Richard Chappell rises to my challenge: We're not doing the world any favours by populating the future with our primitive 20th(-21st) century minds. … So cryonicists must assume that it is better to extend an existing life than to create a new one. … Many people are (quite reasonably!) wedded to the particularities of their life and situation, … insofar as this newly awakened person would be enculturated into a new society, acquiring new values and life projects, they are effectively becoming a new and different person. But … then revival is unjustified: a better new life could be created 'from scratch', so to speak. So cryonics is (at best) only justified for people whose central concerns and life projects could continue to be fruitfully pursued upon revival in a transhuman society.
Richard, we agree that many of us may not value the creatures who we become much beyond other creatures in our society if that creature is different enough from who we are now. We disagree I think on just how different your cryonics-revived future self would be.
Raven, you wrote:---you state "humans routinely kill other humans" implying that, ergo, modern humans thus do not value life.---
You are wrong: I don't imply that modern humans don't value life.They do.Modern humans value life against other lives and other valuables.Sometimes that evaluation results in killings. More often it results in healing.But the most common result of such evaluation is preserving status quo: whatever life can take care of itself -- lives. Whatever "life" cannot take care of itself -- disappears.
Dead frozen bodies cannot take care of themselves, so their fate is to disappear.
Life is respected.Dead frozen bodies -- not so much.
Robin - "Perhaps you just want us to remind people that maybe they would really rather just die than live such a different life, but even that seems a bit odd."
Why? I'm not sure I'd treat living as an end in itself. It's simply a necessary means to whatever true ends we might have, i.e. those things (our core values, relationships, life projects, etc.) that we live for. So: faced with the option of a longer but radically different life, we have to ask whether that future life would still contain the things we really care about. This is hardly a foregone conclusion.
Your response to my post is to offer two cases of less-radical change (resettlement and retirement), and to note that most of us would intuitively consider these futures worth having. That could well be true: most of us have life projects that could still be advanced in light of those changes. But that doesn't say much about whether this would still hold in case of far more radical change. (Or are you trying to suggest that we consider longevity to be an end in itself?)
If anything, I think your analogy helps my case. Though most people would rather rebuild on a new island, it isn't that hard to imagine the odd person or two -- an old tribal chief, say -- who's so attached to his home village that he'd rather be buried with it than start anew elsewhere. And this is a pretty modest change we're talking about. So when you scale up the example to the sort of radical change we can imagine post-cryonics, it's plausible that a correspondingly higher proportion of people would have trouble seeing this future as offering a continuation of what they really care about.
(It's also worth noting that most people's intuitions and preferences about the future are based on the false belief that they are magically enduring Cartesian Egos. Someone who fully internalizes the truth of reductionism will care far less about mere "survival", relative to their other values.)
Um, hasn't there been a lot of trouble in the past with people "reaching from beyond the grave" to interfere in current affairs. I think that society has, out of necessity, mostly disregarded influence from those who have died.
(from the article) "It really is a terrible shame people feel so free to ignore the wishes of ancestors who sacrificed to benefit them. " - this assumption needs to be defended.
>Economists help please: I think I understand what it means for me to save for>the future, but what would it mean if everyone wanted to do cryonics and so>everyone wanted to save for the future? Would there be such a thing as "normal>interest rates" anymore?"
I was wondering about that, too... relying on compound interest only works as long as enough other people are still "awake" and keeping the economy running. Otherwise we could all be arbitrarily wealthy by just putting all 6 billion of us to sleep for, say, 10,000 years and we'd all wake up millionairs!
Eliezer, James is right; while our financial systems has many failings it does in fact allow choices between current and future consumption. If not for legal prohibitions, the system could allow for trade with the future, to pay for cryonics revival.
"Saving", in theory, means that you trade off a claim on present consumption for a claim on future consumption, presumably by diverting present-day effort from current consumption to building infrastructure that will produce future goods and services.
A "financial system" would let you do this, but unfortunately, as Steve Waldman points out, We Simply Do Not Have A Financial System.
"Economists help please: I think I understand what it means for me to save for the future, but what would it mean if everyone wanted to do cryonics and so everyone wanted to save for the future? Would there be such a thing as "normal interest rates" anymore?"
If everyone used cryonics right after "death" but we devoted more resources today to investments and technological research then we would have more and better stuff in the future. Interest rates would fall, but would still keep their meaning and importance.
@Robin: I do not disagree as that is true enough, though my point in bringing up doctors was otherwise. Yes, they would (likely) want to be paid to bring you back (assuming continued modern capitalist economies); however, assuming this is any doctor worth their salt, your life would not simply be a payment to them (that is, the doctor would actually care about succeeding or not in terms of the value of your life entirely apart from being paid for the job).
