If I can create a new person from a frozen corpse, I can probably also create a new person by duplicating a living person. Why would the corpse have precedence on any moral grounds? Either way a new person is created; and duplication results in a person better adjusted to their era and so happier.
Given limited resources, persons will be created by the highest bidders. Many living persons will have a strong interest in self-duplication. Historical interests in reviving people would face economic competition. That’s why I think they would switch to a burden/asset view.
It definitely depends on the what kind of future there’ll be. Robin Hanson’s Malthusian future of scarcity and effective reproduction is a place where your described things would be indeed commonplace. I personally wouldn’t welcome an explosive wave of replication creating so much scarcity that there’d be an actual competition for resources for an number of additional people that is as small as the number of cryonics patients.
Besides, the corpse would have a great deal of precedence on moral grounds, because a death or failure of reanimation is a huge loss of value that already exists (knowledge, personality, memories, psychological complexity etc.), while duplication only enables the additional person to grow into a unique individual sometimes in the future.
I personally wouldn’t welcome an explosive wave of replication creating so much scarcity that there’d be an actual competition for resources for an number of additional people that is as small as the number of cryonics patients.
Even if nearly all people were against replication—which is far from given—to prevent explosive replication you would need to either effectively limit everyone’s access to basic resources (so they couldn’t replicate) or to execute, exile or severely limit the rights of illegally created replicas (including allowing them to die of hunger or equivalent resource starvation).
Short of a sysop scenario, I don’t see how this could be accomplished. Of course my inability to see it isn’t proof of anything much, but just hoping it will happen without describing how to make it happen is pretty flimsy. That’s why I regard resource scarcity as a primary feature of any future until proven otherwise.
the corpse would have a great deal of precedence on moral grounds, because a death or failure of reanimation is a huge loss of value that already exists (knowledge, personality, memories, psychological complexity etc.), while duplication only enables the additional person to grow into a unique individual sometimes in the future.
“Loss of value”—value to whom? Not value to the frozen person, because they don’t exist until revived. Do you think the general public has a moral obligation to increase the diversity of the set of persons in existence? If so, then instead of reviving or duplicating people or even breeding the old fashioned way, they would spend their time artificially engineering new and radically different life forms. Is that what you have in mind?
scarcity as a primary feature of any future until proven otherwise.
I agree with that; the other default future would be extinction. My problem is that I regard full-blown Hansonian future as equivalent to extinction because it similarly leads to the total loss of everything humans care about now, but note that this is a subject of heated dispute and I’m on Eliezer’s and Nick Bostrom’s side.
“Loss of value”—value to whom? Not value to the frozen person, because they don’t exist until revived.
And anaesthetized people don’t exist until resuscitated? There is no meaningful sense in which suspended people automatically cease to exist and then pop back to existence. The sense in which people cease to exist is rather a continuous function of the amount of lost information about people’s brain states. Reanimation from suspension can have as much effect on the subject’s psychology than waking from sleep, or as much as a severe brain injury, depending on the circumstances and the technologies involved. Legal death is a magical category in this case. Of course they exist.
Also, not wanting to die only requires you to not want to die while you’re alive. We would agree that it’s not moral to kill a lot of people on the basis that once they’re nonexistent they won’t care about the matter. To give a closer analogue, it’s not right either to kill sleeping people because they at the moment cannot want to be not killed. Never reviving the suspended me simply equals killing me, with all the moral implications of an ordinary murder. And the fact the revival has some costs does not give it a special status. After all, keeping me alive has its own costs; I could be shot anytime so that more food is left for others.
Do you think the general public has a moral obligation to increase the diversity of the set of persons in existence? If so, then instead of reviving or duplicating people or even breeding the old fashioned way, they would spend their time artificially engineering new and radically different life forms. Is that what you have in mind?
Does the public has a moral obligation to refrain from killing people? I (personally) disapprove of murder, in general. I suspect that the general public has the same feelings—and yes, this is the primary element of what I have in mind about reanimation.
Aside from this consideration above, I (still) argue that reviving people is more valuable than duplication, for other people. There is stuff there in those frickin’ brains you might find amusing, funny, interesting, useful or aesthetically pleasing. It’s a waste to leave that utter amount of complexity and information that a human brain boasts frozen in ice, inactive and unreachable. The act of duplication, on the other hand, creates not a single bit of information that wasn’t already available, it “just” doubles the total future capacity to think, learn, feel, interact and experience.
To turn back to the quote above, we definitely value individuality and diversity. But I just won’t spend my life mindlessly increasing some amount of a specifically defined “diversity” because I’m not like a paperclip optimizator. Also, “Increase diversity” is not a well-formed moral sentence. The concept of diversity is extremely complex to begin with; diversity as it is valued by people is also a magical category with obfuscated boundaries.
That assumption creates some unpleasant conclusions. To make sure I understand you, please consider the following scenarios.
Suppose that our descendants acquire a deep understanding of human brain operation. They build a machine which can generate a brain-description to given parameters, as different from any existing human as normal humans are different from one another. Given a description, a living brain and body can be built and a person created.
Suppose we generate 10^10 different descriptions. Do we now have a moral duty to instantiate them all in real bodies, because once we have some information-theoretical descriptions of them, they are “existing persons”? Note that we haven’t simulated them; we just computed the single-moment-in-time initial states of possible simulations.
Never reviving the suspended me simply equals killing me, with all the moral implications of an ordinary murder.
Then, does reviving you once equal killing the potential second copy of you we could also have revived?
Does the public has a moral obligation to refrain from killing people?
A better comparison would be: does the public have a moral obligation to support minimal living conditions for all already-existing people, and keep them from dying from hunger or disease? I think the answer is yet, but it is not absolute; it works so far because the burden happens to be economically easily bearable. It might also work for reviving people if very few people will ever be frozen, so that the total burden of reviving is small. If ever it came to a real economic tradeoff, reviving people wouldn’t necessarily win.
There is stuff there in those frickin’ brains you might find amusing, funny, interesting, useful or aesthetically pleasing.
Giving birth to children, the old-fashioned way, and so growing new people also creates interesting new brains. Why would reviving ancient people (who were not outstanding thinkers or personalities in their own time) be so rewarding?
The question about diversity referred to the moral situation. You think there’s a moral obligation to revive people, and you justify doing that instead of duplicating people because the duplicates increase the diversity of society. Is there a factor for diversity in your purely moral calculation, or do you think that morally it doesn’t matter what new person you create, and diversity is only a selfish reason to revive a more interesting person?
If I can create a new person from a frozen corpse, I can probably also create a new person by duplicating a living person. Why would the corpse have precedence on any moral grounds? Either way a new person is created; and duplication results in a person better adjusted to their era and so happier.
Given limited resources, persons will be created by the highest bidders. Many living persons will have a strong interest in self-duplication. Historical interests in reviving people would face economic competition. That’s why I think they would switch to a burden/asset view.
It definitely depends on the what kind of future there’ll be. Robin Hanson’s Malthusian future of scarcity and effective reproduction is a place where your described things would be indeed commonplace. I personally wouldn’t welcome an explosive wave of replication creating so much scarcity that there’d be an actual competition for resources for an number of additional people that is as small as the number of cryonics patients.
Besides, the corpse would have a great deal of precedence on moral grounds, because a death or failure of reanimation is a huge loss of value that already exists (knowledge, personality, memories, psychological complexity etc.), while duplication only enables the additional person to grow into a unique individual sometimes in the future.
Even if nearly all people were against replication—which is far from given—to prevent explosive replication you would need to either effectively limit everyone’s access to basic resources (so they couldn’t replicate) or to execute, exile or severely limit the rights of illegally created replicas (including allowing them to die of hunger or equivalent resource starvation).
Short of a sysop scenario, I don’t see how this could be accomplished. Of course my inability to see it isn’t proof of anything much, but just hoping it will happen without describing how to make it happen is pretty flimsy. That’s why I regard resource scarcity as a primary feature of any future until proven otherwise.
