In spare hours every month or three, I’ve been working on a questionnaire and calculation system to elicit background beliefs about cryonics so as to be able to capture people’s opinions about the value of cryonics (even if they are “I would pay money to avoid it because it sounds really cold”). The idea is to be able to give this instrument to lots of people and let a sort of “wisdom the the crowds” process work on each separate element of the value calculation and then be able to play some of the insights back for specific people to bring them into some kind of sane conclusion on the subject, fixing their “outlier beliefs” on particular questions by showing them information many other people thought lead to different conclusions. I totally do not have this in final form but it has helped me form more than normally educated opinions on the subject.
From what I can tell, the place I part company with people who have already signed up without substantial calculation was in the estimate of the long term value of post-resuscitation life. (Well, that and I don’t like the investment options normally used to pay for it, given other possible uses for my time and money. If life insurance options were held constant and 10-year 20% real return TIPS were for sale, it would probably be a slam dunk yes to get 10 year term cryo-policy and pour money into the TIPS.)
A lot of people seem to assign basically infinite value to their own post-resuscitation life. One basis for this is that they simply take continued existence as the most fundamental value there is, a sort of “there is no amount of money a person wouldn’t pay for a medical treatment that would give them some chance versus no chance” attitude. I don’t share this attitude. There are things I’d die for (thermodynamic obliteration death, not just heart/brain cessation), and some of these things could be accomplished by relatively prosaic amounts of money like $500 million, hence it seems clear to me that my life is probably worth less than this. To me, people who have an infinitely self-valuing attitude seem like immortalist versions of utility monsters, and so it doesn’t seem like a compelling pitch on a virtue ethical basis… though I imagine that someone could produce some sort of “poetry” to change my aesthetic responses somehow?
The other way people get an almost infinite value is to believe that intentional or negligent death would never happen post-resuscitation (no suicide, no murder, no accidents) and thus they expect to happily live for something like a trillion years, and any fraction of a chance at this is “worth it”. This argument seems somewhat plausible to me, and it is my basis for continuing to think that the value of information on cryonics is kind of high, especially if I can develop an inter-subjectively compelling instrument for spelling out the value calculation for many people that is consistent with this reason. It seems like a factual question and if the conclusion comes out a certain way, and people can be convinced of it by the iterated application of basically prosaic reasoning that as yet no one on the planet (including me) possesses, then the acquisition and deployment of this set of reasons would be worth trillions of years times billions of lives and it is one of the most important things that anyone currently alive could do, unless they can do something that entails this as a trivial consequence.
But my own gut feeling at this point is that there probably exists a small but non-negligible “probability that I’d commit suicide in year Y, for arbitrary dates” that would apply to me post-resuscitation unless my mind was forcibly modified by external processes. The ethical framework I’m partial to suggests that, in this case, my “mental self” would have become a mere puppet in the service of the manipulating entity (which was presumably racking up trivial-hedon-points (or some such)?)… but I’d actually prefer to die with some measure of personal integrity rather than end up in that kind of boring and moderately degrading infinite loop. I want something like “a self-directed life with narrative integrity”, not just repetition of some semi-mechanical notionally-point-worthy action. But if I don’t accept a self-modification to make suicide impossible, then the expectation curve for “me being alive N years after resuscitation because I still haven’t exercised my right to kill myself” probably becomes pretty small within a century or five (especially as my mind gets out into the zone past 130 where no human psychology has ever existed to permit interpolative base rate justification).
So at this point, the huge value of information argument still kind of applies and it is the thing that motivates me when I work on my questionnaire, but the thing I’m conceptually interested in is something like “speculative positive geronto-psychology” which is data-poor and hard to make progress in. What would a cognitively and spiritually happy 220 year old person be like? What would their intellectual interests be? Would they be impatient to reach 300 because the people that old seem world-wise and spiritually developed to them? Would it be creepy cradle robbing for them to be in a sexual relationship with someone who was merely 100 years old because the 100-year-old was so naive and vulnerable? Would they be utterly incapable of learning new technology or new skills because the the 25 year opportunity cost hit if they tried to change specialties was too much to handle?
