I don’t think the choice is as simple as choosing cryonics or ignoring life extension completely. I am very interested in the idea of life extension, but so far what civilization has achieved in those terms is relatively modest, given that the oldest person to ever live only lived to 122, and I probably can’t hope to even get to that. I would be absolutely thrilled to be wrong about this.
What makes me hesitate about cryonics is that it is so speculative. Perhaps it is possible to reconstruct a living brain from a cryogenically frozen one. However, I would want to have some expectation that this was so. To give an example, the ancient Egyptians believed that mummification allowed one to continue to live. However, as they removed the brain entirely, their strategy for life extension is not one I think you would be interested in investing in (even if no one was saying you also had to believe in Horus,Isis, Osiris, et al). Cryonics seems a much more plausible revival strategy than ancient Egyptian mummification to me, but I also think restricted caloric diets are more plausible than cryonics (given that this has been shown to work on a wide variety of species, even if humans aren’t one of those). You may think that restricted caloric diets could never possibly extend people’s lives as much as cryonics, but I think it is currently impossible to estimate the additional lifespan of a person successfully revived from cryonic extension. Your assumption, I’m guessing, is that this number would likely be large due to improved future technology. Once again, I think this is a huge assumption, and given the large number of things I could conceivably try, I think the best bet would be to first figure out, to the greatest degree possible, the answer to the following three questions:
Is the method a physically plausible way to extend the human lifespan?
What are the costs (in terms of money, quality of life, etc).
What are the likely benefits (in terms of added years of life, quality of life, etc).
And I’m not saying that a person couldn’t choose more than one strategy of life extension. For example, there’s no reason that a person couldn’t choose caloric restriction and cryonics. The only problem with choosing one or more of these (and other) strategies is that you don’t just have the possible benefits, but the very real costs. And the more strategies you choose, the more of those costs you incur (even ignoring strategies that would be mutually incompatible). With caloric restriction, an obvious cost would be that it would take more time and effort or money to stick to the low calorie, high nutrient diet required (you probably won’t find many restaurants or vending machines that serve the appropriate foods in the appropriate portions, so the only two choices would likely be to do all the cooking and meal planning yourself, or to have your own personal chef who is well-versed in such a diet). Also, if you do not have sufficient self-control, you would probably have to have someone hovering over you, forcing you to eat the right foods (significantly detracting from your quality of life and likely also a blow to your finances). For cryonics, the obvious cost is the non-trivial amount of money it would take. Maybe it would be better to find a way to store information about the brain in a computer until it could be restored. Maybe your brain would be better preserved in a jar of formaldehyde (although I’m hoping for the sake of cryonics customers that this isn’t so, some of those who had their brains preserved for science might then gain an unexpected benefit).
So no, I don’t think the success rate of not-cryonics is a guaranteed zero. I don’t even think the future success rate of cryonics is a guaranteed zero, and you could convince me with more evidence that it is not an almost-certain zero. I would consider the successful revival of non-human animals of increasing complexity through cryonics a great first step to proving its viability. And I need more evidence of the expected benefits only because I have ample evidence of the expected costs (nobody is saying cryonics is free). Opportunity cost means that I should make choices not only with the consideration of what that choice might gain me, but also what passing up my other choices might cost me. That’s why I think it’s a better strategy to give money to life extension research now than save up to give to cryonics specifically to freeze me.
I hope that helps to clarify my thinking on this. I am wondering, what experimental evidence in favor of cryonics do you find most compelling? Are there other life-extension strategies you have considered?
EDIT: Curses...my HTML tricks will do me no good here (goes off to search for message board markup tags...)
EDIT: Yay! Fixed! Thanks for the help, @Mixed Nuts and @nsheppard!
In looking over the comments here, there are a few missed points that I believe heavily shift the balance in favor of having cryonics arrangements. The first is that the need for “cryonics,” in the generic sense, is never likely to go away. While it is true that we can currently envision technologies to repair all of the pathological processes we currently understand, that does NOT mean that we understand all of the things that both can, and will go wrong with us in the future.
Let’s assume that aging is conquered tomorrow. Within some definite (but unknown) period of time you are going to fill up your hard drive—or your “soft drive,” if you prefer. Humans were not designed to store thousands of years of memories and experiences. And we may be doing just that, if the people with Superior Autobiographical Memory are any indication. So unless you are happy with eventually losing most, or all of your current memories, something will have to change…
A likely consequence of this limitation is that we are going to have to reconfigure our brains. I use this very conservative example, because it speaks to the NECESSITY of doing this. Probably most of the people on LW envision, and even desire, vastly more daring reworks of their identity-encoding hardware and software. That will inevitably carry associated risk. It is very easy (at least for me) to envision major and very complicated screw-ups in cognitive re-engineering that cannot be easily or rapidly sorted out. In fact, this sort of thing happens today on a small, but nevertheless sometimes lethal, and not infrequently very damaging way, when people become psychologically confused, or “existentially damaged.” A good example is when seemingly normal people get taken over by ideas, or become ensnared in cults. Is “deprogramming” a treatment, or coercion? Malware, either deliberately designed or accidentally created, which badly damages programs and data are yet another example. So, leaving hardware out of consideration, it seems likely that people will still get very nasty “software” diseases that do a lot of damage in a short period of time, and that require that the “system” (person) be shut down until a solution can be found. Nanotechnology will not solve this problem because the problem is a meta-problem that is intrinsic to complex systems interacting in an open universe.
I also think it will also be a long time, if ever, before damage to “hardware” substrates becomes 100% repairable 100% of the time in REAL TIME. As long as it is possible to envision pathologies that render the individual into a degraded and nonfunctional state, which current technology cannot reverse, then you will need cryonics, regardless of what it is subsequently called or what preservation technology is used.
My next point is that there are a couple of implicit assumptions in the foregoing arguments which are demonstrably not true. The first is that cryonics is a discrete, consumable product, like a bag of crisps, a candy bar, or even a computer or a radio. Or that it is like an automobile maintenance contract, or an insurance policy that pays off when you need it.
It isn’t.
All of those products and services can be assigned, with a high degree of precision, a probability as to how they will perform and what your likelihood is of being satisfied with them. They are fully developed products. And mostly, all you need to know about them is present, free for the asking in your culture in the form of “common knowledge,” information from friends and family, and, of course, in advertising. You pay your money and that’s it. Nobody needs to explain to you, or to or anyone else what a TV or broom are for, how to use them, and what might go wrong with them over time.
This is no way describes cryonics.
So, the first benefit you get by signing up is that you now have a proprietary interest in learning what it is that you just bought; and you will soon become aware that you need to KEEP LEARNING, because cryonics is an undeveloped, immature, and above all, experimental technique. I signed up with the Cryonics Society of New York (CSNY) when I was 15 years old. CSNY is long, long gone and I’ve been signed up with 2 other organizations that have vanished. If you can’t keep learning until old age or “death” overtakes you, you are unwilling to do so, or you are an idiot, then cryonics is not for you.
And because cryonicists are the most rabid and intense of the life extensionists, you will also soon learn that they are at the absolute edge of emerging science in this area. In other words, you stand to be the first to know about newly developed and developing technology to combat aging. That can either “kill you or cure you, “depending upon how good your judgment is.
Finally, non-cryonicists, because they have the view of cryonics as a developed product (like an automobile or a light bulb) have a similarly inaccurate and warped view of the odds. The odds of the Titanic sinking with the loss of 1517 lives were 100% on 15 April 1912. But, what if the Titanic were to have taken, say, 48 hours to sink? Depending upon how the passengers and crew behaved in that interval, the number of survivors might have gone way up, or way down.
There were a lot of smart people on board the Titanic—very clever and very inventive people. But they were panicked, they were dealing with a panicked mass of passengers, and they had very little time to react. Given 48 hours, and the willing participation of the best minds aboard that ship, how many people need have died, or would have died? Were there ways, other than the optimal loading of the inadequate number of lifeboats that would have saved lives? Would clothing those passengers consigned to the icy sea in multiple layers of clothing saturated in grease, shortening, or oil, attaching them to life-ropes, and rotating them in and out of the lifeboats, have saved additional lives? What kind of makeshift lifeboats or floating platforms could have been made on an expedient basis from materials on the ship, allowing additional passengers to remain afloat out of the freezing water?
