We really need a “cryonics sales pitch” article.
Every so often, I see a blog post about death, usually remarking on the death of someone the writer knew, and it often includes sentiments about “everyone is going to die, and that’s terrible, but we can’t do anything about it have so we have to accept it.”
It’s one of those sentiments that people find profound and is often considered Deep Wisdom. There’s just one problem with it. It isn’t true. If you think cryonics can work, as many people here do, then you believe that people don’t really have to die, and we don’t need to accept that we’ve only got at most about a hundred years and then that’s it.
And I want to tell them this, as though I was a religious missionary out to spread the Good Word that you can save your soul and get into Christian Heaven as long as you sign up with Our Church. (Which I would actually do, if I believed that Christianity was correct.)
But it’s not easy to broach the issue in a blog comment, and I’m not a good salesman. (One of the last times I tried, my posts kept getting deleted by the moderators.) It would be a lot better if I could simply link them to a better sales pitch; the kind of people I’m talking to are the kinds of people who read things on the Internet. Unfortunately, not one of the pro-cryonics posts listed on the LessWrong wiki can serve this purpose. Not “Normal Cryonics”, not “You Only Live Twice”, not “We Agree: Get Froze”, not one! Why isn’t there one? Heck, I’d pay money to get it written. I’d even pay Eliezer Yudkowsky a bunch of money to talk to my father on the telephone about cryonics, with a substantial bonus on offer if my father agrees to sign up. (We can discuss actual dollar amounts in the comments or over private messages.)
Please, someone get to work on this!
This is from my book Singularity Rising:
I have encountered many of the same objections to cryonics in the numerous conversations I have had on the subject, and I’m going to assume that you object to cryonics for one or more reasons I have heard before. Below this paragraph is a list of cryonics objections, and beneath each objection is a question. For reasons that either I will provide or should seem obvious, answering any question in the affirmative means that its corresponding objection shouldn’t block you from joining the cryonics movement.
Objection 1: Cryonics is unnatural.
Question 1: Would you support a law prohibiting all medicine not used by our hunter-gatherer ancestors?
Objection 2: Once you have died, you are dead.
Question 2: You fall into a lake while ice skating, and your body quickly freezes. A year from now your body thaws out and for some crazy reason, you think, look and act just as before. Are you alive?
Objection 3: Even if cryonics works, the “person” that would be revived wouldn’t really be me.
Question 3: Were you alive ten years ago?
If you answered yes, then you are not defining “you” by the physical makeup of your body, because almost none of the atoms in your body today are the same as they were ten years ago. Your body has undergone many changes over the last decade, meaning that if you still identify as you, you must be defining yourself by some broad structure and not merely by the exact arrangement of the molecules that compose “you.”
Also, imagine that a year after joining Alcor, you wake up one morning in a hospital bed, and see the smiling face of your (now much older) child. Although thirty years has passed since you died in your sleep, no subjective time has transpired, and your body has the exact same look and feel as it did before you went to bed. Indeed, had Alcor placed you back in the room in which you died, you would think today was a normal morning. Are you still you? Are you glad you signed up with Alcor?
Furthermore, consider two 40-year-olds named Tom and Jane. Tom legally dies in 2020, is cryogenically preserved, and is then revived in 2045 by a process that restores his body and brain to the condition it was in before he legally died. Jane survives to 2045. The Tom of 2045 is vastly more similar to the Tom of 2020 than the Jane of 2045 is to the Jane of 2020, as the Jane of 2045 has undergone twenty-five extra years of aging and life experience. So if you believe that Jane has stayed Jane over the time period, then you should think that the pre-cryonics Tom is the same as the post-cryonics one.
Objection 4: I don’t want to wake up a stranger in a strange world.
Question 4: While driving, you get into an accident. When you wake up in a hospital, an FBI agent tells you that the son of a Mafia leader died in the accident, and although the accident wasn’t your fault, the leader will hold you responsible. If the Mafia thinks you survived the accident, it will kill you. The agent confesses that the Mafia has infiltrated the FBI, and so the government will never be able to protect you. The agent provides one option for survival. He will fake your death, and make people think your body was burned beyond recognition. The agent will then give you a new identity, and transport you to another country, one very different from your own. You will never be able to contact any of your old friends or family again, because the always suspicious Mafia will monitor them. Do you accept the agent’s offer?
Objection 5: If revived, I wouldn’t have any useful skills.
Question 5: You have a fatal disease that has only one cure, but this cure costs $1 billion, which you can’t possibly raise. NASA, however, makes you an offer. The space agency is launching a rocket that will travel near the speed of light. Because of Einstein’s theory of relativity, although the mission will take you only one subjective year to complete, when the rocket returns to Earth, one thousand years will have passed. Because you are the most qualified person to fly the rocket, NASA will pay the cost of your disease’s cure if you accept the mission. Do you accept? .
Also, you are only likely to get revived in a friendly rich world.
Objection 6: The people who revive me might torture me.
Question 6: If you knew an intelligence explosion would occur tomorrow would you commit suicide today to avoid the chance of being tortured?
Objection 7: I don’t cherish my life enough to want to extend it with cryonics.
Question 7: You will die of cancer unless you undergo a painless medical procedure. Do you get the procedure?
Objection 8: It would be morally superior for me to donate money to charity rather than spending money on cryonics.
