How I Think, Part Three: Weighing Cryonics
These are things I’ve been thinking about when trying to decide if I should get cryonics. I’ve sometimes gotten the sense that some rationalists think this is a no-brainer. But since it’s a $100k+ decision, I think it deserves quite a bit of thinking. So here is my list of thoughts as I think them:
1: Even if there’s not a huge chance it will work, it’s probably still worth it. Let’s say there’s a 10% chance I think it will work. Wouldn’t I pay ten times the price to get it as a guarantee?
2: What would my quality of life be after waking up if it did work? There’s a chance it would be very, very high.
3: What would I spend the money on if I didn’t spend it on this? I’m not sure, really.
4: There’s a chance that scientific progress will achieve immortality before I die anyway.
5: There’s a chance I’ll die tomorrow
6: There’s a chance that I’ll die the normal way, and then scientific progress will eventually be able to wake me up anyway
7: There’s a chance that there actually is an afterlife and it’s great, and I don’t have to worry about dying anyway
8: There’s a chance that there’s an afterlife and it is absolutely terrible, in which case I should try even harder to not die
9: Would cryonics prevent/delay an afterlife anyway?
10: How long would I want to live anyway if I was given the choice? It sounds like some people accept the fact that they will die when they get old, maybe they even look forward to it. Maybe that’s just because they are in pain? Or because of other problems with life that are solvable? Or just because they’ve been conditioned to do that somehow?
11: There’s a chance that the world will end before I die, so cryonics wouldn’t help.
12: I only started thinking about cryonics a couple of years ago. Isn’t there a big chance I’ll think it doesn’t make any sense ten or twenty years from now?
13: Can I get a refund if I change my mind about cryonics before dying? If I use a life insurance plan, can I change the beneficiary? If so, it probably makes the most sense to just get the plan now and think about all of this stuff over time.
14: Cryonics is not very popular, in that only a few thousand people have signed up for it and even most scientists seem to think it wouldn’t work. Although I believe other things that I think most of the world views as false (atheism, impending ASI, etc) and it’s a fallacy or something to just argue that the majority of people are always right… it seems like somewhat strong evidence that something is incorrect if over 99.9999% of people think so (~5,000 cryonics signups divided by 8,000,000,000 people in the world). You really have to have a pretty high opinion of your intelligence to say that all of those people are wrong. This isn’t a knock-out, but it’s probably the biggest factor making me stop and think longer.
15: If I was already signed up for cryonics, or if everyone was signed up for cryonics by default, would I un-sign up? Probably not.
16: Speaking of which, would I be okay with almost everyone I care about not existing anymore when I wake up?
17: I think the formula is something like this:
18: If I was looking at my life from an outside perspective, what would I tell myself to do? Or would I at least have advice about how to tackle the question?
19: If I imagine a world somewhere in the universe where everyone is getting cryonics, does that make this world look crazy? What about the opposite, like a world where nobody worried about dying?
Looking back on this list, I think the most relevant points are 2, 13, 14, and 15. At least, these are the ones that I feel like I haven’t really wrapped my head around yet and need to think about more before the gut feeling that I have about signing up for cryonics matches the logical thoughts I’ve had.
May I recommend my cost-benefit analysis of cryonics? I think it’s the SOTA, even though it could be improved.