Here’s a simple metric to demonstrate why alternatives to cryonics could be preferred:
Suppose we calculate the overall value of living as the quantity of life multiplied by the quality of life. For lack of a better metric, we can rate our quality of life from 1 to 100. Thus one really good year (quality = 100) is equal to 100 really bad years (ql = 1). If you think quality of life is more important, you can use a larger metric, like 1 to 1000. But for our purposes, let’s use a scale to 100.
Some transhumanists have calculated that your life expectancy without aging is about 1300 years (because there’s still an annual probability that you will die from an accident, homicide, etc.). Conservatively, let’s assume that if cryonics and revivification are successful, you can expect to live for another 1000 years. Also, knowing nothing else about the future, your quality of life will be ~50. Thus your total life-index points gained is 50,000. But suppose that the probability that cryonics/revivification will be successful is 1 in 10,000, or .0001. Thus the expected utility points gained is .0001 * 50,000 = 50.
It will cost your $300/year for the rest of your life to gain those expected 50 points. But suppose you could spend that $300 a year on something that is 80% likely to increase your quality of life by 5 points a year (only 5%) for the rest of your life (let’s say another 50 years). There are all kinds of things that could do that: vacations, games, lovers, whatever. That’s .80 5 50 = 200 expected utility points.
You’re better off spending your money on things that are highly likely to increase your quality of life here and now, then on things that are highly unlikely or unknown to increase your quantity and quality of life in the future.
To put this in perspective, $300/year is the cost of my ACM subscription. That’s a rounding error as far as increasing my quality of life is concerned, way below 5%.
For about a billion people in the world, $300 a year (or $500, as it sounds the numbers probably really are) would double their income, very probably increasing their quality of life dramatically. I’d rather give my money to them.
“Hi, you have cancer. Want an experimental treatment? It works with >5% probability and costs $500/year.” “No thanks, I’ll die and give the money to charity.”
Strangely enough, I don’t hear that nearly as often as the one against cryonics. And it’s even worse, because signing up for cryonics means more people will be able to (economies of scale, looks less weird, more people hear of it).
Not to mention that most charities suck. But VillageReach does qualify.
While it’s not relevant to Mornedil’s point (about his own quality of life), this was my major objection to cryonics for a while as well. There are a couple of problems with it: Most people don’t currently donate all their disposable income to charity. If you do, then a cryonics subscription would actually trade off with charitable donations; if you’re like most people, it probably trades off with eating out, seeing movies and saving for retirement.
As MixedNuts points out below, most people don’t hesitate to spend that much on accepted medical treatments that could save their lives; another, related point is that people on cryonics may not feel the need to spend millions on costly end-of-life treatments that will only extend their lives by a few months. A disproportionate high portion of medical costs come from the last year of life.
Thirdly, if you estimate the money spent on cryonics could save 20 lives in a third world country, you are choosing between extending 20 lives for a few decades and (possibly) extending one life for millions of years. Which side of that tradeoff you prefer depends a lot on your view of immortality.
Finally, ask yourself “If I was offered cryonics for free, would I sign up?” If not, this isn’t your true rejection.
I give away all my earnings and my husband gives about 20% of his, so we live on a much smaller budget than most people we know.
You have my great respect for this, and if you moreover endorse
But it would be good if people laid off the end-of-life spending even without cryonics.
and you’ve got some sort of numerical lives-saved estimate on the charities you’re donating to, then I will accept “Cryonics is not altruistically maximizing” from you and your husband—and only from you two.
Unless you have kids, in which case you should sign them up.
numerical lives-saved estimate on the charities you’re donating to
The metric I care more about is more like quality-adjusted life years than lives saved. We’ve been giving to Oxfam because they seem to be doing good work on changing systems (e.g. agricultural policy) that keep people in miserable situations addition to more micro, and thus measurable, stuff (e.g. mosquito nets). The lack of measurement does bother us, and our last donation was to their evaluation and monitoring department. I do understand that restricted donations aren’t really restricted, but Oxfam indicated having donors give specifically to something as unpopular as evaluation does increase their willingness to increase its budget.
We may go with a more GiveWell-y choice next year.
Unless you have kids, in which case you should sign them up.
Only if I believe my (currently non-existing) children’s lives are more valuable than other lives. Otherwise, I should fund a cryonics scholarship for someone who definitely wants it. Assuming I even think cryonics is a good use of money, which I’m currently not sure about.
