The whole point of arguing that cryonics is a charity, a social good, etc. is because it tends overwhelmingly to be processed as a selfish act. We don’t get warm fuzzies for purchasing cryonics the way we do when recycling plastic bottles or whatever. It’s not using up the fuzzy supply (or demand rather). It’s like cryonics has a huge blinking neon light that says SELFISH on it. But it’s not so overwhelmingly selfish in reality—it is the one thing that the entire world could jump on and live forever with. At least, I don’t see any compelling reason to think they couldn’t.
The chance of survival is probably much closer to 90% than 5% in my estimation, i.e. there is NO concrete reason to doubt technology can eventually reconstruct the human mind given a good enough morphological approximation to work with—and cryonics does seem to provide at least that. We can even move it further out of the danger zone over the next couple of decades by researching better vitrification, legalizing premortem suspension, and using larger intermediate-temperature storage units. The fewer morphological distortions and the more cellular viability remains, the better the chances are—but that does not mean they are bad to begin with.
Now, it may be true that XRR (my handy acronym for existential risk reduction) potentially saves more total lives. It saves the existence of the human race, in addition to all the individual lives it saves. But it bears mentioning that the chance of XR actually happening is a heck of a lot less certain than the chance of everyone DYING in the old-fashioned way from aging and the diseases of aging. Starting with the more well KNOWN problem makes more sense.
As to most people not being capable of being convinced of cryonics, I strongly doubt that this is the case. It’s a huge uphill battle no doubt but given enough dollars towards PR (or enough intelligently done promotion by unpaid advocates on the web) it can be done. For all their protestations, it actually corresponds well with most people’s actual values, to stay alive when given the option of doing so, to survive into the future, and to save their family and friends from certain death when given the option. And when it comes to being the sort of person who is aware of and cares about AI x-risk factors, cryonics is a good starting point.
Thanks for making this comment! I appreciate that you took the time to think about my points and explain where you disagree. I’d be interested in chatting with you sometime—feel free to PM me with your email address if you’d like to correspond.
The whole point of arguing that cryonics is a charity, a social good, etc. is because it tends overwhelmingly to be processed as a selfish act. We don’t get warm fuzzies for purchasing cryonics the way we do when recycling plastic bottles or whatever. It’s not using up the fuzzy supply (or demand rather). It’s like cryonics has a huge blinking neon light that says SELFISH on it. But it’s not so overwhelmingly selfish in reality—it is the one thing that the entire world could jump on and live forever with. At least, I don’t see any compelling reason to think they couldn’t.
The chance of survival is probably much closer to 90% than 5% in my estimation, i.e. there is NO concrete reason to doubt technology can eventually reconstruct the human mind given a good enough morphological approximation to work with—and cryonics does seem to provide at least that. We can even move it further out of the danger zone over the next couple of decades by researching better vitrification, legalizing premortem suspension, and using larger intermediate-temperature storage units. The fewer morphological distortions and the more cellular viability remains, the better the chances are—but that does not mean they are bad to begin with.
Now, it may be true that XRR (my handy acronym for existential risk reduction) potentially saves more total lives. It saves the existence of the human race, in addition to all the individual lives it saves. But it bears mentioning that the chance of XR actually happening is a heck of a lot less certain than the chance of everyone DYING in the old-fashioned way from aging and the diseases of aging. Starting with the more well KNOWN problem makes more sense.
As to most people not being capable of being convinced of cryonics, I strongly doubt that this is the case. It’s a huge uphill battle no doubt but given enough dollars towards PR (or enough intelligently done promotion by unpaid advocates on the web) it can be done. For all their protestations, it actually corresponds well with most people’s actual values, to stay alive when given the option of doing so, to survive into the future, and to save their family and friends from certain death when given the option. And when it comes to being the sort of person who is aware of and cares about AI x-risk factors, cryonics is a good starting point.
That’s my opinion anyway.
Thanks for making this comment! I appreciate that you took the time to think about my points and explain where you disagree. I’d be interested in chatting with you sometime—feel free to PM me with your email address if you’d like to correspond.