A Dying Young Woman’s Hope in Cryonics and a Future
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
On the face of it, it seems insane. You're essentially making a bet that someone will find something useful to do with a frozen brain -- and that your estate will be able to afford the procedure -- before the company you've entrusted your brain to either makes a mistake or collapses. Given the near-total lack of progress on the former front (there's been considerable progress in the freezing part, but almost none in finding a useful thing to do with a frozen brain), the odds seem phenomenally bad.
On the other hand, it does offer something to those who are still alive: the hope that your exstence could continue indefinitely, and that you might get to be with lost loved ones again. This is a valuable hope, so much so that it's built into most religions in some form or other. It's possible that the benefit of this hope makes the costs worth bearing.
For now, I've left cryonics in my "not for me, but I won't try to discourage anyone else" bucket.
Apparently if you have signed up for some kind of life-insurance, you simply pay your regular insurance fee, and direct them to give it to Alcor for your preservation if you die.
Or if you wish to pay in total, I've heard it's ~$80K for head only. And ~$200K for whole body.
Once I can afford any of the above options, cryonics would be my top "burial preference".
(Think about it, in the US, it's a fraction of the amount you get to spend in the final year of your life. You could choose to waste a lot of money during age 79-80 on a losing battle, or you could call it quits at 79, for which right-to-die needs to be legal, and spend a fraction on cryonics. Suffice to say, I'm a big advocate of right-to-die as well).
[0] (Warning: loud intro) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0xiX9mPB_s
If you believe they are honest and competent (which I do), there are factors to consider entirely beyond their control. Even if we assume that there are still humans around to run Alcor, that energy prices haven't skyrocketed, that cryonics haven't been made illegal for some reason, and that some kind of war or natural or man-made disaster hasn't wiped out the facility, there's still a rather high chance that some future management of Alcor will be either dishonest or incompetent and ruin the whole thing. On a 200 year scale, I'd place the odds of that alone above 90%, even if I assume maximally effective present management.
Again, this doesn't have any effect on the present benefits (hope, etc).
Dying in the jungle in pursuit of the fountain of youth or bathing in the blood of the young rightfully comes off as bonkers to healthy people.
Check your arrogance levels, they're way off.
Sane people are actually very much afraid of death. Anyone would have a much easier time proving that it is insanity not to be afraid of death, than the opposite.
> It takes a weird sort of narcissism to pursue cryonics.
It takes a much nastier sort of narcissism to be judgemental about how people decide their bodies will be handled after death.
> Dying in the jungle in pursuit of the fountain of youth or bathing in the blood of the young rightfully comes off as bonkers to healthy people.
Nobody is bathing in blood. If this is what you are actually reading in this topic, I recommend therapy.
A more neutral example would be someone who thoroughly investigates dietary health, and makes sure to eat a nutritious, healthy diet full of fresh vegetables and whatnot. Which is CLEARLY insane, /s.
I think people are comfortable only because it is inevitable. Given a universe that death did not exist in, would you consider it sane to introduce it?
Considering the long history of the motivation of seeking immortality in literature, and that it's not typically presented in a "hey, look at this freak, what sort of nutjob would want to be immortal, am I right?"[0] sort of way, I think your use of the words "sane" and "weird" aren't on the right track.
Narcissism... sure. But a normal sort.
Also, religions in general seem to spend a lot of time and effort on helping people overcome discomfort with death. Why? Are most people insane, then?
[0] Cautionary tales aplenty, yes, but authors don't typically expect the reader to consider this as a strange motivation, I would say. Why caution against pursuing something no sane, merely-ordinarilly-narcisistic person would pursue anyway?
What? Why should people be perfectly accepting of cessation of existence at ~80? People not wanting to die at 20 is perfectly normal, are you meant to get bored of life at 80 or something?
>Dying in the jungle in pursuit of the fountain of youth or bathing in the blood of the young rightfully comes off as bonkers to healthy people.
Let's rephrase that a bit to apply to money:
>Dying in the jungle in pursuit of the city of El Dorado, or killing people and selling their organs on the stock market rightfully comes off as bonkers to healthy people.
...and therefore pursuing money is clearly psychotic, and we should throw all entrepreneurs in the loonie bin?