@Dennis: I'm sorry, but whatever experiences and observations your arguments are based on fly in the face of my own, nor do I see any evidence that your foundational premises are accurate measures from which we can logically measure expected future (or even present) human behaviors and choices. The society you suggest is far different from the one that actually exists.
For example, you state "humans routinely kill other humans" implying that, ergo, modern humans thus do not value life.
Yet I am fairly certain I live in a society that (ie: among individuals who) overall does, in fact, value and respect my life.
I say this due the simple fact that I can walk down the street or visit with my neighbors without being in or needing to be in constant fear for my life, and expect that should something untoward happen to me that threatens my life, someone will at the very least call 911.
I will further note, to stem any possible argument that people only act this way due fear of punishment and not out of a respect for life, that the members of our armed forces have to be trained how to unflinchingly kill people, because the vast majority will either not pull the trigger, will look away before firing (severely reducing the chances of a hit), or will fire over the head of the opponent when faced with the prospect of firing on another human being.
According to Lt. Col. Dave Grossman (expert on the psychology of killing, U.S. Army (retired)), Christianity Today, Vol. 42, No. 9, "Trained to Kill":
"Patty Griffith demonstrates that the killing potential of the average Civil War regiment was anywhere from five hundred to a thousand men per minute. The actual killing rate was only one or two men per minute per regiment (The Battle Tactics of the American Civil War). At the Battle of Gettysburg, of the 27,000 muskets picked up from the dead and dying after the battle, 90 percent were loaded...even more amazingly, of the thousands of loaded muskets, over half had multiple loads in the barrel--one with 23 loads in the barrel.
In reality, the average man would load his musket and bring it to his shoulder, but he could not bring himself to kill...
...During World War II, U.S. Army Brig. Gen. S. L. A. Marshall had a team of researchers study what soldiers did in battle. For the first time in history, they asked individual soldiers what they did in battle. They discovered that only 15 to 20 percent of the individual riflemen could bring themselves to fire at an exposed enemy soldier."
That somehow this equates to a disrespect for life of the sort you imply, that people are such bastards they flatly won't care, I fundamentally disagree as I see no support for the assertion when examining the broad populace and their actual concerns and practices in daily life.
As well, I find your comparison of birth control (preventing new life from arising due concerns about ability or desire to provide care for said life) to cryostatic revival (restoring an existing life) flawed: apples and oranges.
Case in point: it's much easier "not to perform CPR" than "to prevent unwanted birth". Your claim and logic, against common experience, infers we would simply let them croak. Or, perhaps, it's much easier "not to revive drowned and frozen child" than "to prevent unwanted birth". Yet, again, we still choose to invest significant effort in saving life. Clearly, human respect for life, at least other existing human life, is a significant factor of our psychology.
Economists help please: I think I understand what it means for me to save for the future, but what would it mean if everyone wanted to do cryonics and so everyone wanted to save for the future? Would there be such a thing as "normal interest rates" anymore?
And that, Aron, is why patternism should not be permitted a monopoly over the "mainstream" cryonics world view. It should at most be one of many recognized theories about what constitutes individual survival.
"Dr, my point is to argue against such legal rules preventing trade across generations."
I agree with this goal, but do not think it's the most efficient avenue of attack. Unless you can think of practical reasons other than cryonics to roll back the rule against perpetuities, any realistic chance of repealing this rule would be contingent on there already being substantial public support for cryonics, and as we know that by itself it a difficult political/memetic challenge.
What I'm curious about is what else we as cryonicists can offer in trade to the future?
Historical data? The coordinates for valuable artefacts that we've hidden? What else?
What kinds of bounds can we place around what intelligent entities of the future will value?
The economic argument is feeble. The question should be whether the future would feel compelled ethically to do it. The distance between 'possible' and 'possible AND cheap' is probably narrow. A civilization that can reanimate you, with high fidelity, and with tools to PROVE that fidelity, can likely mine your physical patterns for whatever information it may purely be curious about. That is, any question you could answer conscious, they would already have your answer for. Perhaps that is in someway actually BEING reanimated when your physical pattern is simulated for the purpose of data mining. At any rate, their consideration of our attachment to 'living' may be a laughable consideration. And I think reanimation is possible, but almost certainly post-singularity. We have no idea what ride we are buying a ticket for.
