Cryonics does not prevent you from dying. Humans are afraid of dying. Cryonics does not address the problem (fear of death). It instead offers a possible second life.
I’m afraid of dying, because I know that when I am dying I will be very afraid. So I’m afraid of being afraid. Cryonics would offer very little to me right now in terms of alleviating this fear. Sure it might work; but I won’t know that it will while I’m dying, and so my fear while dying will not be mitigated.
You might say hey wait jhuff- isn’t actually being dead, and not have a chance at a second life a problem (or at least a missed opportunity)? Well I don’t see how it is once I’m dead. Heck the expression “I’m dead” doesn’t even make sense—there is no consciousness or awareness of being dead—if I really wanted to be a pedant I’d argue there is no ego that is dead; only egos that have died.
So anyway until I have died the overwhelming problem with death is my fear of it. After I have died, I don’t exist. So certainly no problems there for me (I can’t have problems if I don’t exist). Cryonics doesn’t seem to offer me much utility value.
So anyway until I have died the overwhelming problem with death is my fear of it.
For me, the overwhelming problem with death is that I don’t get to exist anymore.
If you’re going to be afraid of dying whether or not you’ve signed up for cryonics, then your decision not to sign up cannot depend on your anticipation of being afraid, as that is invariant across the two scenarios.
For me, the overwhelming problem with death is that I don’t get to exist anymore.
I don’t really understand that statement. Your problem—here and now—is that after you die you don’t exist anymore?
I can’t tell you what your problems or fears are but is it possible the real problem here and now is that you are afraid of not existing after your death?
edit to follow-up this remark:
If you’re going to be afraid of dying whether or not you’ve signed up for cryonics, then your decision not to sign up cannot depend on your anticipation of being afraid, as that is invariant across the two scenarios.
So then Cryonics is just a solution looking for a problem. I don’t have a problem it can solve.
Fear of not existing after death is not just some silly uncomfortable emotion to be calmed. Rather it reveals a disconnect between one’s preference and expectations about the actual state of reality.
The real problem is not existing after death. Fear is a way of representing that.
Fear of not existing after death is not just some silly uncomfortable emotion to be calmed. Rather it reveals a disconnect between one’s preference and expectations about the actual state of reality.
I never said it was silly, I hope it didn’t come across that way. And I am not at all suggesting that we shouldn’t prefer life, and shouldn’t take all reasonable steps to continue living as long as living is worthwhile.
I don’t really understand that statement. Your problem—here and now—is that after you die you don’t exist anymore?
I value my continued existence; I’m surprised that this is at all confusing.
Is penicillin also a solution looking for a problem? How about looking both ways before you cross the street? Do you really place no value on the longer life you would have the possibility of living if you signed up? If so, why does the same consideration not also extend to the common death-preventing steps (ETA: limit that to sudden death, the kind where you experience no opportunity to feel fear) you presumably currently take?
Is penicillin also a solution looking for a problem? How about looking both ways before you cross the street?
Of course not, penicillin prevents death. So does watching both ways before I cross the street. Cryonics does not prevent death.
Do you really place no value on the longer life you would have the possibility of living if you signed up?
Well, I could try and calculate the utility based on my guess at the odds of it working, but I estimate that the utility of the time invested in doing that would exceed the marginal utility I’d find when finished. So I’m not going to look into it, for the same reason that I don’t read all the email messages I get from potential business partners in Nigeria. Surely there must be a chance that one of those is real, but I consider that chance to be so vanishingly small that its -EV for me to read the emails.
Fair enough; I can’t deny that your conclusion follows from the premise “Cryonics has so small a probability of succeeding that it doesn’t even justify looking into the topic.” I will note that this is a shift from “Cryonics is a solution in search of a problem” to “Cryonics is not a solution.”
ETA: No, I take that last remark back. But my original comment about your true objection being about something other than your fear of death was correct.
Really my original point was and still is that cryonics doesn’t prevent dying or death. My particular problem with death is a fear of dying. I truly have gotten over the fact that one day I will not exist. So I guess I was projecting this onto others, and probably that isn’t valid.
Yes there is another question, which I didn’t originally speak to, about the analysis of the marginal utility value of a possibly pro-longed life, but that isn’t really something that interests me.
Even if we became much more confident in cryonics, such as some major technological breakthroughs—I would update based on the fact that knowing cryonics is likely to work would be a comfort to me as I was dying. So I’d go sign up, but not just because I want the pro-longed life but because I’d now view dying more like “going to sleep” and the fear of it would be significantly reduced. So even if I were never revived, I would have gotten value from cryonics if I considered it viable at the time I was dying.
Really my original point was and still is that cryonics doesn’t prevent dying or death.
Okay, fair enough. But asserting that cryonics won’t work without detailed prior knowledge of its infeasibility and without even being willing to investigate it puts you in a terrible epistemic position. You still haven’t argued for your ostensible point.
(I wrote another reply, but then deleted it as it was premised on a falsehood.)
You still haven’t argued for your ostensible point.
My ostensible point again: cryonics doesn’t prevent dying. I really need to present an argument for this?
Or I need to present an argument for my point that I’m only afraid of dying, and not of being dead?
Well here it is: I can die. I can’t be dead—because at that point there is no I. So while right now I can fear the void, it won’t be a problem once I am dead. Note that insertion of cryonics does not change any of these facts. I’ll still be afraid of dying, I’ll still die, I will no longer exist. Whether I’m in a frozen can or my ashes are scattered in the ocean there will be an identical amount of neural computation. So I won’t exist and I won’t have any problems, either way.