The ethics of allocating lots of resources to our own children instead of other people’s, and of making our own vs. adopting, is another thing I’m not sure about. If there are writings on LW about this topic, I haven’t found them.
The ethics of allocating lots of resources to our own children instead of other people’s, and of making our own vs. adopting, is another thing I’m not sure about. If there are writings on LW about this topic, I haven’t found them.
In light of the sustainability concerns that Carl Shulman raises in paragraphs 2, 3 and 4 here; I’m not sure that it’s advisable to base the (major) life choice of having or adopting children on ethical considerations.
That being said, if one is looking at the situation bloodlessly and without regard for personal satisfaction & sustainability, I’m reasonably sure that having or adopting children does not count as effective philanthropy. There are two relevant points here:
(a) If one is committed to global welfare, the expected commitment to global welfare of one’s (biological or adopted) children is lower than that of one’s own commitment. On a biological level there’s regression to the mean and at the environmental level though one’s values does influence those of one’s children, there’s also a general tendency for children to rebel against their parents.
(b) The philanthropic opportunity cost of having or adopting children is (in my opinion) so large as to eclipse the added value of a life in the developed world. The financial cost alone has been estimated as a quarter million dollars per child.
And even if one considers the quality of life in the developed world to be so large so that one extra person living in the developed world is more important than hundreds of people in the developing world, to the extent that there are good existential risk reduction charities the calculation still comes out against having children (if the human race thrives in the future then our descendants will have much higher quality of life than people in the contemporary developed world).
Most people don’t currently donate all their disposable income to charity.
I do. I give away all my earnings and my husband gives about 20% of his,
so we live on a much smaller budget than most people we know.
While we live on a much smaller budget than many people, we still have disposable income that we could choose to spend on cryonics instead of other things. If cryonics cost $500/year you would still have $28/week in discretionary money after the cryonics spending. Whether this makes sense depends on whether you think that you would get more happiness out of cryonics or that $10/week. As for me, I need to read more about cryonics.
(Some background: As she wrote, julia is very unwilling to spend money on herself that could instead be going to helping other people. Because this leads to making yourself miserable, I decided to put $38/week into an account as a conditional gift, where the condition is that it can be spent on herself (or on gifts for people she knows personally) but not given away. So cryonics would not in our case actually mean less money given to charity.)
Do you know about Giving What We Can? You may be interested in getting to know people in that community. Basically, it’s a group of people that pledges to give 10% of their earnings to the most effective charities in the developing world. Feel free to PM me or reply if you want to know more.
I think this hugely underestimates both the probability and utility of reanimation. If I am revived, I expect to live for billions of years, and to eventually know a quality of life that would be off the end of any scale we can imagine.
This seems an odd response. I’d understand a response that said “why on Earth do you anticipate that?” or one that said “I think I know why you anticipate that, here are some arguments against...”. But “wildly optimistic” seems to me to make the mistake of offering “a literary criticism, not a scientific one”—as if we knew more about how optimistic a future to expect than what sort of future to expect. These must come the other way around—we must first think about what we anticipate, and our level of optimism must flow from that.
These must come the other way around—we must first think about what we anticipate, and our level of optimism must flow from that.
Not always—minds with the right preference produce surprising outcomes that couldn’t be anticipated, of more or less anticipated good quality. (Expected Creative Surprises)
It does apply, the argument you attacked is wrong for a different reason. Amusingly, I see your original comment, and the follow-up arguments for incorrectness of the previous arguments as all wrong (under assumptions not widely accepted though). Let’s break it up:
(3) is wrong because the general pattern of reasoning from how good the postulated outcome is to its plausibility is valid. (2) is wrong because it’s not in fact too optimistic, quite the opposite. And (1) is wrong because it’s not optimistic enough. If your concepts haven’t broken down when the world is optimized for a magical concept of preference, it’s not optimized strongly enough. “Revival” and “quality of life” are status quo natural categories which are unlikely to survive strong optimization according to the whole of human preference in a recognizable form.
Do you think that if someone frozen in the near future is revived, that’s likely to happen after a friendly-AI singularity has occurred? If so, what’s your reasoning for that assumption?
Sure, I’m talking about heuristics. Don’t think that’s a mistake, though, in an instance with so many unknowns. I agree that my comment above is not a counter-argument, per se, just explaining why your statement goes over my head.
Since you prefer specificity: Why on Earth do you anticipate that?
The best alternative to cryonics is to never need it—to live long enough to be able to keep living longer, as new ways of living longer are developed. Cryonics is only an emergency lifeboat into the future. If you need the lifeboat you take it, but only when the ship is doomed.