Except that there are other things you could do with the money, some of which could potentially even give you a much greater chance of not vitrifying in the first place.
Now if you would divert all cryonics resources towards existential risk mitigations, AI or rejuvenation research, that would be a different story. But pretty soon we'd have to discuss how other resources are allocated right now, and next thing we know, we're talking politics.
If you ask me, the world can probably finance cryonics for everyone and AI research and anti-ageing research and existential risk mitigation and many other things I didn't think of, while preserving and improving our standards of living at the same time. The (huge) problem is getting our act together.
You say "talking politics" like it's a bad thing!
>If you ask me, the world can probably finance cryonics for everyone and AI research and anti-ageing research and existential risk mitigation and many other things I didn't think of, while preserving and improving our standards of living at the same time. The (huge) problem is getting our act together.
Well yes.
That was unintended. But it is difficult: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Politics_is_the_Mind-Killer
There seems a surprising amount of techno pessimism here. Just to take the other side I think it's very likely to succeed at least to some extent. If you just assume computing and scanning keep improving a similar amount per year to what they have been then we'll have the tech to scan and simulate for example in two or three decades.
Logic and reason assures that it almost certainly is not going to work, but the value of the potential upside is effectively infinite to that individual, so it still may be a rational investment.
Life does not have infinite value. People, including atheists, sometimes give their own life for some higher purpose (another life, freedom, a better standard of living for their village…).
Of course, this would be different if you seek to escape Hell. (You might be religious, and guilty of some mortal sin.)
Shambling about like some lonely museum piece come to life sounds pretty worthless to me, personally. The value of a human life is in its context of family and society.
Your brain might contain nothing of value to that society, except as a store of archaic knowledge, or maybe as a substrate for computing. They may never even bother reviving someone as a conscious, self-aware being, or if they do, it may be for a zoo or a lifetime of slavery for the machines which I assume for no particular reason will have taken over.
Have them sign up with you!
Seriously, do have them sign up with you. You don't have to be alone.
The researchers from the future may put your brain into very painful condition in order to keep it functional.
Would cryonic worth it?
A vastly more likely scenario is that the company is a scam in the first place, and has no particular interest in preserving your brain, given the complete lack of any possible accountability mechanism.
There aren't that many companies in cryonics, but they've been around for a long time (30 years I think?). And there are things you can do to verify - e.g. visit their preservation rooms, etc. And people have done this.
That some dead brains are frozen at the moment?
You could verify other things too, but unfortunately, considering it's cryonics, there's not much you can verify except for the authenticity of the effort (e.g. you can't verify effectiveness of the effort since no one really knows).
It would be like a relic[1].
I'd add some testaments to it with untestable claims.
You know, the usual.
The main difference between Cryonics and more established religions is that Cryonics is an unproven sect. Major religions survived and polished their traditions for hundreds or thousands of years.
Cryonics movement is younger than Scientology[2]
---
Remember, this is a company that enters into a contract with you, if they don't do as they claim, they are hugely financially liable. They've been around for longer than many other companies, do you think they would have been able to hide massive fraud for all this time?
AFAIK, we're not talking about some "faith-healer" off in a corner somewhere, we're talking about an actually company, with facilities, doctors, etc. I imagine with open books as well, though I'm not sure.
Let me ask it the other way around - what would it take, theoretically, to convince you that it's not a scam? At least not in the way you are claiming (which is that they're not really preserving brains/bodies)?
I think there is some way to check, but why would anybody do it? Let's imagine that you work for Alcor as a technician and you find out that due to some refrigerator malfunction, dead bodies temporary unthawed.
Would you publicly report the incident or would keep silently collect your salary?
> if they don't do as they claim,
They claim to keep dead bodies frozen.
> they are hugely financially liable
Liable to what exactly?
> do you think they would have been able to hide massive fraud for all this time?
Of course.
Consider Bernie Madoff's Ponzy scheme. Alcor Life has much smaller revenue in comparison.
> convince you that it's not a scam?
Successful revival.
Do you know any technology that worked without successful tests of that technology?
E.g. they create microprocessor and claim that it works inside, but never tested it. What are the chances that this untested microprocessor would work?