THAT is the position of cryonics and cryonicists. The odds are not fixed to those calculated at any given point in time, because you are NOT carting off a discrete product to screw into your lamp, or to process your words, or to play your games on. YOU set the odds of success or failure to an amazing degree. [You also do this, to a tiny degree, for the success or failure of the company that you buy a light bulb or a computer from.] Cryonics is thus an ACTIVIST proposition. Customers can, of course, be customers if they insist. But in cryonics, as in any other market transaction (perfected or experimental) you get what you pay for. In the case of cryonics, the fees required for success are not even remotely reducible to cold hard cash alone. It’s going to all the composure, good judgment and raw intelligence we can muster to escape the sinking ship fate has consigned us to and make it that far shore where we can continue our journey through life, indefinitely.
In general, any debate about whether something is “good” or “bad” is sketchy, and can be changed to a more useful form by converting the thing to an action and applying utilitarianism
Disease (and by analogy, malware) is dissolved here.
And because cryonicists are the most rabid and intense of the life extensionists, you will also soon learn that they are at the absolute edge of emerging science in this area.
Howconvenient that the way to optimize life extension happens to be the same set of actions that would entail signing up for cryonics.
The odds of the Titanic sinking with the loss of 1517 lives were 100% on 15 April 1912.
I always enjoy reading your comments and from their length and writing I can tell you put a lot into them. Perhaps you’ll also put up shorter posts with single thoughts as they come to you, the way I and some others do, which would be great as well. LW has a high standard it holds ideas, arguments, and most of all attempts to persuade to, which is why I enjoy the site and hope you post more often. I think you would pick up certain valuable ideas quickly, the posts I linked to are related to the parts of your comment I quoted.
1) I respect the desire for precision in the use of words, and I understand that each culture has its own nomenclature and rules.Those here that I have seen so far seem eminently reasonable.
2) I have no interest whatsoever (and haven’t for many years) in persuading anyone to sign up for cryonics—including friends and family. While it is an understandable error, my purpose here is not to convince, proselytize, or recruit, but rather to identify minds that are useful to my current endeavor. They will not need persuasion—they will ‘know the lion by his paw.’
3) Forgive my levity, but in urging mono-topical posts of short duration, you pointed me to three dissertations dealing with a range of subjects within each essay, the shortest of which was ~1,400 words and the longest of which was 2,700 words—not including commentary.
4) For the record, I use the word disease in the context your writer specified: as .something unusual, abnormal, and I would add, deleterious to the normal functioning and survival of the organism. I know little about computing and have even less aptitude to learn. I use the word malware as software that damages or destroys data that the computer’s owner doesn’t want destroyed or degraded. I would add that given my predicament, when that happens it is a complex, difficult and thoroughly unpleasant thing to sort out which generally requires my machine spend time in “stasis” until the appropriate expertise can be brought to bear.
5) My posts here have been mostly confined to the subject of cryonics and were never intended to continue. I’ve really enjoyed the discussion and I’ve found this an interesting and rewarding forum. Many thanks!
3) Forgive my levity, but in urging mono-topical posts of short duration, you pointed me to three dissertations dealing with a range of subjects within each essay, the shortest of which was ~1,400 words and the longest of which was 2,700 words—not including commentary.
I suck at being tactful and polite, particularly in this medium. I was trying to say I like your writing by saying you could add short comments to your repertoire, I hadn’t meant to imply you should decrease your production of long ones. That I genuinely enjoy your comments was not the sole motivation behind my writing what I did, I was trying to soften the criticism, and trying not to be rude.
I was also trying to make convenient for you what I was pointing towards, at the level of depth you would want it in, whatever that might be. That’s what I meant to do by having “How” go to link summarizing the content of the following link “convenient”, to present the same idea to the extent you cared to engage it.
4) For the record, I use the word disease in the context your writer specified
My intent was to show that they are analogous, I wasn’t claiming you didn’t use the word that way. What the article shows is that the question “Is “deprogramming” a treatment, or coercion?” is misguided.
2) While it is an understandable error,
I did not mean to imply that you are here to persuade people to sign up for cryonics, if that is what you thought I meant. Rather, when people make assertions, they often are attempting to persuade the reader of their truth. I just did that in the preceding sentence, there is nothing wrong with persuasion! You are trying to persuade me of at least five things in the parent of this comment, this is not a bad thing.
Rather, advocating for something by asserting that it has no opportunity costs is not just non-persuasive, it’s anti-persuasive because it is either clumsy attempted manipulation or rationalization—artful manipulation I wouldn’t be so inclined to comment on, but I genuinely felt empathically embarrassed to read “And because cryonicists are the most rabid and intense of the life extensionists, you will also soon learn that they are at the absolute edge of emerging science in this area. In other words, you stand to be the first to know about newly developed and developing technology to combat aging.”
Perhaps false modesty, or sloth, led me to provide links to what others have said, rather than try to explain more directly what I thought the issue was and how it applied. Perhaps one consideration that led me to write a sparse comment with links is that I know how easy it is for me to miscommunicate over featureless text comments, and how little I can rely on my intent being understood, such that it is valid for me to enlist others’ words to help me communicate...apparently even that didn’t help me here. Alas, there is no law of the universe that reads: “when people intend to communicate, they are skilled enough in communication such that if only they try hard enough and have good intentions, their meaning will be conveyed”.
I honestly think that you, from what I have read by you, wouldn’t even have to work hard or think hard to avoid making certain mistakes. That isn’t an attempt to be nice, as I think any further effort I spend on that is entirely wasted in at least this thread at this point.
You are smart enough that I was embarrassed for you to see you make certain errors of reasoning, happy that they can easily be fixed for you, and that you have happened upon a place that can easily fix them, and happy that I have found such a useful place, and happy that other people here are good at highlighting parts of my arguments and saying the equivalent of “you are being a dumbass at the following places in your argument, and let me explain how to fix that,” to me without it being awkward or unnatural, and I’m sorry I don’t have that skill.
Sorry, you’ve spent a lot of time trying to address things that really aren’t problems. I was in no way offended, or put off. It’s axiomatic, but worth noting yet again, that correspondence in writing is a dangerous way to communicate, because it lacks the context of intonation, facial expressions, and other non-verbal cues.
The best way to deal with errors in my writing, thinking or actions, real or perceived, is directly, matter of factly, and with only such tact as common courtesy requires. Public statements can be dealt with publicly, privates ones are best dealt with privately...
I think this will also save you time (when you are correct), because a succinct critique of an error is a hell of a lot less draining than spending time and energy crafting a convoluted, or overly polite reply. I do understand that this site is about a rigorous way of way thinking.
Finally, in reading your response, I realize that my comment about why I’ve posted here extensively recently, and am unlikely to continue to do so, may have been misinterpreted. It should be taken at face value as the literal truth. My primary obligations in terms of time, energy and writing must necessarily be elsewhere for the foreseeable future. This is just the way it is and it has nothing to do with LW.
Thanks for your letter—I know it took a fair bit of time to write and I really do appreciate it ;and I appreciate even more the sentiments expressed!
You may think that restricted caloric diets could never possibly extend people’s lives as much as cryonics, but I think it is currently impossible to estimate the additional lifespan of a person successfully revived from cryonic extension. Your assumption, I’m guessing, is that this number would likely be large due to improved future technology. Once again, I think this is a huge assumption, and given the large number of things I could conceivably try.
What things could you possibly try in the present that couldn’t also be used in the future on revival? There are lots of things that could theoretically be done to extend lifespans which we can’t do now, but if any methods that are available now have similar effect, why shouldn’t people in the future be able to apply them to at least equal effect?
Besides, measures like following a low calorie diet are not exclusive with signing up for cryonics, although having lived on a low calorie diet for about a month, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t want to live even a normal human life span on one, since it meant that immediately upon finishing each meal, my mind would become preoccupied with the prospect of the next one.
