My co-blogger Eliezer and I may disagree on AI fooms, but we agree on something quite contrarian and, we think, huge: More likely than not, most folks who die today didn't have to die! Yes, I am skeptical of most medicine because on average
There are two problems with cryonics right now. The first is that brain degeneration starts to occur after several minutes of anoxia. Even if they can perform the procedure in an hour, that could be too long and severe degeneration has already occurred. In reality it takes several hours before all the paperwork (certifying death) and other hurdles are cleared, even if the technicians are waiting on hand in your last moments.
The second is that we don't know if they are doing the procedure correctly. There's no formal training program or certification like there is, for example, in a mortuary apprenticeship, and all those folks have to do is perfuse the body with embalming fluid long enough for presentation a few days later. Who are these cryonics technicians? What is their background? The fact that only a hundred bodies have been frozen demonstrates how little practice they've had on actual humans. A surgical resident will perform operations on thousands of people during a residency, all under strict guidance, before they certify her as qualified to do the procedures. Even if we acquire the technology to emulate or revive people, we don't know how well the technicians perfused the bodies.
All that being said, I suppose that you literally have nothing to lose in trying.
"If too many folks are frozen, the future might not want to revive them all. But in four decades of cryonics, only about a thousand folks have signed up, and a hundred have actually been frozen. So this isn't remotely problem yet. And by investing, frozen folk could easy pay to be revived. "
"Organizations charged with keeping bodies frozen could fail before revival is possible. But the more who are frozen, the less often this will happen, and the cheaper cryonics will become as well. There are huge scale economies to freezing folks."
So which is it? Are the organizations going to stay in business because they have loads of customers and economies of scale resulting in too many frozen folk to revive or are they going to go out of business before they get to revive the small number of clients who have already signed up?
I've commented on this before here but I'm not sure if anyone noticed or if this is a common argument but it strikes me that the fatal problem with cryonics is that it relies on technology, a smaller component part of which obviates the need for cryonics in the first place. Once the technology exists to extend life (or upload a living brain), there is no customer base for cryonics and the technology to extend life is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a successful revival (or emulation).
I totally fail to understand the economics of why future peoples would want to resurrect your head out of a frozen jar.
You claim that you can pay to get out of the freezer; I claim that future people are unlikely to feel much obligation to honor contracts to a frozen head and would rather have the money.
This is my really serious stumbling block to cryonics: what motivates a future person to revive me? Why is it to their advantage to have another emulation in their sim world? Is/why is there a shortage of them?
I'm not sure I see the relationship between making a copy of myself in the future, and saving my own life. This is mostly because I don't have the slightest clue what consciousness is.
An interesting one. I will most likely sign up for cryonics when I have some spare cash. Still, I am not entirely sure that cryonically preserving myself gives a particularly utility according to what I value. As Aaron mentioned, brain emulation is not the same as immortality. I, unfortunately, don't have the self improvement capabilities to expect em-Cam to by competitive in the future environment. It may well be that I can create a greater impacting in shifting the expected future utility of the universe by actions more localised to this time.
I've seen Cryonics mentioned here with some fervor. Particularly in Eleizer's post a while back. I'm not familiar with all the reasons why the choice is quite as clear cut. Is it because the cost is trivial in resources and negligible/nil in terms of loss of life now? I've seen some proponents mention their plan to freeze themselves some years before they actually die, to maximise the chance of preservation. Is this an obviously rational choice too?
I currently think along the lines of "Freeze myself. Sure, why not?". This is in contrast to "All rational people with sane utility functions should have themselves frozen at the time of death!" I don't see overwhelming evidence that convinces me that having a frozen Cam around for the next few hundred years is the most effective strategy for ensuring my legacy.
What am I missing? Is this a matter of me simply assigning different utilities to outcomes or is my ambivalence inconsistent or ill-informed?
A stumbling block for me is brain emulation = immortality. A perfect model of me is not the same as me continuing to experience things. I still believe that the entity created from my brain would be conscious and a self, I just think that my personal experience as a dead person at that time would be no different had a been frozen and had my brain emulated, then if I hadn't.