Question 8: Same as Question (7), but now the operation is expensive, although you can afford to pay it.
Objection 9: It’s selfish of me to have more than my fair share of life, especially since the world is overpopulated.
Question 9: Same as question (7), except that your age is well above the length of time the average human lives.
Objection 10: I believe in God, the real one with a capital G, not an extremely smart artificial intelligence. I don’t want to postpone joining him in the afterlife.
Question 10: Same as Question (7).
Also, even the extra million years of life that cryonics might give you is nothing compared to the infinity you believe you will eventually spend in heaven. If you believe that God wants you to spend time in the physical universe before joining him, might he not approve of you using science and reason to extend your life, so you can better serve him in our, material world?
Many faiths believe it’s virtuous to have children, raise these children to understand God, and then hope these children beget more children who will carry on the faith. If there is a God, he appears to have started us out on a tiny planet in an empty universe. People who make it to the Singularity would likely get to “be fruitful and multiply”, and populate God’s universe. (Don’t worry if you are past childbirth age: any technology that could revive the cryogenically preserved could be used to help you have children.)
Objection 11: If people find out I have signed up for cryonics they will think I’m crazy.
Question 11: Same as Question (7), but now most people think the type of operation you will get is crazy.
The stigma of cryonics is real and has even made this author nervous about outing himself, for fear that it might make it harder for me to find alternative employment, should I choose to leave or get fired from Smith College.
Objection 12: Cryonics might not work.
Question 12: Same as Question (7), but now the procedure only has a 5% chance of saving your life.
Here is my final question for you:
One minute from now a man pushes you to the ground, pulls out a long sword, presses the sword’s tip to your throat, and says he will kill you. You have one small chance at survival: grab the sword’s sharp blade, throw it away, and then run. But even with your best efforts, you will probably die. Do you fight?
That already happens to everyone. We call it “birth.”
People make a living now with allegedly primitive skills. I live in rural Arizona, and I know guys who work as cowboys and ranch hands. One of them told me the other day that he had to round up and brand some steers.
Or try to rape you, like in the “reverse cryonics” time travel story Outlander. Claire seems to manage regardless.
People in a post-transition world might have a quite different value system regarding this “fair share” notion. “This guy in cryo lived only 77 years? Wow, he died young. Give him priority for revival and rejuvenation.”
God calls you home according to his schedule, not yours. If you survive to a future era via cryotransport, God obviously hasn’t called your number in the going-to-heaven queue yet. Wait your turn like everyone else, even if you have to wait for centuries. Paraphrasing Luke 19:13, Jesus tells his servants to occupy themselves until he comes for them to account for their service to him.
Small children are better at adjusting themselves to radically new things than adults.
(Though it’s possible that, conditional on cryonics working well at all, whatever technology allows the raising of the kinda-dead would also allow you to increase your neuroplasticity without wrecking your brain.)
I’d say the most important objection to cryonics is the one you raise last, and only spend 1 line on. As a result your entire list seems rather weak. Because it’s not just that cryonics has a low chance of working. If cryonics was free I’d sign up tomorrow, low chance be damned. But it isn’t free, it is in fact very expensive.
So let’s rephrase your question 12: You have a rare fatal disease. There is a complicated medical procedure that can cure you. The good news is that it is painless and has no side effects. The bad news is that it costs $200,000 and has only a 5% chance of working.
I’d expect many people would still say yes, but also many people would say no.
And a 5% chance of cryonics working seems hopelessly optimistic to me. So let’s make that a 0.0000001% chance of working. Suddenly it seems like a pretty lousy deal. Do you think any rational person would still say yes?
The lottery model doesn’t apply to cryonics because the individual cryonicist’s choices in the here and now bear on the probability of success. Cryonicist Thomas Donaldson, Ph.D. in mathematics, wrote about this back in the 1980′s.
http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/probability.html
No, they wouldn’t. If that really is your estimated probability (where did you get those six zeros from? why not three, or twenty?), then you should not sign up for cryo. Those involved think there’s a much higher chance than that. In fact, 5% is the usual order of magnitude.
And you won’t have any other use for that money when you’re dead. Whether it would be better to give it away and certainly die is a whole other issue. (EA meets cryonics — there’s a subject for an interesting debate.)
So yes, those signing up are betting on a long shot, but not an impossibly long one.
Most people are bad at converting their beliefs to numerical probabilities, are bad at estimating low probabilities in general, and will pick numbers in a certain range that sound low enough even when the number that is actually consistent with their beliefs is much lower. It’s like vegetarians who say “well, maybe chickens are sentient enough that they have 1% of the moral value of humans”. Almost nobody who asserts that would then save 101 chickens in preference to 1 human.
What’s your value for a micromort to you?
How much would someone have to bet you to chug 500ml of wine? 5 dollars? Lets go with 5 for now.
For an investment of 200K to be worth it it would have to be worth at least 40000 micromorts.
If I was certain that my method of death would preserve the brain and thus had the full million micromorts to play with then odds of 4% that the procedure would work would be just, just good enough to make it vaguely reasonable.
Also you perform a few actions every day that could see you dying in a manner that involves your brain being destroyed or damaged too significantly for cryonics to help much.
We’re not starting from the full million, accident, fire, bodyloss, alzheimer’s, too-slow freezing, people ignoring the advanced directive about what’s to be done with your head etc eats up a big chunk of the probability space.