I wouldn’t disagree. I stated above that I find cryonics also more plausible than mummification as a life extension strategy, and I think I might place mummification as more plausible than placing a fried egg over someone’s grave. After all, a significantly advanced civiization could perhaps extract enough information from a combination of the person’s genetic material, remaining belongings, and statistical analysis that you could perhaps genetically engineer something close to their original body with it and then add memories sort of like what you think they might have had. I’m pretty sure the fried egg wouldn’t be nearly as helpful. My main objection to cryonics is that I do not find it currently plausible enough to pursue given the fact that it is costly, other possibilities exist, and I do not have sufficient evidence of benefit.
On a completely unrelated note, could you tell me how you made that wonderful link of yours? I would be most appreciative if I, too, could have magical linking powers.
The point of the fried egg quote is to say that cryonics has a decent chance of working—it’s the best bet given costs, not just all else equal.
The almost invisible “Help” link below the bottom right corner of the comment entry field explains how to get various magical powers such as linking and image insertion. The spell for magical linking powers is [text of link](link address).
Thanks for the very helpful commenting instructions! Magical markup powers unlocked! I have upvoted your very useful info on this.
As for pitting cryonics against a chthonic fried egg, I’m not sure that proves that cryonics has a decent chance of working, just that it is not completely implausible. I would be more interested in hearing more about what research has been done in this field, although I understand that is a time consuming task and I don’t expect for you to do any research in that area for me (although of course no objections if you wish to).
I am curious why you think it is the best bet given the cost. For example, it probably makes sense as a strategy for someone who is a.) reasonably wealthy and b.) knows they are likely to die very soon, but that’s because the opportunity cost will be greatly lower for such a person. Since they already have the money, they wouldn’t have to sacrifice as much in their (certain) current life to try cryonics for an (uncertain) future life. Also, being about to die very soon makes the opportunity cost of giving up investigation of other options considerably lower.
Still, I don’t think everyone has the same opportunity costs since not everyone lives the same life. I think learning a lot more about life extension is my best possible option, which should then be followed by investing accordingly. I think your comment reflects the feeling that cryonics has an image problem, and I would agree with that. I also don’t think it should have as much of an image problem as it does, even though I currently don’t have any reason to believe it will be overwhelmingly successful. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with trying whatever seems to be the best option given your own opportunity costs.
I haven’t done much detailed research. “Cryonics works” is the default given the history of medicine and what Alcor says; there could be a flaw or an outright lie in the case for cryonics that makes it deviate -I am not an expert. But the case against cryonics is non-existent. Why would experts not debunk it, if it were false?
On cost:
Robin Hanson has a calculation saying it’s worth it . I haven’t checked. Morendil argues that the cost (a few $100 per year) is very low relative to other expenses. Even if both arguments are false, cryonics still looks developed-country-cheap.
It’s a bad strategy for someone who’ll die soon, because they can’t get life insurance. Cryonics is cheaper when young and healthy.
On opportunity cost:
Research time doesn’t look all that limited. (If it does, why not sign up for cryonics with as little research as possible?) I’m not sure what other costs you’re talking about.
Life extension is a very good idea, yes. But it’s not incompatible with cryonics (unlike mummification and graveyard eggs); in fact it helps, because cryonics is best if you deanimate late (cryonics improves with time, and the longer your life expectancy the cheaper insurance gets).
If life extension techniques look so incredibly good that you put every cent and second in them, sure, go ahead and be a hero—but that applies to every expense, not just cryonics.
Thanks! Upvoted since your responses are highly relevant to my questions.
I’m first looking at the arguments for the science of cryonics that Alcor gives. I do not have much expectation that I can judge all their claims to be valid or invalid yet, but I will give my general impression of the 3 main premises they present on their site here:
1.) Life can be stopped and restarted if cell structure and chemistry are preserved sufficiently well.
Arguments for this are point are based on currently verified procedures such as reviving people after their heart stops, people being revived long after drowning in cold water, freezing embryos, etc. I assume this is the reason you say “cryonics works” based on the history of medicine. I would change this to say that the likeliehood of cryonics working is greater in the universe we live in, because we can now revive people that would once have been irretrievably dead, so it is not inconceivable that people could be revived in the future from some states that would be considered irretrievably dead today. I have no disagreement with this point. I would note that the ‘some’ in the previous sentence is important since it means that it likely matters what strategy is used.
2) Vitrification (not freezing) can preserve biological structure very well.
This is an interesting argument and not one that I was previously aware of, nor of the fact that kidneys have been usable after vitrification or that a cat brain briefly regained EEG capability after vitrification. I thought the pictures were very helpful in showing the structural improvements Alcor says have been accomplished in this procedure, and this increases my confidence that this procedure could preserve information. I will need to look into this determine in more detail what we know about this process. Alcor is pretty clear that the toxicity of the procedure prevents brains from being revived this way today, so I definitely want to try to understand that aspect a little more. It is good to know that the process has improved in preserving visual structure over time, however.
3) Methods for repairing structure at the molecular level can now be foreseen.
True, although I’m not sure if this is an argument so much for cryonics in particular as for finding the most successful strategy for preserving information about that structure in some way. Cryonics may or may not be the best way to accomplish this, and if the best way is mutually exclusive to this method, I think that would be an important piece of information in making the most rational decision.
I will need to look at the other articles some more in the future. I skimmed over them but have not yet had the time to think them over and formulate a response. Thanks for responding to my questions about the available research in the field, the costs, and the opportunity cost.
On preservation methods: gwern has an article on plastination. It’s compatible with cryonics in theory, but not currently in practice.
I distrust “this improves chances of revival with method X”-type reasoning, though. The argument for revival is more like “A huge advance among the many possible ones, only a few of which we can currently foresee” than “Scan and upload”. This encourages catch-all preservation methods rather than methods that optimize for a particular kind of revival.
So are you saying that you don’t think it matters if one method is better, as in having more known working components? I’m not sure I understand what method you are favoring here.
Revival method, or preservation method? I’m saying that the revival method that will in fact be used will probably be none of the methods we can foresee (scan and upload, molecular repair, light molecular repair plus organ printing, growing a new body) - not because there’s anything wrong with those revival methods, just because I expect a lot of currently unknown candidates to be developed.
This implies that we should use methods that minimize maximal corruption—corrupt connections a bit but not too much, corrupt cell structure a bit but not too much, corrupt ease of reversal (thawing is possible, unplastinating isn’t) a bit but not too much. That way, when we try to revive patients using a currently unknown revival method, the currently unknown parameters it cares about won’t be too compromised.
If we could predict the revival method well, then we should pick preservation methods that minimize corruption of the parameters it cares about, and only them. For example, if we’re pretty sure the method will involve destructive scanning, we should try very hard to preserve information exactly, but can go wild with other kinds of damage if they help with information preservation.
I guess to me it seems very important to figure out what would work in terms of both preservation and revival. I see that it could work out to just preserve the brain as well as possible—in some future universes we might imagine, this could work out very well. But I would be more inclined to think this was an easier choice if some of the uncertainty could be removed. I don’t at all mind if other people want to take this risk for themselves, and I hope it works out well for them. But I like to know more about a situation if I’m considering it for myself. I am very risk averse, and I can’t help but worry this could possibly take money I might need later for a medical emergency and then I would die and cryonics wouldn’t work for me. Or it would succeed, but those reviving me would be incredibly hostile. I want to live a long time—but I’m really, really hoping that much of that isn’t also while suffering inconceivable pain. It’s not that I think success is impossible; it’s that I like to know what I’m getting into, as much as is humanly possible.
It’s a bad strategy for someone who’ll die soon, because they can’t get life insurance. Cryonics is cheaper when young and healthy.
Life insurance is more expensive than paying in cash. If that weren’t true, no one could make money selling life insurance. Yes it amortizes the cost over time, and amortizes the risk over the population but that does not reduce the cost of it. The opportunity cost of cryo-preservation is the same whether you buy insurance or not.
Interesting. I’d never heard of this until you mentioned it and I googled a short description. I’ll have to learn what this entails before I can comment more.
