If there is zero money to revive a brain in a jar found somewhere then why would anyone revive them? If money doesn’t matter, then cryonics patients are fine but if money still matters then having a Patient Care Trust with a mission for revival makes sense. So, it is a wager, but it is more rational to want some mechanism in place to revive yourself. Well-off cryonicists set up their own Patient Care Trusts. It is very cheap to get liquid nitrogen so the cost will never be an issue within the current organizations.
For these reasons I am still with traditional cryoprotection, but I might update my views in the next decade if ASC reversibility is shown or if BCI shows that our minds are substrate independent.
I imagine what it would be like if we had the technology to revive preserved brains today, and there's a huge warehouse of preserved people from the 14th century or whenever. How many would we resurrect? Surely we would revive some - at least for a while - out of historical curiosity. But we would quickly discover that most of those people are pretty boring and, moreover, unable to do anything useful in modern society.
Maybe the better gamble is to bury gold somewhere out of the way, and commit the precise GPS coordinates to memory. Along with your preserved brain is a set of instructions: If you resurrect me into a durable and self-directed state, I'll split the gold with you evenly. Give the future resurrectors a reason to help you.
At the moment only a few people have been frozen, but if lots more do then yes you want to offer to pay people who revive you.
Members have a legal agreement with their cryonics organization that requires that they be revived when/if possible. If patient care funds are invested well, over decades the amount of real dollars available to pay for revival grows greatly. If that's not enough, you can set up an asset preservation fund that could also add financial incentives to revive you. So, there are contractual and financials reasons to revive patients. It has nothing to do with how interesting they are.
Who is the "we" of which you speak?
If any group out there wishes to spend the money to pay for the reanimation, then it would get done. Some groups that may wish to do this would be historical societies, sociologists, cultural anthropologists, linguists, and probably a dozen more groups that would be interested in just speaking with them.
And if they were reanimated, why would they be "boring"? I'd wager they'd be 100 to 1000x more interesting than the average random person you meet on the street. Just think how great they'd be at renfaire!
The real problem isn't whether someone would pay for reanimation or if they'd be boring, the real problem would be if some government agency with jurisdiction claims it is illegal to reanimate the people in stasis and/or decides to destroy the bodies before reanimation. Once they're reanimated, however, any normal human society would treat them like any other normal human with normal human rights within their society, so the hard part is making sure they wake up in the first place.
I agree that fixation is a good idea. This is the method we are pursuing at Oregon Brain Preservation: https://www.oregoncryo.com/services.html. Here are what I consider the main advantages of fixation:
1. Better average structural preservation quality
2. More robust to organizational failures (the advantage you correctly point out)
3. Has the potential to make the cost lower, by decreasing the expected costs of long-term storage
I look forward to seeing more products like yours.
Hi Andy, good to hear from you, Oregon Brain Preservation, ASC is an excellent low-cost option for people who cannot afford traditional cryopreservation. However, there is no patient care trust at Oregon Brain Preservation (according to Max More). There is no roadmap for biological revival with currently understood technologies. It is true that there is better average ultrastructure preservation quality, however this technique requires faster response (even faster than traditional cryoprotection techniques). When I spoke to Borys Wrobel, ASC was only workable within a MAID framework and that might present further challenges to some people's families and loved ones.
Hi Carrie, thanks for your thoughts. =)
You're right that there is not currently a patient care trust at Oregon Brain Preservation.
I agree that there is no roadmap for biological revival with currently understood technologies. However, I think that this is also the case for current methods using cryopreservation with cryoprotectants. Simple rewarming would not be possible in these cases because the damage -- both to molecules and to the higher-level structures they form -- is too great. There would need to be significant advances in some other field such as molecular nanotechnology. If I mistaken about this, please let me know.
I personally disagree that aldehyde fixation requires faster responses than pure cryopreservation. I think that fixation is slightly more flexible on this (although minimizing the ischemic interval to the extent legally and ethically possible is always of the utmost importance), because it offers the possibility of immersion fixation. In my understanding, this is why immersion fixation is used by Tomorrow Biostasis in cases where perfusion is not possible.
I think the limiting factor on getting the general public to sign up are cultural issues ensuring people just don't take the prospect seriously yet, rather than strong technological or economic arguments that it is in principle infeasible. It won't be until it stops seeming so weird, and has endorsements from academics/doctors/celebrities/elites that people generally pursue the notion.