Lets say there’s a 50⁄50 chance, now it needs a procedure that’s 8% successful to be reasonable. Optimistic people like to say around 5%, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s bellow 1% or even 0.1% or if it could turn out once they figure out how to actually do it that most current freezing methods are unsuitable and lead to a husk vaguely like you with most of it’s memories mangled.
People value their lives but most don’t value their lives above everything else in the universe and would prefer to give their grandkids a college fund rather than taking a long shot at immortality.
This is really an argument to have with those who advocate signing up. But as it’s directed to me, I’ll point out one factor that needs to be included in that calculation.
What’s the size of a micromort?
A millionth of an ordinary lifetime, or a millionth of the lifetime one might have if cryonics pays off? Given commensurate advances in medicine generally, if you get revived, you might expect a much longer lifespan.
BTW, it would take a lot more than $5 to persuade me to drink a gratuitous half litre of wine. For me, that amount would be close to throwing up in the street and having the following morning wiped out recovering from the hangover. I’ve done that a few times in the past, but only enough to know better.
Some do prefer that, some sign up for cryo, some can afford both, some neither, and some do completely different things with their resources. People are different and there’s no need for everyone to do the same thing.
For that we’d have to get into QALY’s which is tough since we can’t make any kind of reasonable estimates for how many QALY’s someone would gain (perhaps future government decides to deal with a population crisis by setting maximum year limits).
Micromorts aren’t perfect but do make it possible to compare because 1 micromort suffered today can be used to judge cash value something is worth. If you’d accept a minimum of $10,000 to perform a 100 micromort task today(making you quite a bit more cautious than average) that still reduces your chances of immortality even if you’re signed up for cryonics which allows you to do some kind of cost/reward tradeoff calculations.
That’s assuming you’d otherwise die with enough money to pay for it, and neglecting fees that need to be paid while alive. “Life insurance” doesn’t solve this, you still need to pay for it.
Many employers provide life insurance. I’ve always thought that was kind of weird (but then, all of life insurance is weird; it’s more properly “death insurance” anyhow) but it’s a think. My current employer provides (at no cost to me) a life insurance policy sufficient to pay for cryonics. It would currently be given charitably—I have no dependents and my family is reasonably well off—but I’ve considered changing that.
That doesn’t change the situation much, if you can sell it (or get higher pay for refusing it). If you somehow can’t extract value from it (doubtful unless there are laws against selling), then it’s relevant.
I haven’t investigated selling it, but up to a certain multiple of my annual salary it’s included in my benefits and there is no value in setting it lower than that value; I wouldn’t get any extra money.
This is a fairly standard benefit from tech companies (and others that have good benefits packages in the US), apparently. It feels odd but it’s been like this at the last few companies I worked for, differing only in the insurance provider whose policy is used and the actual limit before you’d need to pay extra.
I just looked it up, and apparently reselling life insurance is so popular it has its own word: viatical. I expect you’d get reasonably close to fair value for it, and if you wouldn’t pay fair value for it, you probably should be willing to accept fair value for it.
Although I’m not entirely clear if you can resell life insurance bought by an employer.
No that one in a billion was meant to be illustrative, not a real estimate of probability. But honestly even if you lower that 5% probability by only 1 or 2 orders of magnitude the proposition already becomes very dubious.
Don’t forget that you can also extend your life by spending that money some other way. I think the singularity will probably happen somewhere between 2040 and 2060. So when I’m between 58 and 78 years old. This means I have a good chance to make it even without cryonics. Instead of taking that extra life insurance to pay for cryonics, I could for example also decide to work a few hours a week less, and spend that time on exercise. Not only would that be more enjoyable, it would also probably do more for my chances to reach the singularity.
If you’re significantly older now, that particular math may change. But cryonics is still a long shot, and spending so much money still means a significant hit in quality of life.
I’m very curious why you think 5% is a realistic estimate of the probability of cryonics working (actually on the probability of cryonics working for you personally. So some of that probability will have to be spent on you not dying in a way that makes cryonics impossible, or on the cryonics company not going bust, or on there being no unexpected legal obstacles, etc). If you want to sell me on cryonics, this is what you will have to sell me on.
I don’t have a particular opinion on that. It’s just the sort of figure I’ve seen from people in favour of cryo — that is the chance they are betting on, not a lottery jackpot. I am not signed up and am not planning to, despite having a sufficient pile of money. At the same time, I don’t think the whole cryo movement is misguided either. It’s an idea that should be pursued by those with the motivation to do so, both by freezing bodies now and researching preservation and revival methods.
I also don’t have a particular opinion about how soon a singularity may happen (or a global extinction). For those who think that one of those is very likely to happen before they need cryo, cryo is also not a good bet. At least, they might want to keep their cryo funding in a more liquid form than an insurance policy.
Yes, those are real concerns that anyone contemplating signing up, or urging other people to, has to assess.
Question 14: Wait so you’re like… one of those crazy people that thinks that you can freeze yourself then be reincarnated. You actually think that would work? You should know that my sister knows where I am!
Question 15: Wait what, you actually want me to pay money for this crazy shit, how much?
Question 16: You do realize that’s more than I make in a year, right? Go find some other sucker to peddle your wares on.