It is now a stereotype for people to have a “mid life crisis” somewhere between 38 and 55. Is there something else with similarly noticeable internal structure (that would acquire a name once it started happening and people started noticing it) that lurks in human souls waiting to trigger somewhere between 138 and 182, like a “sesquicentennial crisis” or something? If there is such a thing, how many people decide to kill themselves over it? Maybe a set of inferences click into place at some point and everyone you might naively want to stay alive realizes: “Oh yeah. Nihilism. Duh… That was ironic” and they pull the plug. Presuming a mathematical model of psychological processes that justifies very long term psychological optimism seems naive. It could be I just haven’t found the right approach yet, but it seems like post resuscitation life expectancies of 300 years are vastly more plausible than post resuscitation life expectancies of 300 thousand years (and 300k really would justify a cryo-policy that had a 0.1% chance of working… it just seems unlikely to me that this is how things would play out).
So anyway, I don’t have any particular answer here. I’m still working on it. But my questions are no longer the ones I normally hear other people being interested in so I thought I’d gloss the issues here where they might get eyeballs to see if this causes other people to update or they have some kind of interesting feedback. Maybe my peculiar brand of virtue ethics is naive? Maybe I “should want” to become a subjective utility monster? Maybe being a hedon-puppet isn’t as ugly it sounds to me? Maybe I don’t really have a solid grasp of how to value a single object sampled from an exponential decay function?
Maybe I should just re-read Permutation City? :-P
I’m still uncertain about a lot of this. The value of information around the general issue still seems pretty high to me. But at the same time it seems to me that the people who have already signed up did so with inadequate philosophically-grounded financial justification. There are still many terrible reasons to not sign up that seem to be blocking most normal people, I’m not denying that… but I have never heard a clean and thorough positive case for cryonics on its own terms without having to stoop to address the many many quibbles raised by people (1) with major cognitive dissonance on the general subject of death and/or who are (2) in the grip of an ugh field around end-of-life planning. Just because many of those quibbles are wrong doesn’t mean the conclusion they argue against is right.
I’ve been working on a questionnaire and calculation system to elicit background beliefs about cryonics so as to be able to capture people’s opinions about the value of cryonics
Share a draft? I’d be happy to help. My cryonics probabilities spreadsheet is an attempt in a similar direction.
The odds a race of people ,living on a planet over populated as it is, will take the time effort and money to re-animate thousands/millions of human beings (or brains ) simply because those from the past “paid” for them to do so? Has a probability rate of nearly ZERO!
The idea that people actually pay to possibly (and unlikely) be re-animated in any form? Makes one believe that they are not only without understanding of how the life and death process works but also frighteningly unstable.
Once one is dead? They are DEAD. There are legitimate reasons for this that involve such things as the malfunction of organs etc.
Don’t believe congress in the future (if there even is one) will be arguing over proposed bills to help fund the medical procedures necessary to successfully re-animate human beings from the past. Wont happen.
Also the idea of bringing people/brains back to life without having to perform medical procedures in order to keep said subject alive? I personally do not believe would be possible for many, many hundreds of years if at all !
Meaning: you died for a reason and if they don’t fix it? You aren’t going to be resurrected successfully. There will be no star trek beaming device that resurrects the dead and if so expect hundreds if not thousands of years to pass before such a device is invented and tested to be successful.
All utter hogwash in my opinion.
For the sake of argument if said device was invented: What will the failure rate be by the way? Ever think about that?
Where will one live once re-animated? Where will one work? Where will ones brain be placed?
Will homeless shelters be erected for the re-animated? Or will the few “lucky ones” simply be used as lab rats once they are brought back to “life”? hhhmmm
Also, whose going to re-animate all of these people/brains and what are they going to be paid by the hour to do so? Do they receive benefits? Will they be offered insurance and 2 weeks vacation every year? LOL.
“Honey I’m home! my gosh what a tough day at the re-animation lab today!” How will those brought back to life be fed/nourished? Will they be kept in institutions? Or simply left to walk the streets jobless, hopeless vagrants?
Will there be a re-animators union run by the teamsters?
This is insanity people!
By the way your $100,000 dollars today will be worth about $1,000 tomorrow. In other words: You probably couldn’t spend enough money today to be successfully re-animated in the future. After all inflation IS an issue is it not?
This scenario would be similar to Ben Franklin paying $500 to be cryogenically frozen in 1782 so he could be unfrozen in 2322.
Do you honestly believe his $500 (useless old world dollars) would be enough to pay for his re-animation process in the future? The answer is a resounding NO. Our paper money will be worth nothing in the future as has been the case with most outdated over circulated currency throughout history.
Wake up people, honestly.
The only human beings they may ever consider re-animating in the future would most likely be those who made a phenomenal impact on society and on the world in general.