Very interesting stuff, i’m not personally a fan of it cause I’m not personally against the thought of dying when I’m really old but I see why you’re into it. My main hangups are the consciousness bit, the “never die at all costs” bit, and the “why would all the cyronic people be systematically revived”. The first one seems a little insurmountable to me: if we make a copy of me, it’s not me. Proof by thought experiment: we could easily both exist at the same time. Also, clones are not me, even if given my memories somehow. I would not experience the lives of either of those. So why would I experience the life of a copy? Hell, you could make a copy of me while I’m still alive and never tell me and my life and death wouldn’t be any different. Consciousness may be complicated and poorly understood, but I think those examples are pretty hard to contradict in a practical sense…
Well, i'd beg to disagree on this one. Most folks frozen today probably won't be possible to revive. On top of this jumping onto crappy cryonics is not a very good approach for incentive for that cryonics not to be this crappy.
Freeze a goddamn cow brain, or best yet elephant brain (or other human sized-ish brain), report on all the shredded up by ice pieces that cryo-protectants never reached.
I don't want myself to be frozen by human ostriches that are afraid to do a test that has a good chance of finding out that a lot (or everyone) they already froze is almost certainly non-revivable by any technology up and including atomic resolution scanning..
In every discussion I find about cryonics, I never see anyone talking about the one factor that weighs most heavily (in my opinion) on my decision... The effect that cryopreservation has on your loved ones, friends, and family that you (hopefully temporarily) leave behind. For anyone who has ever stood at the bedside of a loved one as that loved one passed away, you know how difficult and painful it is to let go. Even after the person has most certainly passed, you need to hold that person's hand and come to terms, for your own sake, with that person's passing. This takes time -- different amounts of time for each individual -- and should not be rushed. And the process is not over when you finally physically let go. It continues through the wake and the funeral and for months thereafter. It is the grieving process, it is natural, it is essential to emotional health, and it cannot be suppressed or mitigated by logic. It happens within each of us, no matter what science, religion, or other coping mechanism we may have.
And so, when I think of cryonics, I am torn. I believe in it. I believe it can work. I believe we will, in the "near" future, cure aging and most diseases. We will have the medical technology to un-freeze those who have been preserved. We will have the technology to repair at least some of the damage done by the anoxia of death and the cryopreservation process, such that a substantial portion of identity and memory is restored. (even if not all)
And yet... when I think about my family standing at my bedside, grieving as I pass, I do not want a small army of technicians looking over their shoulders, impatiently tapping their watches, knowing that every second of delay means further damage to my brain. My family will need to grieve. They will need to let go in their own time, at their own pace. And they probably will not understand, despite my best efforts to explain it and prepare them, why these guys in white coats so desperately need to interrupt their grieving RIGHT NOW to drain my blood and put me on ice. And their necessary process of grieving will be muddled and confused -- because even as they conduct my funeral and bury a box somewhere, they will all know that it is empty, and they will wonder... What are we doing?? Is he dead or what? Do we let go now, or what? The potential for psychological and emotional trauma is huge. I love my family, and I do not want to put them through that.
I really don't care about what the future will look like when I wake up. I don't care if there's a super-AI running everything, or if I'm uploaded to a simulator headed for Gliese, where I only get 1 subjective year of processing every 200 actual years, due to power constraints. Whatever. It's so utterly unpredictable, I don't even try. As others have explained, the cost is not an issue, either. No... really, the only hangup in my cryonics calculus is how it will affect my family.
I guess it's all on me to prepare them for it. But I worry that it's simply not possible, no matter how hard I try. It is my love for them, and my desire to never put them through the pain of grieving (or make it worse than it already is), that paradoxically makes me hope they all die before me. If I was alone in this world, cryonics would be a no-brainer. (haha, get it? "no-brainer"...)
Miguel, you do not absolutely need to live (or die) near a Cryonics facility local to you. Cryonics patients are shipped from all around the world. And now the logistics have just become far simpler: http://www.engadget.com/201... I recommend http://www.KrioRus.ru for the most competitive terms and pricing.
There are two problems with cryonics right now. The first is that brain degeneration starts to occur after several minutes of anoxia. Even if they can perform the procedure in an hour, that could be too long and severe degeneration has already occurred. In reality it takes several hours before all the paperwork (certifying death) and other hurdles are cleared, even if the technicians are waiting on hand in your last moments.