It's to that end that I wrote a book on the topic for a general audience (coming out in November) that makes the case for preservation (specifically, fixation), and have gone to the effort of publishing through a mainstream publisher for a generalist audience. Hopefully it's these sorts of things which increase uptake rates, despite lacklustre interest over the past few decades!
The Future Loves You: How and Why We Should Abolish Death (Allen Lane, 28 Nov 2024)
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Future-Loves-You-Should-Abolish/dp/0241655897/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
I look forward to your book. I agree cultural issues are key obstacles, but I'm not sure elite endorsement is very feasible here. There are other cultural paths to consider.
Oh I agree that we should be pursuing as many cultural paths as possible, but I don't think elite endorsement is out of the question as of yet. There have been fairly sudden shifts in elite thinking on similarly controversial topics in the past (gay marriage in the 2000s, anaesthesia in childbirth in the late 19th century, arguably AI at the moment), and I don't think we can be so sure that cryonics/biostasis/preservation won't necessarily have its moment too.
Oh sure, there's always a distant chance of a big elite reversal. Like on religious freedom after the 30 years war.
The advanced benevolent civilization already exists. They have reached out to some of us to spread the word that there is actually a component of our bodies made of technology beyond the capability of our current science that will survive the physical death, something like a cloud storage memory chip. In their benevolence, they have informed us that it is already their plan to create new and enhanced bodies to house this memory chip (at least for those whose revival won’t pose a great risk to the rest). A lot of people like this idea, and no messy cryonics or mummification is needed.
How did you arrive at a median probability of 109.5% for step 7? I asked an LLM (Claude 3.5) for help, giving it the numbers from your poll, and it thinks you made a mistake ;-)
A lognormal model has two param: median and sigma. Each such model predicts the poll % in each of the four option ranges. I search among param values for the model that gives the least squared error with the actual poll %s.
Why are you fitting a model instead of using the actual poll %s?
I think instead of a lognormal distribution for the probability p (which as you acknowledge allows impossible probabilities greater than one) you might want to use a lognormal distribution for the likelihood ratio p/(1-p). This reduces to p for small p where (so behaves the same as your current system) but has sensible behavior for p near 1. It’s also symmetric under p->1-p, so isn’t sensitive to flipping the way questions are asked.
If the reason you don't use the actual poll %s is so that high reported probabilities don't overwhelm the low ones in the average, you could just use the median.
Or if the median doesn't provide enough information due to the limited number of poll options, you could treat each poll option as a uniform distribution over a range, and the overall distribution is a mixture distribution of each poll option distribution, and then you take the median of that. This would give results that could be fractionally between two poll options.
And it wouldn't give results over 100%, nor would it be excessively affected by the higher reported probabilities.
Thanks!
I'm baffled as to why anyone would want to be frozen and revived into an unfamiliar world. Besides, if even only 1% of the world's population chose the option, that would increase an already growing population. Unless, of course, a cataclysmic event has killed enough people so the revived are not a drain on earth's resources. If we still have an earth live on. But let's say you wake in 2090 when eg cancer and dementia have been obliterated. What if there is a new disease challenge that no one foresaw? Just look at Covid.
Population is already shrinking in many places. Global population growth is projected to stop and reverse in a few decades. Life extension and revived cryonics patients can help slow the drop in population, which would be a good thing. Contrary to your thinking (and that of most people), more people (in a largely market-based economy) means *more* resources, not fewer. There are plenty of good books on this. A recent and comprehensive one being Superabundance. Also check out humanprogress.org
For me I think it's rational procrastination. I'm in my 30s and healthy, so I am unlikely to need it for several decades. I'm also wealthy enough that if I were diagnosed with a terminal disease tomorrow, I could just pay for cryonic preservation out of pocket. So why deal with it now, instead of waiting until I am substantially older and/or sicker?
Certainly not trying to convince you to do it or not, but one argument commonly made here is that people often want to deal with the sign up process even less when they are older and less enthusiastic about life. It seems to me that the modal person who does actually sign up (as opposed to just talking about it) does so when they are relatively young and maintains it into old age. However, I agree that the fees of signing up and paying membership fees at many organizations can be a significant deterrent. In that case, you might be interested in signing up with one of the organizations with small or non-existent fees.
If rational procrastination is a deterrent to signing up when you're young, perhaps the deterrent when you're old is lack of desire. My grandma was a very vibrant and happy person but in her mid-90s, in a moment of candor, she confessed to me that she was tired and it was time for her to go. She explained that her husband was long dead, all her friends were gone, and everything she remembered fondly about the world had changed. She died shortly thereafter.