You’re acting like there’s a logical, well thought out argument against cryonics, but most people are acting on some perfectly reasonable heuristics that basically boil down to: “I’m not gonna pay crazy people ridiculous amounts of money for something that’s impossible.”
“You’re acting like there’s a logical, well thought out argument against cryonics, but most people are acting on some perfectly reasonable heuristics that basically boil down to: “I’m not gonna pay crazy people ridiculous amounts of money for something that’s impossible.”″
Exactly right except for the “perfectly reasonable heuristics”. Should be ”...seemingly reasonable but in fact faulty heuristics...” Otherwise they wouldn’t end up with “crazy people”: not; ridiculous amounts of money: not; and “something that’s impossible”: not.
I agree with your last paragraph, but I’m trying to reach the 1% or so who might be open to logical arguments.
I wrote http://lesswrong.com/lw/jx6/on_irrational_theory_of_identity/ a while ago to explain more-or-less why I’m not signed up and hopefully draw some counterarguments, but the latter didn’t really materialize.
The tl;dr is that my System I currently doesn’t care much if I’m signed up for cryonics or not, while it cares a great deal about being seen as weird. To System II it’s clear that signing up for cryonics would be more consistent, but probably also more selfish (I’d estimate a double-digit percentage of the money I don’t spend on cryonics will go to charity). So I could override my intuitive preference, but what I’d accomplish by doing so is higher utility for myself and lower utility globally, and why would I put in effort to do that?
Strongly disagree. The more people who sign up for cryonics the less weird it becomes, so your joining Alcor would have a positive externality. Two enormous problems facing mankind are death and short-term thinking. Widespread cryonics membership would mitigate both.
If you knew an intelligence explosion would occur tomorrow, the possibility of being tortured would certainly reduce the expected utility of that intelligence explosion, but in order for suicide to be appropriate, it would have to reduce the expected utility below zero. However, for it to be a factor in cryonics, it needn’t reduce the expected utility below zero, it only need reduce the expected utility below the cost of the cryonics.
Several of the arguments in this list have the same problem. For question 7, I’d certainly prefer getting a painless medical procedure to dying of cancer if the medical procedure has no cost. It’s easy for the utility I get from the procedure to exceed the cost if the cost is zero. If the procedure had a cost, however, I would have to decide whether the procedure is worth it (particularly if the procedure only has a chance of working, thus reducing the expected utility I get from it).
Fred was the best supporter I had at work. He was in his 70s, and about to retire. I invited him to lunch to try to convince him to sign up for cryonics. He was a perfect candidate. He had lots of money, was (I think) an atheist, had a strong belief in the power of technology to improve society, had teenage children, and most importantly he loved life and had plans to travel the world after he retired. About ten seconds after I started my cryonics pitch I knew I had lost him, and he would be just politely humoring me. I had about as much chance of getting him to join Alcor as of convincing him to donate $50,000 to a cult of Cthulhu. Fred died of pancreas cancer shortly after retiring.
I am sorry to hear that.
Cryonics organizations themselves have neglected the obligation to generate and update current expository literature. I see the urgent need for a “Cryonics for Dummies” book which incorporates the experience base of real, existing cryonics organizations over the last 50 years and explains what the bearing of current neuroscience, cryobiology, gerontology and biotechnology have on what cryonicists want to do.
The cryonics movement needs more people with clinical medical backgrounds involved, but then it also needs people with practical business experience.
I will give you a business intelligence test. Look at just the home page of the website for this startup cryonics organization in Oregon, and tell me one obvious thing that it lacks—just on the home page:
http://oregoncryo.com/
I wrote it, so I find the question and MattG’s answer interesting. I will try to figure out what you think is lacking, but it’s probably just a difference of opinion on the purpose of the website. Just so we’re clear, the purpose is NOT to get customers to buy our service. We are still in the startup phase. Maybe you think it’s the phone number that’s lacking. That’s very intentional. We don’t want people calling us right now.
What is the purpose of the website?
-To inform the existing cryonics community of our level of readiness and of our unique approach to the various issues. -To exchange technical information with other cryonics organizations. -To educate the public -To build and refine the information framework that will eventually become the website that informs and attracts customers. -To rank higher on google by publishing large amounts of detailed quality content. We just made it to page 2 on the results and are working our way toward page 1. -Discussion forum, as soon as I get that server up and running.
It doesn’t say what the hell they actually do.
Or why you should care, or what you should do next. (Learn more, join the org, sign up for cryonics?)
Needs catchy bylines, and about 500 fewer words.
Where’s the answer?
It lacks a whole bunch of things, like a CTA, USP, any sort of trust indicators… I could go on here, but this is really quite a hard test to choose just one :).
Scientific evidence for its treatment being noticeably different from having died.
One?
A clue X-)
As we talk about sales pitch here, just one question: how can we distinguish between genuine cryonics research and quackery?
Don’t forget that wishful thinking is deeply ingrained into human psychology, and it seems that many people on this site are ready to throw money at any organization who claims to work on cryonics.
Given that we don’t have any evidence of cryonics working (as far as I know, no successful revival has been ever done), it is only hoped that it might work some day in the future. This can also attract scammers.
Successful revival doesn’t seem it’s the right thing to look at—but there are probably preservation metrics that we can track and judge cryonics organizations by, like time involved in suspension, some metrics of how well the suspension went, and so on. One might be also interested if anything happened in the wake of Melody Maxim’s criticisms 5 years ago (I haven’t looked into it since then).
