It’s not clear to me whether I should spend this sum of money (considering opportunity cost etc.) on potentially cryopreserving myself or reducing existential risk or making some other charitable contribution or actually passing on substantially more of my money to my relatives or whatever else. Namely, I’m not sure how to estimate the probability of actually being revived at some point. It might help to determine the probability of legally “dying” in such a way as to be around people during death or “dying” only a short time before while still being possible to preserve (for example this might include the chance of “dying” in a hospital). This would seemingly have a large effect on my chances of being revived, but maybe not. The technology for reviving those thought “dead” would already require such major advances in technology that even days of not being discovered (and thus an enormous difference in bodily decay) that perhaps even such large differences in decay could be trivial. Or, this could be entirely wrong, depending on how technology does progress. But even after such differences of time of pre-preservation “death” are accounted for, it is not then clear how to estimate the likelihood of ever being revived or a number of other things that would be necessary at a minimum to establish a reasonable method of determining the proper amount of money to allocate to the aforementioned potential uses.
Basically, this issue is far more difficult to resolve than a simple pseudo-Pascal’s Wager (here the response is not to the article in question but rather in a more general form to a few arguments I have seen even on this site including some comments)
It’s not clear to me whether I should spend this sum of money (considering opportunity cost etc.) on potentially cryopreserving myself or reducing existential risk or making some other charitable contribution or actually passing on substantially more of my money to my relatives or whatever else. Namely, I’m not sure how to estimate the probability of actually being revived at some point. It might help to determine the probability of legally “dying” in such a way as to be around people during death or “dying” only a short time before while still being possible to preserve (for example this might include the chance of “dying” in a hospital). This would seemingly have a large effect on my chances of being revived, but maybe not. The technology for reviving those thought “dead” would already require such major advances in technology that even days of not being discovered (and thus an enormous difference in bodily decay) that perhaps even such large differences in decay could be trivial. Or, this could be entirely wrong, depending on how technology does progress. But even after such differences of time of pre-preservation “death” are accounted for, it is not then clear how to estimate the likelihood of ever being revived or a number of other things that would be necessary at a minimum to establish a reasonable method of determining the proper amount of money to allocate to the aforementioned potential uses.
Basically, this issue is far more difficult to resolve than a simple pseudo-Pascal’s Wager (here the response is not to the article in question but rather in a more general form to a few arguments I have seen even on this site including some comments)