I don’t think the 1 to 100 scale works; the scale should allow for negative numbers to accommodate some of the concepts that have been mentioned.For example, would you rather die at 50 years old, or live another decade while being constantly and pointlessly tortured, and then die?
It seems reasonable to assume that selection bias will work in our favor when considering the nature of the world in cases where the revival will work. This is debatable, but the debate shouldn’t just be ignored.
Even assuming that your math is right, I’m having a hard time thinking of something that I could spend $300/year on that would give me a quality-of-life increase equivalent to 5% of the difference between the worse possible case (being tortured for a year) and the best possible case (being massively independently wealthy, having an awesome social life and plenty of interesting things to do with my time). I’d rate a week’s vacation as less than 0.5% of the difference between those two, for example, and you can barely get plane tickets to somewhere interesting for $300.
Edit: Flubbed the math. Point still stands, but not as strongly as I originally thought.
For a single individual the cost is much more than $300. Alcor’s website says membership is $478 annually, plus another $120 a year if you elect the stand-by option. Also you need $150K worth of life insurance, which will add a bit more.
Peanuts! You say...
I really don’t see the point of signing up now, because I really don’t see how you can avoid losing all the information in your mind to autolysis unless you get a standby or at least a very quick (within an hour or two) vitrification. That means I have to be in the right place, at the right time when I die and I simply don’t think thats likely now—when any death I experience would almost certainly be sudden and it would be hours and hours before I’m vitrified.
I mean, if I get a disease and have some warning then sure I’ll consider a move to Phoenix and pay them their $20k surcharge (about a lifetime’s worth of dues anyway) and pay for the procedure in cash up-front. There is no reason for me to put money into dues now when the net present value of those payments exceeds the surcharge they charge if you are a “last minute” patient.
I understand this isn’t an option if you don’t have at least that much liquidity but since I happen to do so then it makes sense to me to keep it all (and future payments) under my control.
Hopefully that decision is a long time from now and I’ll be more optimistic about the whole business at that time. I’ll also have better picture of my overall financial outlook and whether I’d rather spend that money on my children’s future than my doubtful one.
jhuffman’s point made me think of the following devil’s advocacy:
If someone is very confident of cryonics, say more than 99% confident, then they should have themselves preserved before death. They should really have themselves preserved immediately—otherwise there is a higher risk that they will die in a way that causes the destruction of their mind, than there is that cryonics will fail. The amount that they will be willing to pay would also be irrelevant—they won’t need the money until after they are preserved. I appreciate that there are probably laws against preserving healthy adults, so this is strictly a thought experiment.
As people get older their risk of death or brain damage increases. This means that as someone gets older the confidence level at which they should seek early preservation will decrease. Also as someone gets older their expected “natural” survival time decreases, by definition. This means the payoff for not seeking early preservation is reducing all the time. This seems to bring some force to the argument—if there is a 10% probability that cryonics will succeed, then I really can’t see why anyone would let themselves get within 6 years of likely death—they are putting a second lifetime at risk for 6 years of less and less healthy life.
Finally the confidence level relates to cost. If people can be shown to have a low level of confidence in cryonics, then their willingness to pay money should be lower. The figures I’ve seen quoted require a sum of $150,000. (Whether this is paid in life insurance or not is irrelevant—you must pay for it in the premium since, if you’re going to keep the insurance until you die, the probability of the insurer paying out is 100%). If the probability of Cryonics working is 10%, then the average cost for a successful re-animation is $1.5 million. This is a pretty conservative cost I think—doubtless for some who read this blog it is small change. Not for me sadly though :)
I don’t think anyone is that confident...at least I hope that they are not. Even if cryonics itself works there are so many other reasons revival would never happen; I outlined them near the bottom of the thread related to my original reply to this post already so I won’t do so again. Suffice it to say, even if you had 100% confidence in both cryonics and future revival technology, you cannot have nearly 100% confidence in actually being revived.
But if you are young and healthy and want to be preserved intact you can probably figure out how to do it; but it is risky and you need to take precautions which I don’t know the least thing about… The last thing you want is to end up under a scalpel on a medical examiner’s table, which is what often happens to people who die suddenly or violently.
I really don’t see how you can avoid losing all the information in your mind to autolysis unless you get a standby or at least a very quick (within an hour or two) vitrification.
