With regard to the cryonics perhaps the issue is more that it really does not postpone death—it merely claims a path to resurrection or reincarnation, presumably with knowledge of the prior life. I think that last aspect is critical for most, particularly those in the western cultures that tend not a believe or have a cultural history of such beliefs. (Is that testable? I think so.)
I ran through a thought experiment for myself a number of years back regarding choices and problems in a world where someone claimed technology that would allow me to transfer my “self” (knowledge, memories, experiences, personality...) into a bio-engineered clone of myself that was then a perfectly healthy body that would last another 70 or 80 years. (My personal expectations now are 100 years give or take a bit on either side. Parents and many uncles and aunts made it well into 90s and some over 100).
Well, I would ask for a demonstration to prove it works. If that is successful....what to do. I could say, okay that’s good lets do the copy for real. Well, here is where some of my dilemma comes in. What to do with the test version? Kill it? To me that would be murder. See it as success, kill myself? Well that hardly solves the problem of dying from my perspective.
If I say, we’ve been successful and let both live, I will later die my natural death and the copy will continue living and so I will continue living—but that will be a different me, especially since each of these version will diverge in experience. So I still die and the I that I know that is different from the life extending version loses everything since the copy event.
Even if I ignore any of the issues around the demo copy of me and then go though the process which by design is a transfer from my aging body into the new, healthy body I don’t have a great baseline for claiming I don’t die in the process and that transfer is really me rather than some copy.
However, that is not the case for the demo copy or the actual “new” me. They have been though that process and “woken up” in the new body.
I think once we actually have this type of technology then we can take the experiences from those that took the jump as part of our own baseline and the basis for forming some priors on the results. I think we lack that now so it seems reasonable to me that few pursue such an approach. In the end I would say today such choices are not really rational but made on the basis of faith or hope, along with a view of not really risking or losing anything.
As this is not about life-logging it needed to be put somewhere else!
With regard to life-logging though, I wonder how different that might be from the idea than one’s children and those one mentored are their life extension. A bit along the lines of as long as someone remembers us we are still alive.
With regard to the cryonics perhaps the issue is more that it really does not postpone death—it merely claims a path to resurrection or reincarnation, presumably with knowledge of the prior life. I think that last aspect is critical for most, particularly those in the western cultures that tend not a believe or have a cultural history of such beliefs. (Is that testable? I think so.)
I ran through a thought experiment for myself a number of years back regarding choices and problems in a world where someone claimed technology that would allow me to transfer my “self” (knowledge, memories, experiences, personality...) into a bio-engineered clone of myself that was then a perfectly healthy body that would last another 70 or 80 years. (My personal expectations now are 100 years give or take a bit on either side. Parents and many uncles and aunts made it well into 90s and some over 100).
Well, I would ask for a demonstration to prove it works. If that is successful....what to do. I could say, okay that’s good lets do the copy for real. Well, here is where some of my dilemma comes in. What to do with the test version? Kill it? To me that would be murder. See it as success, kill myself? Well that hardly solves the problem of dying from my perspective.
If I say, we’ve been successful and let both live, I will later die my natural death and the copy will continue living and so I will continue living—but that will be a different me, especially since each of these version will diverge in experience. So I still die and the I that I know that is different from the life extending version loses everything since the copy event.
Even if I ignore any of the issues around the demo copy of me and then go though the process which by design is a transfer from my aging body into the new, healthy body I don’t have a great baseline for claiming I don’t die in the process and that transfer is really me rather than some copy.
However, that is not the case for the demo copy or the actual “new” me. They have been though that process and “woken up” in the new body.
I think once we actually have this type of technology then we can take the experiences from those that took the jump as part of our own baseline and the basis for forming some priors on the results. I think we lack that now so it seems reasonable to me that few pursue such an approach. In the end I would say today such choices are not really rational but made on the basis of faith or hope, along with a view of not really risking or losing anything.
As this is not about life-logging it needed to be put somewhere else!
With regard to life-logging though, I wonder how different that might be from the idea than one’s children and those one mentored are their life extension. A bit along the lines of as long as someone remembers us we are still alive.