(i.e. world renowned physicists, astronomers, Nobel laureates and possibly leaders of nations depending upon their resumes).
Even this seems highly unlikely due to the cost, man hours etc. involved and even they would most likely be reduced to lab rats or specimens to be used by future scientists. Possibly a life spent in a plexi-glass enclosure for future human beings to gaze at in awe from 9-5pm?
If you honestly believe they (whoever they may be) ,in the distant future, would take the time effort and money to re-animate your average joe? Excuse me while I shoot coffee through my nose in uncontrollable fits of laughter !
what evolved society does such a thing unless it possesses value of some sort? How are you or your brain going to make it in a future of smarter, stronger and more advanced human beings? Will you be reduced to the local freak show at the future carnival? “Come see the ignorant weakling from the past folks: Resurrected Man!”
Someone like ohhh lets say: John Jones dollar store chain and BBQ restaurant magnate of Kentucky OR Jill Holloway trust fund baby of the Wal Mart clan? Probably wouldn’t make the cut unless of course they needed another guinea pig from the past to study. So those of you with questionable resumes don’t count on being resurrected. We don’t invest in bums today why would we in the future?!
If you pay for such a service? You are a naive and emotionally disconnected human being of the highest order plain and simple. 2+2=4 people. This is not rocket science.
Obviously some human beings self importance, fear of death and narcissism knows no bounds (OR any form of sanity).
If you buy into this obvious scam? I have a bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you as well …
What will the failure rate be by the way? Ever think about that?
I daresay people do think about that. But look at it this way: What’s the failure rate for revivification after cremation? What’s the failure rate for revivification after burial? I personally believe that these techniques have a potentially non-zero revivification rate (we don’t know for certain that we can’t work backwards from aggregate environmental data), but even so, freezing the brain whole is going to give us success probabilities which are orders of magnitude higher.
Also whose going to re-animate all of these people/brains and what are they going to be paid by the week to do so?
Speculating on future economics is less fruitful than speculating on future motivation. Here’s an emotionally moving argument, whether or not it’s accurate:
The economic and motivational behaviors of a society are flexible. Societies have existed which are motivated by scientific curiosity or concern for the well-being of their fellow man. Such societies are more likely to resurrect a cryonaut than a society which is motivated purely by selfish profit. This is a good thing, as it means that I am more likely to resurrect into a society which shares my motivational values, than one which holds motivational values which I find contemptuous.
Will they be offered insurance and 2 weeks vacation every year? LOL.
This is, again, an emotional rather than a factual argument—you are attempting to force people’s imagination to conjure familiar images of present-day economic working conditions. Statistically, the future is very unlikely to look like the present—note that the present, at any given point in history, looked very unlike its own past.
Will there be a re-animators union run by the teamsters? This is insanity people!
Again with the exclamation points. Also, mentioning union politics automatically hooks into people’s political pack instincts, which degrades rational reasoning abilities. People here know this, so they tend to discount arguments which attempt to exploit such hooks.
By the way your $100,000 dollars today will be worth about $1,000 tomorrow. In other words: You probably couldn’t spend enough money today to be successfully re-animated in the future.
That would be like Ben Franklin paying $500 to be cryogenically frozen in 1782 so he could be unfrozen in 2322. Do you honestly believe his $500 (useless old world dollars) would be enough to pay for his re-animation process in the future? The answer is NO.
Are you certain you understand how compound interest and investment work? This is directly from Wikipedia:
Franklin bequeathed £1,000 (about $4,400 at the time, or about $112,000 in 2011 dollars[139] each to the cities of Boston and Philadelphia, in trust to gather interest for 200 years. The trust began in 1785 when the French mathematician Charles-Joseph Mathon de la Cour, who admired Franklin greatly, wrote a friendly parody of Franklin’s “Poor Richard’s Almanack” called “Fortunate Richard.” The main character leaves a smallish amount of money in his will, five lots of 100 livres, to collect interest over one, two, three, four or five full centuries, with the resulting astronomical sums to be spent on impossibly elaborate utopian projects.[140] Franklin, who was 79 years old at the time, wrote thanking him for a great idea and telling him that he had decided to leave a bequest of 1,000 pounds each to his native Boston and his adopted Philadelphia. As of 1990, more than $2,000,000 had accumulated in Franklin’s Philadelphia trust, which had loaned the money to local residents. From 1940 to 1990, the money was used mostly for mortgage loans. When the trust came due, Philadelphia decided to spend it on scholarships for local high school students. Franklin’s Boston trust fund accumulated almost $5,000,000 during that same time; at the end of its first 100 years a portion was allocated to help establish a trade school that became the Franklin Institute of Boston and the whole fund was later dedicated to supporting this institute.
