For the record, does anyone have a good website I can link my father to containing a reasonably persuasive case for signing up for cryonics? He’s a smart guy and skilled at Traditional Rationality; I think he can be persuaded to sign up, but I don’t know if I can persuade him. (When I told him the actual price of cryonics, his response was something like “Sure, you can preserve someone for that amount, but revival, once it exists, would probably cost the equivalent of millions of dollars, and who would pay for that?”)
The technology to revive suspendees will likely cost billions to develop, but who cares about development costs? What matters is the cost per procedure, and we already have “magical” technologies which carry only a reasonable cost per use, for instance MRI scanning.
The Future of Humanity Institute has a technological roadmap for Whole Brain Emulation which tantalizingly mentions MRI as a technology which already has close to the required resolution to scan brains at a resolution suitable for emulation.
Freezing is itself a primitive technology, it’s only the small scale at which it is currently implemented which keeps the costs high. You don’t need to look very far to see how cheap advanced-to-the-point-of-magical technology can get, given economies of scale; it’s sitting on your desk, or in your pocket.
If it is feasible at all, and if it is ever done at scale, it will be cheap. This last could be a very big if: current levels of adoption are not encouraging. However, you can expect that as soon as the technical feasibility is proven many more people are going to develop an interest in cryonics.
Even assuming no singularity and no nanotech, a relatively modest extrapolation from current technology would be enough get us to “uploads” from frozen brains. Of course, reaching the tech level is only half the story—you’d still have to prove that in practice the emulated brains are “the same people”. Our understanding of how the brain implements consciousness might be flawed, perhaps Penrose turns out to be right after all, etc.
Yeah, Penrose’s position that the human brain is a hypercomputer isn’t really supported by known physics, but there’s still enough unknown and poorly understood physics that it can’t be ruled out. His “proof” that human brains are hypercomputers based on applying Godel’s incompleteness theorem to human mathematical reasoning, however, missed the obvious loophole: Godel’s theorem only applies to consistent systems, and human reasoning is anything but consistent!
His “proof” that human brains are hypercomputers based on applying Godel’s incompleteness theorem to human mathematical reasoning, however, missed the obvious loophole: Godel’s theorem only applies to consistent systems, and human reasoning is anything but consistent!
I thought the obvious loophole was that brains aren’t formal systems.
I thought the obvious loophole was that one can construct statements of the form “Cyan’s brain can’t prove this statement is true”. (The statement is true, but you’ll have to prove it for yourself—you can’t take my word for it.)
Revival when first developed will probably cost the equivalent of hundreds of millions. You won’t be revived until the cost is much lower; if progress continues and UFAI is avoided, I can’t see how that can fail to happen.
Sure, you can preserve someone for that amount, but revival, once it exists, would probably cost the equivalent of millions of dollars, and who would pay for that?
It’s trite but it’s true that you usually ‘get what you pay for’. So that if cryonics really only cost $300 a year, I wouldn’t go anywhere near it. But then I know that it is hugely subsidized by people who obviously have a genuine interest in it working, so this is inconclusive.
For the record, does anyone have a good website I can link my father to containing a reasonably persuasive case for signing up for cryonics? He’s a smart guy and skilled at Traditional Rationality; I think he can be persuaded to sign up, but I don’t know if I can persuade him. (When I told him the actual price of cryonics, his response was something like “Sure, you can preserve someone for that amount, but revival, once it exists, would probably cost the equivalent of millions of dollars, and who would pay for that?”)
The technology to revive suspendees will likely cost billions to develop, but who cares about development costs? What matters is the cost per procedure, and we already have “magical” technologies which carry only a reasonable cost per use, for instance MRI scanning.
The Future of Humanity Institute has a technological roadmap for Whole Brain Emulation which tantalizingly mentions MRI as a technology which already has close to the required resolution to scan brains at a resolution suitable for emulation.
Freezing is itself a primitive technology, it’s only the small scale at which it is currently implemented which keeps the costs high. You don’t need to look very far to see how cheap advanced-to-the-point-of-magical technology can get, given economies of scale; it’s sitting on your desk, or in your pocket.
If it is feasible at all, and if it is ever done at scale, it will be cheap. This last could be a very big if: current levels of adoption are not encouraging. However, you can expect that as soon as the technical feasibility is proven many more people are going to develop an interest in cryonics.
Even assuming no singularity and no nanotech, a relatively modest extrapolation from current technology would be enough get us to “uploads” from frozen brains. Of course, reaching the tech level is only half the story—you’d still have to prove that in practice the emulated brains are “the same people”. Our understanding of how the brain implements consciousness might be flawed, perhaps Penrose turns out to be right after all, etc.
Yeah, Penrose’s position that the human brain is a hypercomputer isn’t really supported by known physics, but there’s still enough unknown and poorly understood physics that it can’t be ruled out. His “proof” that human brains are hypercomputers based on applying Godel’s incompleteness theorem to human mathematical reasoning, however, missed the obvious loophole: Godel’s theorem only applies to consistent systems, and human reasoning is anything but consistent!
I thought the obvious loophole was that brains aren’t formal systems.
If you can simulate them in a Turing machine, then they might as well be.
I thought the obvious loophole was that one can construct statements of the form “Cyan’s brain can’t prove this statement is true”. (The statement is true, but you’ll have to prove it for yourself—you can’t take my word for it.)
Revival when first developed will probably cost the equivalent of hundreds of millions. You won’t be revived until the cost is much lower; if progress continues and UFAI is avoided, I can’t see how that can fail to happen.
Try You Only Live Twice ( http://lesswrong.com/lw/wq/you_only_live_twice/ ) perhaps?
It’s trite but it’s true that you usually ‘get what you pay for’. So that if cryonics really only cost $300 a year, I wouldn’t go anywhere near it. But then I know that it is hugely subsidized by people who obviously have a genuine interest in it working, so this is inconclusive.