I have been working on a little essay about plastination, http://www.gwern.net/plastination—it’s not very thorough, but Darwin says he’ll send me what he’s written before on the topic of plastination/chemical fixation, which ought to help a lot.
The main problem with Pascal’s Wager isn’t that the odds of winning are tiny but that it unduly privileges a particular tiny possibility. Perfectly straightforward expected value calculations will tell you that you should follow Pascal when you feed them “eternal bliss” as a possible reward—if you ignore all the points in metaphysics-space besides “generalized Christianity” and “business as usual”.
It’s a lot harder to argue that the space of cryonics outcomes includes some hidden options that the expected-value result doesn’t address. I have occasionally seen people speculate about a sadistic future that wakes cryonics patients up and tortures them for fun, but that seems rather far-fetched.
I think you make a good point, but if the probability of cryonics working is sufficiently low, then relatively speaking, there are a lot of bad outcomes which are not far-fetched. For example, religious fanatics taking over the government and denying life-prolonging medical treatment to people who had previously signed up for cryonics.
Is it really even as remotely likely that religious fanatics will take over and then do that as it is that cryonics would work? (I would think that discriminating against cryonicists, when no religion I am aware of has any real official anti-cryonics position yet, would be something like a billion places down on their TODO list.) Or are you just privileging the hypothesis?
Yes, because there are positive arguments for cryonics working and not having negative effects besides the well-known ones. Fantasizing about religious fanatics taking over during your lifetime is about as sensible as fantasizing about another group of fanatics taking over and cutting off healthcare to everyone who didn’t signup on the grounds that their revealed preference is to die sooner. (Notice the isomorphism here to issues with Pascal’s Wager and the ‘atheist’s god’.)
Yes, because there are positive arguments for cryonics working and not having negative effects besides the well-known ones. Fantasizing about religious fanatics taking over during your lifetime is about as sensible as fantasizing about another group of fanatics taking over and cutting off healthcare to everyone who didn’t signup on the grounds that their revealed preference is to die sooner.
I agree and that’s my main point: The case for cryonics depends on there being a decent chance that it will actually work. As opposed to some epsilon.
A useful point of comparison here is a part-per-million chance
Looking at the other actions which cost a micromort, I’d say that if the odds were worse than a part per million,
filling out the sign-up paperwork alone would outweigh the benefit. (My personal best guess is that the
odds are closer to 1%, which, for me, is close to the break even point, mostly due to the financial part of the costs.)
I agree with that. However the term “tiny” can be misleading -- 1% is pretty small compared to what I would think reasonable, but would still be a fair motivator for a $28k expenditure if your life is valued at >$2.8 million.
I don’t think so, since access to life-prolonging technology might keep you alive long enough to get access to even better life-prolonging technology, and so on.
But it which case you never get frozen, so I don’t see the point of this criticism.
Cryonics works like this: (1) you suffer “normal” death, (2) cryonicists move in to arrest all decay, (3) in the future, you may be revived using more advanced technology.
But if you live to see radical life extension, then step one never happens and so the others don’t either.
But it which case you never get frozen, so I don’t see the point of this criticism.
Well the question as I understand it is whether one can envision scenarios in which one would be far worse off for having signed up for cryonics, just like whether there exist scenarios in which one might be far worse off for having decided to accept Jesus. Agreed?
Not really. Pascal’s Wager’s domain is afterlives, about which we know nothing (either because they’re false or because no one can tell us anything). But cryonics has its domain over future possibilities, about which we can know things and so can assign meaningful prior estimates.
While we certainly can think of errant possibilia that make cryonics bad, they are notably errant, requiring us to posit a future incredibly unlike the present, the past and the kinds of changes we see in the world.
Not really. Pascal’s Wager’s domain is afterlives, about which we know nothing (either because they’re false or because no one can tell us anything). But cryonics has its domain over future possibilities, about which we can know things and so can assign meaningful prior estimates.
I’m not sure that this distinction is important to the argument. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that evidence is discovered which allows one to assign meaningful probabilities to the claim that accepting Jesus will guaranty a trip to heaven for eternity after one’s death. Let’s further suppose that this probability is roughly one in one billion. Would that change anything about the argument? I don’t think so. Pascal’s wager would still have the same basic flaws.
While we certainly can think of errant possibilia that make cryonics bad, they are notably errant, requiring us to posit a future incredibly unlike the present, the past and the kinds of changes we see in the world.
I’m not sure I would put it at “incredibly unlike the present.” After all, there is a lot of hostility to cryonics. And history shows that politics can be pretty chaotic.
Still, you seem to agree that one can make a meaningful estimate of the probability that future public policy will make people worse off for having chosen to sign up for cryonics. So what’s your rough estimate of that probability?
The problem with this is that, once we assign meaningful probabilities to Pascal’s Wager, the conceit succeeds or fails based on those probabilities.
I don’t see why that’s a problem. If somehow it were known that there is a 1 in 3 chance that accepting Jesus would lead to an eternity in heaven, then Pascal’s wager would start to make a lot more sense.
My estimate of a dystopian future in which you’d rather be dead than alive and, yet, somehow you are awakened into that world: basically zero.
That’s not an answer to my question, since it excludes some scenarios where you are worse off for having chosen cryonics even if you are never frozen. Besides, I don’t understand what you mean by “basically zero.” Is it greater than zero?
some scenarios where you are worse off for having chosen cryonics even if you are never frozen.
I don’t think I’ve seen any such scenarios explicitly displayed yet. Here’s one that I think might be plausible:
Assume that cryonics and organ donation continue to be technically incompatible
Assume that organ donation becomes “opt-out” rather than “opt-in” (true in some places now, e.g. Spain)
Assume that opting out for organ donation makes one ineligible to receive a transplant (not true now,
but I’ve heard it proposed) ( new information: something similar is inplace in Israel )
Under this scenario, the loss of eligibility for receiving a transplant would become a liability of cryonics,
even to those cryonicists who are never frozen.
My guess is that the odds of this happening are low, but not exceeding so. Perhaps 1% 10%? (updating odds for similar policy no-give-no-take policy to go into effect in the U.S.)
The scenario I had in mind (which is probably more far-fetched than yours) is that (1) good life extension technology becomes available; and (2) in deciding who should get the benefit of this technology, the powers that be decide to categorically exclude anyone who has ever signed up for cryonics.
It certainly could happen—but mostly cryonics is too small to be on anyone’s radar. If the powers that be decide to categorically exclude a group, it is more likely to be a larger group, and perhaps a group that is more of a direct opponent to the powers. (Also, I think you can omit (1) from your scenario—exclusion from current medical care would do much the same thing, with similar political questions, but without needing to posit a technical advance.)
It certainly could happen—but mostly cryonics is too small to be on anyone’s radar
Possibly, but it’s also possible that cryonics will grow to the point where it hits the radar screen. If a few prominent people sign up it could get a lot of attention.
Anyway, all that’s necessary for the argument is that there is some small chance that you will be worse off for having chosen cryonics just like there is some small chance that you will be worse off for having accepted Jesus.
Under this scenario, the loss of eligibility for receiving a transplant would become a liability of cryonics, even to those cryonicists who are never frozen.
I don’t see how this works. If you want the transplants, you drop the cryonics. If you want the cryonics more, you drop the transplants. You pick whichever option is more valuable for you.
Unless you can’t drop cryonics and sign up for organ donation once you learn you need a transplant, there’s no real loss here, even in this unlikely scenario.
Unless you can’t drop cryonics and sign up for organ donation once you learn you need a transplant, there’s no real loss here, even in this unlikely scenario.
Well presumably under soreff’s scenario, there would be some sort of exclusionary period in place to prevent people from waiting to opt in until just before they need a transplant.
no religion I am aware of has any real official anti-cryonics position yet
I think the actual heuristic used by a minority of them, more than the smaller minority who admit it, is to oppose things unless they are religiously endorsed. For this reason I partially disagree with this select portion of your post. I endorse the rest.
Geek’s Wager would require me to argue, albeit slyly, that cryonics should be preferred over other entropy-defeating technologies.