Also, are you certain that you know how future economies will operate? “Money” may not necessarily continue to be a prime motivator.
Wake up people, honestly.
Continuing to show contempt for your audience is an excellent dominance display, but very poor at engaging rational thinking skills. Again—this site is about rational thinking skills. You will not do well to play primate-level affect-manipulation games here. If you want to perform affect-manipulation games here, you need to appeal to higher order emotional responses (pride in the reader’s intelligence, for example, or wonder and excitement at future possibility).
The only human beings they may consider re-animating in the future would be those who made a phenomenal impact on society and the world in general (i.e. world renowned physicists, astronomers, Nobel laureates and possibly leaders of nations depending upon their resume).
This is actually a potentially valid argument, which (along with your “what will the failure rate be?” point) merits serious consideration. Historically, technologies are not fairly distributed. People should be having better discussions about the fairness of transhuman/post-singularity technologies. Your voice could lend valid input to that process, if you could learn to speak more clearly about it.
Even this seems highly unlikely due to the cost.
That seems patently absurd. There are MULTIPLE famous people from the past, that Hollywood has spent millions of dollars creating the illusion of “resurrecting”. If it were possible to legitimately resurrect famous people, I daresay some reality / news commentary channel would be willing to spend millions of dollars per head just to resurrect them, for no other reason than to make a guest panel for some commentary show.
Otherwise, If you honestly believe they would take the time, effort and money to re-animate your average joe? Excuse me while I spit my coffee all over the room in laughter.
This argument actually has a kernel of truth and importance to it, which you utterly buried in contempt for your audience. Why are you deliberately weakening your own argument, when you have important things to say? Nevermind your failure to respect your audience; you are failing to respect yourself. Why are you doing this? What you are saying is too important to cover in shit like this.
Someone like ohhh lets say: “John Jones dollar store chain and BBQ restaurant magnate of Kentucky” OR “Jill Holloway trust fund baby of the Wal Mart clan”? … If you believe such? You are nothing short of CRAZY.
Why do you believe that attacking an argument necessitates denigrating the arguer? Facts should stand on their own merits; why are you feeling the need to repeatedly insult the people you are communicating with?
If you pay for such a service? You are a naive and emotionally disconnected human being of the highest order plain and simple. 2+2=4 people.
I’m afraid I don’t follow this at all; each sentence seems to have no connection to the previous, other than to convey a vague emotional sense of superiority, hostility and disdain. In what way do you believe that will help you “win” this argument?
Obviously some human beings self importance, fear of death and narcissism knows no bounds (OR any form of sanity).
I would tend to agree.
If you buy into this scam? I have a bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you as well …
Hello! I’m going to expend karma to reply to you, twice (my response is too long to fit into one comment). I consider this worth it, on the off chance that I can impart knowledge to you that you will find useful. Please accept this as a genuine gesture of goodwill.
My God human beings can be ignorant.
Leading in with this statement is an emotional tactic. People on this site are far better trained to recognize emotional tactics than they are to respond to them. Rather than flagging “I have high status and a willingness to inflict coercive force”, your verbal hostility and boldness merely flag “I am attempting to subvert a rational conversation by playing to my audience’s dominance instincts”. This is a poor tactic to choose here, because people here are explicitly training themselves to not respond favorably to such tactics. Paradoxically, many people here actually respond negatively to such tactics, rather than ignoring them, because using those tactics indicates that you are not part of this community (i.e., not “pack”).
The odds a race of people ,living on a planet over populated as it is, will take the time, effort and money to re-animate millions of human beings (simply because they paid to be)? Has a probability rate of ZERO!
Nothing has a probability rate of zero. If you wish to use this community’s language (and it’s always a good tactic to use the language of your audience), you should rather say “has a probability rate of epsilon”. Also, capitalizing ‘ZERO’ and putting an exclamation point on the end connotes that you are speaking with a level of fervor and passion that most people here do not respond well to, when used to punctuate a numerical fact. Most people appear to respond better in this community, in my observations thus far, if you state your facts with as flat an implied affect as possible. Reserve your passion for your surprising conclusions; most people here respond very favorably to labile displays when expressing surprise—it seems to imply that you are excited at the opportunity to learn something new.