"> they are hugely financially liable
Liable to what exactly?"
Well, the original point made above is that there is no way to verify they do as they claim, which is to freeze bodies/heads, in the hopes that someday in the future someone will know how to do something with it. I'm assuming that if they don't actually freeze the bodies as they say, they are committing fraud. That's what the discussion was about. That's what I meant by "liable".
"[What would it take to] > convince you that it's not a scam?
Successful revival."
Well, since no one is claiming that a successful revival is possible now, or even that a successful revival will be possible sometime in the future, I don't think that's a fair thing to demand.
Again, as long as they're clearly explaining the idea behind this, as long as they're not trying to trick anyone by promising something that doesn't exist, which they aren't, then I don't think it's fair to call it a scam.
I just find it a little sad that, at least as far as I can tell, most of the people involved in this are people who really believe in the mission. They're not lying, not misleading people, giving all the facts, and yet, everyone just assumes it's a fraud or a scam.
2) "in the hopes that someday in the future someone will know"
They promote and claim that revival will be possible in the future. Without any proof. So it is a confidence game. Hence "scam".
There is a good chance that successful freezing and revival would be possible in the future.
But it is very unlikely that revival of dead bodies that Alcor is freezing today would ever be possible.
> most of the people involved in this are people who really believe in the mission
You can say the same about any established religion.
> They're not lying, not misleading people,
Sorry, internal belief is not a guarantee that the statements are true and not misleading.
It also may make sense to use cryonics for future cure of deceases, assuming that cryonics work.
But now we should assume that cryonics does NOT work, and everyone who claims (or hints) otherwise without testing is a scammer.
Again, if you're talking about some group like Alcor, they say it may be possible in the future.
I'd love it if you could provide some kind of evidence that they're not presenting the truth or trying to dupe people. Especially considering that so few people have actually signed up, so I'm guessing most people who sign up do it after a lot of research.
By default you should assume that stuff does NOT work.
If only few people actually sign up, that is a telling sign that most of people cannot find any proof that advertised service works.
Their conference is in October. I'm going. (I signed up with Alcor after Hal Finney; the only thing worse is dying, and I'd like it to get better...)
$1k/yr between membership and a 20y 500k term life policy seems cheap enough to me.
You've misunderstood the business structure of modern cryonics. A cryonics org like ALCOR is actually two organizations: one is a commercial organization which charges for storage and for the messy business of cryopreservation, and the second is a nonprofit trust which 'owns' the vitrified brains, pays the rent, conservatively invests the rest, and which will pay for the revival procedures if/when such are invented. When the commercial organization collapses, the nonprofit will simply have to have the dewars transferred somewhere else (it takes something like weeks for those things to boil down to a dangerous level; LN2 dewars are really cool!); and I believe there have already been transferrals of cryopatients in the past.
When you die, your life insurance is paying much of that out into the trust fund. There's not much question of 'whether your estate will be able to afford the procedure', since that's what the trust is for. It's not your estate's business at all.
Is it likely to happen? Honestly I have a very hard time imagining the probabilities. Financial collapse versus deliberate destruction versus horrible accident versus actually getting revived? They all seem unlikely, but once your brain is in deep freeze, its fate is one of those.
It's hard to estimate, but nonprofits in the West have OK long-term track records and the cryonics double-organization model has worked well since it was created in the aftermath of Chatsworth (which demonstrated why the commercial side must be separated). Arguably, it only needs to work for another century, and it's not like it's that hard to keep some funds conservatively invested, pay rent regularly, and react once every few decades to a problem.
I'm no neurologist but wouldn't be surprised if there's information in the brain which is encoded in ways other than which neuron is connected to which. Like, firing patterns.
Maybe you should reread my comment.
"You're essentially making a bet that someone will find something useful to do with a frozen brain -- and that your estate will be able to afford the procedure -- before the company you've entrusted your brain to either makes a mistake or collapses."
The procedure your parent was talking about is revival, not cryopreservation. Your comment talks in detail about why you think ALCOR's corporate structure makes them unlikely to collapse, but the money in ALCOR's trust is only enough to keep people frozen, not to cover revival.
