My own excuse for not signing up for cryonics is not that I don’t think it will work, it’s that I don’t particularly value my own existence.
Could you elaborate on this?
If you are depressed, or not enjoying life, or not satisfied with who you are for some reason or other, have you considered that if we get to a future where technology is vastly more advanced than it is now, that there might be ways to fix that and at least bring you to the level of “life enjoyment” that others who want to sign up for cryonics have (if not much more than that since we are currently very limited)?
Because of that possibility, maybe it would make sense to sign up, and if you get to the “other side” and realize that you still don’t value your existence and there’s no way to change that, then commit suicide.
Personally, I have a mild preference towards being alive rather than dead, but it’s not strong enough to motivate me to look at cryonics options. (Especially since their availability in Europe is rather bad.) This is partially motivated by the fact that I consider continuity of consciousness to be an illusion in any case—yes, there might be a person tomorrow who remembers thinking the thoughts of me today, but that’s a different person from the one typing these words now.
Of course, I’m evolutionarily hardwired to succumb to that illusion in some degree. Postulating a period of cryonic suspension after which I’m rebuilt, however, feels enough like being effectively killed and then reborn that it breaks the illusion. Also, that illusion is mostly something that operates in ‘near’ mode. Evoking the far, post-revival future gets me into ‘far’ mode, where I’m much less inclined to attach particular value for the survival of this particular being.
Finally, there’s also the fact that I consider our chances of actually building FAI and not getting destroyed by UFAI to be rather vanishingly small.
This is partially motivated by the fact that I consider continuity of consciousness to be an illusion in any case—yes, there might be a person tomorrow who remembers thinking the thoughts of me today, but that’s a different person from the one typing these words now.
Interesting. That thought process is how I made a case for cryonics to a friend recently. Their objection was that they didn’t think it would be them, and I countered with the fact that the you of tomorrow isn’t really the same as the you of today...and yet you still want to live till tomorrow.
Personally, I have a mild preference towards being alive rather than dead, but it’s not strong enough to motivate me to look at cryonics options. (Especially since their availability in Europe is rather bad.)
Do you think that there might be a link between these two things?
Aubrey de Grey often talks about the “pro-death trance”, and says that as long as people think that death from the diseases of aging is inevitable, they’ll find ways to rationalize why “it’s a good thing” or at least “not so bad”.
Do you think that if Cryonics was widely available where you are and that it was affordable (a hundred Euros a year life insurance, f.ex.) that this would increase your interest in it?
I have pretty much the same view as Kaj, I’d get cryonics if it was cheap.
If I did I’d want to put a note that I’d be okay with people using my brain for science when they needed it to test scanning equipment and the like. For some reason I can associate better and feel more positive about imagining papers being published about my brain than being reincarnated in silicon (or carbon nanotubes).
Do you think that if Cryonics was widely available where you are and that it was affordable (a hundred Euros a year life insurance, f.ex.) that this would increase your interest in it?
I often have this thought, and then get a nasty sick feeling along the lines of ‘what the hell kind of expected utility calculation am I doing that weighs a second shot at life against some amount of cash?’ Argument rejected!
This has to be a rationality error. Given that it’s far from guaranteed to work, there has to be an amount that cryonics could cost such that it wouldn’t be worth signing up. I’m not saying that the real costs are that high, just that if you’re making a rational decision such an amount will exist.
Given the sky-high utility I’d place on living, I wouldn’t expect to see the numbers crunch down to a place where a non-huge sum of money is the difference between signing up and not.
So when someone says ‘if it were half the price maybe I’d sign up’ I’m always interested to know exactly what calculations they’re performing, and exactly what it is that reduces the billions of utilons of living down to a marginal cash sum. The (tiny?) chance of cryonics working? Serious coincidence if those factors cancel comfortably. Just smacks of bottom-line to me.
Put it this way—imagine cryonics has been seriously, prohibitively expensive for many years after introduction. Say it still was today, for some reason, and then after much debate and hand-wringing about immortality for the uber-rich, tomorrow suddenly and very publicly dropped to current levels, I’d expect to see a huge upswing in signing up. Such is the human being!