I’m pretty sure your terminology is causing a lot of needless confusion here. I think people are reading “cryonics doesn’t prevent dying” as “cryonics does not prevent death”, which is the usual way of speaking. If someone says, “Sam’s dying; do something!” they don’t so much want you to stop Sam from feeling like he’s dying, but rather they want you to make it so that Sam does not die.
However, you seem to be talking about death in the following, and people’s replies might be better directed towards this:
Well here it is: I can die. I can’t be dead—because at that point there is no I. So while right now I can fear the void, it won’t be a problem once I am dead. Note that insertion of cryonics does not change any of these facts. I’ll still be afraid of dying, I’ll still die, I will no longer exist. Whether I’m in a frozen can or my ashes are scattered in the ocean there will be an identical amount of neural computation. So I won’t exist and I won’t have any problems, either way.
cryonics doesn’t prevent dying. I really need to present an argument for this?
Yes. I think the standard counterargument is linked to on the wiki; ‘death’ is a moving target, and it seems like “information-theoretic death” is a good candidate for what “death” will mean when the technology settles out.
I take it you have a do not resuscitate medical tag then? You wouldn’t want some EMTs to restart your heart after you had the “emotional experience of dying.”
(Original poster thinks of himself as a persistent billiard ball of identity, when neural processing stops, the billiard ball winks out of existence. This winking-out is death. If anyone wants to explain the ontological falsity of the billiard-balls theory to the original poster at less length than working all the way up to here, they can go ahead and try.)
(Original poster thinks of himself as a persistent billiard ball of identity, when neural processing stops, the billiard ball winks out of existence.
Uhm, no. I would subscribe to more of an information view of identity. In other words, if my information state encoded in my brain could be uploaded to a computer and executed in a mind simulator it would have my identity as much as the meat guy writing this right now.
Actually I have no idea what identity is or how many of me there are; I’m the guy who Can’t Get Over Dust Theory.
I don’t have doubts about cryonics at that level. If the technology works, the technology works and I would wake up as me as I ever was. That isn’t where I’m “going wrong”.
I do think that identity is lost when information is irretrievably lost. And I think that has likely happened or will happen to everyone being suspended right now.
Okay, fair enough. But asserting that cryonics won’t work without detailed prior knowledge of its infeasibility and without even being willing to investigate it puts you in a terrible epistemic position.
I don’t know why you’d assume I’ve done no research on it or have no knowledge of its feasibility. What I’m unwilling at this point to do, is try and estimate the marginal utility of the proposition in any serious or sophisticated way.
And I don’t know where I said it won’t work. That would be ridiculous to say that. Given our continued existence and advancement as a civilization it almost certainly it will work someday for someone.
We present we have substantial technical challenges related to preserving people in a state such that they can be revived. I also know there is debate on what may be possible in the even further future in terms of repairing brain cells that were destroyed through apoptosis or necrosis.
I also know there are a number of risks or barriers to revivals even after the technology challenges are resolved, and these risks (particularly the economic and political risks) increase the longer it takes the revival and medical technology to catch up. No one can predict the odds that any given person now would ever be revived, but there are many reasons to be pessimistic about those chances.
I don’t know why you’d assume I’ve done no research on it or have no knowledge of its feasibility.
It’s because we’re using certain words in different ways, and according to my usage of them, what you said somewhat weakly implied that you hadn’t.
And I don’t know where I said it won’t work.
You did say “Cryonics does not prevent you from dying.” If cryonics works, then I don’t consider the life events that follow resuscitation to be a second life that occured after death, as opposed to a single life with a long inanimate period somewhere in the middle—to me, that just looks like a distinction without a difference. This is an example of the ongoing semantic clash.
Anyway, it now seems to me that you’ve practiced some form of Dark Side Epistemology on yourself, in that the fact that after you’re dead you have no preferences seems to be critical to your reasoning. I’m all for removing time inconsistency of preferences, but I think that’s going a bit far.
It seems that CronoDAS had a far better grasp than me of what you were actually claiming; the linked query is far more apposite than I originally appreciated, and I’d be very interested in your reply to his question. I’ll even accentuate it: does the fact that if you were in a stable coma* you would have no preferences excuse your doctor from rescuing you from that coma if they can?
* Let us stipulate that you have no awareness of your state.
You did say “Cryonics does not prevent you from dying.” If cryonics works, then I don’t consider the life events that follow resuscitation to be a second life that occured after death, as opposed to a single life with a long inanimate period somewhere in the middle—to me, that just looks like a distinction without a difference. This is an example of the ongoing semantic clash.
I think it is more than just semantics. Unless you are very confident in a cryonic revival, then the emotional experience of dying is not much changed by that distant prospect.
Anyway, it now seems to me that you’ve practiced some form of Dark Side Epistemology
Gosh I hope its not fatal.
in that the fact that after you’re dead you have no preferences seems to be critical to your reasoning.
So you really think you will have preferences after you cease to exist?
So you really think you will have preferences after you cease to exist?
I’m pretty sure it’s hard to fix the temporal context of that utterance. However, this might clear things up:
I currently have preferences regarding things that haven’t happened yet. Even things that will happen after I die! It shouldn’t be too hard to imagine: “I want my great-grandchildren to grow up in a world without violence.” or some such sentiment.
Whether I will have preferences after I die is a different, interesting question, but not particularly relevant to decisions I have to make now; for those, I use my current preferences.
Whether I will have preferences after I die is a different, interesting question, but not particularly relevant to decisions I have to make now; for those, I use my current preferences.
Ok I guess I’m caught up now. So if my current preference is that I am revived at some point after “dying” (which I’ve acknowledged it is), then I should act on it now and sign up for Cryonics, since that is my only chance of that happening later.
The fact that it provides no cure for the “dying experience” doesn’t detract from its possibility to fulfill my current preferences. Got it.