It’s information, it doesn’t need to be found in the same form that is necessary for normal brain’s function. If there is something else correlated with the info in question, or some kind of residue from which it’s possible to infer what was there before, it’s enough. Also, concepts in the brain seem to be coded holographically, so even a bullet in the brain may be recoverable from.
(For the same reason, importance of vitrification seems overemphasised. I can’t imagine information getting lost because of freezing damage. Of course, brain becomes broken, but info doesn’t magically disappear because of that.)
And yet even vitrified brains still fracture during freezing, and even pre-vitrification bodies are stored. What happens in modern practice to bodies that were impossible to vitrify, or that weren’t frozen for “too long” (e.g. because of autopsy)? Are they thrown away? (I believe they are.) I’m a little worried about these scenarios (and consistency of decision-making that goes into them).
Lots of non-vitrified bodies are stored. I don’t think any are discarded because they were impossible to vitrify, but some are discarded because they weren’t frozen for too long, and Alcor note that this is controversial: see Neural Archaeology and Ethics of Non-ideal Cryonics Cases.
I’m expecting to have to wait a long subjective time before I get to meet James Bedford, put it that way!
The really key idea in cryonics is the idea of freezing (or otherwise preserving) people when we don’t know if we can ever revive them. Of course, we intend to figure out later whether we can do this. We intend to succeed in reviving them. But before we’ve actually done so, we certainly can’t prove we will succeed. And funny thing, after we’ve done so, the proof will be irrelevant.
[...]
We can say that a condition is incurable (meaning permanently incurable, not just incurable by present technology) if the information is permanently lost. Without any means to put patients in stasis, doctors must decide what is curable and incurable in a hasty fashion. Nobody can afford to wait. But with cryonic suspension, there is no hurry at all. We simply don’t have to decide that someone is gone until we have full and complete understanding of what happened to them. Before cryonics, the patient was assumed dead unless proven otherwise; after cryonics, we assume that the patient is alive unless proven otherwise.
The most serious ethical problems of non-ideal cases arise in the context of “last minute” cases. A “last minute” case is a case in which a cryonics organization is contacted when legal death is imminent, or has already occurred, for a non-member of the organization.
These cases typically involve distraught families, high emotion, lack of informed consent, and even lack of patient consent when the patient is unconscious or already legally deceased. Families are faced with the decision of paying a large amount of money for something they do not understand, is not likely to work, and that cryonics organizations can barely defend. Such cases conform to the worst negative stereotypes of cryonics preying on grieving families for financial gain. “Last minute” cases are rarely accepted by Alcor for many of these reasons.
It’s information, it doesn’t need to be found in the same form that is necessary for normal brain’s function. If there is something else correlated with the info in question, or some kind of residue from which it’s possible to infer what was there before, it’s enough.
That’s a pretty big if. The self-destruction and consumption of neural cells is certainly going to leave a residue, but this would be like trying to figure out what sort of information was carved into an apple slice before I ate it, digested it and excreted the remains.
I am fairly sure, though I haven’t been able to refind a link, that there’s some solid evidence that autolysis isn’t nearly that quick or severe.
We can watch neural cells dying underneath a microscope. The destruction looks pretty complete. Structure is dissolved in what are essentially digestive enzymes.
If you read Alcor’s FAQ for Scientists, you’ll notice that they are the most careful to point out that there is considerable doubt about the possibility to ever revive anyone whose gone several hours without vitrification. Maybe this is because they want more “stand-by” revenue. Maybe its because they know they know there is no basis for speculation; by our current understanding of things its a serious problem. There are those who hope it is not a fatal problem. There are those who hope there is a heaven, too.
What has to be done ASAP is not vitrification it is cooling. Just dropping the body in a bath of icewater will prevent that kind of damage for days; and Suspended Animation or Alcor—either of which will be waiting right next to your bedside as fast as they can fly—have much more effective ways of cooling than a bath of icewater, and they’re working on better ways yet. They also use a portable thumper to perform CPR while cooling (their special waterproof version has been patented by cryo orgs for marketing for other medical uses), just to make sure your blood stays oxygenated while you’re in the metabolic danger zone, and I believe they pump you full of other protectants as well (using interosseous access, which is much faster than intravenous).
Local cryonics groups in faraway lands may not have thumpers and complicated blood medications and interosseous access, but they can at least dump you in a bathtub of ice water and perform CPR for a few minutes.
Also, with a bit more life insurance you can get the air ambulance option at Suspended Animation.
What has to be done ASAP is not vitrification it is cooling.
