Cryonics: convincing my parents
I’m currently trying to convince my parents to sign up for cryonics.
The problem is that they are completely opposed to the any form of life extension and/or immortality (and that’s without even mentioning something as “strange” as cryonics). Unfortunately, being their child, I have the intrinsic property that I can never know more about life then they do. The only thing they will believe are scientific studies from respectable scientists (a respectable scientist being someone who only says what they want to hear and is not me)
I have the arguments I gathered from Less Wrong and the Alcor Library. I’m focusing on my mother since my dad is impossible to convince without her support.
Her argument is that when you live for a very long time/forever wars are almost guaranteed to occur at least once in your lifetime and she doesn’t want to live through those. I asked her when, given that we could perfectly predict the future, we would know a war would break out tomorrow she would commit suicide today. Her answer was yes, as she couldn’t bear losing any of us and doesn’t want experience a war. I pointed out how I would feel if she died but she just dismissed the entire thing as crazy.
My parents aren’t religious at all, so that’s one less bridge to cross but for all the rest I would greatly appreciate anything that might help convince them.
If cryonics does work, and she’s that serious about not wanting to experience wartime, she can always sleep through it.
Too late.
If she means fighting in her area, she could just move.
I think this is the real problem. I don’t really know a lot about convincing irrational people of things, so I can’t really help.
Perhaps he can ask her to elaborate more about what she means when she doesn’t want to experience war, because as you point out, there are lots of wars going on right now. Maybe she means a very “close” war. Perhaps you could comfort her with the thought that you guys could escape to a different country? Or ask her whether that’s really her ultimate value, that no matter what good things she experiences experiencing war would cancel them all out.
She does mean a “close” war and she’s afraid we won’t be able to escape or get separated. Even if we do make it to another country we’d have to live in a refugee camp under horrible conditions.
Remind her that Poor Folks Do Smile, and often (ok, nearly 100% of the time) people who say they’d rather be dead than be paralyzed/quadriplegic/whatever and then end up in that condition turn out to actually want to keep living cuz it’s not as terrible as they imagined. I presume the same goes for people in a warzone.
Besides, living in a refugee camp during a warzone is reversible, death is not.
Or, heck, if she really DOES despise the condition that much, and she really would kill herself today if a war broke out in her neighborhood tomorrow—she can still possibly live thousands of years in peace and then, once the war actually breaks out, kill herself. Either way she avoided the horror of war, but with cyronics she first got to enjoy an extra millenia or two of life first.
Whatever is behind this “reason” is not amenable to rationality. You’d need to work out where on earth this came from.
Hmm. Perhaps you could suggest the following: “Why not use cryonics to keep yourself alive until there’s a war, and then kill yourself? That way you would experience the maximum possible amount of life, and still not live through a war.” Note that this argument carries a risk of sounding creepy, because it involves suicide. On the other hand, she mentioned it first, so the additional ick factor may be small.
Read Signing up your relatives.
Best of luck!
A great read; thanks for the link.
Try more emotional arguments with them, like “I don’t want to lose you guys if I don’t have to” or “The future will be awesome” or “Don’t you want to see what I’ve accomplished when I grow up?”. I find that logical arguments aren’t that useful (for most people) in debates on issues that people identify themselves using.
Basically you need to do something to convince them that living longer is desirable, then that cryonics will factually help with that.
I wrote about this for Zvi last month.
However, I must express my perennial doubt that cryonics actually permits personal survival. I lean towards the view that at best it permits the creation of a copy of the dead person.
Consider Ray Kurzweil’s desire to resurrect his father, using only scraps of information such as DNA, photographs, and the memories that living people still have about his father. Logistically, this is not very different to “resurrecting” Sherlock Holmes, or any other fictional character. What is being contemplated, in either case, is the de novo creation of a conscious being, with an identity based on memories of a life that it never lived.
As we do not know the true nature of memory, and we especially do not know what is involved in the technological fabrication of a lifetime of memories, it may be that there is no epistemic difference, no subjectively discernible difference, between true memories and implanted memories. In pondering the idea that the conscious self may indeed be a holistic “quantum” subsystem of the brain, with sharply defined boundaries in space and time, I have wondered whether there may be a true form of memory, which can only be laid down by living through the experience, because the memory information has to get dynamically enfolded into the state of this subsystem, and the only way for that to happen might be for that subsystem to endure through time the boundary conditions which correspond to actually having the experience.
However, let us assume the contrary—that there is no such thing as long-term memory that is guaranteed to be veridical, that the memories of an individual mind have the same modularity and replaceability that the “memory” in a computer possesses. Nonetheless, there is an obvious sense in which a newly minted conscious being, that somehow gets supplied with a readymade lifetime of experience at its inception, did not actually live that life. Even people who insist that a copy, restored from a backup of someone’s mind, is that person, will be able to distinguish conceptually between one physical instance and another physical instance of that person, and should readily admit that the second instance did not physically live through the experiences recorded in the memories which it inherited from the first instance.