The second is that we don't know if they are doing the procedure correctly. There's no formal training program or certification like there is, for example, in a mortuary apprenticeship, and all those folks have to do is perfuse the body with embalming fluid long enough for presentation a few days later. Who are these cryonics technicians? What is their background? The fact that only a hundred bodies have been frozen demonstrates how little practice they've had on actual humans. A surgical resident will perform operations on thousands of people during a residency, all under strict guidance, before they certify her as qualified to do the procedures. Even if we acquire the technology to emulate or revive people, we don't know how well the technicians perfused the bodies.
All that being said, I suppose that you literally have nothing to lose in trying.
"If too many folks are frozen, the future might not want to revive them all. But in four decades of cryonics, only about a thousand folks have signed up, and a hundred have actually been frozen. So this isn't remotely problem yet. And by investing, frozen folk could easy pay to be revived. "
"Organizations charged with keeping bodies frozen could fail before revival is possible. But the more who are frozen, the less often this will happen, and the cheaper cryonics will become as well. There are huge scale economies to freezing folks."
So which is it? Are the organizations going to stay in business because they have loads of customers and economies of scale resulting in too many frozen folk to revive or are they going to go out of business before they get to revive the small number of clients who have already signed up?
I've commented on this before here but I'm not sure if anyone noticed or if this is a common argument but it strikes me that the fatal problem with cryonics is that it relies on technology, a smaller component part of which obviates the need for cryonics in the first place. Once the technology exists to extend life (or upload a living brain), there is no customer base for cryonics and the technology to extend life is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a successful revival (or emulation).
I totally fail to understand the economics of why future peoples would want to resurrect your head out of a frozen jar.
You claim that you can pay to get out of the freezer; I claim that future people are unlikely to feel much obligation to honor contracts to a frozen head and would rather have the money.
This is my really serious stumbling block to cryonics: what motivates a future person to revive me? Why is it to their advantage to have another emulation in their sim world? Is/why is there a shortage of them?
I'm not sure I see the relationship between making a copy of myself in the future, and saving my own life. This is mostly because I don't have the slightest clue what consciousness is.
Allan: thanks for the tip! Dull philosophy should be avoided at all costs, regardless if immortality is achievable.
An interesting one. I will most likely sign up for cryonics when I have some spare cash. Still, I am not entirely sure that cryonically preserving myself gives a particularly utility according to what I value. As Aaron mentioned, brain emulation is not the same as immortality. I, unfortunately, don't have the self improvement capabilities to expect em-Cam to by competitive in the future environment. It may well be that I can create a greater impacting in shifting the expected future utility of the universe by actions more localised to this time.
I've seen Cryonics mentioned here with some fervor. Particularly in Eleizer's post a while back. I'm not familiar with all the reasons why the choice is quite as clear cut. Is it because the cost is trivial in resources and negligible/nil in terms of loss of life now? I've seen some proponents mention their plan to freeze themselves some years before they actually die, to maximise the chance of preservation. Is this an obviously rational choice too?
I currently think along the lines of "Freeze myself. Sure, why not?". This is in contrast to "All rational people with sane utility functions should have themselves frozen at the time of death!" I don't see overwhelming evidence that convinces me that having a frozen Cam around for the next few hundred years is the most effective strategy for ensuring my legacy.
What am I missing? Is this a matter of me simply assigning different utilities to outcomes or is my ambivalence inconsistent or ill-informed?
A stumbling block for me is brain emulation = immortality. A perfect model of me is not the same as me continuing to experience things. I still believe that the entity created from my brain would be conscious and a self, I just think that my personal experience as a dead person at that time would be no different had a been frozen and had my brain emulated, then if I hadn't.
