What I want, first of all, is to not be fooling myself. If cryonics is a way of having a copy of you made after your death, that’s not survival as ordinarily understood; it’s more like reproduction. If the present instance of me is still headed for oblivion, even if I sign up for cryonics, then yes, it does make me question the point of doing so. It means that cryonics is not a way for me to avoid death, and I may as well spend my time and energy on something else.
I can raise slippery-slope questions for myself: Let’s suppose, as I like to do, that the self is some lump of quantum entanglement residing in the cortex of a living brain, and let’s suppose that this quantum lump actually persists physically throughout the suspension process, so that revival really is like waking up, rather than being a matter of creating a whole new quantum lump and seeding it with the appropriate memories and dispositions. Is existence as a slumbering soul on ice really so different to revival as a copy, that only in the first case should I even consider cryonics?
And then there’s the issue of memories. If there is no subjective difference between memories laid down during a lifetime, and memories implanted in a fresh copy, should I resist scenarios in which “I” might one day become the second sort of entity, on the grounds that the copy isn’t really a fake, it’s just a “me” which came to exist by an unusual path?
Given all the uncertainties, I’m not in possession of the one true algorithm for deciding the right way to answer these questions. But I think, if you want to be realistic, you should not imagine that resurrection from cryonic suspension is a simple happy process of losing consciousness in our time and regaining it in another. It’s more that they will reconstruct you, just like Kurzweil reconstructing his father, or transhuman Conan Doyle fans “re”constructing a real-life Sherlock Holmes. And that has to have implications for the desirability of the procedure.
What I want, first of all, is to not be fooling myself. If cryonics is a way of having a copy of you made after your death, that’s not survival as ordinarily understood; it’s more like reproduction. If the present instance of me is still headed for oblivion, even if I sign up for cryonics, then yes, it does make me question the point of doing so. It means that cryonics is not a way for me to avoid death, and I may as well spend my time and energy on something else.
I can raise slippery-slope questions for myself: Let’s suppose, as I like to do, that the self is some lump of quantum entanglement residing in the cortex of a living brain, and let’s suppose that this quantum lump actually persists physically throughout the suspension process, so that revival really is like waking up, rather than being a matter of creating a whole new quantum lump and seeding it with the appropriate memories and dispositions. Is existence as a slumbering soul on ice really so different to revival as a copy, that only in the first case should I even consider cryonics?
And then there’s the issue of memories. If there is no subjective difference between memories laid down during a lifetime, and memories implanted in a fresh copy, should I resist scenarios in which “I” might one day become the second sort of entity, on the grounds that the copy isn’t really a fake, it’s just a “me” which came to exist by an unusual path?
Given all the uncertainties, I’m not in possession of the one true algorithm for deciding the right way to answer these questions. But I think, if you want to be realistic, you should not imagine that resurrection from cryonic suspension is a simple happy process of losing consciousness in our time and regaining it in another. It’s more that they will reconstruct you, just like Kurzweil reconstructing his father, or transhuman Conan Doyle fans “re”constructing a real-life Sherlock Holmes. And that has to have implications for the desirability of the procedure.