Well I did reply to CronoDAS directly, but I’ll try this scenario too (I think it is a lot different):
I’ll even accentuate it: does the fact that if you were in a stable coma* you would have no preferences excuse your doctor from rescuing you from that coma if they can?
Let us stipulate that you have no awareness of your state.
I think this is more similar to the resuscitation question; yes I have a preference to be resuscitated. Doctor’s have a responsibility to their patients to treat them in spite of their present lack of consciousness.
This shares with the resuscitation example the fact that I really have to take no action for these preferences to be carried out.
I think that in the end, regardless of everything else we’ve discussed, your argument against choosing cryonics is founded on your judgment that it has negligible chance of success. So what is the evidence and reasoning that led you to that conclusion?
I think that in the end, regardless of everything else we’ve discussed, your argument against choosing cryonics is founded on your judgment that it has negligible chance of success.
Yes, I’ve acknowledged that much earlier. If I became much more confident in Cryonics I’d be more likely to sign-up, as I think it would then be a comfort in the dying process, to know that maybe this is “just going to sleep for awhile”.
I’ve also acknowledged I prefer resuscitation so even though “I’m out” for a period, yes I could see a value in cryonics now if I expected it to work.
So what is the evidence and reasoning that led you to that conclusion?
Well we know that pretty serious damage happens to the brain, beginning minutes after heart failure and getting worse and worse due to autolysis as the hours pass before vitrification. We also know that vitrification does cause some damage; not the devastation that actual freezing would be but damage nonetheless.
Cryonics advocates wave what I call the “future nano-wand” at all of these problems. While it does not in theory seem infeasible that future resuscitation could avoid the destruction caused by ischemia, and that our nano-friends can repair any chemical contamination caused by vitrification itself; it is very, very doubtful to me that there is any information left in a brain that has suffered several hours of autolysis.
As a young man, I’d expect my death to be unexpected (e.g. due to accident or violence) and that it would be hours before I could be vitrified. When this changes (e.g. I get older or find I’m doomed by a a life-threatening disease) maybe I’d be more interested in cryonics.
Even assuming we can vitrify people in a state that preserves information, I have some doubts about revival actually ever happening.
First, we don’t really know what is going to be possible and when with nanotechnology. So some people want to say revival is 50 years out, I’ve got no reason—no successes in nanotechnology to date—to make me think its not 200 years out.
I’ve got serious concerns about our economic and political stability over the next fifty years. There is no doubt, there are going to be some serious changes in the world. I think there may be problems beyond their control that would force Alcor into insolvency. Trust funds established today may be as worthless as the pension funds and retirement accounts, and yes foundation trusts that have been utterly annihilated over the last few years.
I work for a large bank and for a long time (2004 to mid 2009) managed the systems that do the margin monitoring of trust account loans. I’ve seen first hand the damage that has been suffered by all manner of legal trusts, even ones that were invested in what were thought to be very stable instruments.
The idea that interest on capital will always outpace inflation has been refuted many, many times over. Modern monetary policies have not proven effective, and there is no reason to assume our current crisis won’t deteriorate into the kind of stagflation
we saw in the 80s again.
I’m not preaching doom and gloom and the end of western civilization, but I am skeptical that people sleeping for 200 years will have trust funds capable of keeping them on ice. The people that recover from these slumps will be the ones who are working and producing new income streams independent of their current capital.
Finally, I’m concerned that a massive adoption of cryonics would actually be a serious problem. So suppose Alcor generates enough new money (via sign-ups) and its trust fund remains solvent for 200 years so they can keep the lights on. What if they don’t have the money to revive everyone? We have no idea what that would cost. And then what are we to do with these revived people? They would almost certainly have no personal assets of any value (see above) and so would essentially be destitute refugees from the distant past. We’d have to solve world hunger before we could responsibly wake anyone up.
A small number of people would be novelty revivals; ironically your best chance for revival is to keep as few vitrified people as possible, although this increases the reliance on the trust fund since there is no new income.
So to sum up:
I expect autolysis to destroy the information in my brain before I’m vitrified
I don’t expect any trust fund to survive 200 years
Large numbers (millions) of ancient corpsicles may not find many friends interested in reviving them and then sponsoring them until they can be trained and given a vocation in 200 years
The longer these corpsicles hang around without being revived the less people will sign up for cryonics, and then we’re back to dependence on a dwindling trust fund until they’ve solved world hunger, there is plenty for everyone and there is little political opposition to reviving millions of “dead” penniless refugees from the 21st century.
In light of the recent post on logical rudeness, I feel I ought to complete this thread with a final reply. It is this: if your first post had consisted of this analysis instead of your remarks on fearing death, I would not have begun a conversation; therefore, having reached this point, I’m happy to stop here. On the substance of the parent, I’ll say I don’t agree on a couple of points, these points make all the difference, and I don’t expect a return on the investment of arguing them.
Well I thought some about this whole thread after reading that article.
In my defense, I did acknowledge a number of errors or fallacies: the most important being that I do have preferences now about things that happen even when I am unconscious, and that the same apply even when I am dead. The second is your point, which is that underscoring my entire argument is a basic belief that it “just won’t work”; and thats really all my argument amounts to.
For me, I take it as a given that cryonics won’t work, just as I take atheism as a given. So when I’m presented with someone who is in favor of cryonics, I don’t really take their preference for it at face-value. I project (incorrectly) that they are buying to cryonics to get a hedge against “fear of dying” and so my only point is it doesn’t really help much with that...if you believe what I believe. Its a pretty stupid argument really; while there was some learning value in this thread for me the OP is pretty fail.
Really my original point was and still is that cryonics doesn’t prevent dying or death.