Do you agree with the quantum physics sequence? This is the big reveal:
If you can see the moments of now braided into time, the causal dependencies of future states on past states, the high-level pattern of synapses and the internal narrative as a computation within it—if you can viscerally dispel the classical hallucination of a little billiard ball that is you, and see your nows strung out in the river that never flows—then you can see that signing up for cryonics, being vitrified in liquid nitrogen when you die, and having your brain nanotechnologically reconstructed fifty years later, is actually less of a change than going to sleep, dreaming, and forgetting your dreams when you wake up.
You should be able to see that, now, if you’ve followed through this whole series. You should be able to get it on a gut level—that being vitrified in liquid nitrogen for fifty years (around 3e52 Planck intervals) is not very different from waiting an average of 2e26 Planck intervals between neurons firing, on the generous assumption that there are a hundred trillion synapses firing a thousand times per second. You should be able to see that there is nothing preserved from one night’s sleep to the morning’s waking, which cryonic suspension does not preserve also. Assuming the vitrification technology is good enough for a sufficiently powerful Bayesian superintelligence to look at your frozen brain, and figure out “who you were” to the same resolution that your morning’s waking self resembles the person who went to sleep that night.
Assuming the vitrification technology is good enough for a sufficiently powerful Bayesian superintelligence to look at your frozen brain, and figure out “who you were” to the same resolution that your morning’s waking self resembles the person who went to sleep that night.
But I don’t think the person tomorrow is the same person as me today, either.
Point taken. Any interest in having your volition realized? This seems much more likely to me to matter and I do happen to run an organization aimed at providing it whether you pay us or not but we’d still appreciate your help.
being vitrified in liquid nitrogen when you die, and having your brain nanotechnologically reconstructed fifty years later, is actually less of a change than going to sleep, dreaming, and forgetting your dreams when you wake up.
I haven’t been entirely convinced on that note. The process of dying and the time it takes from heart stopping to head frozen in a jar seems like it would give plenty of opportunity for minor disruptions even granted that a superintelligence could put it back together.
I’m not sure if this has ever been presented as a scenario, but even if you are looking at many minor disruptions, physically speaking, there aren’t that many places that your neurons would have gone.
So, it is possible that many versions of you might be woken up, wedrifid1, wedrifid2, etc. , each the result of a different extrapolation that was minor enough to be extrapolated, yet major enough to deserve a different version. This would only happen if the damages have occurred in a place critical to your sense of self. I simply don’t know enough neurology and neurochemistry to say how much damage this is and where, but I’m sure that the superintelligences would be able to crack that one.
And your great grand children, being the nice sweet posthumans that we expect them to be, (they did recover you, didn’t they?) will spend time with all versions of their great grand parents. Their brains would be running at higher cycles and keeping intelligent conversations on with 10 versions of you will be trivial to them.
Most of my desires seem to take the form “I don’t want to do/experience X”. Those desires of the form “I want to do/experience X” seem to be much weaker. Being dead means that I will have no experiences, and will therefore never have an experience I don’t want, at the cost of never being able to have an experience I do want. Because I want to avoid bad experiences much more than I want to have good experiences, being dead doesn’t seem like all that bad a deal.
I’m also incredibly lazy. I hate doing things that seem like they take work or effort. If I’m dead, I’ll never have to do anything at all, ever again, and that has a kind of perverse appeal to it.
Because I want to avoid bad experiences much more than I want to have good experiences, being dead doesn’t seem like all that bad a deal.
This rejection doesn’t work: if the world of the future changes so that bad experiences don’t happen, and good experiences are better, it’s in your interest to see it. Furthermore, do you prefer your current disposition, or you’d rather it’d change?
I don’t know if I want it to change or not, but that doesn’t seem like something to worry about because I don’t know how to change my disposition and I don’t know how to go about figuring how to change my disposition.
You know what? Someone should just go hunt down CronoDAS and forcibly cryo-suspend him. It’d be doing everyone a favour. He’d get to live in a future where he doesn’t have to be geek-emo, a perceived ‘murder’ would be less shameful than a suicide for his parents and we wouldn’t have the same old hand wringing conversation all the time.
See you on the other side. (Or not, as the case may be.)
On the other hand, “we should (legally) kill this guy so as to save his life” is unethical and I would never do it. But it is a significant question and the kind of reasoning that is relevant to all sorts of situations.
No, I don’t mind at all. As long as you don’t mind that I don’t treat this specific desire of yours with sombre dignity. I do, after all, think a death wish as an alternative to cryonic revival where your mental health can be restored is silly and something to laugh at (and so lower in status and discourage without being actually aggressive.)
