What if the future is hellish and I won’t be able to die? (Current objection)
From this post (which is a great source of insight on many particular cryonics objections):
(5) You somehow know that a singularity-causing intelligence explosion will occur tomorrow. You also know that the building you are currently in is on fire. You pull an alarm and observe everyone else safely leaving the building. You realize that if you don’t leave you will fall unconscious, painlessly die, and have your brain incinerated. Do you leave the building?
Answering yes to (5) means you probably shouldn’t abstain from cryonics because you fear being revived and then tortured.
(This comment, including copying over text and links, was composed entirely without the mouse due to the Pentadactyl Firefox extension.)
That scenario is full of fail in terms of helping someone to weigh the issue in an ecologically valid way. Answers to the the trolley problem empirically hinge on all kinds of consequentially irrelevant details like whether you have to physically push the person to be sacrificed. The details that matter are hints about your true rejection and handling them in a sloppy way is less like grounded wisdom and more like a high pressure sales tactic.
In this case, for example, “leaving the building” stands in for signing up for cryonics, and “everyone else safely leaving the building” is the reason your unconscious body won’t be dragged out to safety… but that means you’d be doing a socially weird thing to not do the action that functions as a proxy for signing up for cryonics, which is the reverse of the actual state of affairs in the real world.
A more accurate scenario might be that your local witch doctor has diagnosed you with a theoretically curable degenerative disorder that will kill you in a few months, but you live in a shanty town by the sea where the cure is not available. The cure is probably available, but only in a distant and seemingly benevolent country across the sea where you don’t speak the language or understand the economy or politics very well. The sea has really strong currents and you could float downstream to the distant civilization, but they can’t come to you. You have heard from some people that you have a claim on something called “government assistance checks” in that far nation that will be given initially to whoever is taking care of you and helping you settle in while you are still sick.
You will be almost certainly be made a ward of some entity or another while there, but you don’t understand the details. It could be a complex organization or a person. There might be some time waiting for details of the cure to be worked out and there is a possibility that you could be completely cured but that this might cost an unknown amount of extra money, and its a real decision that reasonable people could go different ways on depending on their informed preferences, but the details and decisions will be made by whoever your benefactor ends up being.
That benefactor might have incentives to leave you the equivalent of “a hospital bed in the attic” for decades with lingering pain and some children’s books and audio tapes from the 1980′s for entertainment, pocketing some of the assistance checks for personal use, with your actual continued consciousness functioning as the basis of their moral claim to the assistance checks, and your continued ignorance being the basis of their claim to control the checks.
If you get bored/unhappy with your situation, especially over time, they might forcibly inject you with heroin or periodically erase your memory as a palliative. This is certainly within their means and is somewhat consistent with some of the professed values of some people who plan to take the raft trip themselves at some point, so there might actually be political cover for this to happen even if you don’t want that. Given the drugs and control over your information sources, they might trick you into nominally agreeing to the treatments.
You don’t get to pick your benefactor in advance, you don’t know what the details of the actual options that will exist to do the cost/benefit yourself in advance, and you don’t know what kind of larger political institutions will exist to oversee their decision making. You’d have to build your own raft and show up on their shores as a sort of refugee, and your family is aware of roughly the same things as you, and they could use the raft making materials to build part of a new shack for your sister, or perhaps a new outhouse for the family. Do you get on the raft and rely on the kindness of strangers or accept your fate and prepare to die in a way that leaves less bad memories for your loved ones than the average death.
Also, human nature being what it is, if you talk about it too much but then decide to not build the raft and make the attempt, then your family may feel worse than average about your death, because there will be lingering guilt over the possibility that they shamed or frightened you into sacrificing your chances at survival so that they could have a new outhouse instead. And knowing all of these additional local/emotional issues as well as you do, they might resent the subject being brought up in a way that destabilizes the status quo “common knowledge” of how family resources will be allocated. And your cousin got sick from an overflowing outhouse last year, so even though it sounds banal, the outhouse is a real thing that really verifiably matters.