To make sense of your original post, one must know that you presupposed that cryonics doesn’t prevent death. You don’t state it there, and you haven’t actually argued the point yet. But given that cryonics doesn’t prevent death, everything else you’ve written seems valid to me.
Well, it kinda depends on how you define death. For instance:
Perhaps the most misunderstood aspect of cryonics is that cryonics procedures can, in fact, be legally done on patients that are still biologically viable. For terminal patients with DNR (“Do Not Resuscitate”) orders on their chart, legal death is determined when a qualified medical authority pronounces death based on cardiopulmonary arrest. In other words, the patient is legally dead when their heart stops beating. However, CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation) can maintain life when the heart is stopped if done promptly. “Do Not Resuscitate” orders are necessary precisely because such heroics would inappropriately extend the dying process if implemented in a conventional medical setting. In the context of cryonics, though, DNR status allows a cryonics team to use resuscitation techniques to keep the brain viable despite occurrence of legal death. [...]
How viable is a cryonics patient during stabilization? Perhaps the most successful cryonics stabilization documented to date was that of CryoCare patient James Gallagher in 1995. Mr. Gallagher was a cancer patient who suffered cardiac arrest in his home under supervision of his family and personal physician after voluntary discontinuation of oxygen therapy. When his heart stopped beating, his physician pronounced legal death, and the cryonics transport team waiting in an ambulance outside began their work. The BioPreservation, Inc. team used a custom-modified Michigan Instruments HLR that was capable of delivering simultaneous Active-Compression-Decompression-High-Impulse CPR (ACDC-HICPR). HLR support was begun three minutes after cardiac arrest, and an arterial oxygen saturation over 90% was maintained for the next two hours until external life support with a blood pump and oxygenator was begun. This level of blood oxygenation is the same as that experienced by passengers in commercial airliners at cabin altitudes near 8000 feet, and it is certainly sufficient to maintain life. The blood gases, electrolytes, enzymes, and other clinical laboratory parameters of this patient have been published [1], and establish that this legally deceased patient was biologically viable during the initial cooling phase of his cryopreservation.
Not all the patients who are cryopreserved are actually dead as the term is usually understood. They’re just in stasis. (Though unavoidably some will die, as the first aid teams can’t get to everyone that fast.)
When I die, even if I had a cryogenic stand-by all ready to go, I would not expect to be revived. So dying would be a lot more emotionally painful than going to sleep.
In the future, if cryonic suspension and revival is an ordinary fact of life (for space travel or whatever) then I think there would be not much difference. The main emotional difference would be that you know you are going to be “away” for a long time. You may know people will miss you etc. Just like if you were taking a long trip with no communications.
So different from sleep/wake but not different from other ordinary human experiences.
When I die, I plan on being on enough morphine that it doesn’t cause me emotional pain to embrace my own probability estimates, which should be biased a lot higher in favor of resurrection by all of that morphine or kratom.
I agree, cryonics is failing to “click” with me for largely the same reason—that the estimate of me benefitting from cryonics is not 95%, but more like 5%. If the likelihood of my revival and resumption of awareness is only 5%, then it doesn’t much alleviate the emotional trauma of death.
Plus, I can imagine the possibility of a harmful revival, where the mind is cloned and resumes awareness, only to become a lab experiment that gets reused tens of thousands of times.
I agree, cryonics is failing to “click” with me for largely the same reason—that the estimate of me benefitting from cryonics is not 95%, but more like 5%.
Think of it as insurance, in the literal sense. When you buy e.g. insurance for your house against fire, there is only something like 0.2% chance or less that you’ll benefit from the fact that you’ve bought insurance (you only benefit if fire happens), and 99.8% chance that you’ll only lose money by paying for insurance, which is by the way not a trivial sum.
The analogy is not intuitively very salient on first sight, because “fire” may connote with “death”, while actually the analogy likens “fire” to successful revival, and death is just a fact of the scenery. A cryonics contract ensures you against the risk of successful revival. If it turns out that you can be successfully revived, then you get the premium of open-ended future.
It also “insures” against the risk of a horrific revival. Plus, in order for the insurance to work, the premium would be very high right now for me to pay:
If the likelihood of my revival and resumption of awareness is only 5%, then it doesn’t much alleviate the emotional trauma of death.
“resumption of awareness”—I think that this is a common intuition that people have—that their awareness is a continuous stream that is interrupted only by death—but I think it is nonsense.
If you look at cryonics from a MW QM/subjective probability point of view, the “subjective probability” of revival is 100%, but that’s only because branches where you don’t survive don’t contribute to your subjective probability from this point of view.
If you take the utilitarian point of view, then 5% * millions or billions of years of fabulous life looks pretty good…
If you look at cryonics from a MW QM/subjective probability point of view, the “subjective probability” of revival is 100%, but that’s only because branches where you don’t survive don’t contribute to your subjective probability from this point of view.
Well if I’m banking on MW QM don’t I already enjoy subjective quantum immortality, regardless of cryonics?
Immortality is not much fun if you are in perpetual pain.
If you condition on your own survival without cryo, there is an increased chance of most of the survival probability mass coming from scenarios where you are kept alive unpleasantly.
Also, you might place some stead in “subjective” survival, and some in total survival measure.
Immortality is not much fun if you are in perpetual pain.
If you condition on your own survival without cryo, there is an increased chance of most of the survival probability mass coming from scenarios where you are kept alive unpleasantly.
To bad about all those people who lived before cryo. I guess they all have at least a few world paths where they are in...hell?
