(The following assumes that you don’t actually want to die. My honest assessment is that I think you might want to die. I don’t believe there’s anything actually wrong with just living out your life as it comes and then dying, even if living longer might be nicer, and particularly when living longer might totally suck. So don’t assume I’m passing judgement on a particular decision to sign up or not; in fact, the thought that life might suck forever drives me damn near favoring suicide myself.)
Let’s tackle the question from another angle.
I do not believe cryonics will work. I have seen the probability calculations, and I prefer to call them plausibility calculations: cryonics has never been seen to work before, even in animal models, so I can’t assign a strictly evidential probability to its working on me or anyone else. Since I don’t have good priors or astronomical sums of mental computing power, I can’t use pure Bayesianism, personally.
So, let’s say I consider myself to have valid reason to believe cryonics simply doesn’t work. Everyone cryo-preserved right now is dead, and is never coming back.
How do you fix that? That is, if you really believe cryonics can work, or probably does work, then who is performing the research to improve preservation techniques so that future cryopreservation procedures will be known to work? Who is doing things like freezing animal specimens and then attempting to resuscitate them? And more importantly: who is working to ensure that everyone successfully cryopreserved has a good life to come back to when you do resuscitate them (the answers “MIRI” and “FHI” will not be accepted, on grounds that I already support them)?
(The following assumes that you don’t actually want to die. My honest assessment is that I think you might want to die. I don’t believe there’s anything actually wrong with just living out your life as it comes and then dying, even if living longer might be nicer, and particularly when living longer might totally suck. So don’t assume I’m passing judgement on a particular decision to sign up or not; in fact, the thought that life might suck forever drives me damn near favoring suicide myself.)
Let’s tackle the question from another angle.
I do not believe cryonics will work. I have seen the probability calculations, and I prefer to call them plausibility calculations: cryonics has never been seen to work before, even in animal models, so I can’t assign a strictly evidential probability to its working on me or anyone else. Since I don’t have good priors or astronomical sums of mental computing power, I can’t use pure Bayesianism, personally.
So, let’s say I consider myself to have valid reason to believe cryonics simply doesn’t work. Everyone cryo-preserved right now is dead, and is never coming back.
How do you fix that? That is, if you really believe cryonics can work, or probably does work, then who is performing the research to improve preservation techniques so that future cryopreservation procedures will be known to work? Who is doing things like freezing animal specimens and then attempting to resuscitate them? And more importantly: who is working to ensure that everyone successfully cryopreserved has a good life to come back to when you do resuscitate them (the answers “MIRI” and “FHI” will not be accepted, on grounds that I already support them)?