You are right—what I should be saying is not that I’m concerned about the likelihood of hours without vitrification but that I am concerned about hours of autolysis occurring.
Yes, well, I think it’s safe to say that quite a few cryonics patients and orgs are concerned about that. There are complex technologies to prevent it, but also a simple one, widely available if you have any local cryonics group. It’s called crushed ice, and a lot of stores will sell it to you.
What we need are studies of damage from vitrification when the operation was not done immediately after death, but after few hours as it usually happens.
Please write up these objections into a blog post or article somewhere. From the searches I’ve been doing, you only have to clear a very low bar to write the most clearly argued and well informed criticism of cryonics in the world.
Here’s a simple metric to demonstrate why alternatives to cryonics could be preferred:
Suppose we calculate the overall value of living as the quantity of life multiplied by the quality of life. For lack of a better metric, we can rate our quality of life from 1 to 100. Thus one really good year (quality = 100) is equal to 100 really bad years (ql = 1). If you think quality of life is more important, you can use a larger metric, like 1 to 1000. But for our purposes, let’s use a scale to 100.
Some transhumanists have calculated that your life expectancy without aging is about 1300 years (because there’s still an annual probability that you will die from an accident, homicide, etc.). Conservatively, let’s assume that if cryonics and revivification are successful, you can expect to live for another 1000 years. Also, knowing nothing else about the future, your quality of life will be ~50. Thus your total life-index points gained is 50,000. But suppose that the probability that cryonics/revivification will be successful is 1 in 10,000, or .0001. Thus the expected utility points gained is .0001 * 50,000 = 50.
It will cost your $300/year for the rest of your life to gain those expected 50 points. But suppose you could spend that $300 a year on something that is 80% likely to increase your quality of life by 5 points a year (only 5%) for the rest of your life (let’s say another 50 years). There are all kinds of things that could do that: vacations, games, lovers, whatever. That’s .80 5 50 = 200 expected utility points.
You’re better off spending your money on things that are highly likely to increase your quality of life here and now, then on things that are highly unlikely or unknown to increase your quantity and quality of life in the future.
To put this in perspective, $300/year is the cost of my ACM subscription. That’s a rounding error as far as increasing my quality of life is concerned, way below 5%.
For about a billion people in the world, $300 a year (or $500, as it sounds the numbers probably really are) would double their income, very probably increasing their quality of life dramatically. I’d rather give my money to them.
“Hi, you have cancer. Want an experimental treatment? It works with >5% probability and costs $500/year.” “No thanks, I’ll die and give the money to charity.”
Strangely enough, I don’t hear that nearly as often as the one against cryonics. And it’s even worse, because signing up for cryonics means more people will be able to (economies of scale, looks less weird, more people hear of it).
Not to mention that most charities suck. But VillageReach does qualify.
Welcome to LessWrong!
While it’s not relevant to Mornedil’s point (about his own quality of life), this was my major objection to cryonics for a while as well. There are a couple of problems with it: Most people don’t currently donate all their disposable income to charity. If you do, then a cryonics subscription would actually trade off with charitable donations; if you’re like most people, it probably trades off with eating out, seeing movies and saving for retirement.
As MixedNuts points out below, most people don’t hesitate to spend that much on accepted medical treatments that could save their lives; another, related point is that people on cryonics may not feel the need to spend millions on costly end-of-life treatments that will only extend their lives by a few months. A disproportionate high portion of medical costs come from the last year of life.
Thirdly, if you estimate the money spent on cryonics could save 20 lives in a third world country, you are choosing between extending 20 lives for a few decades and (possibly) extending one life for millions of years. Which side of that tradeoff you prefer depends a lot on your view of immortality.
Finally, ask yourself “If I was offered cryonics for free, would I sign up?” If not, this isn’t your true rejection.
I do. I give away all my earnings and my husband gives about 20% of his, so we live on a much smaller budget than most people we know.
This would be good. But it would be good if people laid off the end-of-life spending even without cryonics.
Maybe. I only heard of the idea a week ago—still thinking.
You have my great respect for this, and if you moreover endorse
and you’ve got some sort of numerical lives-saved estimate on the charities you’re donating to, then I will accept “Cryonics is not altruistically maximizing” from you and your husband—and only from you two.
Unless you have kids, in which case you should sign them up.
