1) I think it’s important to keep in mind that consciousness might not be determined on the neuronal level. It might be determined at the atomic or subatomic level. It’s encouraging that there are cases of people losing consciousness for various reasons (http://www.alcor.org/sciencefaq.htm) who regain consciousness, but we don’t know how cryogenic freezing or how death change the equation.
2) We don’t know what happens when we die, and how to value that. For example, personally, I rarely remember my dreams. If I didn’t know better, I’d think that I just go unconscious every night, and wake up conscious. But, it turns out that every night I experience dreams. Which means that… in a way… I have multiple conscious experiences every night—I just don’t remember them. How do we know that dying isn’t like this? On a very basic and fundamental level, we don’t understand what happens to make us conscious. For this reason, dying seems to me like a big question mark in the equation of calculating expected utility values.
My opinion is that death being a question mark gets an expected utility value of zero (could be good, bad, nothingness… idk), and that cryonics get a slight/moderate positive expected utility value. But I still feel very uneasy about all of this. I feel like I’m making a decision about something with tremendous importance (eternity), and have frighteningly little information about it (death, efficacy of cryonics). Other people seem to be relatively comfortable just choosing cryonics and not thinking twice, and I don’t know why this is.
On #1: smart people have looked for atomic or subatomic events that could make our consciousness non-classical. They’ve found none. As far as I’m concerned, this is a dead hypothesis. But of course others may disagree.
On #2: not to put too fine a point on it, but all the evidence says death acts just like damaging part of the brain—it stops working—only applied to the whole brain. The thought of some consciousness persisting in the absence of all known function is rather horrifying, now that I come to think of it that way! Happily, we have no reason at all to think it’s true.
1) I think it’s important to keep in mind that consciousness might not be determined on the neuronal level. It might be determined at the atomic or subatomic level. It’s encouraging that there are cases of people losing consciousness for various reasons (http://www.alcor.org/sciencefaq.htm) who regain consciousness, but we don’t know how cryogenic freezing or how death change the equation.
2) We don’t know what happens when we die, and how to value that. For example, personally, I rarely remember my dreams. If I didn’t know better, I’d think that I just go unconscious every night, and wake up conscious. But, it turns out that every night I experience dreams. Which means that… in a way… I have multiple conscious experiences every night—I just don’t remember them. How do we know that dying isn’t like this? On a very basic and fundamental level, we don’t understand what happens to make us conscious. For this reason, dying seems to me like a big question mark in the equation of calculating expected utility values.
My opinion is that death being a question mark gets an expected utility value of zero (could be good, bad, nothingness… idk), and that cryonics get a slight/moderate positive expected utility value. But I still feel very uneasy about all of this. I feel like I’m making a decision about something with tremendous importance (eternity), and have frighteningly little information about it (death, efficacy of cryonics). Other people seem to be relatively comfortable just choosing cryonics and not thinking twice, and I don’t know why this is.
On #1: smart people have looked for atomic or subatomic events that could make our consciousness non-classical. They’ve found none. As far as I’m concerned, this is a dead hypothesis. But of course others may disagree.
On #2: not to put too fine a point on it, but all the evidence says death acts just like damaging part of the brain—it stops working—only applied to the whole brain. The thought of some consciousness persisting in the absence of all known function is rather horrifying, now that I come to think of it that way! Happily, we have no reason at all to think it’s true.