There aren’t any, at present, and so it’s sufficient to characterize the set as not-cryonics because the set of post-mortem entropy defeaters contains only cryonics.
And, because it’s, you know, a pretty good slogan that wraps the issue nicely.
But if there were other options, like uploads or maybe a plastination-like preservation system, I’d probably not say anything, especially not anything glib. I would no longer feel comfortable telling random people on the Internet where they should place their bets.
The success rate of not-cryonics is a guaranteed zero.
I’d go with cryonics.
I don’t think the choice is as simple as choosing cryonics or ignoring life extension completely. I am very interested in the idea of life extension, but so far what civilization has achieved in those terms is relatively modest, given that the oldest person to ever live only lived to 122, and I probably can’t hope to even get to that. I would be absolutely thrilled to be wrong about this.
What makes me hesitate about cryonics is that it is so speculative. Perhaps it is possible to reconstruct a living brain from a cryogenically frozen one. However, I would want to have some expectation that this was so. To give an example, the ancient Egyptians believed that mummification allowed one to continue to live. However, as they removed the brain entirely, their strategy for life extension is not one I think you would be interested in investing in (even if no one was saying you also had to believe in Horus,Isis, Osiris, et al). Cryonics seems a much more plausible revival strategy than ancient Egyptian mummification to me, but I also think restricted caloric diets are more plausible than cryonics (given that this has been shown to work on a wide variety of species, even if humans aren’t one of those). You may think that restricted caloric diets could never possibly extend people’s lives as much as cryonics, but I think it is currently impossible to estimate the additional lifespan of a person successfully revived from cryonic extension. Your assumption, I’m guessing, is that this number would likely be large due to improved future technology. Once again, I think this is a huge assumption, and given the large number of things I could conceivably try, I think the best bet would be to first figure out, to the greatest degree possible, the answer to the following three questions:
Is the method a physically plausible way to extend the human lifespan?
What are the costs (in terms of money, quality of life, etc).
What are the likely benefits (in terms of added years of life, quality of life, etc).
And I’m not saying that a person couldn’t choose more than one strategy of life extension. For example, there’s no reason that a person couldn’t choose caloric restriction and cryonics. The only problem with choosing one or more of these (and other) strategies is that you don’t just have the possible benefits, but the very real costs. And the more strategies you choose, the more of those costs you incur (even ignoring strategies that would be mutually incompatible). With caloric restriction, an obvious cost would be that it would take more time and effort or money to stick to the low calorie, high nutrient diet required (you probably won’t find many restaurants or vending machines that serve the appropriate foods in the appropriate portions, so the only two choices would likely be to do all the cooking and meal planning yourself, or to have your own personal chef who is well-versed in such a diet). Also, if you do not have sufficient self-control, you would probably have to have someone hovering over you, forcing you to eat the right foods (significantly detracting from your quality of life and likely also a blow to your finances). For cryonics, the obvious cost is the non-trivial amount of money it would take. Maybe it would be better to find a way to store information about the brain in a computer until it could be restored. Maybe your brain would be better preserved in a jar of formaldehyde (although I’m hoping for the sake of cryonics customers that this isn’t so, some of those who had their brains preserved for science might then gain an unexpected benefit).
So no, I don’t think the success rate of not-cryonics is a guaranteed zero. I don’t even think the future success rate of cryonics is a guaranteed zero, and you could convince me with more evidence that it is not an almost-certain zero. I would consider the successful revival of non-human animals of increasing complexity through cryonics a great first step to proving its viability. And I need more evidence of the expected benefits only because I have ample evidence of the expected costs (nobody is saying cryonics is free). Opportunity cost means that I should make choices not only with the consideration of what that choice might gain me, but also what passing up my other choices might cost me. That’s why I think it’s a better strategy to give money to life extension research now than save up to give to cryonics specifically to freeze me.
I hope that helps to clarify my thinking on this. I am wondering, what experimental evidence in favor of cryonics do you find most compelling? Are there other life-extension strategies you have considered?
EDIT: Curses...my HTML tricks will do me no good here (goes off to search for message board markup tags...)
EDIT: Yay! Fixed! Thanks for the help, @Mixed Nuts and @nsheppard!
Notice the little “Help” link under the comment box ;)
Thanks! I’m glad people are being so helpful with this.
In looking over the comments here, there are a few missed points that I believe heavily shift the balance in favor of having cryonics arrangements. The first is that the need for “cryonics,” in the generic sense, is never likely to go away. While it is true that we can currently envision technologies to repair all of the pathological processes we currently understand, that does NOT mean that we understand all of the things that both can, and will go wrong with us in the future.
Let’s assume that aging is conquered tomorrow. Within some definite (but unknown) period of time you are going to fill up your hard drive—or your “soft drive,” if you prefer. Humans were not designed to store thousands of years of memories and experiences. And we may be doing just that, if the people with Superior Autobiographical Memory are any indication. So unless you are happy with eventually losing most, or all of your current memories, something will have to change…
A likely consequence of this limitation is that we are going to have to reconfigure our brains. I use this very conservative example, because it speaks to the NECESSITY of doing this. Probably most of the people on LW envision, and even desire, vastly more daring reworks of their identity-encoding hardware and software. That will inevitably carry associated risk. It is very easy (at least for me) to envision major and very complicated screw-ups in cognitive re-engineering that cannot be easily or rapidly sorted out. In fact, this sort of thing happens today on a small, but nevertheless sometimes lethal, and not infrequently very damaging way, when people become psychologically confused, or “existentially damaged.” A good example is when seemingly normal people get taken over by ideas, or become ensnared in cults. Is “deprogramming” a treatment, or coercion? Malware, either deliberately designed or accidentally created, which badly damages programs and data are yet another example. So, leaving hardware out of consideration, it seems likely that people will still get very nasty “software” diseases that do a lot of damage in a short period of time, and that require that the “system” (person) be shut down until a solution can be found. Nanotechnology will not solve this problem because the problem is a meta-problem that is intrinsic to complex systems interacting in an open universe.
I also think it will also be a long time, if ever, before damage to “hardware” substrates becomes 100% repairable 100% of the time in REAL TIME. As long as it is possible to envision pathologies that render the individual into a degraded and nonfunctional state, which current technology cannot reverse, then you will need cryonics, regardless of what it is subsequently called or what preservation technology is used.
My next point is that there are a couple of implicit assumptions in the foregoing arguments which are demonstrably not true. The first is that cryonics is a discrete, consumable product, like a bag of crisps, a candy bar, or even a computer or a radio. Or that it is like an automobile maintenance contract, or an insurance policy that pays off when you need it.
It isn’t.
All of those products and services can be assigned, with a high degree of precision, a probability as to how they will perform and what your likelihood is of being satisfied with them. They are fully developed products. And mostly, all you need to know about them is present, free for the asking in your culture in the form of “common knowledge,” information from friends and family, and, of course, in advertising. You pay your money and that’s it. Nobody needs to explain to you, or to or anyone else what a TV or broom are for, how to use them, and what might go wrong with them over time.
This is no way describes cryonics.
So, the first benefit you get by signing up is that you now have a proprietary interest in learning what it is that you just bought; and you will soon become aware that you need to KEEP LEARNING, because cryonics is an undeveloped, immature, and above all, experimental technique. I signed up with the Cryonics Society of New York (CSNY) when I was 15 years old. CSNY is long, long gone and I’ve been signed up with 2 other organizations that have vanished. If you can’t keep learning until old age or “death” overtakes you, you are unwilling to do so, or you are an idiot, then cryonics is not for you.
And because cryonicists are the most rabid and intense of the life extensionists, you will also soon learn that they are at the absolute edge of emerging science in this area. In other words, you stand to be the first to know about newly developed and developing technology to combat aging. That can either “kill you or cure you, “depending upon how good your judgment is.
Finally, non-cryonicists, because they have the view of cryonics as a developed product (like an automobile or a light bulb) have a similarly inaccurate and warped view of the odds. The odds of the Titanic sinking with the loss of 1517 lives were 100% on 15 April 1912. But, what if the Titanic were to have taken, say, 48 hours to sink? Depending upon how the passengers and crew behaved in that interval, the number of survivors might have gone way up, or way down.
