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?
I don’t want to wake up a stranger in a strange world.
That already happens to everyone. We call it “birth.”
If revived, I wouldn’t have any useful skills.
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.
The people who revive me might torture me.
Or try to rape you, like in the “reverse cryonics” time travel story Outlander. Claire seems to manage regardless.
It’s selfish of me to have more than my fair share of life, especially since the world is overpopulated.
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.”
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 your value for a micromort to you?
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.
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.
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.
And you won’t have any other use for that money when you’re dead.
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’m very curious why you think 5% is a realistic estimate of the probability of cryonics working
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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).
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).