there is also cryonics, whose lack of popularity suggests that this isn’t a real argument taken seriously by a nontrivial number of people. Though perhaps there is a precisely calibrated level of belief in the capabilities of future technology that makes cryonics knowably useless, while AGIs remain capable of significantly extending lifespans.
For me, it’s mostly a combination of
skepticism that there is enough structure to restart my first-person experience[1] given our inability to revive a frozen mouse and
skepticism that needed relatively uninterrupted power supply will be maintained through a likely coming period of civilizational upheaval[2].
I don’t care much about preservation of information per se or about existence of a human very similar to me, but without my first-person view. I’ve written 90% of what matters and I’ve forgotten a lot, and other than that it is only the preservation of the first-person subjective reality which is of value to me in this sense. I don’t see a strong reason to create a clone with similar memories who is not me in terms of subjective reality, but more like a twin brother forked at a later than usual point in time. (I am in Camp 2 in terms of https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NyiFLzSrkfkDW4S7o/why-it-s-so-hard-to-talk-about-consciousness; these days I tend to make this note when talking about subjective reality.)
Frankly, I would like to hear if that state of uninterrupted power supply is properly audited even in our relatively normal times. But also, what are their plans for long blackouts (in a situation when people might be struggling to survive, and might care less about those obligations because of that)?
A frozen brain can’t be literally revived, it’s all about information theoretic death, ability to infer a mind from positions of atoms and molecules in the frozen wreck of a brain, with superintelligent efficiency and considerable compute (at least compared to what we have today). What mostly persuades me here is a combination of resilience of LLMs to all kinds of abuse (on top of the older arguments about redundancy and “holographic” encoding), and the relatively large scale nature of even the smallest relevant structures in the brain, such as the synapses (there’s a lot of atoms in any individual thing, and distinctive molecules). It’d take a lot of deterioration to destroy enough to leave no trace. And macroscopic damage from crystallization is probably entirely irrelevant.
relatively uninterrupted power supply will be maintained through a likely coming period of civilizational upheaval
Cryogenic dewars can be kept at room temperature, and lose on the order of 1% of the liquid nitrogen daily, so only need to be topped off every few days, maybe a couple of weeks, and some redundant liquid nitrogen could be kept on site. So this doesn’t seem substantially more difficult than for example avoiding a local famine due to a breakdown of logistics. If there is no global catastrophe that takes out the relevant area for good, the cryonauts preserved there might fare no worse than the local population.
Yes, I think something functionally similar might be recreatable (assuming that people in charge of the cryogenic storage care about it in difficult situations on par with caring about actively living humans; it’s a big assumption, but not completely impossible). It would behave approximately like me.
But I don’t think I care about something functionally similar to me more than I care about something functionally similar to many other people I know. I actually would not mind quite a bit of information loss, I mostly care about the first-person subjective focus (in Camp 2 terminology), and I don’t see why I should hope for keeping that if it’s just an approximate restoration. But yes, we just don’t understand that part of reality enough to make a confident judgement.
On the other hand, I am not sure that with stronger tech a frozen brain can’t be literally revived. Certain animals are nicely revivable in this sense; it’s just (for some strange reasons I don’t quite understand) we have not solved this problem for animals which are not already adapted to survive freezing. It’s weird that we don’t know how to avoid crystallization damage in the first place (say, in mice, given that many frogs survive this), but with a stronger tech this kind of damage might be fixable… I don’t know if that makes the chances of keeping the subjective focus good enough...
But yes, perhaps, I should reconsider. I have made a decision that I don’t want cryonic preservation, and that I am more or less certain that that would not work, that odds are indistinguishable from zero, but perhaps that’s a mistake on my part.
For me, it’s mostly a combination of
skepticism that there is enough structure to restart my first-person experience[1] given our inability to revive a frozen mouse and
skepticism that needed relatively uninterrupted power supply will be maintained through a likely coming period of civilizational upheaval[2].
But I am quite open to persuasion.
I don’t care much about preservation of information per se or about existence of a human very similar to me, but without my first-person view. I’ve written 90% of what matters and I’ve forgotten a lot, and other than that it is only the preservation of the first-person subjective reality which is of value to me in this sense. I don’t see a strong reason to create a clone with similar memories who is not me in terms of subjective reality, but more like a twin brother forked at a later than usual point in time. (I am in Camp 2 in terms of https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NyiFLzSrkfkDW4S7o/why-it-s-so-hard-to-talk-about-consciousness; these days I tend to make this note when talking about subjective reality.)
Frankly, I would like to hear if that state of uninterrupted power supply is properly audited even in our relatively normal times. But also, what are their plans for long blackouts (in a situation when people might be struggling to survive, and might care less about those obligations because of that)?
A frozen brain can’t be literally revived, it’s all about information theoretic death, ability to infer a mind from positions of atoms and molecules in the frozen wreck of a brain, with superintelligent efficiency and considerable compute (at least compared to what we have today). What mostly persuades me here is a combination of resilience of LLMs to all kinds of abuse (on top of the older arguments about redundancy and “holographic” encoding), and the relatively large scale nature of even the smallest relevant structures in the brain, such as the synapses (there’s a lot of atoms in any individual thing, and distinctive molecules). It’d take a lot of deterioration to destroy enough to leave no trace. And macroscopic damage from crystallization is probably entirely irrelevant.
Cryogenic dewars can be kept at room temperature, and lose on the order of 1% of the liquid nitrogen daily, so only need to be topped off every few days, maybe a couple of weeks, and some redundant liquid nitrogen could be kept on site. So this doesn’t seem substantially more difficult than for example avoiding a local famine due to a breakdown of logistics. If there is no global catastrophe that takes out the relevant area for good, the cryonauts preserved there might fare no worse than the local population.
Thanks!
Yes, I think something functionally similar might be recreatable (assuming that people in charge of the cryogenic storage care about it in difficult situations on par with caring about actively living humans; it’s a big assumption, but not completely impossible). It would behave approximately like me.
But I don’t think I care about something functionally similar to me more than I care about something functionally similar to many other people I know. I actually would not mind quite a bit of information loss, I mostly care about the first-person subjective focus (in Camp 2 terminology), and I don’t see why I should hope for keeping that if it’s just an approximate restoration. But yes, we just don’t understand that part of reality enough to make a confident judgement.
On the other hand, I am not sure that with stronger tech a frozen brain can’t be literally revived. Certain animals are nicely revivable in this sense; it’s just (for some strange reasons I don’t quite understand) we have not solved this problem for animals which are not already adapted to survive freezing. It’s weird that we don’t know how to avoid crystallization damage in the first place (say, in mice, given that many frogs survive this), but with a stronger tech this kind of damage might be fixable… I don’t know if that makes the chances of keeping the subjective focus good enough...
But yes, perhaps, I should reconsider. I have made a decision that I don’t want cryonic preservation, and that I am more or less certain that that would not work, that odds are indistinguishable from zero, but perhaps that’s a mistake on my part.