There were a lot of smart people on board the Titanic—very clever and very inventive people. But they were panicked, they were dealing with a panicked mass of passengers, and they had very little time to react. Given 48 hours, and the willing participation of the best minds aboard that ship, how many people need have died, or would have died? Were there ways, other than the optimal loading of the inadequate number of lifeboats that would have saved lives? Would clothing those passengers consigned to the icy sea in multiple layers of clothing saturated in grease, shortening, or oil, attaching them to life-ropes, and rotating them in and out of the lifeboats, have saved additional lives? What kind of makeshift lifeboats or floating platforms could have been made on an expedient basis from materials on the ship, allowing additional passengers to remain afloat out of the freezing water?
THAT is the position of cryonics and cryonicists. The odds are not fixed to those calculated at any given point in time, because you are NOT carting off a discrete product to screw into your lamp, or to process your words, or to play your games on. YOU set the odds of success or failure to an amazing degree. [You also do this, to a tiny degree, for the success or failure of the company that you buy a light bulb or a computer from.] Cryonics is thus an ACTIVIST proposition. Customers can, of course, be customers if they insist. But in cryonics, as in any other market transaction (perfected or experimental) you get what you pay for. In the case of cryonics, the fees required for success are not even remotely reducible to cold hard cash alone. It’s going to all the composure, good judgment and raw intelligence we can muster to escape the sinking ship fate has consigned us to and make it that far shore where we can continue our journey through life, indefinitely.
Yvain has said:
Disease (and by analogy, malware) is dissolved here.
How convenient that the way to optimize life extension happens to be the same set of actions that would entail signing up for cryonics.
On odds.
I always enjoy reading your comments and from their length and writing I can tell you put a lot into them. Perhaps you’ll also put up shorter posts with single thoughts as they come to you, the way I and some others do, which would be great as well. LW has a high standard it holds ideas, arguments, and most of all attempts to persuade to, which is why I enjoy the site and hope you post more often. I think you would pick up certain valuable ideas quickly, the posts I linked to are related to the parts of your comment I quoted.
I’ll try to keep my response brief:
1) I respect the desire for precision in the use of words, and I understand that each culture has its own nomenclature and rules.Those here that I have seen so far seem eminently reasonable.
2) I have no interest whatsoever (and haven’t for many years) in persuading anyone to sign up for cryonics—including friends and family. While it is an understandable error, my purpose here is not to convince, proselytize, or recruit, but rather to identify minds that are useful to my current endeavor. They will not need persuasion—they will ‘know the lion by his paw.’
3) Forgive my levity, but in urging mono-topical posts of short duration, you pointed me to three dissertations dealing with a range of subjects within each essay, the shortest of which was ~1,400 words and the longest of which was 2,700 words—not including commentary.
4) For the record, I use the word disease in the context your writer specified: as .something unusual, abnormal, and I would add, deleterious to the normal functioning and survival of the organism. I know little about computing and have even less aptitude to learn. I use the word malware as software that damages or destroys data that the computer’s owner doesn’t want destroyed or degraded. I would add that given my predicament, when that happens it is a complex, difficult and thoroughly unpleasant thing to sort out which generally requires my machine spend time in “stasis” until the appropriate expertise can be brought to bear.
5) My posts here have been mostly confined to the subject of cryonics and were never intended to continue. I’ve really enjoyed the discussion and I’ve found this an interesting and rewarding forum. Many thanks!
I suck at being tactful and polite, particularly in this medium. I was trying to say I like your writing by saying you could add short comments to your repertoire, I hadn’t meant to imply you should decrease your production of long ones. That I genuinely enjoy your comments was not the sole motivation behind my writing what I did, I was trying to soften the criticism, and trying not to be rude.
I was also trying to make convenient for you what I was pointing towards, at the level of depth you would want it in, whatever that might be. That’s what I meant to do by having “How” go to link summarizing the content of the following link “convenient”, to present the same idea to the extent you cared to engage it.
My intent was to show that they are analogous, I wasn’t claiming you didn’t use the word that way. What the article shows is that the question “Is “deprogramming” a treatment, or coercion?” is misguided.
I did not mean to imply that you are here to persuade people to sign up for cryonics, if that is what you thought I meant. Rather, when people make assertions, they often are attempting to persuade the reader of their truth. I just did that in the preceding sentence, there is nothing wrong with persuasion! You are trying to persuade me of at least five things in the parent of this comment, this is not a bad thing.
Rather, advocating for something by asserting that it has no opportunity costs is not just non-persuasive, it’s anti-persuasive because it is either clumsy attempted manipulation or rationalization—artful manipulation I wouldn’t be so inclined to comment on, but I genuinely felt empathically embarrassed to read “And because cryonicists are the most rabid and intense of the life extensionists, you will also soon learn that they are at the absolute edge of emerging science in this area. In other words, you stand to be the first to know about newly developed and developing technology to combat aging.”
Perhaps false modesty, or sloth, led me to provide links to what others have said, rather than try to explain more directly what I thought the issue was and how it applied. Perhaps one consideration that led me to write a sparse comment with links is that I know how easy it is for me to miscommunicate over featureless text comments, and how little I can rely on my intent being understood, such that it is valid for me to enlist others’ words to help me communicate...apparently even that didn’t help me here. Alas, there is no law of the universe that reads: “when people intend to communicate, they are skilled enough in communication such that if only they try hard enough and have good intentions, their meaning will be conveyed”.
I honestly think that you, from what I have read by you, wouldn’t even have to work hard or think hard to avoid making certain mistakes. That isn’t an attempt to be nice, as I think any further effort I spend on that is entirely wasted in at least this thread at this point.
You are smart enough that I was embarrassed for you to see you make certain errors of reasoning, happy that they can easily be fixed for you, and that you have happened upon a place that can easily fix them, and happy that I have found such a useful place, and happy that other people here are good at highlighting parts of my arguments and saying the equivalent of “you are being a dumbass at the following places in your argument, and let me explain how to fix that,” to me without it being awkward or unnatural, and I’m sorry I don’t have that skill.
Sorry, you’ve spent a lot of time trying to address things that really aren’t problems. I was in no way offended, or put off. It’s axiomatic, but worth noting yet again, that correspondence in writing is a dangerous way to communicate, because it lacks the context of intonation, facial expressions, and other non-verbal cues.
The best way to deal with errors in my writing, thinking or actions, real or perceived, is directly, matter of factly, and with only such tact as common courtesy requires. Public statements can be dealt with publicly, privates ones are best dealt with privately...
I think this will also save you time (when you are correct), because a succinct critique of an error is a hell of a lot less draining than spending time and energy crafting a convoluted, or overly polite reply. I do understand that this site is about a rigorous way of way thinking.
Finally, in reading your response, I realize that my comment about why I’ve posted here extensively recently, and am unlikely to continue to do so, may have been misinterpreted. It should be taken at face value as the literal truth. My primary obligations in terms of time, energy and writing must necessarily be elsewhere for the foreseeable future. This is just the way it is and it has nothing to do with LW.
Thanks for your letter—I know it took a fair bit of time to write and I really do appreciate it ;and I appreciate even more the sentiments expressed!
What things could you possibly try in the present that couldn’t also be used in the future on revival? There are lots of things that could theoretically be done to extend lifespans which we can’t do now, but if any methods that are available now have similar effect, why shouldn’t people in the future be able to apply them to at least equal effect?
Besides, measures like following a low calorie diet are not exclusive with signing up for cryonics, although having lived on a low calorie diet for about a month, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t want to live even a normal human life span on one, since it meant that immediately upon finishing each meal, my mind would become preoccupied with the prospect of the next one.
The trick i found with low calorie diet was to eat less meals :) but that’s not as approachable for many people.
The point is that cryonics has a better chance of working than, say, placing a fried egg over your grave, and that’s something people find very hard to grasp or work with.