The metric I care more about is more like quality-adjusted life years than lives saved. We’ve been giving to Oxfam because they seem to be doing good work on changing systems (e.g. agricultural policy) that keep people in miserable situations addition to more micro, and thus measurable, stuff (e.g. mosquito nets). The lack of measurement does bother us, and our last donation was to their evaluation and monitoring department. I do understand that restricted donations aren’t really restricted, but Oxfam indicated having donors give specifically to something as unpopular as evaluation does increase their willingness to increase its budget.
We may go with a more GiveWell-y choice next year.
Only if I believe my (currently non-existing) children’s lives are more valuable than other lives. Otherwise, I should fund a cryonics scholarship for someone who definitely wants it. Assuming I even think cryonics is a good use of money, which I’m currently not sure about.
The ethics of allocating lots of resources to our own children instead of other people’s, and of making our own vs. adopting, is another thing I’m not sure about. If there are writings on LW about this topic, I haven’t found them.
In light of the sustainability concerns that Carl Shulman raises in paragraphs 2, 3 and 4 here; I’m not sure that it’s advisable to base the (major) life choice of having or adopting children on ethical considerations.
That being said, if one is looking at the situation bloodlessly and without regard for personal satisfaction & sustainability, I’m reasonably sure that having or adopting children does not count as effective philanthropy. There are two relevant points here:
(a) If one is committed to global welfare, the expected commitment to global welfare of one’s (biological or adopted) children is lower than that of one’s own commitment. On a biological level there’s regression to the mean and at the environmental level though one’s values does influence those of one’s children, there’s also a general tendency for children to rebel against their parents.
(b) The philanthropic opportunity cost of having or adopting children is (in my opinion) so large as to eclipse the added value of a life in the developed world. The financial cost alone has been estimated as a quarter million dollars per child.
And even if one considers the quality of life in the developed world to be so large so that one extra person living in the developed world is more important than hundreds of people in the developing world, to the extent that there are good existential risk reduction charities the calculation still comes out against having children (if the human race thrives in the future then our descendants will have much higher quality of life than people in the contemporary developed world).
While we live on a much smaller budget than many people, we still have disposable income that we could choose to spend on cryonics instead of other things. If cryonics cost $500/year you would still have $28/week in discretionary money after the cryonics spending. Whether this makes sense depends on whether you think that you would get more happiness out of cryonics or that $10/week. As for me, I need to read more about cryonics.
(Some background: As she wrote, julia is very unwilling to spend money on herself that could instead be going to helping other people. Because this leads to making yourself miserable, I decided to put $38/week into an account as a conditional gift, where the condition is that it can be spent on herself (or on gifts for people she knows personally) but not given away. So cryonics would not in our case actually mean less money given to charity.)
Do you know about Giving What We Can? You may be interested in getting to know people in that community. Basically, it’s a group of people that pledges to give 10% of their earnings to the most effective charities in the developing world. Feel free to PM me or reply if you want to know more.
I’m familiar with it. Thanks for checking!
See also my (ill-received) post Against Cryonics & For Cost-Effective Charity.
Irrelevant. My observation was adressed to an argument that those $300 would improve my own QoL.
I think this hugely underestimates both the probability and utility of reanimation. If I am revived, I expect to live for billions of years, and to eventually know a quality of life that would be off the end of any scale we can imagine.
I can’t argue that cryonics would strike me as an excellent deal if I believed that, but that seems wildly optimistic.
This seems an odd response. I’d understand a response that said “why on Earth do you anticipate that?” or one that said “I think I know why you anticipate that, here are some arguments against...”. But “wildly optimistic” seems to me to make the mistake of offering “a literary criticism, not a scientific one”—as if we knew more about how optimistic a future to expect than what sort of future to expect. These must come the other way around—we must first think about what we anticipate, and our level of optimism must flow from that.
Not always—minds with the right preference produce surprising outcomes that couldn’t be anticipated, of more or less anticipated good quality. (Expected Creative Surprises)
But that property is not limited to outcomes of good quality, correct?
Agreed—but that caveat doesn’t apply in this instance, does it?
It does apply, the argument you attacked is wrong for a different reason. Amusingly, I see your original comment, and the follow-up arguments for incorrectness of the previous arguments as all wrong (under assumptions not widely accepted though). Let’s break it up:
(1) “If I am revived, I expect to live for billions of years”
(2) “That seems wildly optimistic”
(3) “We must first think about what we anticipate, and our level of optimism must flow from that”
(3) is wrong because the general pattern of reasoning from how good the postulated outcome is to its plausibility is valid. (2) is wrong because it’s not in fact too optimistic, quite the opposite. And (1) is wrong because it’s not optimistic enough. If your concepts haven’t broken down when the world is optimized for a magical concept of preference, it’s not optimized strongly enough. “Revival” and “quality of life” are status quo natural categories which are unlikely to survive strong optimization according to the whole of human preference in a recognizable form.