I've also seen older people care a lot more (relative to their younger selves) about the tangible legacy (money, property) that they will give to their descendants when they die. They start to see frivolous spending as taking money away from their heirs, not coming out of their own pocket. All of which would discourage them from making a gamble on cryopreservation which is, after all, a selfish act.
I believe that opting for cryopreservation is unselfish. It involves donating one's body to science, helping decrease social stigma for a stigmatized decision, and using resources that could be spent on selfish things -- such as travel, expensive possessions, etc -- instead on subsidizing research & development in a field that could greatly benefit humans and other animals.
There's a similar argument made in EA circles about taking the GWWC pledge - that one's values may drift over time and so we should lock ourselves in to our current altruistic values. I don't buy that argument either and thus have not taken the GWWC pledge, despite having come very close to fulfilling its terms over the last 3 years or so.
One of the advantages of being in my 30s rather than my 20s is that I can look back on my adulthood so far, and see that my values have improved! I make better decisions now than I did in my 20s. And I expect that trend to continue. So I trust my future self to make better decisions than my current self. If my future self decides not to be preserved, I trust that there will be good reasons for that and it will be the right decision.
People fear death. Cryogenics offers the chance to die twice. That’s my guess why it’s not popular.
About a year ago I wrote on this topic:
https://biostasis.substack.com/p/what-is-the-probability-of-cryonics
How often do people check up on their loved ones dead bodies to make sure they're still in good condition? For all we know they've been putting them in the dumpster.
A few people have legal representatives who visit Alcor periodically to check on their continued maintenance. (I know this from personal experience. I had lunch a couple of times with one such representative.) Organizations have to keep the containers full of liquid nitrogen because they can be checked easily at any time. It cost no more to keep a person in the container, so there is no incentive to "put them in the dumpster." Not to mention that doing the latter would lead to lawsuits and probably the end of the organization.
Life is good, death is good. (Walt Whitman, leaves of grass)
He got it half right.
Or: Life is good, death we pretend is good because it's hard to bear facing reality.
With an *arbitrarily* advanced civilization, step 3 should be about 100%. As long as the synapses are there, it doesn't matter if they are shredded by ice.
But will there be an *arbitrarily* advanced civilization?
I wonder if faster freezing to prevent ice crystals from growing would be possible if the person is first injected with many fine syringes, and then in a single step the liquid nitrogen is pumped through all of the syringes, so the cold gets deep inside very quickly.
The perfusate (anti-freeze) passes through the circulatory system very quickly. And you do not pump liquid nitrogen into the patient. That would be a terrible thing to do. You first introduce chilled cryoprotectant (at +4C to -4C) and *then* gradually lower temperature to liquid nitrogen temperature.
I have heard that we can cryogenically preserve small animals like insects because their surface area is large compared to their mass, which allows them to be frozen so quickly that ice crystals do not form, and that the challenge with larger animals is that we can't freeze them quickly enough so that ice crystals do not form. Is that not the case?
We cannot yet reversibly cryopreserve insects or small animals. It is true that the smaller the organism, the faster you can cool it. But fast cooling won't prevent ice formation. Some creatures naturally produce cryoprotectant (glycerol), such as some frogs, and can survive partial freezing. The trick to preventing ice formation is not speed of cooling but the introduction of cryoprotectant. Once cryoprotected, you can (and should!) cool a patient gradually without ice formation. You should slow down to about 1 degC per hour once you approach the glass transition point (around minus 120 C).
The microscopic worm C. elegans has been reversibly cryopreserved. The difficulty in making the process reversible is that ice crystals can form as you warm up. Sounds odd, but this "devitrification" happens. Speed *does* matter here. Tissue samples, sperm, eggs, embryos, and some mammalian organs have been successfully cryopreserved and rewarmed by doing it rapidly. The cutting edge is research is HIFU (high intensity focused ultrasound).
It’s unlikely this is a major reason, but I backed off of it because I didn’t want to spend $7,000/year on the whole life policies (which are almost university considered terrible investments that mainly exists to earn commissions) Alcor recommend and that their recommended-but-not-technically-recommended insurance salesman was in a hurry to sell me.
What I’m likely to do now is get a much cheaper term policy. Then when I’m older, if I have the cash, which I expect to, then I’ll do it. If not then I won’t. But to get a whole life policy you have to be really committed to it financially to a degree I just don’t want to at this point in my life.
A better approach is probably an indexed universal life policy combined with a personal investment plan. Wealth built with the latter can later either be paid to the cryonics organization or put in a truth that pays out on legal death.