I don’t know if I can be “fixed” without changing me to the point where I’m effectively somebody else. And that’s not much different than someone in the future simply having a baby and raising it to be a better person than I am. Furthermore, if the future has to choose between resurrecting me and somebody raising a child from scratch, I prefer that somebody raise a child; I’d rather the future have someone better than “me” instead of someone that I would recognize as “me”.
(Additionally, the argument you just made is also an argument for getting frozen right now instead of having to wait until you die a natural death before you get to be revived in a better future. “If the afterlife is so great, why not kill yourself and get there right now?”)
The future will have this choice (not to revive you), and will make it against you if this turns out to be a better option, but if you don’t make it to the future, you won’t give it the chance of doing this particular thing (your revival) in case it turns out to be a good thing.
Again, you can’t be certain of what your preference actually says in the not-clear-cut cases like this, you can’t know for sure that you prefer some child to be raised in place of yourself, and for this particular question it seems to be a false dilemma, since it’s likely that there will be no resource limitation of this kind, only moral optimization.
I don’t know if I can be “fixed” without changing me to the point where I’m effectively somebody else.
I don’t want to get into a whole other discussion here, but I think people change a lot throughout their lives—I know I sure did—and I’m not sure if this would be such a problem. Maybe it would be, but comparing the certainty of death to that potential problem, I know I’d take the risk.
Furthermore, if the future has to choose between resurrecting me and somebody raising a child from scratch, I prefer that somebody raise a child; I’d rather the future have someone better than “me” instead of someone that I would recognize as “me”.
The cost of another individual might be so low in the future that there might not be a choice between you and someone else.
(Additionally, the argument you just made is also an argument for getting frozen right now instead of having to wait until you die a natural death before you get to be revived in a better future. “If the afterlife is so great, why not kill yourself and get there right now?”)
For someone who doesn’t want to live at all right now and would commit suicide anyway, then yes, I’d recommend getting cryo’ed instead.
But for someone who enjoys life, then no, I wouldn’t recommend it because it might not work (though having that possibility is still better than the certainty of annihilation).
I’ve actually been thinking about something similar;
What if I find out I have an incurable degenerative brain disease. At which point would I decide to get vitrified to improve my chances of being successfully revived by keeping my brain in better condition at the time of my death?
Nothing in ORS 127.800 to 127.897 shall be construed to authorize a physician or any other person to end a patient’s life by lethal injection, mercy killing or active euthanasia. Actions taken in accordance with ORS 127.800 to 127.897 shall not, for any purpose, constitute suicide, assisted suicide, mercy killing or homicide, under the law. [1995 c.3 s.3.14]
Nothing in this chapter authorizes a physician or any other person to end a patient’ s life by lethal injection, mercy killing, or active euthanasia. Actions taken in accordance with this chapter do not, for any purpose, constitute suicide, assisted suicide, mercy killing, or homicide, under the law. State reports shall not refer to practice under this chapter as “suicide” or “assisted suicide.” Consistent with sections 1 (7), (11), and (12), 2(1), 4(1)(k), 6, 7, 9, 12 (1) and (2), 16 (1) and (2), 17, 19(1) (a) and (d), and 20(2) of this act, state reports shall refer to practice under this chapter as obtaining and self-administering life-ending medication.
Could you elaborate on this?
If you are depressed, or not enjoying life, or not satisfied with who you are for some reason or other, have you considered that if we get to a future where technology is vastly more advanced than it is now, that there might be ways to fix that and at least bring you to the level of “life enjoyment” that others who want to sign up for cryonics have (if not much more than that since we are currently very limited)?
Because of that possibility, maybe it would make sense to sign up, and if you get to the “other side” and realize that you still don’t value your existence and there’s no way to change that, then commit suicide.
Personally, I have a mild preference towards being alive rather than dead, but it’s not strong enough to motivate me to look at cryonics options. (Especially since their availability in Europe is rather bad.) This is partially motivated by the fact that I consider continuity of consciousness to be an illusion in any case—yes, there might be a person tomorrow who remembers thinking the thoughts of me today, but that’s a different person from the one typing these words now.