Authority. Look at who has signed up for cryonics. Peter Thiel, Robin Hanson, Ray Kurzweil, and Aubrey de Grey are all Alcor members.
Eh, smart people can rationalize doing dumb things—Skepticism 101.
I would point to cryobiologist Greg Fahy, Ph.D., as a more relevant authority:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Fahy
If I wanted to play the devil’s advocate, i would point out two issues with this:
Most of the people in your example seem to be very rich. For such a very rich person the costs might be as insignificant as the cost of buying a beer might be for me. This means, if it turned out to be a scam, they wouldn’t lose almost anything. I, on the other hand, might lose a significant portion of my net worth, which might have had a better use in the hands of my family than in the hands of a fraudster.
There are famous celebrities who join a certain very infamous cult disguising itself as a religion, whose name I don’t mention because that might be enough for them to sue me. Of course, most of those celebrities are no scientists or engineers, so this point can be weak against your list of examples.
If everyone outside of cryonics thinks of it as a rich man’s indulgence, then why haven’t adventuresses showed up? In the real world, cryonics acts like “female Kryptonite.”
Those are all also examples of famous contrarians, as well as famous futurists… anyone who knows who those people are will also know that.
So far, cryonics looks like a great SF idea. One of those things that should be possible in theory, but may not be possible in practice. If you get frozen now, what I think will happen is that they’ll do it wrong, and the people who thaw you will do it wrong, too. And those people will learn about what to avoid next time they thaw someone, and what the people who froze you should have done differently.
That’s great, because it’ll help people they freeze in 2215 to maybe have a real chance of being revived, so I’d be prepared to volunteer for it (but not pay a lot of money for it). But what if they succeed partially, and I don’t just die (for real, this time) but end up a ‘vegetable’? No, thanks, I’m not as altruistic as all that.
Such are the hazards of early adoption.
Gregory Benford, Ph.D., the physicist and science fiction writer, talks about cryonics in a new video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoGMYjYSCG8
“Many Are Cold But Few Are Frozen”
;)
Steve Harris, M.D., beat you to it over 20 years ago:
http://www.researchgate.net/publication/11700148_Many_are_cold_but_few_are_frozen_a_humanist_looks_at_cryonics
Agreed; in fact, I think that we need a better “cryonics sales pitch” everything. Note that I may have used a more critical and more cynical tone than I meant to in writing these quick thoughts:
Neither CI nor Alcor’s logos are particularly memorable, and neither organization has a mascot. Why not include a cute cartoonized polar bear on Alcor’s website?
CI’s home page is well done. Alcor’s is decent. The pictures on the home pages of both sites could be improved—instead of using pictures of a room full of freezing/storage tanks on the home page, use a picture of your new smiling, cartoonized polar bear mascot taking a cold bath in a bisected storage tank. The polar bear could be depicted in a reclined position, as one might recline in a hot tub if feeling especially relaxed.
On Alcor’s home page, the pictures of Alcor members recommending Alcor’s service could be replaced with pictures of smiling doctors and scientists (either old ones with grey beards, or young ones who are conventionally attractive) wearing lab coats on top of business professional attire, and recommending Alcor’s services. Bonus points if the scientists are actually signed up for cryonics.
Could a prominent biologist or science-related public figure be paid to do a TED talk on cryonics?
I remember that Eliezer one mentioned that sending people cryonics pendants when they were just beginning to sign up, rather than after they were completely signed up, might help motivate people to finish the process of signing up for cryonics.
Because Alcor is a conservative organisation. It needs to be to stay around for a long time.
I think you’re confusing conservative-as-facade with conservative-as-need-for-survival. Do you really think that having a mascot would decrease the chance of it surviving?
If the internal culture of a company doesn’t match it’s external culture often bad.
with a slogan: “Be Cool—Live Forever!”
Do a deal with Disney and license Elsa X-D
Seeing as how you’re potentially willing to put money toward this, have you considering running a contest?
Ah, I also wish there were some posts about the practical parts of signing up. An overview of options, like Alcor or CI, standby service, life insurance costs, whether to consider relocation to Phoenix or whatnot, whether to get one of those bracelet things or something, and for god’s sake let the guide not be so US-centric.
Though possibly this masterpost-thing exists and I haven’t heard of it, or my unusual distaste for not having every detail planned out beforehand is biasing me.
Focus on the goal more than the means:
I want to stay alive in good shape.
Life allows for experiences.
Experiences can lead to skills.
Accumulate enough skills, and you can become a futuristic badass like something out of science fiction, kind of like the character Rutger Hauer plays in Blade Runner, but really old and “ultramature,” as Max More says, if you do it right: “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. . . ”
And then, some day, young people—I don’t mean ones in their teens and twenties, but ones only a few centuries old after the transition to superlongevity—will learn of your reputation, and they will come up to you deferentially to ask, “You knew people who have DIED?! And no one could revive them? We don’t understand that experience. Could you please tell us about it?”
Being a badass is not a function of how many skills have you accumulated.
Personality certainly plays a role in the early-peaking badass. But then an introverted person thrown into a lot of sticky situations that he has to figure out and survive through could wind up with a pretty impressive résumé, and in effect become a different kind of badass.