(ALCOR does claim that the patient care trust will be enough to cover revival, but (a) revival could potentially be very expensive and (b) ongoing maintenance expenses have been using up the money generated by the trust and this seems likely to continue).
So you understand exactly how it's supposed to work and what I was talking about, and you were playing dumb by claiming to misinterpret my comment. Thanks.
Something is deeply wrong with this way of thinking: it doesn't value human life at all.
Here's another version. Someone comes to you seeking for help. He's dying. He could be saved by some recently devised miraculous medical procedure, which would return him to full health. The catch is, that procedure is relatively expensive (let's say a few weeks worth of your own salary). Question: would you let him die?
Put it this way, of course not. But we tend to forget that cryopreservation, if it works, is exactly the same.
See, a preserved person, provided she can actually be reconstructed back to life, is not actually dead. She's mostly dead. There's a difference. Think of it as a very deep coma. So, if we ever devise a proper reconstruction procedure, we have two choices: (i) pay for the procedure and heal that patient at last; or (ii) don't pay and let the patient drift into utter annihilation.
Heal or don't heal. It's that simple.
---
Now maybe you assume a frozen brain is not a living person. Maybe you're right. Maybe the preservation wasn't good enough on this particular brain. Maybe the preservation procedure was flawed to begin with. Maybe the brain doesn't hold enough information about a person to begin with. Maybe we won't find the technological means to actually get the brain back to its old state —even if it's theoretically possible. Maybe we won't be able to fix whatever caused the brainwaves to go flat in the first place —if that's fixable even in theory, see Alzheimer. I'm sure I've forgotten lots of ways this could go horribly wrong. Anyway, if any of this is true, that frozen brain can't be recovered, does count as dead, and you'd be right to call it a "frozen brain" instead of a "patient".
The thing is, to the best of our current knowledge, the odds are not nil. They're not good, but they're not nil. There is a chance that the brain is actually alive —I mean, in some real deep coma. I'm not talking about some abstract hope here, but some actual probabilities of the kind you have for experimental drugs on cancer patients. Slim, but real.
And of course, if we somehow come up with an actual reconstruction procedure, if we somehow can examine the brain and be assured that yes, a return to full health is not only possible, but highly probable, then we'll know that brain was alive all along. That it was a living person in dire need of healing.
Surely the people of the future would be willing to pay for such healing? If not strangers, maybe (distant) relatives? Some philanthropist? The transhumanist community? Government or mutual funds? Today, people pay good money to give Kim a very slim hope of living again. In what kind of bleak world would no one be willing to pay for a probable return to full health?
Edit: > In what kind of bleak world would no one be willing to pay for a probable return to full health?
This one. People die of totally curable conditions all the time in the real, modern world.
Even Greg Egan took a whole short story to do it.
http://ttapress.com/553/crystal-nights-by-greg-egan/
“You know what they say the modern version of Pascal’s Wager is? Sucking up to as many Transhumanists as possible, just in case one of them turns into God. Perhaps your motto should be ‘Treat every chatterbot kindly, it might turn out to be the deity’s uncle’.”
edit: and when I scroll down I see I've been beaten to the Greg Egan punch. Great minds, I suppose...
This one.
People are dying now because of diseases we have basically eradicated in rich countries. The choice you're talking about making, saving a life for a few weeks worth of your own salary, is one that is already available to you and many others. What are you doing about it?
Now, I think you're right that it's horribly wrong to be letting people die when it's so easily avoidable, and I donate half my salary to help make things better, but most people don't think this way--most people just spend their money on themselves. Which means that if you're relying on the generosity of others to revive you you're probably going to be out of luck.
You're living proof of this. (Me… less so. I don't donate much.)
Amalcom on the other hand formulated things in such a way that it would be normal, expected to receive no outside help from the future. I disagree with that assumption. Expecting from the outset that the future will not help us is ludicrous. It's not guaranteed, but come on, we still have people like you, philanthropists, governments, and mutual funds —there's some things to say about the effectiveness of collective action vs individual choice: it's easier to donate or pay up when you know you're not alone.
So I ask again: in what kind of bleak world would NO ONE be willing to pay?
And mostly dead is partly alive. If she were all dead, well, there's only one thing you can do -- go through her pockets and look for loose change.