Do you think that if someone frozen in the near future is revived, that’s likely to happen after a friendly-AI singularity has occurred? If so, what’s your reasoning for that assumption?
Sure, I’m talking about heuristics. Don’t think that’s a mistake, though, in an instance with so many unknowns. I agree that my comment above is not a counter-argument, per se, just explaining why your statement goes over my head.
Since you prefer specificity: Why on Earth do you anticipate that?
The best alternative to cryonics is to never need it—to live long enough to be able to keep living longer, as new ways of living longer are developed. Cryonics is only an emergency lifeboat into the future. If you need the lifeboat you take it, but only when the ship is doomed.
Or as Ralph Merkle put it, “cryonic suspension is the second-worst thing that can happen to you”.
I don’t think the 1 to 100 scale works; the scale should allow for negative numbers to accommodate some of the concepts that have been mentioned.For example, would you rather die at 50 years old, or live another decade while being constantly and pointlessly tortured, and then die?
It seems reasonable to assume that selection bias will work in our favor when considering the nature of the world in cases where the revival will work. This is debatable, but the debate shouldn’t just be ignored.
Even assuming that your math is right, I’m having a hard time thinking of something that I could spend $300/year on that would give me a quality-of-life increase equivalent to 5% of the difference between the worse possible case (being tortured for a year) and the best possible case (being massively independently wealthy, having an awesome social life and plenty of interesting things to do with my time). I’d rate a week’s vacation as less than 0.5% of the difference between those two, for example, and you can barely get plane tickets to somewhere interesting for $300.
Edit: Flubbed the math. Point still stands, but not as strongly as I originally thought.
For a single individual the cost is much more than $300. Alcor’s website says membership is $478 annually, plus another $120 a year if you elect the stand-by option. Also you need $150K worth of life insurance, which will add a bit more.
Peanuts! You say...
I really don’t see the point of signing up now, because I really don’t see how you can avoid losing all the information in your mind to autolysis unless you get a standby or at least a very quick (within an hour or two) vitrification. That means I have to be in the right place, at the right time when I die and I simply don’t think thats likely now—when any death I experience would almost certainly be sudden and it would be hours and hours before I’m vitrified.
I mean, if I get a disease and have some warning then sure I’ll consider a move to Phoenix and pay them their $20k surcharge (about a lifetime’s worth of dues anyway) and pay for the procedure in cash up-front. There is no reason for me to put money into dues now when the net present value of those payments exceeds the surcharge they charge if you are a “last minute” patient.
I understand this isn’t an option if you don’t have at least that much liquidity but since I happen to do so then it makes sense to me to keep it all (and future payments) under my control.
Hopefully that decision is a long time from now and I’ll be more optimistic about the whole business at that time. I’ll also have better picture of my overall financial outlook and whether I’d rather spend that money on my children’s future than my doubtful one.
jhuffman’s point made me think of the following devil’s advocacy: If someone is very confident of cryonics, say more than 99% confident, then they should have themselves preserved before death. They should really have themselves preserved immediately—otherwise there is a higher risk that they will die in a way that causes the destruction of their mind, than there is that cryonics will fail. The amount that they will be willing to pay would also be irrelevant—they won’t need the money until after they are preserved. I appreciate that there are probably laws against preserving healthy adults, so this is strictly a thought experiment.
As people get older their risk of death or brain damage increases. This means that as someone gets older the confidence level at which they should seek early preservation will decrease. Also as someone gets older their expected “natural” survival time decreases, by definition. This means the payoff for not seeking early preservation is reducing all the time. This seems to bring some force to the argument—if there is a 10% probability that cryonics will succeed, then I really can’t see why anyone would let themselves get within 6 years of likely death—they are putting a second lifetime at risk for 6 years of less and less healthy life.
Finally the confidence level relates to cost. If people can be shown to have a low level of confidence in cryonics, then their willingness to pay money should be lower. The figures I’ve seen quoted require a sum of $150,000. (Whether this is paid in life insurance or not is irrelevant—you must pay for it in the premium since, if you’re going to keep the insurance until you die, the probability of the insurer paying out is 100%). If the probability of Cryonics working is 10%, then the average cost for a successful re-animation is $1.5 million. This is a pretty conservative cost I think—doubtless for some who read this blog it is small change. Not for me sadly though :)
I don’t think anyone is that confident...at least I hope that they are not. Even if cryonics itself works there are so many other reasons revival would never happen; I outlined them near the bottom of the thread related to my original reply to this post already so I won’t do so again. Suffice it to say, even if you had 100% confidence in both cryonics and future revival technology, you cannot have nearly 100% confidence in actually being revived.