Of course, I’m evolutionarily hardwired to succumb to that illusion in some degree. Postulating a period of cryonic suspension after which I’m rebuilt, however, feels enough like being effectively killed and then reborn that it breaks the illusion. Also, that illusion is mostly something that operates in ‘near’ mode. Evoking the far, post-revival future gets me into ‘far’ mode, where I’m much less inclined to attach particular value for the survival of this particular being.
Finally, there’s also the fact that I consider our chances of actually building FAI and not getting destroyed by UFAI to be rather vanishingly small.
Interesting. That thought process is how I made a case for cryonics to a friend recently. Their objection was that they didn’t think it would be them, and I countered with the fact that the you of tomorrow isn’t really the same as the you of today...and yet you still want to live till tomorrow.
Do you think that there might be a link between these two things?
Aubrey de Grey often talks about the “pro-death trance”, and says that as long as people think that death from the diseases of aging is inevitable, they’ll find ways to rationalize why “it’s a good thing” or at least “not so bad”.
Do you think that if Cryonics was widely available where you are and that it was affordable (a hundred Euros a year life insurance, f.ex.) that this would increase your interest in it?
I have pretty much the same view as Kaj, I’d get cryonics if it was cheap.
If I did I’d want to put a note that I’d be okay with people using my brain for science when they needed it to test scanning equipment and the like. For some reason I can associate better and feel more positive about imagining papers being published about my brain than being reincarnated in silicon (or carbon nanotubes).
Probably, yes.
I often have this thought, and then get a nasty sick feeling along the lines of ‘what the hell kind of expected utility calculation am I doing that weighs a second shot at life against some amount of cash?’ Argument rejected!
This has to be a rationality error. Given that it’s far from guaranteed to work, there has to be an amount that cryonics could cost such that it wouldn’t be worth signing up. I’m not saying that the real costs are that high, just that if you’re making a rational decision such an amount will exist.
Sorry, should have given more context.
Given the sky-high utility I’d place on living, I wouldn’t expect to see the numbers crunch down to a place where a non-huge sum of money is the difference between signing up and not.
So when someone says ‘if it were half the price maybe I’d sign up’ I’m always interested to know exactly what calculations they’re performing, and exactly what it is that reduces the billions of utilons of living down to a marginal cash sum. The (tiny?) chance of cryonics working? Serious coincidence if those factors cancel comfortably. Just smacks of bottom-line to me.
Put it this way—imagine cryonics has been seriously, prohibitively expensive for many years after introduction. Say it still was today, for some reason, and then after much debate and hand-wringing about immortality for the uber-rich, tomorrow suddenly and very publicly dropped to current levels, I’d expect to see a huge upswing in signing up. Such is the human being!
I agree with all of this.
Do you agree with the quantum physics sequence? This is the big reveal:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/qx/timeless_identity/
But I don’t think the person tomorrow is the same person as me today, either.
Point taken. Any interest in having your volition realized? This seems much more likely to me to matter and I do happen to run an organization aimed at providing it whether you pay us or not but we’d still appreciate your help.
Well, I am a monthly donor, and unless something unexpected happens I’ll be coming over in a few months to see what I can do for SIAI, so yes. :)
I haven’t been entirely convinced on that note. The process of dying and the time it takes from heart stopping to head frozen in a jar seems like it would give plenty of opportunity for minor disruptions even granted that a superintelligence could put it back together.
I’m not sure if this has ever been presented as a scenario, but even if you are looking at many minor disruptions, physically speaking, there aren’t that many places that your neurons would have gone.
So, it is possible that many versions of you might be woken up, wedrifid1, wedrifid2, etc. , each the result of a different extrapolation that was minor enough to be extrapolated, yet major enough to deserve a different version. This would only happen if the damages have occurred in a place critical to your sense of self. I simply don’t know enough neurology and neurochemistry to say how much damage this is and where, but I’m sure that the superintelligences would be able to crack that one.
And your great grand children, being the nice sweet posthumans that we expect them to be, (they did recover you, didn’t they?) will spend time with all versions of their great grand parents. Their brains would be running at higher cycles and keeping intelligent conversations on with 10 versions of you will be trivial to them.
Most of my desires seem to take the form “I don’t want to do/experience X”. Those desires of the form “I want to do/experience X” seem to be much weaker. Being dead means that I will have no experiences, and will therefore never have an experience I don’t want, at the cost of never being able to have an experience I do want. Because I want to avoid bad experiences much more than I want to have good experiences, being dead doesn’t seem like all that bad a deal.