“Loss of value”—value to whom? Not value to the frozen person, because they don’t exist until revived. Do you think the general public has a moral obligation to increase the diversity of the set of persons in existence? If so, then instead of reviving or duplicating people or even breeding the old fashioned way, they would spend their time artificially engineering new and radically different life forms. Is that what you have in mind?
I agree with that; the other default future would be extinction. My problem is that I regard full-blown Hansonian future as equivalent to extinction because it similarly leads to the total loss of everything humans care about now, but note that this is a subject of heated dispute and I’m on Eliezer’s and Nick Bostrom’s side.
And anaesthetized people don’t exist until resuscitated? There is no meaningful sense in which suspended people automatically cease to exist and then pop back to existence. The sense in which people cease to exist is rather a continuous function of the amount of lost information about people’s brain states. Reanimation from suspension can have as much effect on the subject’s psychology than waking from sleep, or as much as a severe brain injury, depending on the circumstances and the technologies involved. Legal death is a magical category in this case. Of course they exist.
Also, not wanting to die only requires you to not want to die while you’re alive. We would agree that it’s not moral to kill a lot of people on the basis that once they’re nonexistent they won’t care about the matter. To give a closer analogue, it’s not right either to kill sleeping people because they at the moment cannot want to be not killed. Never reviving the suspended me simply equals killing me, with all the moral implications of an ordinary murder. And the fact the revival has some costs does not give it a special status. After all, keeping me alive has its own costs; I could be shot anytime so that more food is left for others.
Does the public has a moral obligation to refrain from killing people? I (personally) disapprove of murder, in general. I suspect that the general public has the same feelings—and yes, this is the primary element of what I have in mind about reanimation.
Aside from this consideration above, I (still) argue that reviving people is more valuable than duplication, for other people. There is stuff there in those frickin’ brains you might find amusing, funny, interesting, useful or aesthetically pleasing. It’s a waste to leave that utter amount of complexity and information that a human brain boasts frozen in ice, inactive and unreachable. The act of duplication, on the other hand, creates not a single bit of information that wasn’t already available, it “just” doubles the total future capacity to think, learn, feel, interact and experience.
To turn back to the quote above, we definitely value individuality and diversity. But I just won’t spend my life mindlessly increasing some amount of a specifically defined “diversity” because I’m not like a paperclip optimizator. Also, “Increase diversity” is not a well-formed moral sentence. The concept of diversity is extremely complex to begin with; diversity as it is valued by people is also a magical category with obfuscated boundaries.
That assumption creates some unpleasant conclusions. To make sure I understand you, please consider the following scenarios.
Suppose that our descendants acquire a deep understanding of human brain operation. They build a machine which can generate a brain-description to given parameters, as different from any existing human as normal humans are different from one another. Given a description, a living brain and body can be built and a person created.
Suppose we generate 10^10 different descriptions. Do we now have a moral duty to instantiate them all in real bodies, because once we have some information-theoretical descriptions of them, they are “existing persons”? Note that we haven’t simulated them; we just computed the single-moment-in-time initial states of possible simulations.
Then, does reviving you once equal killing the potential second copy of you we could also have revived?
A better comparison would be: does the public have a moral obligation to support minimal living conditions for all already-existing people, and keep them from dying from hunger or disease? I think the answer is yet, but it is not absolute; it works so far because the burden happens to be economically easily bearable. It might also work for reviving people if very few people will ever be frozen, so that the total burden of reviving is small. If ever it came to a real economic tradeoff, reviving people wouldn’t necessarily win.
Giving birth to children, the old-fashioned way, and so growing new people also creates interesting new brains. Why would reviving ancient people (who were not outstanding thinkers or personalities in their own time) be so rewarding?
The question about diversity referred to the moral situation. You think there’s a moral obligation to revive people, and you justify doing that instead of duplicating people because the duplicates increase the diversity of society. Is there a factor for diversity in your purely moral calculation, or do you think that morally it doesn’t matter what new person you create, and diversity is only a selfish reason to revive a more interesting person?