The relevance of this for cryonics is that I suspect that the resurrected person stands in precisely the same relationship to the one who died, as a copy does with respect to its original, in a scenario of mind uploading. This is most obviously the case if one imagines people in cryonic suspension being brought back via simulation of their brains in some nonbiological way, but it may even hold for people whose frozen brains are nanotechnologically restored to functionality without disassembly or nonbiological substitution of parts, brains which are simply set in motion again through a highly coordinated process of local thawing and local repair.
This is the case in which insisting that the continuity of personal identity has been interrupted is most counterintuitive, because in the whole process from life, through death and cryonic suspension, to restoration, the same brain sits in the same skull. I would compare it to a situation in which a mirror is shattered but all the pieces remain in the frame and next to each other. You might be able to reattach them to each other, and get a whole mirror again, but in the interim, the mirror was shattered. I am very skeptical that true identity survives a process as microphysically disruptive as cryonics. I’m not 100% convinced that it can’t, but I lean towards the view that cryonics is simply preserving fantastically detailed records about people who are actually dead, and therefore at best providing raw materials for the creation of new people who might think, at first, that they are the person found in their memories, but who did not actually live that life, just as the freshly minted person who has been supplied with the memories of Sherlock Holmes never actually lived at 222-B Baker Street or engaged in a death struggle with Professor Moriarty.
Those are my views on cryonics. Life extension and rejuvenation are a far more straightforward issue: they are to be desired almost unconditionally, and resistance to the very idea is mostly due to weariness with life; see the link at the start of this comment. For someone who has lost their physical youth, choosing to regain it should be an immediate “yes”. However, in the real world of the present, there is no such option, so reaching for rejuvenation turns out to involve staying alive in a nonrejuvenated form for an unknown period of time, and perhaps taking risks with half-baked and untested biotechnology when rejuvenation does begin to be an option. Apart from the cryonics option, I think the most you can do is encourage them to be healthy and live healthily, something which most people want to do anyway, and encourage them to think about the possibility that they will live to see a second youth become possible. You can’t promise them anything more than that.
Like most people, you rely on the intuition that there’s a “true identity” that survives the process of spending a lifetime embedded in a human brain, and then you question whether that “true identity” can survive various other processes.
This questioning of identity preservation also happens in the real world in cases of personality alteration or memory loss, but only when it’s unusually rapid or extreme.
For example, not many people experience the intuition that their ten-year-old child “isn’t the same person” as the infant they gave birth to. (That is, they assume that “true identity” has been preserved through this radical transformation.) But if their parent with Alzheimer’s Disease undergoes a no-more-radical transformation, they are more likely to feel that intuition challenged—to feel that their parent “just isn’t the same person anymore.”
Supposing I died and were reconstructed, and supposing that afterwards I didn’t feel significantly different than I do right now, you might still assert that my personal identity had not been preserved, I can’t think of a compelling argument I could use to convince you otherwise.
Similarly, if I meet someone who doesn’t believe I’m the same person I was when my body was born, I can’t think of a compelling argument I could use to convince them otherwise.
But… so what?
It’s all just dueling intuitions, and those don’t tend to lead to much progress. Hell, maybe I don’t have the same “true identity” I was born with… how would I know? Or maybe I suffer from a tragic degenerative “true identity” disease, and my “true identity” will degrade completely by the time I’m 45, with no observable consequences.
My own response to this is to discard the notion of “true identity” as hopelessly confused, and resolve not to care about it.
There must be a level of knowledge at which one intuition or the other (or perhaps neither) is vindicated by the facts. Not caring about true identity may be expedient in the present, but some of these questions must have answers, answers that require information we just don’t have yet. Some other questions will have more to do with choices, values perhaps, choices about what to identify with and what aspects of yourself to value. I don’t think that, even with a shared ontology, everyone will feel the same about the desirability of making a personal backup, and so on.
Examining myself, it seems that two things bother me. First, people who believe that cryonic suspension is just like going to sleep and then being woken up. Second, people choosing cryonics because they have wacky avantgarde ideas about identity not requiring continuity of existence. The first group seem to me naive; the second group seem to me mistaken in believing that the facts require us to jettison so many common-sense ideas about ourselves and what we are, which means that decisions made on the basis of that belief may be flawed.
Yes. And when an intuition is confused enough, I generally conclude that the facts (once they are fully understood) will vindicate neither it nor its negation.
That said, I agree that many questions about identity will (and do) ground out into choices about what to identify with and what aspects of ourselves to value (although we’re not always able to implement those choices unaided, any more than I can easily choose what flavors of ice cream taste good to me), and that not everyone will (or does) share those choices.
I tend to agree with what I think is your practical conclusion, that cryonics (over a long period of time) will not preserve that which is most important, and that for most people it’s at best unobvious that cryonic preservation is desirable. However, I disagree in how I get there.
You think there are facts of the matter about personal survival, and that a reanimated frozen corpse does not survive as the same person who died. Those who endorse cryonics typically (but not always) deny that there are such facts, but then they behave as though there are! They place great values on their memories, personalities and patterns of thought which go far beyond what could be justified by an objective appraisal of their use or importance in the far future—the criteria they would presumably use in assessing the value of cryonic preservation of a stranger. I think people should apply those same criteria when thinking about whether to preserve themselves.