Obviously related: D.J. MacLennan’s new book, Frozen to Life:
https://www.singularityweblog.com/cryonics-a-glass-state-time-travel/
Cryonics: A Glass-state Time Travel
by D.J. MacLennan on August 6, 2015 0 Comments
Frozen to Life
What if we gave people a way to escape absolute death at the end of their biologically-allotted lifespans? Wouldn’t many of them jump at it? Of course, and they do, and have been for some time now. Religionists believe that the metaverse (or whatever they wish to call the whole macro-everything, including all the ‘spiritual’ bits) is neatly ordered to deliver them into immortality, just in time. There’s no mechanism for this. It just happens.
That’s an amazing technology – no mechanism, no physical processes, no messy cause and effect to worry about. Religionists, however, don’t consider this a technology. It’s beyond technology and little human tinkerings like that. Something else does the miraculous transmutation from decay-prone physical stuff to eternal ethereal stuff – something evidently a lot smarter than we are.
The religionist route is an unfounded one, to say the very least.
So, what might work if you want to avoid absolute death? First, you need to accept your existence as a host of atoms in particular configurations. Second, you need to think about ways to arrest biological decay, which is just the chemical reactions that happen when the specific set of constraints we call life no longer apply. As Brian Wowk discusses in his essay Medical Time Travel, the Arrhenius equation shows us that chemical reactions stop when temperature drops low enough (-196 °C, just below the boiling point of nitrogen, will suffice for our purposes). Done correctly, with the right concentration of antifreeze-type cryoprotectants, your ‘dead’ brain and its surrounding tissues will undergo ‘glass-state’ vitrification after suspension in liquid nitrogen. Third, armed with this information, you need to act. It’s unlikely that anybody else is going to set up the circumstances for your eventual glass-state transition, so it’s down to you.
In information-theoretic terms, immortality is already possible. It just isn’t much fun, because you can’t be conscious of anything. Bad and extant, good and gone, you hang on the precipice tip of an unclosed infinity symbol. With your molecular interactions halted, nothing happens. Time yawns, and down its craw you silently fall. Nobody knows how to resurrect a person from this immortal abeyance. Some have theories, some even incipient skills and tools, but no one yet knows how to trigger the temporal gag reflex that will cough you out and close the sigil.
But think on it. Think on the potential. The glass-state time-traveler is indeterminate, undissipated, untruncated. Her death was not information-theoretic death. She is orders of magnitude less dead than the conventionally-erased many.
Skepticism about her possible revival amounts to this: because we cannot imagine how she might be revived, we cannot imagine how she might be revived. Might it take nanobots, substrate-independence tech, scanning neuromorphic arrays, advanced connectomic inference, molecular assemblers? Who knows? Perhaps all of these, perhaps none. No matter. She has the luxury of time. Only if abandoned and allowed to decay (or if our race extinguishes itself before the necessary technology arises) will her problem become terminally insurmountable.
This potential solution to the problem of absolute death defies established human conventions of death and corpse-disposal. It triggers ‘cognitive dissonance’ and repugnance reactions. Scientist Leon Kass finds ‘wisdom’ in the human repugnance response. On cryonics, I neither feel it nor find it wise. Post-mortem cryoprotective abeyance is a logical choice. Nevertheless, the heavy blinders of repugnance and convention still screen this from most. And we ‘cryonicists’ do it to ourselves; we are far from immune to the emotional and existential (for a few, even ‘spiritual’) turmoil our mortal decision may cause.
‘Cryonauts’ are simply mute, liminal dwellers on an unknown threshold. Not living, not dead; not formerly crazy – nor necessarily selfish, altruistic, or pioneering. Just – for the love of hope and reason – not irretrievably lost.
About the Author:
D.J. MacLennan
D.J. MacLennan is a futurist author who lives on the Isle of Skye, Scotland. He wrote two chapters of the recently-published cryonics anthology The Prospect of Immortality – Fifty Years Later. His new book Frozen to Life: A Personal Mortality Experiment is due for release at the end of August 2015.
Is there a foundation devoted to promotion of cryonics? If no, it would be probably very desirable to create such. Popularizing cryonics can save an incredible amout of existences and so, many people supporting cryonics would probably be willing to donate money to make some more organized promotion. Not to mention personal gains—the more popular cryonics would become, the lower the costs and better logistics.
If you are or know someone supporting cryonics and having experience/knowledge in non-profit organisations or professional promotion, please consider that.
Yes. This is part of the mission of the Brain Preservation Foundation. The American Cryonics Society is also in this space, I believe.
It doesn’t depend on the quality of the writing if someone is mourning over a death then it’s a bad time to speak about how the death could have been prevented.
CronoDAS, I’m glad you brought up this issue. Sadly, I don’t think there’s good evidence that cryo, as practiced today, works. I think it is reasonable (but of course, not ideal) for people to dismiss things which are only theoretically possible but not practically possible.
If we had verifiably working cryo today, it might be easier to change people’s minds.
I think your “might” is a severe understatement. If people could actually see other previously dead people walk, this would have an immediate and large effect.
If they could even just revive a mouse, that’d help a lot already.
What is the largest living thing that has been successfully pulled out of cryo? A single cell? Disconnected tissue? An organ?
I’d find a single cell not terribly convincing, a working organ much more so.
(context: I haven’t signed up and don’t currently intend to, but it’s mentally marked as “keep an eye on this, additional information may change my mind.”)
Technically, it’s the frogs and fish that routinely freeze through the winter. Of course, they evolved to pull off that stunt, so it’s less impressive.
We’ve cryopreserved a whole mouse kidney before, and were able to thaw and use it as a mouse’s sole kidney.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2781097/
We’ve also shown that nematode memory can survive cryopreservation:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3107805/Could-brains-stay-forever-young-Memories-survive-cryogenic-preservation-study-shows.html
The trouble is that larger chunks of tissue (like, say, a whole mouse or a human brain) are more prone to thermal cracking at very low temperatures. Until we solve that problem, nobody’s coming back short of brain emulation or nanotechnology.
Nitpick: The article talks about a rabbit kidney, not a mouse one
It also isn’t entirely clear how cold the kidney got, or how long it was stored. It’s evidence in favor of “at death” cryonics, but I’m not sure how strong of evidence it is. Also, it’s possible to survive with substantially more kidney damage than you would even want to incur as brain damage.
Waterbears routinely survive freeze-thaw cycles (and much more besides).
Cryonics is being deeply confused with suspended animation in this thread. Cryonics has nothing to do with cellular viability. It’s only about preserving the wiring and physical structure of the brain by any means necessary. In current cryonics, all cells are totally and completely dead long before the procedure is finished. But we also have electron micrographs showing very good structural preservation of these dead cells. The cryonics revival technology will need to manipulate trillions of atoms inside of each of billions of cells. No low tech is going to be able to revive them.
Thank you for clarifying this point.
FYI I was referring only to “Cryonics” when I said cryo in the parent comment, not to “suspended animation”.
How about arguments from analogy that are broadly evocative.
The underlying question seems to be:
To what extent should an agent’s utility definition extend beyond their own person?
A ready example would be effective altruism—should an effective altruism care about bequesting their fortune after death, given that they are not around to process the outcome? Intuitively, subcultural conditioning would bring most people to say yes, but how about if I turned it around? For example, a suicidal woman may strongly advocate for a right to suicide. Would she be maximising her utility to publish a note to the effect of calling on potential like-minded suicidees to kill anti-suicide policy-makers/politicians before they kill themselves, in order to pressure them to change their stance and raise awareness for dying with dignity? The post-death value maximising approach should be consistent in both the EA and suicide example, I should think.
I’m not sure how to evaluate “should” in the question, but most people I know (including myself) “do” include events they’ll never directly perceive in their decisions.
Personally, I recognize that some of my current happiness and motivation is based on imagining potential future events that I think are exceedingly unlikely for me to actually experience. I make decisions based on likely impact on others outside of my perception-cone, such as strangers I’ll never meet or interact with, and who may well be figments of the mass-media’s imagination.
Whether these un-meetable person-placeholders in my imagined decision-consequence timeline are contemporaneous but physically removed, or distantly removed in time is kind of irrelevant.
I wonder what this philosophical stance is called?
My argument against cyronics:
The probability of being successfully frozen and then being revived later on is dependent on the following
1)Being successfully frozen upon death (loved ones could interfere, lawyers could interfere, the manner of my death could interfere)
2)The company storing me keeps me in the same (or close to it) condition for however long it takes for revivification technologies to be discovered
3)The revivification technologies are capable of being discovered
4)There is a will to revivify me
These all combine to make the probability of success quite low.
The value of success is obviously high, but it’s difficult to assess how high: just because they can revivify me doesn’t mean my life will then end up being endless (at the very least, violent death might still lead to death in the future)
This is weighted by the costs. These are
1)The obvious financial ones
2)The social ones. I actually probably value this higher than 1. Explaining to my loved ones my decision, having to endure mockery and possibly quite strong reactions
The final point here is about risk aversion. While one could probably set up the utility calculation above to come up positive, I’m not sure that utility calculation is the correct way to determine whether to make such a risk. That is, if a probability of a one shot event is low enough, the expected value isn’t a very useful indicator of my actual returns. That is, if a lottery has a positive gain, it still might not be worth me playing it if the odds are still very much against me making any money from it!
So how would you convince me?
1)Drop the costs, both social and financial. The former is obviously done by making cryonics more mainstream, the latter… well by making cryonics more mainstream, probably
2)Convince me that the probability of all 4 components is higher than I think it is. If the conjoined probability started hitting >5% then I might start thinking about it seriously.
You have to play a Long Game here, something I find increasingly easy to do as I have reached my 50′s. I told my original “loved ones”—my mother, my father (divorced from the former), and my sister—about cryonics a quarter century ago. They all considered it weird, but then whatever problems that might have caused me tend to correct themselves with time. My father died last October, for example, and now his ashes reside in a veterans’ cemetery in Arkansas.
As for other “loved ones,” I have had no candidates for that role so far. (Don’t sign up for cryonics for the dating prospects, in other words.)
(2) was a big deal for me as well, until I got used to it. Now cryonics has become a positive part of my identity that I’m proud to tell others about.
A friendly super-intelligence would easily solve (3) and (4). Keep in mind that most of the probability mass of cryonics working occurs if things turn out really well for the world. Conditional on cryonics working, you almost certainly would get an enormous benefit from greatly extending your life.
Assuming that (3) is practically solvable. Super-intelligence is not omnipotence.
Depending on the definition of “friendly”.
Could you provide a probability value for “quite low”?
Less than 1%. I haven’t thought hard about these numbers, but I would say 1 has a probability of say 50/60%,2 10% (as 2 allows for societal collapse, not just company collapse) 3 10% (being quite generous there) and 4 40% which gives us 0.60.10.1*0.4=0.0024. If I’m more generous to 3, bumping it up to 80% I get 0.0192. I don’t think I could be more generous to 2 though. These numbers are snatched from the air without deep thought, but I don’t think they’re wildly bad or anything.
thakil, I have a deal for you:
I offer you an extra .5% probability of your getting to spend a million years in utopia. How much are you willing to pay?
A fairly small amount. Again, risk aversion says to me that a 1 in 1000 chance isn’t worth much if I can only make that bet once.
I don’t think that “risk aversion” is the right phrase. Risk aversion arises when you would get a high marginal utility of wealth in future states in which you are relatively poor. As a result, you want to even out your wealth across different states so you buy insurance. Cryonics is like insurance in that it reduces the harm of bad states so all else being equal the more risk adverse you are, the more willing you should be to buy cryonics.
Risk aversion generally occur when your subjective utility with respect to some quantity X is monotonically but sublinearly increasing.
In most economic analysis X is generally considered to be money, but it can be really anything else, including years spent in utopia.
Risk aversion can be demonstrated even in trivial cases where you offer people a certain payout of $10 or a 50% chance of getting $20. I don’t think it’s about high marginal utility of wealth in certain future states.
Cryonics is not at all like insurance: insurance is about paying to protect yourself from a small chance that a bad thing will happen. Cryonics is about paying to get a small chance that a good thing will happen. It’s much more akin to a lottery (as Vaniver already pointed out).
Risk aversion generally occur when your subjective utility with respect to some quantity X is monotonically but sublinearly increasing.
In most economic analysis X is generally considered to be money, but it can be really anything else, including years spent in utopia.
Explaining my position would be more appropriate for a full post rather than a response to a response to a response, so for now I will tap out on this issue.
I think this gets into prospect theory territory: psychologically, cryonics is perceived more like a lottery ticket than it is like insurance, in that you pay in the common case to gain wealth in the rare case. To the extent that one is sensitive to losses (rather than having a concave utility function), that makes cryonics seem like a worse idea (and insurance better).
Please demonstrate that your offer is credible :-P
See my book for why a singularity is likely near and the implications of this for cryonics.
As someone who has read a bit about cryonics and is not convinced, I’d be interested in a summary of the arguments for cryonics. However, I’m skeptical it would convince me to sign up.
What are your main concerns?
I’m not convinced that revival of most cryopreserved people will ever be possible in any reasonable sense, even if we have strong AI. Brain damage sets in quickly, so to me you have to take it on faith that being preserved when they can is adequate. Add on a host of other things which you have to take on faith about the entire process, and it seems closer to a scam than the fountain of youth to me. The entire scheme seems to be wishful thinking. I find it hard to estimate the probabilities involved with this because it’s so speculative. With that being said, I gave about a 2% chance of a cryopreserved human being revived before 2040, mostly because I don’t know what the future holds. (Note that this prediction is fairly weak. This is a 2% probability that at least 1 human will be revived. If there are 100 attempts and 1 is a success then that’s enough, but the track record would be pretty bad. I don’t anticipate there will be many attempts by that date, though.)
Assuming I would be revived if preserved, I don’t see any reason to believe I’ll come out unscathed. I would rather be not revived at all than to be revived severely mentally retarded, for example.
With that being said, I’m not opposed to the idea and give it serious consideration, but I believe maximizing my own QALYs in more established ways like physical fitness is much more important. Also, it’s worth noting that I don’t believe immortality is necessarily a good goal in isolation. If I were immortal, I’d want my memory erased every couple hundred years or so just to keep things interesting (I assume if cryonics works then this is likely possible with no ill effects. Might also be possible to reverse wiping someone’s memory if they store it somewhere.).
I recently had the realization that cryo might actually have some unintended consequences. I can think of one which would need to be addressed before I’d sign up: risk compensation. That is, because one has signed up for cryo they might feel less risk and do more dangerous things. A few quick Google searches suggests cryo people might not be aware of this issue, so I don’t know what their response might be.
Maybe cryo believers are paranoid enough about dying that they are unaffected or less affected by risk compensation. This is possible, but I see being unaffected as unlikely given that irrationality affects us all. To give an example of how this might manifest, people signed up for cryo might be more likely to be out of shape than similar people who are not signed up for cryo. There’s no clear evidence either way, but I’d be interested in seeing where the truth lies before considering signing up.
The best “death” for cryo members is one where you have time to notify your provider before hand. You have an incentive to take extra care against accidents where this wouldn’t happen. My being a member of Alcor in part motivated this post.
Excellent point I had not considered. I’d still be curious to see whether those signed up for cryonics have healthier habits (with respect to exercise, diet, wearing bike helmets, etc.), but this seems like reasonable evidence to believe they do. In fact, it seems to me that signing up for cryonics, even if you believe it to be overwhelmingly unlikely to work, might provide strong incentive to have good habits. I don’t know if this is cost effective, but it’s worth considering.
I’m just hoping for something that will get people to think about the possibility. Obviously, you already have.
God bless this post and God bless Aubrey de Grey.