I’m also incredibly lazy. I hate doing things that seem like they take work or effort. If I’m dead, I’ll never have to do anything at all, ever again, and that has a kind of perverse appeal to it.
I just wanted to note that your post seems completely alien to me.
Not to me.
This rejection doesn’t work: if the world of the future changes so that bad experiences don’t happen, and good experiences are better, it’s in your interest to see it. Furthermore, do you prefer your current disposition, or you’d rather it’d change?
I don’t know if I want it to change or not, but that doesn’t seem like something to worry about because I don’t know how to change my disposition and I don’t know how to go about figuring how to change my disposition.
You know what? Someone should just go hunt down CronoDAS and forcibly cryo-suspend him. It’d be doing everyone a favour. He’d get to live in a future where he doesn’t have to be geek-emo, a perceived ‘murder’ would be less shameful than a suicide for his parents and we wouldn’t have the same old hand wringing conversation all the time.
See you on the other side. (Or not, as the case may be.)
This post was obviously a joke, but “we should kill this guy so as to avoid social awkwardness” is probably a bad sentiment, revival or no revival.
On the other hand, “we should (legally) kill this guy so as to save his life” is unethical and I would never do it. But it is a significant question and the kind of reasoning that is relevant to all sorts of situations.
Should I stop talking about this here?
No, I don’t mind at all. As long as you don’t mind that I don’t treat this specific desire of yours with sombre dignity. I do, after all, think a death wish as an alternative to cryonic revival where your mental health can be restored is silly and something to laugh at (and so lower in status and discourage without being actually aggressive.)
Well, as long as I’m being funny...
Not to nitpick, but I think wedrifid was implying “ridiculous” rather than “funny”.
;-p
Being dead != Not doing anything
Not doing something because you’re lazy != Not existing
I don’t believe that you put low utility on life. You’re just putting low utility on doing stuff you don’t like.
I don’t know if I can be “fixed” without changing me to the point where I’m effectively somebody else. And that’s not much different than someone in the future simply having a baby and raising it to be a better person than I am. Furthermore, if the future has to choose between resurrecting me and somebody raising a child from scratch, I prefer that somebody raise a child; I’d rather the future have someone better than “me” instead of someone that I would recognize as “me”.
(Additionally, the argument you just made is also an argument for getting frozen right now instead of having to wait until you die a natural death before you get to be revived in a better future. “If the afterlife is so great, why not kill yourself and get there right now?”)
The future will have this choice (not to revive you), and will make it against you if this turns out to be a better option, but if you don’t make it to the future, you won’t give it the chance of doing this particular thing (your revival) in case it turns out to be a good thing.
Again, you can’t be certain of what your preference actually says in the not-clear-cut cases like this, you can’t know for sure that you prefer some child to be raised in place of yourself, and for this particular question it seems to be a false dilemma, since it’s likely that there will be no resource limitation of this kind, only moral optimization.
I don’t want to get into a whole other discussion here, but I think people change a lot throughout their lives—I know I sure did—and I’m not sure if this would be such a problem. Maybe it would be, but comparing the certainty of death to that potential problem, I know I’d take the risk.
The cost of another individual might be so low in the future that there might not be a choice between you and someone else.
For someone who doesn’t want to live at all right now and would commit suicide anyway, then yes, I’d recommend getting cryo’ed instead.
But for someone who enjoys life, then no, I wouldn’t recommend it because it might not work (though having that possibility is still better than the certainty of annihilation).
Life > Cryo uncertainty > Death
This leads directly into the morbid subject of “What is the optimal way to kill oneself, for purposes of cryo?”
I’ve actually been thinking about something similar;
What if I find out I have an incurable degenerative brain disease. At which point would I decide to get vitrified to improve my chances of being successfully revived by keeping my brain in better condition at the time of my death?
Now that’s a tough decision to make…
If you live in the US, make sure you have had life insurance for at least two years. Then move to Oregon or Washington).
Suicide is automatic grounds for autopsy; if this is not true in the assisted-suicide states, I haven’t heard about it.
Technically, neither state considers it suicide. I don’t know if that rules out autopsy in practice though.
From the Oregon Death with Dignity Act:
From Washington Initiative 1000: