I would think that the corporate reviving you would be either a foundation of your family, a general charity organization or a fan club of yours (Don’t laugh! There are fan clubs for super stars in India. Extend it further in the future and each LW commentor might have a fan club.) Since you will be, relatively speaking, an early adopter of cryonics, you will be relatively, a late riser. Cryonics goes LIFO, if I understand it correctly.
I’m pretty sure now that your fears are explicitly stated in a public forum, they are on the record for almost all eternity and they will be given sufficient consideration by those reviving you.
Eliezer has already presented one solution. A make-do best friend who can be upgraded to sentience whenever need be.
A simpler solution will be a human child, holding your palm and saying “I’m your great great grand child”. Are you still sure you’ll still not care enough? (Dirty mind hack, I understand, but terribly easy to implement)
I’m pretty sure now that your fears are explicitly stated in a public forum, they are on the record for almost all eternity and they will be given sufficient consideration by those reviving you.
Probably worth backing up though, in the form of a stone tablet adjacent to your body.
Alcor do keep some of your stuff in a secret location, but given problems with data retrieval from old media it might be good if they offered an explicit service to store your data—which I’d expect them to defer to providers like Amazon, but handle the long-term problems of moving to new providers as the need arises, and of decryption only on revival.
I would take the “I’m your great great grandchild” solution in a heartbeat—but I do not already have children, and something could still come up to prevent me from having them (and hence great great grandchildren).
If you’d take that solution, why not a great great … great grand niece? Or distant cousin? Any human child of that time will be related to you at some remove.
My sister doesn’t have children yet either, and may or may not in the future. It does matter if they’re a relation I’d ever be disposed to see at Christmas, which has historically bottomed out with second cousins.
It does matter if they’re a relation I’d ever be disposed to see at Christmas
Then it looks like I misunderstood. Say you have a child, then get preserved (though no one else you know does). Then say you wake up, it’s 500 years in the future, and you meet your great (great … great) great grandchild, someone you would never have seen at Christmas otherwise. Would this satisfy you?
If so, then you don’t have to worry. You will have relatives alive when you’re revived. Even if they’re descendants of cousins or second cousins. And since it will be 500 years in the future, you are equally likely to see your cousin’s 2510 descendant and your 2510 descendant at Christmas (that is, not at all).
If I had a child, I’d sign up me and said child simultaneously—problem solved right there. There’s no need to postulate any additional descendants to fix my dilemma.
I can’t get enthusiastic about second cousins 30 times removed. I wouldn’t expect to have even as much in common with them as I have in common with my second cousins now (with whom I can at least swap reminisces about prior Christmases and various relatives when the situation calls for it).
I can’t guarantee it, no, but I can be reasonably sure—someone signed up from birth (with a parent) would not have the usual defense mechanisms blocking the idea.
Then why can you get enthusiastic about a great great grandchild born after you get frozen?
I can usually think about something enough and change my feelings about it through reason.
For example, if I thought “direct descent seems special”, I could think about all the different ideas like the questions Blueberry asks and change my actual emotions about the subject.
I suspect this comes from my guilty pleasure...I glee at biting-the-bullet.
I would think that the corporate reviving you would be either a foundation of your family, a general charity organization or a fan club of yours (Don’t laugh! There are fan clubs for super stars in India. Extend it further in the future and each LW commentor might have a fan club.) Since you will be, relatively speaking, an early adopter of cryonics, you will be relatively, a late riser. Cryonics goes LIFO, if I understand it correctly.
I’m pretty sure now that your fears are explicitly stated in a public forum, they are on the record for almost all eternity and they will be given sufficient consideration by those reviving you.
Eliezer has already presented one solution. A make-do best friend who can be upgraded to sentience whenever need be.
A simpler solution will be a human child, holding your palm and saying “I’m your great great grand child”. Are you still sure you’ll still not care enough? (Dirty mind hack, I understand, but terribly easy to implement)
Probably worth backing up though, in the form of a stone tablet adjacent to your body.
Alcor do keep some of your stuff in a secret location, but given problems with data retrieval from old media it might be good if they offered an explicit service to store your data—which I’d expect them to defer to providers like Amazon, but handle the long-term problems of moving to new providers as the need arises, and of decryption only on revival.
I would take the “I’m your great great grandchild” solution in a heartbeat—but I do not already have children, and something could still come up to prevent me from having them (and hence great great grandchildren).
If you’d take that solution, why not a great great … great grand niece? Or distant cousin? Any human child of that time will be related to you at some remove.
My sister doesn’t have children yet either, and may or may not in the future. It does matter if they’re a relation I’d ever be disposed to see at Christmas, which has historically bottomed out with second cousins.
Then it looks like I misunderstood. Say you have a child, then get preserved (though no one else you know does). Then say you wake up, it’s 500 years in the future, and you meet your great (great … great) great grandchild, someone you would never have seen at Christmas otherwise. Would this satisfy you?
If so, then you don’t have to worry. You will have relatives alive when you’re revived. Even if they’re descendants of cousins or second cousins. And since it will be 500 years in the future, you are equally likely to see your cousin’s 2510 descendant and your 2510 descendant at Christmas (that is, not at all).
If I had a child, I’d sign up me and said child simultaneously—problem solved right there. There’s no need to postulate any additional descendants to fix my dilemma.
I can’t get enthusiastic about second cousins 30 times removed. I wouldn’t expect to have even as much in common with them as I have in common with my second cousins now (with whom I can at least swap reminisces about prior Christmases and various relatives when the situation calls for it).
You can’t guarantee that your child will go through with it, even if you sign em up.
Then why can you get enthusiastic about a great great grandchild born after you get frozen?
I can’t guarantee it, no, but I can be reasonably sure—someone signed up from birth (with a parent) would not have the usual defense mechanisms blocking the idea.
Direct descent seems special to me.
I find this thread fascinating.
I can usually think about something enough and change my feelings about it through reason.
For example, if I thought “direct descent seems special”, I could think about all the different ideas like the questions Blueberry asks and change my actual emotions about the subject.
I suspect this comes from my guilty pleasure...I glee at biting-the-bullet.
Is this not the case with you?
I do not have a reliable ability to change my emotional reactions to things in a practically useful time frame.