Each of the questions in that post was meant to address one argument against cryo. The argument ‘hardly anyone I know will be alive when I’m revived’ is addressed by the second question. (Which I would answer “I don’t know, I’d have to think about it”, BTW.)
From this post (which is a great source of insight on many particular cryonics objections):
(This comment, including copying over text and links, was composed entirely without the mouse due to the Pentadactyl Firefox extension.)
That scenario is full of fail in terms of helping someone to weigh the issue in an ecologically valid way. Answers to the the trolley problem empirically hinge on all kinds of consequentially irrelevant details like whether you have to physically push the person to be sacrificed. The details that matter are hints about your true rejection and handling them in a sloppy way is less like grounded wisdom and more like a high pressure sales tactic.
In this case, for example, “leaving the building” stands in for signing up for cryonics, and “everyone else safely leaving the building” is the reason your unconscious body won’t be dragged out to safety… but that means you’d be doing a socially weird thing to not do the action that functions as a proxy for signing up for cryonics, which is the reverse of the actual state of affairs in the real world.
A more accurate scenario might be that your local witch doctor has diagnosed you with a theoretically curable degenerative disorder that will kill you in a few months, but you live in a shanty town by the sea where the cure is not available. The cure is probably available, but only in a distant and seemingly benevolent country across the sea where you don’t speak the language or understand the economy or politics very well. The sea has really strong currents and you could float downstream to the distant civilization, but they can’t come to you. You have heard from some people that you have a claim on something called “government assistance checks” in that far nation that will be given initially to whoever is taking care of you and helping you settle in while you are still sick.
You will be almost certainly be made a ward of some entity or another while there, but you don’t understand the details. It could be a complex organization or a person. There might be some time waiting for details of the cure to be worked out and there is a possibility that you could be completely cured but that this might cost an unknown amount of extra money, and its a real decision that reasonable people could go different ways on depending on their informed preferences, but the details and decisions will be made by whoever your benefactor ends up being.
That benefactor might have incentives to leave you the equivalent of “a hospital bed in the attic” for decades with lingering pain and some children’s books and audio tapes from the 1980′s for entertainment, pocketing some of the assistance checks for personal use, with your actual continued consciousness functioning as the basis of their moral claim to the assistance checks, and your continued ignorance being the basis of their claim to control the checks.
If you get bored/unhappy with your situation, especially over time, they might forcibly inject you with heroin or periodically erase your memory as a palliative. This is certainly within their means and is somewhat consistent with some of the professed values of some people who plan to take the raft trip themselves at some point, so there might actually be political cover for this to happen even if you don’t want that. Given the drugs and control over your information sources, they might trick you into nominally agreeing to the treatments.
You don’t get to pick your benefactor in advance, you don’t know what the details of the actual options that will exist to do the cost/benefit yourself in advance, and you don’t know what kind of larger political institutions will exist to oversee their decision making. You’d have to build your own raft and show up on their shores as a sort of refugee, and your family is aware of roughly the same things as you, and they could use the raft making materials to build part of a new shack for your sister, or perhaps a new outhouse for the family. Do you get on the raft and rely on the kindness of strangers or accept your fate and prepare to die in a way that leaves less bad memories for your loved ones than the average death.
Also, human nature being what it is, if you talk about it too much but then decide to not build the raft and make the attempt, then your family may feel worse than average about your death, because there will be lingering guilt over the possibility that they shamed or frightened you into sacrificing your chances at survival so that they could have a new outhouse instead. And knowing all of these additional local/emotional issues as well as you do, they might resent the subject being brought up in a way that destabilizes the status quo “common knowledge” of how family resources will be allocated. And your cousin got sick from an overflowing outhouse last year, so even though it sounds banal, the outhouse is a real thing that really verifiably matters.
That is an awesome metaphor :)
Each of the questions in that post was meant to address one argument against cryo. The argument ‘hardly anyone I know will be alive when I’m revived’ is addressed by the second question. (Which I would answer “I don’t know, I’d have to think about it”, BTW.)
[realizes he has been rationalizing] Oh...