I think that, like Schrodinger’s Cat was originally posited as a thought experiment to show that there is something wrong with the Copenhagen interpretation of a wave collapse; Quantum Immortality was originally posited as a thought experiment to suggest that there is something intuitively wrong with the many worlds interpretation of QM. I know MW is very popular here, but personally I don’t find any interpretation of QM to be meaningful. The only thing we know is that the standard model makes accurate predictions. But that is another debate.
But this invites Pascal’s Wager/Pascal’s Mugging type arguments. It’s not enough to argue that it’s more than zero—it has to be enough to be worth the investment.
The real flaw in Pascal’s Wager isn’t that the probability of getting the desired payoff is extremely low, it’s that the probability of getting the payoff by holding any one belief from a set of different beliefs is the same. For example, the probability of being rewarded for being an atheist by a God who loves epistemic rationalism is at least as big as the probability of being rewarded by Yahweh for being a Christian.
The probability of cryonics getting us the payoff, however, is a lot bigger than the probability that not signing up for cryonics will get us the payoff, so it’s not a Pascal’s Wager type argument to point out that cryonics is worth it even if the probability of it working is very small.
Plus, I can imagine the possibility of a harmful revival, where the mind is cloned and resumes awareness, only to become a lab experiment that gets reused tens of thousands of times.
Rather than pick a particular paranoid scenario, I’d just suggest you further reduce your +EV by some percentage to indicate revival into a future life you do not want to be living in. If you are lucky you’ll have the chance to stop before the nanobots repair that particular “defect” in your mind.
The issue is that my positive expected value for cryo starts out as marginal. Once I account for the possible horrific outcomes, I’m not sure whether the resulting balance is positive at all. And if it is, I’m not sure it’s worth the drastic changes I would have to make right now for cryo to be viable. In order for cryo to make sense for me right now, I’d have to move from the Caribbean to somewhere nearer to Alcor where they can get my body in case I die. I’d then also have to move my company, start paying corporate and personal income taxes...
The current +EV from cryo seems minor enough to me to not warrant these changes, but I would sign up if it didn’t involve making a major compromise, and especially if I knew that the risk of a horrific outcome is nonexistent.
Cryonics does not prevent you from dying. Humans are afraid of dying. Cryonics does not address the problem (fear of death). It instead offers a possible second life.
I’m afraid of dying, because I know that when I am dying I will be very afraid. So I’m afraid of being afraid. Cryonics would offer very little to me right now in terms of alleviating this fear. Sure it might work; but I won’t know that it will while I’m dying, and so my fear while dying will not be mitigated.
You might say hey wait jhuff- isn’t actually being dead, and not have a chance at a second life a problem (or at least a missed opportunity)? Well I don’t see how it is once I’m dead. Heck the expression “I’m dead” doesn’t even make sense—there is no consciousness or awareness of being dead—if I really wanted to be a pedant I’d argue there is no ego that is dead; only egos that have died.
So anyway until I have died the overwhelming problem with death is my fear of it. After I have died, I don’t exist. So certainly no problems there for me (I can’t have problems if I don’t exist). Cryonics doesn’t seem to offer me much utility value.
For me, the overwhelming problem with death is that I don’t get to exist anymore.
If you’re going to be afraid of dying whether or not you’ve signed up for cryonics, then your decision not to sign up cannot depend on your anticipation of being afraid, as that is invariant across the two scenarios.
I don’t really understand that statement. Your problem—here and now—is that after you die you don’t exist anymore?
I can’t tell you what your problems or fears are but is it possible the real problem here and now is that you are afraid of not existing after your death?
edit to follow-up this remark:
So then Cryonics is just a solution looking for a problem. I don’t have a problem it can solve.
Fear of not existing after death is not just some silly uncomfortable emotion to be calmed. Rather it reveals a disconnect between one’s preference and expectations about the actual state of reality.
The real problem is not existing after death. Fear is a way of representing that.
I never said it was silly, I hope it didn’t come across that way. And I am not at all suggesting that we shouldn’t prefer life, and shouldn’t take all reasonable steps to continue living as long as living is worthwhile.
I value my continued existence; I’m surprised that this is at all confusing.
Is penicillin also a solution looking for a problem? How about looking both ways before you cross the street? Do you really place no value on the longer life you would have the possibility of living if you signed up? If so, why does the same consideration not also extend to the common death-preventing steps (ETA: limit that to sudden death, the kind where you experience no opportunity to feel fear) you presumably currently take?
Of course not, penicillin prevents death. So does watching both ways before I cross the street. Cryonics does not prevent death.
Well, I could try and calculate the utility based on my guess at the odds of it working, but I estimate that the utility of the time invested in doing that would exceed the marginal utility I’d find when finished. So I’m not going to look into it, for the same reason that I don’t read all the email messages I get from potential business partners in Nigeria. Surely there must be a chance that one of those is real, but I consider that chance to be so vanishingly small that its -EV for me to read the emails.
Funny that your expected value from posting this comment was higher than researching cryonics.
Funny, I had the same thought. But I actually I got value from the responses I’ve gotten in this thread, even if you haven’t.
Fair enough; I can’t deny that your conclusion follows from the premise “Cryonics has so small a probability of succeeding that it doesn’t even justify looking into the topic.” I will note that this is a shift from “Cryonics is a solution in search of a problem” to “Cryonics is not a solution.”
ETA: No, I take that last remark back. But my original comment about your true objection being about something other than your fear of death was correct.
Really my original point was and still is that cryonics doesn’t prevent dying or death. My particular problem with death is a fear of dying. I truly have gotten over the fact that one day I will not exist. So I guess I was projecting this onto others, and probably that isn’t valid.
Yes there is another question, which I didn’t originally speak to, about the analysis of the marginal utility value of a possibly pro-longed life, but that isn’t really something that interests me.
