Since learning, from Less Wrong, of Alcor and vitrification tech and such, I seriously considered cryonics for the first time in my life and really it was obvious. However slim, it is an actual chance to live beyond the meager handful of decades we get naturally, an actual chance to not die, and in the world as it is today, the only option. Even if the chance of it actually working as advertised (waking up after however long with a brand new perfectly healthy youthful nanotechnologically-grown immortal body) is vanishingly tiny, it is still the optimal action in today’s world, is it not?
I should mention that (despite my efforts to hack it out of myself) I have a powerful neurotic phobia of medication, mind-altering substances, surgeries, and basically anything past or current technology can do to a human body that leaves traces, however beneficial. The idea of my still-active brain being pumped full of cryoprotectant upon my heart’s last beat is more subjectively disturbing to me than eating flesh cut from my own body.
And I fully intend to sign up anyway.
(I’m currently living on a fixed income that has me occasionally going hungry in order to keep myself in air conditioning and internet, or I would have signed up already.)
The thing is, I want to convince my dad to sign himself up as well, and I think punctuating with this article, if presented in the proper context, could go a long way towards convincing him to sign us up all at once if I can just get passed his excessive skepticism. I’m not at all confident in my ability to sell him on it, though, so are there any good arguments to use when your primary obstacle is the other person’s deep-seated irrational pride in their own skepticism? He could easily afford it, and he already lives in Arizona. I know he would totally go for it if I could just find a way to get passed his initial dismissal of it (a decade ago) as false hope for gullible cowards. I think he’s been numbing himself to his mortality, and accepting the existence of a genuine hope against death would be difficult because it dispels the numbness. (This might even be why the majority of otherwise-sane people dismiss cryonics out of hand now that I think of it: for some, accepting a tenuous hope is more painful than having no hope at all.)
I’d appreciate any good advice on how to present my case to him, if anyone has any insights.
the chance of it actually working as advertised (waking up after however long with a brand new perfectly healthy youthful nanotechnologically-grown immortal body) is vanishingly tiny
Am I the only one who thinks it is far more likely that the institution will fail than that the technology is never developed or is never applied?
Corporations, nation-states—few things have lasted hundreds of years with their cores intact. Laws change, market prices of commodities change, wars happen. The United States is not immune.
Concur. I am moderately confident that cryonics will eventually be a viable technology, assuming normal conditions—but I am very much not confident that Alcor and the like will live to see that day.
I wish you the best of luck in signing up, and persuading your dad to. I think that the technical plausibility of cryonics (not “cyronics” btw) is much higher than you seem to imply here, incidentally—I’d put it over 50%.
I wasn’t actually expressing an estimation of the plausibility of it working; merely that an uncertainty of death is preferable to a certainty of death.
Since learning, from Less Wrong, of Alcor and vitrification tech and such, I seriously considered cryonics for the first time in my life and really it was obvious. However slim, it is an actual chance to live beyond the meager handful of decades we get naturally, an actual chance to not die, and in the world as it is today, the only option. Even if the chance of it actually working as advertised (waking up after however long with a brand new perfectly healthy youthful nanotechnologically-grown immortal body) is vanishingly tiny, it is still the optimal action in today’s world, is it not?
I should mention that (despite my efforts to hack it out of myself) I have a powerful neurotic phobia of medication, mind-altering substances, surgeries, and basically anything past or current technology can do to a human body that leaves traces, however beneficial. The idea of my still-active brain being pumped full of cryoprotectant upon my heart’s last beat is more subjectively disturbing to me than eating flesh cut from my own body.
And I fully intend to sign up anyway.
(I’m currently living on a fixed income that has me occasionally going hungry in order to keep myself in air conditioning and internet, or I would have signed up already.)
The thing is, I want to convince my dad to sign himself up as well, and I think punctuating with this article, if presented in the proper context, could go a long way towards convincing him to sign us up all at once if I can just get passed his excessive skepticism. I’m not at all confident in my ability to sell him on it, though, so are there any good arguments to use when your primary obstacle is the other person’s deep-seated irrational pride in their own skepticism? He could easily afford it, and he already lives in Arizona. I know he would totally go for it if I could just find a way to get passed his initial dismissal of it (a decade ago) as false hope for gullible cowards. I think he’s been numbing himself to his mortality, and accepting the existence of a genuine hope against death would be difficult because it dispels the numbness. (This might even be why the majority of otherwise-sane people dismiss cryonics out of hand now that I think of it: for some, accepting a tenuous hope is more painful than having no hope at all.)
I’d appreciate any good advice on how to present my case to him, if anyone has any insights.
Am I the only one who thinks it is far more likely that the institution will fail than that the technology is never developed or is never applied?
Corporations, nation-states—few things have lasted hundreds of years with their cores intact. Laws change, market prices of commodities change, wars happen. The United States is not immune.
Concur. I am moderately confident that cryonics will eventually be a viable technology, assuming normal conditions—but I am very much not confident that Alcor and the like will live to see that day.
Maybe we can vitrify them?
I wish you the best of luck in signing up, and persuading your dad to. I think that the technical plausibility of cryonics (not “cyronics” btw) is much higher than you seem to imply here, incidentally—I’d put it over 50%.
I wasn’t actually expressing an estimation of the plausibility of it working; merely that an uncertainty of death is preferable to a certainty of death.