But if you are young and healthy and want to be preserved intact you can probably figure out how to do it; but it is risky and you need to take precautions which I don’t know the least thing about… The last thing you want is to end up under a scalpel on a medical examiner’s table, which is what often happens to people who die suddenly or violently.
It’s information, it doesn’t need to be found in the same form that is necessary for normal brain’s function. If there is something else correlated with the info in question, or some kind of residue from which it’s possible to infer what was there before, it’s enough. Also, concepts in the brain seem to be coded holographically, so even a bullet in the brain may be recoverable from.
(For the same reason, importance of vitrification seems overemphasised. I can’t imagine information getting lost because of freezing damage. Of course, brain becomes broken, but info doesn’t magically disappear because of that.)
Most cryonics literature concentrates on the possibility of direct bodily reanimation, not scanning and WBE.
And yet even vitrified brains still fracture during freezing, and even pre-vitrification bodies are stored. What happens in modern practice to bodies that were impossible to vitrify, or that weren’t frozen for “too long” (e.g. because of autopsy)? Are they thrown away? (I believe they are.) I’m a little worried about these scenarios (and consistency of decision-making that goes into them).
Lots of non-vitrified bodies are stored. I don’t think any are discarded because they were impossible to vitrify, but some are discarded because they weren’t frozen for too long, and Alcor note that this is controversial: see Neural Archaeology and Ethics of Non-ideal Cryonics Cases.
I’m expecting to have to wait a long subjective time before I get to meet James Bedford, put it that way!
(Updated to add “Ethics...” link)
Thanks for the links! From the first one:
From the second link:
Sure, but if I was Alcor or CI, I’d be wary of being seen to be over-eager to preserve (and so get the money).
The best solution is probably to ask when you sign up.
That’s a pretty big if. The self-destruction and consumption of neural cells is certainly going to leave a residue, but this would be like trying to figure out what sort of information was carved into an apple slice before I ate it, digested it and excreted the remains.
I am fairly sure, though I haven’t been able to refind a link, that there’s some solid evidence that autolysis isn’t nearly that quick or severe.
We can watch neural cells dying underneath a microscope. The destruction looks pretty complete. Structure is dissolved in what are essentially digestive enzymes.
If you read Alcor’s FAQ for Scientists, you’ll notice that they are the most careful to point out that there is considerable doubt about the possibility to ever revive anyone whose gone several hours without vitrification. Maybe this is because they want more “stand-by” revenue. Maybe its because they know they know there is no basis for speculation; by our current understanding of things its a serious problem. There are those who hope it is not a fatal problem. There are those who hope there is a heaven, too.
What has to be done ASAP is not vitrification it is cooling. Just dropping the body in a bath of icewater will prevent that kind of damage for days; and Suspended Animation or Alcor—either of which will be waiting right next to your bedside as fast as they can fly—have much more effective ways of cooling than a bath of icewater, and they’re working on better ways yet. They also use a portable thumper to perform CPR while cooling (their special waterproof version has been patented by cryo orgs for marketing for other medical uses), just to make sure your blood stays oxygenated while you’re in the metabolic danger zone, and I believe they pump you full of other protectants as well (using interosseous access, which is much faster than intravenous).
Local cryonics groups in faraway lands may not have thumpers and complicated blood medications and interosseous access, but they can at least dump you in a bathtub of ice water and perform CPR for a few minutes.
Also, with a bit more life insurance you can get the air ambulance option at Suspended Animation.
You are right—what I should be saying is not that I’m concerned about the likelihood of hours without vitrification but that I am concerned about hours of autolysis occurring.
Yes, well, I think it’s safe to say that quite a few cryonics patients and orgs are concerned about that. There are complex technologies to prevent it, but also a simple one, widely available if you have any local cryonics group. It’s called crushed ice, and a lot of stores will sell it to you.
What we need are studies of damage from vitrification when the operation was not done immediately after death, but after few hours as it usually happens.
Please write up these objections into a blog post or article somewhere. From the searches I’ve been doing, you only have to clear a very low bar to write the most clearly argued and well informed criticism of cryonics in the world.