Even if we became much more confident in cryonics, such as some major technological breakthroughs—I would update based on the fact that knowing cryonics is likely to work would be a comfort to me as I was dying. So I’d go sign up, but not just because I want the pro-longed life but because I’d now view dying more like “going to sleep” and the fear of it would be significantly reduced. So even if I were never revived, I would have gotten value from cryonics if I considered it viable at the time I was dying.
Okay, fair enough. But asserting that cryonics won’t work without detailed prior knowledge of its infeasibility and without even being willing to investigate it puts you in a terrible epistemic position. You still haven’t argued for your ostensible point.
(I wrote another reply, but then deleted it as it was premised on a falsehood.)
My ostensible point again: cryonics doesn’t prevent dying. I really need to present an argument for this?
Or I need to present an argument for my point that I’m only afraid of dying, and not of being dead?
Well here it is: I can die. I can’t be dead—because at that point there is no I. So while right now I can fear the void, it won’t be a problem once I am dead. Note that insertion of cryonics does not change any of these facts. I’ll still be afraid of dying, I’ll still die, I will no longer exist. Whether I’m in a frozen can or my ashes are scattered in the ocean there will be an identical amount of neural computation. So I won’t exist and I won’t have any problems, either way.
I’m pretty sure your terminology is causing a lot of needless confusion here. I think people are reading “cryonics doesn’t prevent dying” as “cryonics does not prevent death”, which is the usual way of speaking. If someone says, “Sam’s dying; do something!” they don’t so much want you to stop Sam from feeling like he’s dying, but rather they want you to make it so that Sam does not die.
However, you seem to be talking about death in the following, and people’s replies might be better directed towards this:
Yes. I think the standard counterargument is linked to on the wiki; ‘death’ is a moving target, and it seems like “information-theoretic death” is a good candidate for what “death” will mean when the technology settles out.
But the dying process does not change. The philosophical or even clinical definition of “dead” has no bearing on the emotional experience of dying.
I take it you have a do not resuscitate medical tag then? You wouldn’t want some EMTs to restart your heart after you had the “emotional experience of dying.”
I’ve never said I wouldn’t want to be revived before I expire. I’ve only said I wouldn’t expect to be and so it would be of no comfort to me.
Probably, it would be pretty terrible both dying and being revived. Afterward, I’d be glad I was revived.
I can see where you are headed with this about the value of preferences now for things happening later.
I see. I think you’re being unclear, though I’m not sure it’s your fault. I’ll reply to your earlier post.
(Original poster thinks of himself as a persistent billiard ball of identity, when neural processing stops, the billiard ball winks out of existence. This winking-out is death. If anyone wants to explain the ontological falsity of the billiard-balls theory to the original poster at less length than working all the way up to here, they can go ahead and try.)
Uhm, no. I would subscribe to more of an information view of identity. In other words, if my information state encoded in my brain could be uploaded to a computer and executed in a mind simulator it would have my identity as much as the meat guy writing this right now.
Actually I have no idea what identity is or how many of me there are; I’m the guy who Can’t Get Over Dust Theory.
I don’t have doubts about cryonics at that level. If the technology works, the technology works and I would wake up as me as I ever was. That isn’t where I’m “going wrong”.
I do think that identity is lost when information is irretrievably lost. And I think that has likely happened or will happen to everyone being suspended right now.
I don’t know why you’d assume I’ve done no research on it or have no knowledge of its feasibility. What I’m unwilling at this point to do, is try and estimate the marginal utility of the proposition in any serious or sophisticated way.
And I don’t know where I said it won’t work. That would be ridiculous to say that. Given our continued existence and advancement as a civilization it almost certainly it will work someday for someone.
We present we have substantial technical challenges related to preserving people in a state such that they can be revived. I also know there is debate on what may be possible in the even further future in terms of repairing brain cells that were destroyed through apoptosis or necrosis.
I also know there are a number of risks or barriers to revivals even after the technology challenges are resolved, and these risks (particularly the economic and political risks) increase the longer it takes the revival and medical technology to catch up. No one can predict the odds that any given person now would ever be revived, but there are many reasons to be pessimistic about those chances.
It’s because we’re using certain words in different ways, and according to my usage of them, what you said somewhat weakly implied that you hadn’t.
You did say “Cryonics does not prevent you from dying.” If cryonics works, then I don’t consider the life events that follow resuscitation to be a second life that occured after death, as opposed to a single life with a long inanimate period somewhere in the middle—to me, that just looks like a distinction without a difference. This is an example of the ongoing semantic clash.
Anyway, it now seems to me that you’ve practiced some form of Dark Side Epistemology on yourself, in that the fact that after you’re dead you have no preferences seems to be critical to your reasoning. I’m all for removing time inconsistency of preferences, but I think that’s going a bit far.
It seems that CronoDAS had a far better grasp than me of what you were actually claiming; the linked query is far more apposite than I originally appreciated, and I’d be very interested in your reply to his question. I’ll even accentuate it: does the fact that if you were in a stable coma* you would have no preferences excuse your doctor from rescuing you from that coma if they can?
* Let us stipulate that you have no awareness of your state.
I think it is more than just semantics. Unless you are very confident in a cryonic revival, then the emotional experience of dying is not much changed by that distant prospect.
Gosh I hope its not fatal.
So you really think you will have preferences after you cease to exist?
Or just that is not important that you won’t?
I’m pretty sure it’s hard to fix the temporal context of that utterance. However, this might clear things up:
I currently have preferences regarding things that haven’t happened yet. Even things that will happen after I die! It shouldn’t be too hard to imagine: “I want my great-grandchildren to grow up in a world without violence.” or some such sentiment.
Whether I will have preferences after I die is a different, interesting question, but not particularly relevant to decisions I have to make now; for those, I use my current preferences.
Ok I guess I’m caught up now. So if my current preference is that I am revived at some point after “dying” (which I’ve acknowledged it is), then I should act on it now and sign up for Cryonics, since that is my only chance of that happening later.
The fact that it provides no cure for the “dying experience” doesn’t detract from its possibility to fulfill my current preferences. Got it.
Apparently I fail at convincing people not to sign up.
I hope so too. (I know you’re being sarcastic; I’m being genuine. You can Google it if you don’t know what the term I used means.)
The fact that after I’m dead I have no preferences is not important to my decision-making.
ETA: And, uh, not to be pushy or anything, but the coma scenario...?
Well I did reply to CronoDAS directly, but I’ll try this scenario too (I think it is a lot different):
Let us stipulate that you have no awareness of your state.
I think this is more similar to the resuscitation question; yes I have a preference to be resuscitated. Doctor’s have a responsibility to their patients to treat them in spite of their present lack of consciousness.
This shares with the resuscitation example the fact that I really have to take no action for these preferences to be carried out.
I think that in the end, regardless of everything else we’ve discussed, your argument against choosing cryonics is founded on your judgment that it has negligible chance of success. So what is the evidence and reasoning that led you to that conclusion?
Yes, I’ve acknowledged that much earlier. If I became much more confident in Cryonics I’d be more likely to sign-up, as I think it would then be a comfort in the dying process, to know that maybe this is “just going to sleep for awhile”.
I’ve also acknowledged I prefer resuscitation so even though “I’m out” for a period, yes I could see a value in cryonics now if I expected it to work.
Well we know that pretty serious damage happens to the brain, beginning minutes after heart failure and getting worse and worse due to autolysis as the hours pass before vitrification. We also know that vitrification does cause some damage; not the devastation that actual freezing would be but damage nonetheless.
Cryonics advocates wave what I call the “future nano-wand” at all of these problems. While it does not in theory seem infeasible that future resuscitation could avoid the destruction caused by ischemia, and that our nano-friends can repair any chemical contamination caused by vitrification itself; it is very, very doubtful to me that there is any information left in a brain that has suffered several hours of autolysis.
As a young man, I’d expect my death to be unexpected (e.g. due to accident or violence) and that it would be hours before I could be vitrified. When this changes (e.g. I get older or find I’m doomed by a a life-threatening disease) maybe I’d be more interested in cryonics.
Even assuming we can vitrify people in a state that preserves information, I have some doubts about revival actually ever happening.
First, we don’t really know what is going to be possible and when with nanotechnology. So some people want to say revival is 50 years out, I’ve got no reason—no successes in nanotechnology to date—to make me think its not 200 years out.
I’ve got serious concerns about our economic and political stability over the next fifty years. There is no doubt, there are going to be some serious changes in the world. I think there may be problems beyond their control that would force Alcor into insolvency. Trust funds established today may be as worthless as the pension funds and retirement accounts, and yes foundation trusts that have been utterly annihilated over the last few years.
I work for a large bank and for a long time (2004 to mid 2009) managed the systems that do the margin monitoring of trust account loans. I’ve seen first hand the damage that has been suffered by all manner of legal trusts, even ones that were invested in what were thought to be very stable instruments.
The idea that interest on capital will always outpace inflation has been refuted many, many times over. Modern monetary policies have not proven effective, and there is no reason to assume our current crisis won’t deteriorate into the kind of stagflation we saw in the 80s again.
I’m not preaching doom and gloom and the end of western civilization, but I am skeptical that people sleeping for 200 years will have trust funds capable of keeping them on ice. The people that recover from these slumps will be the ones who are working and producing new income streams independent of their current capital.
Finally, I’m concerned that a massive adoption of cryonics would actually be a serious problem. So suppose Alcor generates enough new money (via sign-ups) and its trust fund remains solvent for 200 years so they can keep the lights on. What if they don’t have the money to revive everyone? We have no idea what that would cost. And then what are we to do with these revived people? They would almost certainly have no personal assets of any value (see above) and so would essentially be destitute refugees from the distant past. We’d have to solve world hunger before we could responsibly wake anyone up.
A small number of people would be novelty revivals; ironically your best chance for revival is to keep as few vitrified people as possible, although this increases the reliance on the trust fund since there is no new income.
So to sum up:
I expect autolysis to destroy the information in my brain before I’m vitrified
I don’t expect any trust fund to survive 200 years
Large numbers (millions) of ancient corpsicles may not find many friends interested in reviving them and then sponsoring them until they can be trained and given a vocation in 200 years
The longer these corpsicles hang around without being revived the less people will sign up for cryonics, and then we’re back to dependence on a dwindling trust fund until they’ve solved world hunger, there is plenty for everyone and there is little political opposition to reviving millions of “dead” penniless refugees from the 21st century.
In light of the recent post on logical rudeness, I feel I ought to complete this thread with a final reply. It is this: if your first post had consisted of this analysis instead of your remarks on fearing death, I would not have begun a conversation; therefore, having reached this point, I’m happy to stop here. On the substance of the parent, I’ll say I don’t agree on a couple of points, these points make all the difference, and I don’t expect a return on the investment of arguing them.
Well I thought some about this whole thread after reading that article.
In my defense, I did acknowledge a number of errors or fallacies: the most important being that I do have preferences now about things that happen even when I am unconscious, and that the same apply even when I am dead. The second is your point, which is that underscoring my entire argument is a basic belief that it “just won’t work”; and thats really all my argument amounts to.
For me, I take it as a given that cryonics won’t work, just as I take atheism as a given. So when I’m presented with someone who is in favor of cryonics, I don’t really take their preference for it at face-value. I project (incorrectly) that they are buying to cryonics to get a hedge against “fear of dying” and so my only point is it doesn’t really help much with that...if you believe what I believe. Its a pretty stupid argument really; while there was some learning value in this thread for me the OP is pretty fail.
Upvoted.
To make sense of your original post, one must know that you presupposed that cryonics doesn’t prevent death. You don’t state it there, and you haven’t actually argued the point yet. But given that cryonics doesn’t prevent death, everything else you’ve written seems valid to me.
Well, it kinda depends on how you define death. For instance:
Not all the patients who are cryopreserved are actually dead as the term is usually understood. They’re just in stasis. (Though unavoidably some will die, as the first aid teams can’t get to everyone that fast.)
Thought:
Is there a significant difference between the process of being suspended and revived, and the process of going to sleep and waking up?
When I go to sleep I expect to wake up.
When I die, even if I had a cryogenic stand-by all ready to go, I would not expect to be revived. So dying would be a lot more emotionally painful than going to sleep.
In the future, if cryonic suspension and revival is an ordinary fact of life (for space travel or whatever) then I think there would be not much difference. The main emotional difference would be that you know you are going to be “away” for a long time. You may know people will miss you etc. Just like if you were taking a long trip with no communications.
So different from sleep/wake but not different from other ordinary human experiences.
When I die, I plan on being on enough morphine that it doesn’t cause me emotional pain to embrace my own probability estimates, which should be biased a lot higher in favor of resurrection by all of that morphine or kratom.
I agree, cryonics is failing to “click” with me for largely the same reason—that the estimate of me benefitting from cryonics is not 95%, but more like 5%. If the likelihood of my revival and resumption of awareness is only 5%, then it doesn’t much alleviate the emotional trauma of death.
Plus, I can imagine the possibility of a harmful revival, where the mind is cloned and resumes awareness, only to become a lab experiment that gets reused tens of thousands of times.
Think of it as insurance, in the literal sense. When you buy e.g. insurance for your house against fire, there is only something like 0.2% chance or less that you’ll benefit from the fact that you’ve bought insurance (you only benefit if fire happens), and 99.8% chance that you’ll only lose money by paying for insurance, which is by the way not a trivial sum.
The analogy is not intuitively very salient on first sight, because “fire” may connote with “death”, while actually the analogy likens “fire” to successful revival, and death is just a fact of the scenery. A cryonics contract ensures you against the risk of successful revival. If it turns out that you can be successfully revived, then you get the premium of open-ended future.
It also “insures” against the risk of a horrific revival. Plus, in order for the insurance to work, the premium would be very high right now for me to pay:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/1mh/that_magical_click/1iam
“resumption of awareness”—I think that this is a common intuition that people have—that their awareness is a continuous stream that is interrupted only by death—but I think it is nonsense.
If you look at cryonics from a MW QM/subjective probability point of view, the “subjective probability” of revival is 100%, but that’s only because branches where you don’t survive don’t contribute to your subjective probability from this point of view.
If you take the utilitarian point of view, then 5% * millions or billions of years of fabulous life looks pretty good…
Well if I’m banking on MW QM don’t I already enjoy subjective quantum immortality, regardless of cryonics?
Immortality is not much fun if you are in perpetual pain.
If you condition on your own survival without cryo, there is an increased chance of most of the survival probability mass coming from scenarios where you are kept alive unpleasantly.
Also, you might place some stead in “subjective” survival, and some in total survival measure.
Interesting arguments. Thank you.
no problem!
To bad about all those people who lived before cryo. I guess they all have at least a few world paths where they are in...hell?
I think that, like Schrodinger’s Cat was originally posited as a thought experiment to show that there is something wrong with the Copenhagen interpretation of a wave collapse; Quantum Immortality was originally posited as a thought experiment to suggest that there is something intuitively wrong with the many worlds interpretation of QM. I know MW is very popular here, but personally I don’t find any interpretation of QM to be meaningful. The only thing we know is that the standard model makes accurate predictions. But that is another debate.
5% is how many times better than 0% ?
But this invites Pascal’s Wager/Pascal’s Mugging type arguments. It’s not enough to argue that it’s more than zero—it has to be enough to be worth the investment.
The real flaw in Pascal’s Wager isn’t that the probability of getting the desired payoff is extremely low, it’s that the probability of getting the payoff by holding any one belief from a set of different beliefs is the same. For example, the probability of being rewarded for being an atheist by a God who loves epistemic rationalism is at least as big as the probability of being rewarded by Yahweh for being a Christian.
The probability of cryonics getting us the payoff, however, is a lot bigger than the probability that not signing up for cryonics will get us the payoff, so it’s not a Pascal’s Wager type argument to point out that cryonics is worth it even if the probability of it working is very small.
Rather than pick a particular paranoid scenario, I’d just suggest you further reduce your +EV by some percentage to indicate revival into a future life you do not want to be living in. If you are lucky you’ll have the chance to stop before the nanobots repair that particular “defect” in your mind.
See VijayKrishnan’s comment for a much better writeup of the point I wanted to get across.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/1mh/that_magical_click/1hl8
The issue is that my positive expected value for cryo starts out as marginal. Once I account for the possible horrific outcomes, I’m not sure whether the resulting balance is positive at all. And if it is, I’m not sure it’s worth the drastic changes I would have to make right now for cryo to be viable. In order for cryo to make sense for me right now, I’d have to move from the Caribbean to somewhere nearer to Alcor where they can get my body in case I die. I’d then also have to move my company, start paying corporate and personal income taxes...
The current +EV from cryo seems minor enough to me to not warrant these changes, but I would sign up if it didn’t involve making a major compromise, and especially if I knew that the risk of a horrific outcome is nonexistent.