As a follow-up, if you actually state that something has a probability rate of epsilon, be prepared to have people challenge those numbers. This is a VERY math-based community.
The idea that people actually pay to possibly (and unlikely) be re-animated in any form? Makes one believe that they are not only without understanding of how the life and death process truly works but also stupid!
Calling your audience stupid only works if you are pulling on their dominance strings. Most people here respond rather poorly to having their dominance triggers manipulated this crassly. Also, you said “unlikely” in parentheses, immediately after declaring in bold terms that the probability is ZERO! in the previous statement. This introduces stress fractures into your argument, as “unlikely” has a very different emotional connotation than ZERO! - it makes it easy for someone to respond with “which is it? Unlikely, or ZERO! probability? These are very different things.”
Once one is dead? They are DEAD! and there are legitimate reasons for this that involve the malfunction of organs etc.
Regrettably, the definition of “death” is not so cut-and-dry. Anyone who has researched medical ethics is familiar with the basic arguments, but ultimately, it comes down to the fact that brain death happens separately from organ death, happens separately in different portions of the brain than in other portions of the brain, and that revival is possible—although statistically less and less likely—at almost any point in the process, even with current technology. We can assume that future technology will be better than current technology, of course, barring some kind of information-destroying disaster.
Don’t believe congress will be arguing over proposed bills to help fund the medical procedures necessary to successfully re-animate past human beings so they can actually live through the re-animation process itself! Wont happen.
In the time-scales we’re talking about, “congress” may not even be a valid target for speculation anymore. Even if they are, politics in this country have vastly changed over the past 40 years, 80 years, 120 years, 160 years, etc.; there is no reason to doubt that they will continue to do so.
In spare hours every month or three, I’ve been working on a questionnaire and calculation system to elicit background beliefs about cryonics so as to be able to capture people’s opinions about the value of cryonics (even if they are “I would pay money to avoid it because it sounds really cold”). The idea is to be able to give this instrument to lots of people and let a sort of “wisdom the the crowds” process work on each separate element of the value calculation and then be able to play some of the insights back for specific people to bring them into some kind of sane conclusion on the subject, fixing their “outlier beliefs” on particular questions by showing them information many other people thought lead to different conclusions. I totally do not have this in final form but it has helped me form more than normally educated opinions on the subject.
From what I can tell, the place I part company with people who have already signed up without substantial calculation was in the estimate of the long term value of post-resuscitation life. (Well, that and I don’t like the investment options normally used to pay for it, given other possible uses for my time and money. If life insurance options were held constant and 10-year 20% real return TIPS were for sale, it would probably be a slam dunk yes to get 10 year term cryo-policy and pour money into the TIPS.)
A lot of people seem to assign basically infinite value to their own post-resuscitation life. One basis for this is that they simply take continued existence as the most fundamental value there is, a sort of “there is no amount of money a person wouldn’t pay for a medical treatment that would give them some chance versus no chance” attitude. I don’t share this attitude. There are things I’d die for (thermodynamic obliteration death, not just heart/brain cessation), and some of these things could be accomplished by relatively prosaic amounts of money like $500 million, hence it seems clear to me that my life is probably worth less than this. To me, people who have an infinitely self-valuing attitude seem like immortalist versions of utility monsters, and so it doesn’t seem like a compelling pitch on a virtue ethical basis… though I imagine that someone could produce some sort of “poetry” to change my aesthetic responses somehow?
The other way people get an almost infinite value is to believe that intentional or negligent death would never happen post-resuscitation (no suicide, no murder, no accidents) and thus they expect to happily live for something like a trillion years, and any fraction of a chance at this is “worth it”. This argument seems somewhat plausible to me, and it is my basis for continuing to think that the value of information on cryonics is kind of high, especially if I can develop an inter-subjectively compelling instrument for spelling out the value calculation for many people that is consistent with this reason. It seems like a factual question and if the conclusion comes out a certain way, and people can be convinced of it by the iterated application of basically prosaic reasoning that as yet no one on the planet (including me) possesses, then the acquisition and deployment of this set of reasons would be worth trillions of years times billions of lives and it is one of the most important things that anyone currently alive could do, unless they can do something that entails this as a trivial consequence.
But my own gut feeling at this point is that there probably exists a small but non-negligible “probability that I’d commit suicide in year Y, for arbitrary dates” that would apply to me post-resuscitation unless my mind was forcibly modified by external processes. The ethical framework I’m partial to suggests that, in this case, my “mental self” would have become a mere puppet in the service of the manipulating entity (which was presumably racking up trivial-hedon-points (or some such)?)… but I’d actually prefer to die with some measure of personal integrity rather than end up in that kind of boring and moderately degrading infinite loop. I want something like “a self-directed life with narrative integrity”, not just repetition of some semi-mechanical notionally-point-worthy action. But if I don’t accept a self-modification to make suicide impossible, then the expectation curve for “me being alive N years after resuscitation because I still haven’t exercised my right to kill myself” probably becomes pretty small within a century or five (especially as my mind gets out into the zone past 130 where no human psychology has ever existed to permit interpolative base rate justification).
So at this point, the huge value of information argument still kind of applies and it is the thing that motivates me when I work on my questionnaire, but the thing I’m conceptually interested in is something like “speculative positive geronto-psychology” which is data-poor and hard to make progress in. What would a cognitively and spiritually happy 220 year old person be like? What would their intellectual interests be? Would they be impatient to reach 300 because the people that old seem world-wise and spiritually developed to them? Would it be creepy cradle robbing for them to be in a sexual relationship with someone who was merely 100 years old because the 100-year-old was so naive and vulnerable? Would they be utterly incapable of learning new technology or new skills because the the 25 year opportunity cost hit if they tried to change specialties was too much to handle?
It is now a stereotype for people to have a “mid life crisis” somewhere between 38 and 55. Is there something else with similarly noticeable internal structure (that would acquire a name once it started happening and people started noticing it) that lurks in human souls waiting to trigger somewhere between 138 and 182, like a “sesquicentennial crisis” or something? If there is such a thing, how many people decide to kill themselves over it? Maybe a set of inferences click into place at some point and everyone you might naively want to stay alive realizes: “Oh yeah. Nihilism. Duh… That was ironic” and they pull the plug. Presuming a mathematical model of psychological processes that justifies very long term psychological optimism seems naive. It could be I just haven’t found the right approach yet, but it seems like post resuscitation life expectancies of 300 years are vastly more plausible than post resuscitation life expectancies of 300 thousand years (and 300k really would justify a cryo-policy that had a 0.1% chance of working… it just seems unlikely to me that this is how things would play out).
So anyway, I don’t have any particular answer here. I’m still working on it. But my questions are no longer the ones I normally hear other people being interested in so I thought I’d gloss the issues here where they might get eyeballs to see if this causes other people to update or they have some kind of interesting feedback. Maybe my peculiar brand of virtue ethics is naive? Maybe I “should want” to become a subjective utility monster? Maybe being a hedon-puppet isn’t as ugly it sounds to me? Maybe I don’t really have a solid grasp of how to value a single object sampled from an exponential decay function?
Maybe I should just re-read Permutation City? :-P
I’m still uncertain about a lot of this. The value of information around the general issue still seems pretty high to me. But at the same time it seems to me that the people who have already signed up did so with inadequate philosophically-grounded financial justification. There are still many terrible reasons to not sign up that seem to be blocking most normal people, I’m not denying that… but I have never heard a clean and thorough positive case for cryonics on its own terms without having to stoop to address the many many quibbles raised by people (1) with major cognitive dissonance on the general subject of death and/or who are (2) in the grip of an ugh field around end-of-life planning. Just because many of those quibbles are wrong doesn’t mean the conclusion they argue against is right.
Share a draft? I’d be happy to help. My cryonics probabilities spreadsheet is an attempt in a similar direction.
Interesting and nearly impossible subject
The odds a race of people ,living on a planet over populated as it is, will take the time effort and money to re-animate thousands/millions of human beings (or brains ) simply because those from the past “paid” for them to do so? Has a probability rate of nearly ZERO!
The idea that people actually pay to possibly (and unlikely) be re-animated in any form? Makes one believe that they are not only without understanding of how the life and death process works but also frighteningly unstable.
Once one is dead? They are DEAD. There are legitimate reasons for this that involve such things as the malfunction of organs etc.
Don’t believe congress in the future (if there even is one) will be arguing over proposed bills to help fund the medical procedures necessary to successfully re-animate human beings from the past. Wont happen.
Also the idea of bringing people/brains back to life without having to perform medical procedures in order to keep said subject alive? I personally do not believe would be possible for many, many hundreds of years if at all !