I don’t think there are facts of the matter about personal survival after cryonic preservation, but this ‘cuts both ways’. Yes, it’s “exactly as though you went under a general anaesthetic and later woke up”. (I don’t say it’s exactly the same as going to sleep and waking up because I think the mind is still ‘doing things’ throughout sleep.) But it’s also “exactly as if you died and someone else woke up in your place”.
Now for a hypothetical: imagine that the technology for restoration of cryonauts has been perfected, such that when the person is reanimated they feel as though they have just ‘woken up’ after an ordinary spell of unconsciousness, and have the same personalities as before. Suppose that, for some reason, you are dying in a remote place and the only way ‘you’ (a person with your body, your memories etc.) will be able to persist is if you’re cryonically preserved in a local hospital, taken to a much fancier hospital and then thawed out a few hours later. I think that if such circumstances were routine then, as a matter of fact, people would regard cryonic restoration as being exactly like coming round from a general anaesthetic. Abstruse metaphysical considerations would evaporate before the manifest fact that people are surviving cryonic preservation (in the prephilosophical sense that ‘people survive anaesthesia’.)
In other words, the quest to prove (or demonstrate the unprovability of) the fact that a restored cryonaut is ‘the same person’ as the person who died would be compartmentalised as ‘the kind of thing only a philosopher would care about’ in much the same way as ‘brain in a vat’ skepticism, or whether other people have minds; whereas “we all know” (or at least we behave as if) the common sense answers are correct.
(However, “common sense” might be very different if a restored cryonaut had cognitive deficits or personality changes like one sees in cases of frontal lobe damage.)
I read that cryonics revives a copy rather than the original person. Could you clarify whether your main argument is that this is because the copy is necessarily imperfect, or because it is instantiated in another body?
Also, suppose I do not mind if I am replaced with a copy of myself. Does this mean that we value our “selves” differently..? That is, do you place much value on being an original?
What I want, first of all, is to not be fooling myself. If cryonics is a way of having a copy of you made after your death, that’s not survival as ordinarily understood; it’s more like reproduction. If the present instance of me is still headed for oblivion, even if I sign up for cryonics, then yes, it does make me question the point of doing so. It means that cryonics is not a way for me to avoid death, and I may as well spend my time and energy on something else.
I can raise slippery-slope questions for myself: Let’s suppose, as I like to do, that the self is some lump of quantum entanglement residing in the cortex of a living brain, and let’s suppose that this quantum lump actually persists physically throughout the suspension process, so that revival really is like waking up, rather than being a matter of creating a whole new quantum lump and seeding it with the appropriate memories and dispositions. Is existence as a slumbering soul on ice really so different to revival as a copy, that only in the first case should I even consider cryonics?
And then there’s the issue of memories. If there is no subjective difference between memories laid down during a lifetime, and memories implanted in a fresh copy, should I resist scenarios in which “I” might one day become the second sort of entity, on the grounds that the copy isn’t really a fake, it’s just a “me” which came to exist by an unusual path?
Given all the uncertainties, I’m not in possession of the one true algorithm for deciding the right way to answer these questions. But I think, if you want to be realistic, you should not imagine that resurrection from cryonic suspension is a simple happy process of losing consciousness in our time and regaining it in another. It’s more that they will reconstruct you, just like Kurzweil reconstructing his father, or transhuman Conan Doyle fans “re”constructing a real-life Sherlock Holmes. And that has to have implications for the desirability of the procedure.
But don’t you know life extension is immoral? :)
I may dip my toe in the water and turn my prezi into my first proper LW post, time permitting. I’d be interested to see what you guys think.
It sounds like they treat the idea completely in FAR mode. Or as a fancy new idea their bight son has come up with for the day. And sadly I have no idea what to do about that. You could of course make the money on your own and see if they would consent if you sign them up and/or state that you plan to freeze them anyway. But that might not work out that well either.
But i seriously doubt that your parents are against any for of life extension. Most people are not. At least do not state so. Using seat belts, doing checkups at the doctors. Even dentistry qualifies, since each of those defy the ‘natural order’ of things, which was to be dead by about 30 from toothdecay. Everyone who takes his medicine is pro life extension. You just need to move the border a bit.
Are you signed yet?
Disclaimer: I am not signed, and have not made up my mind about the usefulness of cryo myself yet. It might be totally useless. But the counterarguments usually brought up against it are not particularly convincing.
Hmm. Perhaps you could suggest the following: “Why not use cryonics to keep yourself alive until there’s a war, and then kill yourself? That way you would experience the maximum possible amount of life, and still not live through a war.” Note that this argument carries a risk of sounding creepy, because it involves suicide. On the other hand, she mentioned it first, so the additional ick factor may be small.
Hmm. Perhaps you could suggest the following: “Why not use cryonics to keep yourself alive until there’s a war, and then kill yourself? That way you would experience the maximum possible amount of life, and still not live through a war.” Note that this argument carries a risk of sounding creepy, because it involves suicide. On the other hand, she mentioned it first, so the additional ick factor may be small.