I wouldn’t disagree. I stated above that I find cryonics also more plausible than mummification as a life extension strategy, and I think I might place mummification as more plausible than placing a fried egg over someone’s grave. After all, a significantly advanced civiization could perhaps extract enough information from a combination of the person’s genetic material, remaining belongings, and statistical analysis that you could perhaps genetically engineer something close to their original body with it and then add memories sort of like what you think they might have had. I’m pretty sure the fried egg wouldn’t be nearly as helpful. My main objection to cryonics is that I do not find it currently plausible enough to pursue given the fact that it is costly, other possibilities exist, and I do not have sufficient evidence of benefit.
On a completely unrelated note, could you tell me how you made that wonderful link of yours? I would be most appreciative if I, too, could have magical linking powers.
The point of the fried egg quote is to say that cryonics has a decent chance of working—it’s the best bet given costs, not just all else equal.
The almost invisible “Help” link below the bottom right corner of the comment entry field explains how to get various magical powers such as linking and image insertion. The spell for magical linking powers is [text of link](link address).
Thanks for the very helpful commenting instructions! Magical markup powers unlocked! I have upvoted your very useful info on this.
As for pitting cryonics against a chthonic fried egg, I’m not sure that proves that cryonics has a decent chance of working, just that it is not completely implausible. I would be more interested in hearing more about what research has been done in this field, although I understand that is a time consuming task and I don’t expect for you to do any research in that area for me (although of course no objections if you wish to).
I am curious why you think it is the best bet given the cost. For example, it probably makes sense as a strategy for someone who is a.) reasonably wealthy and b.) knows they are likely to die very soon, but that’s because the opportunity cost will be greatly lower for such a person. Since they already have the money, they wouldn’t have to sacrifice as much in their (certain) current life to try cryonics for an (uncertain) future life. Also, being about to die very soon makes the opportunity cost of giving up investigation of other options considerably lower.
Still, I don’t think everyone has the same opportunity costs since not everyone lives the same life. I think learning a lot more about life extension is my best possible option, which should then be followed by investing accordingly. I think your comment reflects the feeling that cryonics has an image problem, and I would agree with that. I also don’t think it should have as much of an image problem as it does, even though I currently don’t have any reason to believe it will be overwhelmingly successful. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with trying whatever seems to be the best option given your own opportunity costs.
On probability it’ll work:
I haven’t done much detailed research. “Cryonics works” is the default given the history of medicine and what Alcor says; there could be a flaw or an outright lie in the case for cryonics that makes it deviate -I am not an expert. But the case against cryonics is non-existent. Why would experts not debunk it, if it were false?
On cost:
Robin Hanson has a calculation saying it’s worth it . I haven’t checked. Morendil argues that the cost (a few $100 per year) is very low relative to other expenses. Even if both arguments are false, cryonics still looks developed-country-cheap.
It’s a bad strategy for someone who’ll die soon, because they can’t get life insurance. Cryonics is cheaper when young and healthy.
On opportunity cost:
Research time doesn’t look all that limited. (If it does, why not sign up for cryonics with as little research as possible?) I’m not sure what other costs you’re talking about.
Life extension is a very good idea, yes. But it’s not incompatible with cryonics (unlike mummification and graveyard eggs); in fact it helps, because cryonics is best if you deanimate late (cryonics improves with time, and the longer your life expectancy the cheaper insurance gets).
If life extension techniques look so incredibly good that you put every cent and second in them, sure, go ahead and be a hero—but that applies to every expense, not just cryonics.
Thanks! Upvoted since your responses are highly relevant to my questions.
I’m first looking at the arguments for the science of cryonics that Alcor gives. I do not have much expectation that I can judge all their claims to be valid or invalid yet, but I will give my general impression of the 3 main premises they present on their site here:
1.) Life can be stopped and restarted if cell structure and chemistry are preserved sufficiently well.
Arguments for this are point are based on currently verified procedures such as reviving people after their heart stops, people being revived long after drowning in cold water, freezing embryos, etc. I assume this is the reason you say “cryonics works” based on the history of medicine. I would change this to say that the likeliehood of cryonics working is greater in the universe we live in, because we can now revive people that would once have been irretrievably dead, so it is not inconceivable that people could be revived in the future from some states that would be considered irretrievably dead today. I have no disagreement with this point. I would note that the ‘some’ in the previous sentence is important since it means that it likely matters what strategy is used.
2) Vitrification (not freezing) can preserve biological structure very well.
This is an interesting argument and not one that I was previously aware of, nor of the fact that kidneys have been usable after vitrification or that a cat brain briefly regained EEG capability after vitrification. I thought the pictures were very helpful in showing the structural improvements Alcor says have been accomplished in this procedure, and this increases my confidence that this procedure could preserve information. I will need to look into this determine in more detail what we know about this process. Alcor is pretty clear that the toxicity of the procedure prevents brains from being revived this way today, so I definitely want to try to understand that aspect a little more. It is good to know that the process has improved in preserving visual structure over time, however.
3) Methods for repairing structure at the molecular level can now be foreseen.
True, although I’m not sure if this is an argument so much for cryonics in particular as for finding the most successful strategy for preserving information about that structure in some way. Cryonics may or may not be the best way to accomplish this, and if the best way is mutually exclusive to this method, I think that would be an important piece of information in making the most rational decision.
I will need to look at the other articles some more in the future. I skimmed over them but have not yet had the time to think them over and formulate a response. Thanks for responding to my questions about the available research in the field, the costs, and the opportunity cost.
On preservation methods: gwern has an article on plastination. It’s compatible with cryonics in theory, but not currently in practice.
I distrust “this improves chances of revival with method X”-type reasoning, though. The argument for revival is more like “A huge advance among the many possible ones, only a few of which we can currently foresee” than “Scan and upload”. This encourages catch-all preservation methods rather than methods that optimize for a particular kind of revival.
So are you saying that you don’t think it matters if one method is better, as in having more known working components? I’m not sure I understand what method you are favoring here.
Revival method, or preservation method? I’m saying that the revival method that will in fact be used will probably be none of the methods we can foresee (scan and upload, molecular repair, light molecular repair plus organ printing, growing a new body) - not because there’s anything wrong with those revival methods, just because I expect a lot of currently unknown candidates to be developed.
This implies that we should use methods that minimize maximal corruption—corrupt connections a bit but not too much, corrupt cell structure a bit but not too much, corrupt ease of reversal (thawing is possible, unplastinating isn’t) a bit but not too much. That way, when we try to revive patients using a currently unknown revival method, the currently unknown parameters it cares about won’t be too compromised.
If we could predict the revival method well, then we should pick preservation methods that minimize corruption of the parameters it cares about, and only them. For example, if we’re pretty sure the method will involve destructive scanning, we should try very hard to preserve information exactly, but can go wild with other kinds of damage if they help with information preservation.
Okay. I see what you were saying now.
I guess to me it seems very important to figure out what would work in terms of both preservation and revival. I see that it could work out to just preserve the brain as well as possible—in some future universes we might imagine, this could work out very well. But I would be more inclined to think this was an easier choice if some of the uncertainty could be removed. I don’t at all mind if other people want to take this risk for themselves, and I hope it works out well for them. But I like to know more about a situation if I’m considering it for myself. I am very risk averse, and I can’t help but worry this could possibly take money I might need later for a medical emergency and then I would die and cryonics wouldn’t work for me. Or it would succeed, but those reviving me would be incredibly hostile. I want to live a long time—but I’m really, really hoping that much of that isn’t also while suffering inconceivable pain. It’s not that I think success is impossible; it’s that I like to know what I’m getting into, as much as is humanly possible.
Life insurance is more expensive than paying in cash. If that weren’t true, no one could make money selling life insurance. Yes it amortizes the cost over time, and amortizes the risk over the population but that does not reduce the cost of it. The opportunity cost of cryo-preservation is the same whether you buy insurance or not.
People who are young and healthy usually end up becoming people who are likely to die soon.
I’m guessing that’s why it’s a good strategy to get cryonics when you’re young and healthy.
Many of the rates quoted are for term life insurance, which expires and becomes worthless after a certain number of years.
How did you do that without spending any reagents?