Richard, we agree that many of us may not value the creatures who we become much beyond other creatures in our society if that creature is different enough from who we are now. We disagree I think on just how different your cryonics-revived future self would be.
Raven, you wrote:---you state "humans routinely kill other humans" implying that, ergo, modern humans thus do not value life.---
You are wrong: I don't imply that modern humans don't value life.They do.Modern humans value life against other lives and other valuables.Sometimes that evaluation results in killings. More often it results in healing.But the most common result of such evaluation is preserving status quo: whatever life can take care of itself -- lives. Whatever "life" cannot take care of itself -- disappears.
Dead frozen bodies cannot take care of themselves, so their fate is to disappear.
Life is respected.Dead frozen bodies -- not so much.
Robin - "Perhaps you just want us to remind people that maybe they would really rather just die than live such a different life, but even that seems a bit odd."
Why? I'm not sure I'd treat living as an end in itself. It's simply a necessary means to whatever true ends we might have, i.e. those things (our core values, relationships, life projects, etc.) that we live for. So: faced with the option of a longer but radically different life, we have to ask whether that future life would still contain the things we really care about. This is hardly a foregone conclusion.
Your response to my post is to offer two cases of less-radical change (resettlement and retirement), and to note that most of us would intuitively consider these futures worth having. That could well be true: most of us have life projects that could still be advanced in light of those changes. But that doesn't say much about whether this would still hold in case of far more radical change. (Or are you trying to suggest that we consider longevity to be an end in itself?)
If anything, I think your analogy helps my case. Though most people would rather rebuild on a new island, it isn't that hard to imagine the odd person or two -- an old tribal chief, say -- who's so attached to his home village that he'd rather be buried with it than start anew elsewhere. And this is a pretty modest change we're talking about. So when you scale up the example to the sort of radical change we can imagine post-cryonics, it's plausible that a correspondingly higher proportion of people would have trouble seeing this future as offering a continuation of what they really care about.
(It's also worth noting that most people's intuitions and preferences about the future are based on the false belief that they are magically enduring Cartesian Egos. Someone who fully internalizes the truth of reductionism will care far less about mere "survival", relative to their other values.)
Um, hasn't there been a lot of trouble in the past with people "reaching from beyond the grave" to interfere in current affairs. I think that society has, out of necessity, mostly disregarded influence from those who have died.
(from the article) "It really is a terrible shame people feel so free to ignore the wishes of ancestors who sacrificed to benefit them. " - this assumption needs to be defended.
I wonder if this paper might be of help in defining the economics of trade with the future:http://www.princeton.edu/~p...
>Economists help please: I think I understand what it means for me to save for>the future, but what would it mean if everyone wanted to do cryonics and so>everyone wanted to save for the future? Would there be such a thing as "normal>interest rates" anymore?"
I was wondering about that, too... relying on compound interest only works as long as enough other people are still "awake" and keeping the economy running. Otherwise we could all be arbitrarily wealthy by just putting all 6 billion of us to sleep for, say, 10,000 years and we'd all wake up millionairs!
Eliezer, James is right; while our financial systems has many failings it does in fact allow choices between current and future consumption. If not for legal prohibitions, the system could allow for trade with the future, to pay for cryonics revival.
"Saving", in theory, means that you trade off a claim on present consumption for a claim on future consumption, presumably by diverting present-day effort from current consumption to building infrastructure that will produce future goods and services.
A "financial system" would let you do this, but unfortunately, as Steve Waldman points out, We Simply Do Not Have A Financial System.
"Economists help please: I think I understand what it means for me to save for the future, but what would it mean if everyone wanted to do cryonics and so everyone wanted to save for the future? Would there be such a thing as "normal interest rates" anymore?"
If everyone used cryonics right after "death" but we devoted more resources today to investments and technological research then we would have more and better stuff in the future. Interest rates would fall, but would still keep their meaning and importance.
@Robin: I do not disagree as that is true enough, though my point in bringing up doctors was otherwise. Yes, they would (likely) want to be paid to bring you back (assuming continued modern capitalist economies); however, assuming this is any doctor worth their salt, your life would not simply be a payment to them (that is, the doctor would actually care about succeeding or not in terms of the value of your life entirely apart from being paid for the job).
@Dennis: I'm sorry, but whatever experiences and observations your arguments are based on fly in the face of my own, nor do I see any evidence that your foundational premises are accurate measures from which we can logically measure expected future (or even present) human behaviors and choices. The society you suggest is far different from the one that actually exists.
For example, you state "humans routinely kill other humans" implying that, ergo, modern humans thus do not value life.
