I’m not sure what a broad search for objections really buys you. From my perspective there is a “basic cryonics scenario” and a smallish number of variants. If you pick a scenario which is a good compromise between maximally plausible and maximally inconvenient, you should flush out most of the key points where things can go wrong.
The basic scenario might be something like this:
I sign up for cryonics and life insurance
I keep up with my payments for a few years
I get run over by a car
I am rushed to the hospital and die there
I am transferred to the care of a funeral director in France
the required paperwork gets completed
my body is packed in ice and shipped by air to the US
I am prepared for suspension, sustaining inevitable damage
years pass, during which the facility stays viable
a revival procedure is developed and becomes cheap
surviving relatives fund my revival
I blink, smile and say “OK, let’s go see what’s changed”
I turn out to be the same person, continuous with the old me
that new life turns out to be enjoyable enough
There are shorter alternative scenarios, such as the ones in which you pay for the insurance but never need it owing to life extension and other technology catching up faster than expected, so that you never actually execute your suspension contract. You’d turn up fewer reasons not to do it if you only examined those, so it makes sense to look at the scenario that exercises the greater number of options for things to go wrong. On the other hand, we shouldn’t burden the scenario with extraneous details, such as major changes in the legal status of cryonics facilities, etc. These should be accounted for by a “background uncertainty” about what the relatively far future holds in store.
The backbone of our argument map is that outline above, perhaps with more “near” details filled in as we go back over that insanely long discussion thread.
The research articles are only likely to help us out with the major theoretical issue, which is “How much of your personality is erased through damage done by death, suspension and revival.” Answers range from “all” to “none” and hinge partly on philosophical stances, such as whether you believe personality is equivalent to information encoded in the brain.
All that is definitely part of the decision tree, but seems only a small part of the story. They are things we won’t be able to do much about. The interesting part of the tree is the things we could do something about. As you noted, if cryonics works in principle but is unaffordable or runs into tricky practical problems such as getting your body moved about, you’re no longer weighing just a money cost against a philosophical possibility; you’re weighing the much larger hassle cost of changing your life plans (e.g. moving to the US sooner or later, or setting yourself a goal of getting rich), and that changes the equation drastically.
I’m not sure what a broad search for objections really buys you. From my perspective there is a “basic cryonics scenario” and a smallish number of variants. If you pick a scenario which is a good compromise between maximally plausible and maximally inconvenient, you should flush out most of the key points where things can go wrong.
The basic scenario might be something like this:
I sign up for cryonics and life insurance
I keep up with my payments for a few years
I get run over by a car
I am rushed to the hospital and die there
I am transferred to the care of a funeral director in France
the required paperwork gets completed
my body is packed in ice and shipped by air to the US
I am prepared for suspension, sustaining inevitable damage
years pass, during which the facility stays viable
a revival procedure is developed and becomes cheap
surviving relatives fund my revival
I blink, smile and say “OK, let’s go see what’s changed”
I turn out to be the same person, continuous with the old me
that new life turns out to be enjoyable enough
There are shorter alternative scenarios, such as the ones in which you pay for the insurance but never need it owing to life extension and other technology catching up faster than expected, so that you never actually execute your suspension contract. You’d turn up fewer reasons not to do it if you only examined those, so it makes sense to look at the scenario that exercises the greater number of options for things to go wrong. On the other hand, we shouldn’t burden the scenario with extraneous details, such as major changes in the legal status of cryonics facilities, etc. These should be accounted for by a “background uncertainty” about what the relatively far future holds in store.
The backbone of our argument map is that outline above, perhaps with more “near” details filled in as we go back over that insanely long discussion thread.
The research articles are only likely to help us out with the major theoretical issue, which is “How much of your personality is erased through damage done by death, suspension and revival.” Answers range from “all” to “none” and hinge partly on philosophical stances, such as whether you believe personality is equivalent to information encoded in the brain.
All that is definitely part of the decision tree, but seems only a small part of the story. They are things we won’t be able to do much about. The interesting part of the tree is the things we could do something about. As you noted, if cryonics works in principle but is unaffordable or runs into tricky practical problems such as getting your body moved about, you’re no longer weighing just a money cost against a philosophical possibility; you’re weighing the much larger hassle cost of changing your life plans (e.g. moving to the US sooner or later, or setting yourself a goal of getting rich), and that changes the equation drastically.