Meaning: you died for a reason and if they don’t fix it? You aren’t going to be resurrected successfully. There will be no star trek beaming device that resurrects the dead and if so expect hundreds if not thousands of years to pass before such a device is invented and tested to be successful.
All utter hogwash in my opinion.
For the sake of argument if said device was invented: What will the failure rate be by the way? Ever think about that?
Where will one live once re-animated? Where will one work? Where will ones brain be placed?
Will homeless shelters be erected for the re-animated? Or will the few “lucky ones” simply be used as lab rats once they are brought back to “life”? hhhmmm
Also, whose going to re-animate all of these people/brains and what are they going to be paid by the hour to do so? Do they receive benefits? Will they be offered insurance and 2 weeks vacation every year? LOL.
“Honey I’m home! my gosh what a tough day at the re-animation lab today!” How will those brought back to life be fed/nourished? Will they be kept in institutions? Or simply left to walk the streets jobless, hopeless vagrants?
Will there be a re-animators union run by the teamsters?
This is insanity people!
By the way your $100,000 dollars today will be worth about $1,000 tomorrow. In other words: You probably couldn’t spend enough money today to be successfully re-animated in the future. After all inflation IS an issue is it not?
This scenario would be similar to Ben Franklin paying $500 to be cryogenically frozen in 1782 so he could be unfrozen in 2322.
Do you honestly believe his $500 (useless old world dollars) would be enough to pay for his re-animation process in the future? The answer is a resounding NO. Our paper money will be worth nothing in the future as has been the case with most outdated over circulated currency throughout history.
Wake up people, honestly.
The only human beings they may ever consider re-animating in the future would most likely be those who made a phenomenal impact on society and on the world in general. (i.e. world renowned physicists, astronomers, Nobel laureates and possibly leaders of nations depending upon their resumes).
Even this seems highly unlikely due to the cost, man hours etc. involved and even they would most likely be reduced to lab rats or specimens to be used by future scientists. Possibly a life spent in a plexi-glass enclosure for future human beings to gaze at in awe from 9-5pm?
If you honestly believe they (whoever they may be) ,in the distant future, would take the time effort and money to re-animate your average joe? Excuse me while I shoot coffee through my nose in uncontrollable fits of laughter !
what evolved society does such a thing unless it possesses value of some sort? How are you or your brain going to make it in a future of smarter, stronger and more advanced human beings? Will you be reduced to the local freak show at the future carnival? “Come see the ignorant weakling from the past folks: Resurrected Man!”
Someone like ohhh lets say: John Jones dollar store chain and BBQ restaurant magnate of Kentucky OR Jill Holloway trust fund baby of the Wal Mart clan? Probably wouldn’t make the cut unless of course they needed another guinea pig from the past to study. So those of you with questionable resumes don’t count on being resurrected. We don’t invest in bums today why would we in the future?!
If you pay for such a service? You are a naive and emotionally disconnected human being of the highest order plain and simple. 2+2=4 people. This is not rocket science.
Obviously some human beings self importance, fear of death and narcissism knows no bounds (OR any form of sanity).
If you buy into this obvious scam? I have a bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you as well …
I daresay people do think about that. But look at it this way: What’s the failure rate for revivification after cremation? What’s the failure rate for revivification after burial? I personally believe that these techniques have a potentially non-zero revivification rate (we don’t know for certain that we can’t work backwards from aggregate environmental data), but even so, freezing the brain whole is going to give us success probabilities which are orders of magnitude higher.
Speculating on future economics is less fruitful than speculating on future motivation. Here’s an emotionally moving argument, whether or not it’s accurate:
The economic and motivational behaviors of a society are flexible. Societies have existed which are motivated by scientific curiosity or concern for the well-being of their fellow man. Such societies are more likely to resurrect a cryonaut than a society which is motivated purely by selfish profit. This is a good thing, as it means that I am more likely to resurrect into a society which shares my motivational values, than one which holds motivational values which I find contemptuous.
This is, again, an emotional rather than a factual argument—you are attempting to force people’s imagination to conjure familiar images of present-day economic working conditions. Statistically, the future is very unlikely to look like the present—note that the present, at any given point in history, looked very unlike its own past.
Again with the exclamation points. Also, mentioning union politics automatically hooks into people’s political pack instincts, which degrades rational reasoning abilities. People here know this, so they tend to discount arguments which attempt to exploit such hooks.