You can escape the magic using backslashes. So to write [this], write “\[this\]”.
Not quite so as brain plastination is not-cryonics.
Interesting. I’d never heard of this until you mentioned it and I googled a short description. I’ll have to learn what this entails before I can comment more.
I have been working on a little essay about plastination, http://www.gwern.net/plastination—it’s not very thorough, but Darwin says he’ll send me what he’s written before on the topic of plastination/chemical fixation, which ought to help a lot.
Thanks! Upvoted for the useful essay link. I have started reading the essay to get more familiar with this.
Isn’t this basically a Pascal’s Wager for science fiction fans?
Not really, because it doesn’t take a tiny arbitrary possibility and single it out the way Pascal’s Wager does.
Well, Hyena seemed to be arguing that cryonics is preferable even if the odds of success are tiny. Agreed?
The main problem with Pascal’s Wager isn’t that the odds of winning are tiny but that it unduly privileges a particular tiny possibility. Perfectly straightforward expected value calculations will tell you that you should follow Pascal when you feed them “eternal bliss” as a possible reward—if you ignore all the points in metaphysics-space besides “generalized Christianity” and “business as usual”.
It’s a lot harder to argue that the space of cryonics outcomes includes some hidden options that the expected-value result doesn’t address. I have occasionally seen people speculate about a sadistic future that wakes cryonics patients up and tortures them for fun, but that seems rather far-fetched.
I think you make a good point, but if the probability of cryonics working is sufficiently low, then relatively speaking, there are a lot of bad outcomes which are not far-fetched. For example, religious fanatics taking over the government and denying life-prolonging medical treatment to people who had previously signed up for cryonics.
Is it really even as remotely likely that religious fanatics will take over and then do that as it is that cryonics would work? (I would think that discriminating against cryonicists, when no religion I am aware of has any real official anti-cryonics position yet, would be something like a billion places down on their TODO list.) Or are you just privileging the hypothesis?
In my opinion, no. But the argument I was addressing seemed to be that one should do cryonics, even if the odds of it working are tiny.
Yes, because there are positive arguments for cryonics working and not having negative effects besides the well-known ones. Fantasizing about religious fanatics taking over during your lifetime is about as sensible as fantasizing about another group of fanatics taking over and cutting off healthcare to everyone who didn’t signup on the grounds that their revealed preference is to die sooner. (Notice the isomorphism here to issues with Pascal’s Wager and the ‘atheist’s god’.)
I agree and that’s my main point: The case for cryonics depends on there being a decent chance that it will actually work. As opposed to some epsilon.
A useful point of comparison here is a part-per-million chance Looking at the other actions which cost a micromort, I’d say that if the odds were worse than a part per million, filling out the sign-up paperwork alone would outweigh the benefit. (My personal best guess is that the odds are closer to 1%, which, for me, is close to the break even point, mostly due to the financial part of the costs.)
I agree with that. However the term “tiny” can be misleading -- 1% is pretty small compared to what I would think reasonable, but would still be a fair motivator for a $28k expenditure if your life is valued at >$2.8 million.
Uh… more importantly: this scenario just reverses us back to the not-cryonics position because it’s simply a failure state for the strategy.
I don’t think so, since access to life-prolonging technology might keep you alive long enough to get access to even better life-prolonging technology, and so on.
But it which case you never get frozen, so I don’t see the point of this criticism.
Cryonics works like this: (1) you suffer “normal” death, (2) cryonicists move in to arrest all decay, (3) in the future, you may be revived using more advanced technology.
But if you live to see radical life extension, then step one never happens and so the others don’t either.
Well the question as I understand it is whether one can envision scenarios in which one would be far worse off for having signed up for cryonics, just like whether there exist scenarios in which one might be far worse off for having decided to accept Jesus. Agreed?
Not really. Pascal’s Wager’s domain is afterlives, about which we know nothing (either because they’re false or because no one can tell us anything). But cryonics has its domain over future possibilities, about which we can know things and so can assign meaningful prior estimates.
While we certainly can think of errant possibilia that make cryonics bad, they are notably errant, requiring us to posit a future incredibly unlike the present, the past and the kinds of changes we see in the world.
I’m not sure that this distinction is important to the argument. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that evidence is discovered which allows one to assign meaningful probabilities to the claim that accepting Jesus will guaranty a trip to heaven for eternity after one’s death. Let’s further suppose that this probability is roughly one in one billion. Would that change anything about the argument? I don’t think so. Pascal’s wager would still have the same basic flaws.
I’m not sure I would put it at “incredibly unlike the present.” After all, there is a lot of hostility to cryonics. And history shows that politics can be pretty chaotic.
Still, you seem to agree that one can make a meaningful estimate of the probability that future public policy will make people worse off for having chosen to sign up for cryonics. So what’s your rough estimate of that probability?
The problem with this is that, once we assign meaningful probabilities to Pascal’s Wager, the conceit succeeds or fails based on those probabilities.
My estimate of a dystopian future in which you’d rather be dead than alive and, yet, somehow you are awakened into that world: basically zero.
I don’t see why that’s a problem. If somehow it were known that there is a 1 in 3 chance that accepting Jesus would lead to an eternity in heaven, then Pascal’s wager would start to make a lot more sense.
That’s not an answer to my question, since it excludes some scenarios where you are worse off for having chosen cryonics even if you are never frozen. Besides, I don’t understand what you mean by “basically zero.” Is it greater than zero?
I don’t think I’ve seen any such scenarios explicitly displayed yet. Here’s one that I think might be plausible:
Assume that cryonics and organ donation continue to be technically incompatible
Assume that organ donation becomes “opt-out” rather than “opt-in” (true in some places now, e.g. Spain)
Assume that opting out for organ donation makes one ineligible to receive a transplant (not true now, but I’ve heard it proposed) ( new information: something similar is in place in Israel )
Under this scenario, the loss of eligibility for receiving a transplant would become a liability of cryonics, even to those cryonicists who are never frozen. My guess is that the odds of this happening are low, but not exceeding so. Perhaps 1% 10%? (updating odds for similar policy no-give-no-take policy to go into effect in the U.S.)
The scenario I had in mind (which is probably more far-fetched than yours) is that (1) good life extension technology becomes available; and (2) in deciding who should get the benefit of this technology, the powers that be decide to categorically exclude anyone who has ever signed up for cryonics.
It certainly could happen—but mostly cryonics is too small to be on anyone’s radar. If the powers that be decide to categorically exclude a group, it is more likely to be a larger group, and perhaps a group that is more of a direct opponent to the powers. (Also, I think you can omit (1) from your scenario—exclusion from current medical care would do much the same thing, with similar political questions, but without needing to posit a technical advance.)
Possibly, but it’s also possible that cryonics will grow to the point where it hits the radar screen. If a few prominent people sign up it could get a lot of attention.
Anyway, all that’s necessary for the argument is that there is some small chance that you will be worse off for having chosen cryonics just like there is some small chance that you will be worse off for having accepted Jesus.
I don’t see how this works. If you want the transplants, you drop the cryonics. If you want the cryonics more, you drop the transplants. You pick whichever option is more valuable for you.
Unless you can’t drop cryonics and sign up for organ donation once you learn you need a transplant, there’s no real loss here, even in this unlikely scenario.
Well presumably under soreff’s scenario, there would be some sort of exclusionary period in place to prevent people from waiting to opt in until just before they need a transplant.
I think the actual heuristic used by a minority of them, more than the smaller minority who admit it, is to oppose things unless they are religiously endorsed. For this reason I partially disagree with this select portion of your post. I endorse the rest.
Geek’s Wager would require me to argue, albeit slyly, that cryonics should be preferred over other entropy-defeating technologies.
There aren’t any, at present, and so it’s sufficient to characterize the set as not-cryonics because the set of post-mortem entropy defeaters contains only cryonics.
And, because it’s, you know, a pretty good slogan that wraps the issue nicely.
But if there were other options, like uploads or maybe a plastination-like preservation system, I’d probably not say anything, especially not anything glib. I would no longer feel comfortable telling random people on the Internet where they should place their bets.