I suppose the Less Wrong response to this argument would be: how many of them are signed up for cryonics?
LessWrongers, and high-karma LessWrongers, on average seem to think cryonics won’t work, with mean odds of 5:1 or more against cryonics (although the fact that they expect it to fail doesn’t stop an inordinate proportion from trying it for the expected value).
On the other hand, if mice or human organs were cryopreserved and revived without brain damage or loss of viability, people would probably become a lot more (explicitly and emotionally) confident that there is no severe irreversible information loss. Much less impressive demonstrations have been enough to create huge demand to enlist in clinical trials before.
That number is the total probability of being revived taking into account x-risk among other things. It would be interesting to know how many people think it’s likely to be technically feasable to revive future cryo patients.
X-risk is a fairly unimportant factor in my survivability equation. Odds of dying due to accident and/or hardware failure trump it by a substantial margin. At my age, hardware failure is my most probable death mode.
That’s why I have the Alcor paperwork in progress even as we speak, and why I’m donating a substantial fraction of my income to SENS and not CFAR.
It’s not that X-risk is unimportant. It’s that it’s not of primary importance to me, and I suspect that a lot of LW people hold the same view.
Alas, cryonics may be screwed with regards to this. It simply may not be physically possible to freeze something as large and delicate as a brain without enough damage to prevent you from thawing it and have it still work. This is of course is no big deal if you just want the brain for the pattern it contains. You can computationally reverse the cracks and to a lesser extent some of the more severe damage the same way we can computationally reconstruct a shredded document.
The point is, I think in terms of relative difficulty, the order is :
Whole brain emulation
Artificial biological brain/body
Brain/body repaired via MNT
Brain revivable with no repairs.
Note that even the “easiest” item on this list is extremely difficult.
LessWrongers, and high-karma LessWrongers, on average seem to think cryonics won’t work, with mean odds of 5:1 or more against cryonics (although the fact that they expect it to fail doesn’t stop an inordinate proportion from trying it for the expected value).
On the other hand, if mice or human organs were cryopreserved and revived without brain damage or loss of viability, people would probably become a lot more (explicitly and emotionally) confident that there is no severe irreversible information loss. Much less impressive demonstrations have been enough to create huge demand to enlist in clinical trials before.
That number is the total probability of being revived taking into account x-risk among other things. It would be interesting to know how many people think it’s likely to be technically feasable to revive future cryo patients.
X-risk is a fairly unimportant factor in my survivability equation. Odds of dying due to accident and/or hardware failure trump it by a substantial margin. At my age, hardware failure is my most probable death mode.
That’s why I have the Alcor paperwork in progress even as we speak, and why I’m donating a substantial fraction of my income to SENS and not CFAR.
It’s not that X-risk is unimportant. It’s that it’s not of primary importance to me, and I suspect that a lot of LW people hold the same view.
When you say “hardware failure”, could you give an example of the sort of thing you have in mind?
I imagine he means cancer, heart disease, &c.
Alas, cryonics may be screwed with regards to this. It simply may not be physically possible to freeze something as large and delicate as a brain without enough damage to prevent you from thawing it and have it still work. This is of course is no big deal if you just want the brain for the pattern it contains. You can computationally reverse the cracks and to a lesser extent some of the more severe damage the same way we can computationally reconstruct a shredded document.
The point is, I think in terms of relative difficulty, the order is :
Whole brain emulation
Artificial biological brain/body
Brain/body repaired via MNT
Brain revivable with no repairs.
Note that even the “easiest” item on this list is extremely difficult.