Are you certain you understand how compound interest and investment work? This is directly from Wikipedia:
Also, are you certain that you know how future economies will operate? “Money” may not necessarily continue to be a prime motivator.
Continuing to show contempt for your audience is an excellent dominance display, but very poor at engaging rational thinking skills. Again—this site is about rational thinking skills. You will not do well to play primate-level affect-manipulation games here. If you want to perform affect-manipulation games here, you need to appeal to higher order emotional responses (pride in the reader’s intelligence, for example, or wonder and excitement at future possibility).
This is actually a potentially valid argument, which (along with your “what will the failure rate be?” point) merits serious consideration. Historically, technologies are not fairly distributed. People should be having better discussions about the fairness of transhuman/post-singularity technologies. Your voice could lend valid input to that process, if you could learn to speak more clearly about it.
That seems patently absurd. There are MULTIPLE famous people from the past, that Hollywood has spent millions of dollars creating the illusion of “resurrecting”. If it were possible to legitimately resurrect famous people, I daresay some reality / news commentary channel would be willing to spend millions of dollars per head just to resurrect them, for no other reason than to make a guest panel for some commentary show.
This argument actually has a kernel of truth and importance to it, which you utterly buried in contempt for your audience. Why are you deliberately weakening your own argument, when you have important things to say? Nevermind your failure to respect your audience; you are failing to respect yourself. Why are you doing this? What you are saying is too important to cover in shit like this.
Why do you believe that attacking an argument necessitates denigrating the arguer? Facts should stand on their own merits; why are you feeling the need to repeatedly insult the people you are communicating with?
I’m afraid I don’t follow this at all; each sentence seems to have no connection to the previous, other than to convey a vague emotional sense of superiority, hostility and disdain. In what way do you believe that will help you “win” this argument?
I would tend to agree.
You appear to be confused; how can I help?
Hello! I’m going to expend karma to reply to you, twice (my response is too long to fit into one comment). I consider this worth it, on the off chance that I can impart knowledge to you that you will find useful. Please accept this as a genuine gesture of goodwill.
Leading in with this statement is an emotional tactic. People on this site are far better trained to recognize emotional tactics than they are to respond to them. Rather than flagging “I have high status and a willingness to inflict coercive force”, your verbal hostility and boldness merely flag “I am attempting to subvert a rational conversation by playing to my audience’s dominance instincts”. This is a poor tactic to choose here, because people here are explicitly training themselves to not respond favorably to such tactics. Paradoxically, many people here actually respond negatively to such tactics, rather than ignoring them, because using those tactics indicates that you are not part of this community (i.e., not “pack”).
Nothing has a probability rate of zero. If you wish to use this community’s language (and it’s always a good tactic to use the language of your audience), you should rather say “has a probability rate of epsilon”. Also, capitalizing ‘ZERO’ and putting an exclamation point on the end connotes that you are speaking with a level of fervor and passion that most people here do not respond well to, when used to punctuate a numerical fact. Most people appear to respond better in this community, in my observations thus far, if you state your facts with as flat an implied affect as possible. Reserve your passion for your surprising conclusions; most people here respond very favorably to labile displays when expressing surprise—it seems to imply that you are excited at the opportunity to learn something new.
As a follow-up, if you actually state that something has a probability rate of epsilon, be prepared to have people challenge those numbers. This is a VERY math-based community.
Calling your audience stupid only works if you are pulling on their dominance strings. Most people here respond rather poorly to having their dominance triggers manipulated this crassly. Also, you said “unlikely” in parentheses, immediately after declaring in bold terms that the probability is ZERO! in the previous statement. This introduces stress fractures into your argument, as “unlikely” has a very different emotional connotation than ZERO! - it makes it easy for someone to respond with “which is it? Unlikely, or ZERO! probability? These are very different things.”
Regrettably, the definition of “death” is not so cut-and-dry. Anyone who has researched medical ethics is familiar with the basic arguments, but ultimately, it comes down to the fact that brain death happens separately from organ death, happens separately in different portions of the brain than in other portions of the brain, and that revival is possible—although statistically less and less likely—at almost any point in the process, even with current technology. We can assume that future technology will be better than current technology, of course, barring some kind of information-destroying disaster.
In the time-scales we’re talking about, “congress” may not even be a valid target for speculation anymore. Even if they are, politics in this country have vastly changed over the past 40 years, 80 years, 120 years, 160 years, etc.; there is no reason to doubt that they will continue to do so.
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