Yet I am fairly certain I live in a society that (ie: among individuals who) overall does, in fact, value and respect my life.
I say this due the simple fact that I can walk down the street or visit with my neighbors without being in or needing to be in constant fear for my life, and expect that should something untoward happen to me that threatens my life, someone will at the very least call 911.
I will further note, to stem any possible argument that people only act this way due fear of punishment and not out of a respect for life, that the members of our armed forces have to be trained how to unflinchingly kill people, because the vast majority will either not pull the trigger, will look away before firing (severely reducing the chances of a hit), or will fire over the head of the opponent when faced with the prospect of firing on another human being.
According to Lt. Col. Dave Grossman (expert on the psychology of killing, U.S. Army (retired)), Christianity Today, Vol. 42, No. 9, "Trained to Kill":
"Patty Griffith demonstrates that the killing potential of the average Civil War regiment was anywhere from five hundred to a thousand men per minute. The actual killing rate was only one or two men per minute per regiment (The Battle Tactics of the American Civil War). At the Battle of Gettysburg, of the 27,000 muskets picked up from the dead and dying after the battle, 90 percent were loaded...even more amazingly, of the thousands of loaded muskets, over half had multiple loads in the barrel--one with 23 loads in the barrel.
In reality, the average man would load his musket and bring it to his shoulder, but he could not bring himself to kill...
...During World War II, U.S. Army Brig. Gen. S. L. A. Marshall had a team of researchers study what soldiers did in battle. For the first time in history, they asked individual soldiers what they did in battle. They discovered that only 15 to 20 percent of the individual riflemen could bring themselves to fire at an exposed enemy soldier."
That somehow this equates to a disrespect for life of the sort you imply, that people are such bastards they flatly won't care, I fundamentally disagree as I see no support for the assertion when examining the broad populace and their actual concerns and practices in daily life.
As well, I find your comparison of birth control (preventing new life from arising due concerns about ability or desire to provide care for said life) to cryostatic revival (restoring an existing life) flawed: apples and oranges.
Case in point: it's much easier "not to perform CPR" than "to prevent unwanted birth". Your claim and logic, against common experience, infers we would simply let them croak. Or, perhaps, it's much easier "not to revive drowned and frozen child" than "to prevent unwanted birth". Yet, again, we still choose to invest significant effort in saving life. Clearly, human respect for life, at least other existing human life, is a significant factor of our psychology.
Economists help please: I think I understand what it means for me to save for the future, but what would it mean if everyone wanted to do cryonics and so everyone wanted to save for the future? Would there be such a thing as "normal interest rates" anymore?
And that, Aron, is why patternism should not be permitted a monopoly over the "mainstream" cryonics world view. It should at most be one of many recognized theories about what constitutes individual survival.
"Dr, my point is to argue against such legal rules preventing trade across generations."
I agree with this goal, but do not think it's the most efficient avenue of attack. Unless you can think of practical reasons other than cryonics to roll back the rule against perpetuities, any realistic chance of repealing this rule would be contingent on there already being substantial public support for cryonics, and as we know that by itself it a difficult political/memetic challenge.
What I'm curious about is what else we as cryonicists can offer in trade to the future?
Historical data? The coordinates for valuable artefacts that we've hidden? What else?
What kinds of bounds can we place around what intelligent entities of the future will value?
Robin,
"this post is responding to Richard's argument which didn't depend on the specific costs, times, and chances."
I'm confused:Do you imply that replying to Richard allows you to ignore common sense?
"My first cryonics post started to address those issues."
It would be nice to see your view on Cryonics issue from economics perspective.
The economic argument is feeble. The question should be whether the future would feel compelled ethically to do it. The distance between 'possible' and 'possible AND cheap' is probably narrow. A civilization that can reanimate you, with high fidelity, and with tools to PROVE that fidelity, can likely mine your physical patterns for whatever information it may purely be curious about. That is, any question you could answer conscious, they would already have your answer for. Perhaps that is in someway actually BEING reanimated when your physical pattern is simulated for the purpose of data mining. At any rate, their consideration of our attachment to 'living' may be a laughable consideration. And I think reanimation is possible, but almost certainly post-singularity. We have no idea what ride we are buying a ticket for.
Raven,
You ask: "isn't life itself enough of a trade?"
My answer is: life itself is not enough for a trade.
Humans routinely kill other animals and even other humans.
Even "highly moral" societies don't really value life that much:- Pets are neutered.- Birth control is actively promoted.
What are your reasons to believe that it would change in the future?
Note, that it's much easier "not to revive frozen body" than "to prevent unwanted birth".