Very interesting stuff, i’m not personally a fan of it cause I’m not personally against the thought of dying when I’m really old but I see why you’re into it. My main hangups are the consciousness bit, the “never die at all costs” bit, and the “why would all the cyronic people be systematically revived”. The first one seems a little insurmountable to me: if we make a copy of me, it’s not me. Proof by thought experiment: we could easily both exist at the same time. Also, clones are not me, even if given my memories somehow. I would not experience the lives of either of those. So why would I experience the life of a copy? Hell, you could make a copy of me while I’m still alive and never tell me and my life and death wouldn’t be any different. Consciousness may be complicated and poorly understood, but I think those examples are pretty hard to contradict in a practical sense…
last thing earth needs is for humans to be immortal
(joke)
https://waitbutwhy.com/2016...
Please read this and share it, as it has convinced many people to sign up for cryonics.
I've asked about this. It doesn't seem you can sign up for cryonics and volunteer to be an organ doner.
Well, i'd beg to disagree on this one. Most folks frozen today probably won't be possible to revive. On top of this jumping onto crappy cryonics is not a very good approach for incentive for that cryonics not to be this crappy.
Freeze a goddamn cow brain, or best yet elephant brain (or other human sized-ish brain), report on all the shredded up by ice pieces that cryo-protectants never reached.
I don't want myself to be frozen by human ostriches that are afraid to do a test that has a good chance of finding out that a lot (or everyone) they already froze is almost certainly non-revivable by any technology up and including atomic resolution scanning..
Thank you. You have no idea how much this article has impacted me. It is a large part of my worldview, and I think back to it every day.
So just freeze your head. Everything below the neck can still go to organ donation when the cryonicists are done with it. It's even cheaper.
In every discussion I find about cryonics, I never see anyone talking about the one factor that weighs most heavily (in my opinion) on my decision... The effect that cryopreservation has on your loved ones, friends, and family that you (hopefully temporarily) leave behind. For anyone who has ever stood at the bedside of a loved one as that loved one passed away, you know how difficult and painful it is to let go. Even after the person has most certainly passed, you need to hold that person's hand and come to terms, for your own sake, with that person's passing. This takes time -- different amounts of time for each individual -- and should not be rushed. And the process is not over when you finally physically let go. It continues through the wake and the funeral and for months thereafter. It is the grieving process, it is natural, it is essential to emotional health, and it cannot be suppressed or mitigated by logic. It happens within each of us, no matter what science, religion, or other coping mechanism we may have.
And so, when I think of cryonics, I am torn. I believe in it. I believe it can work. I believe we will, in the "near" future, cure aging and most diseases. We will have the medical technology to un-freeze those who have been preserved. We will have the technology to repair at least some of the damage done by the anoxia of death and the cryopreservation process, such that a substantial portion of identity and memory is restored. (even if not all)
And yet... when I think about my family standing at my bedside, grieving as I pass, I do not want a small army of technicians looking over their shoulders, impatiently tapping their watches, knowing that every second of delay means further damage to my brain. My family will need to grieve. They will need to let go in their own time, at their own pace. And they probably will not understand, despite my best efforts to explain it and prepare them, why these guys in white coats so desperately need to interrupt their grieving RIGHT NOW to drain my blood and put me on ice. And their necessary process of grieving will be muddled and confused -- because even as they conduct my funeral and bury a box somewhere, they will all know that it is empty, and they will wonder... What are we doing?? Is he dead or what? Do we let go now, or what? The potential for psychological and emotional trauma is huge. I love my family, and I do not want to put them through that.
I really don't care about what the future will look like when I wake up. I don't care if there's a super-AI running everything, or if I'm uploaded to a simulator headed for Gliese, where I only get 1 subjective year of processing every 200 actual years, due to power constraints. Whatever. It's so utterly unpredictable, I don't even try. As others have explained, the cost is not an issue, either. No... really, the only hangup in my cryonics calculus is how it will affect my family.
I guess it's all on me to prepare them for it. But I worry that it's simply not possible, no matter how hard I try. It is my love for them, and my desire to never put them through the pain of grieving (or make it worse than it already is), that paradoxically makes me hope they all die before me. If I was alone in this world, cryonics would be a no-brainer. (haha, get it? "no-brainer"...)
Miguel, you do not absolutely need to live (or die) near a Cryonics facility local to you. Cryonics patients are shipped from all around the world. And now the logistics have just become far simpler: http://www.engadget.com/201... I recommend http://www.KrioRus.ru for the most competitive terms and pricing.