The part where it gets weird is, if you don't destroy the "original", you end up with two originals.
More (much more) details here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/r9/quantum_mechanics_and_personal_id...
Are you willing to risk your life on "pretty much sure" ? Especially when there's no experiment you can devise to test it?
If the Star Trek transporter is shown to work (it has transported healthy monkeys so far, and did nothing weird with flies), I would totally step on it. I would feel uneasy of course, but no more so than if I stepped into a rocket.
You might lose some memories, but if its at least 51% of the original brains tissue, is that not still "you", even if it is now full of fresh gray matter to replace all that damaged by freezing?
Especially since the tech to do that will probably come long before the tech to recreate your adult body.
PS: Hi WalterBright, D is amazing :<
Besides, why would there be only single WalterBright's clone, considering that cloning computer programs is many orders of magnitude cheaper than cloning humans?
Even more starkly: ever had surgery? Ever taken benzos? Or been black out drunk? I could give you an amnesic med, like midazolam (often used in surgery) then tell you that you were absolutely certain to die. And I'd be right (again for whatever flimsy values we're using here). The version of you that is hearing me tell you these things will disappear from earth. You'll wake up in the morning, none the wiser.
Edit: Only scary part is staying conscious after the cutover. Greg Egan gets into some of this with excellent short stories in Axiomatic (The Jewel) and Luminous (Transition Dreams). But that's still not really much worse than benzos.
The concerns about your frozen remains spoiling before anything happens is valid, but I personally suspect that unfreezing will play out like Social Security, but in reverse order. If we're unfrozen, it will be paid for (or prompted, in whatever post-scarcity Star Trek economy exists in the future) by our children and grandchildren, who will be unfrozen by their children and grandchildren, or childhood friend who misses them, or former coworker, and so on down the line.
There's probably no practical or economic reason for future people to unfreeze corpsicles, but there are sentimental ones. So I'm not so much worried about estates needing to pay for unfreezing or some future banks needing COBOL programmers.
Over 30 years ago, I joined others to sit with a friend while he died way too young. He had arranged for cryonic preservation. AFAIK, he's still chilling. And he has a minuscule but nonzero chance of someday resuming his prematurely interrupted life.
While that seems to me extremely unlikely to happen, I wonder if it felt just as unlikely to somebody in the 3rd century that people would someday fly through the air...or talk to a friend who was beyond shouting distance...or live to 90 years of age...etc. We've sequenced DNA from dinosaurs, and 30 years ago I would have bet strongly against that.
I've learned to avoid underrating the power of exponential increments in knowledge and capability.
1) Extremely low chances to win (if at all).
2) The change that the winner is going to regret being revived is quite high (dysfunctional body, totally new environment, being a subject of historians' research).
I might be narcissistic but that seems like a good thing to me. Imagine being able to tell future people what the present was really like.
Would you still like to try?
This is what I don't get it. Why people think this? You have exactly ZERO chance to win.
Even if cryonics will be a thing in the future, nobody is going to unfreeze you or put you in some body. I'm not even counting technological aspects, where your brain would be incorrectly frozen/lack of some key chemicals that has to be used that don't exist yet/tissue not preserved well enough. Even if they COULD make you live, future people wouldn't do it. Reason is that your brain has no value of any kind besides cryonics experimentation - means same value as a cow or a pig. Maybe even less, because your brain might bring trouble to ethicists who would be upset.
Cryonics for smart people is money spending equivalent of fortune teller for less smart people. Even if you explain to them it is not worth it, it doesn't work like they think it works, etc., they will still be convinced they are right. If this helps you psychologically then good for you, fortune tellers sometimes helps people in certain areas too.
Of course there is the issue of reviving the person, either biologically or digitally. As computing power grows, I don't see any barrier to simulating an entire human brain. Sure it will take time: according to this[0] and applying Moore's law, it will take about 60 years before we can simulate a brain in real time with a single machine.
This whole field makes me very uncomfortable. I'm not saying it's wrong, but the potential for harm (particularly to those being simulated) is very great. There's a Greg Egan story where reanimated humans live as "AI" characters a game simulation, waiting for when society will wake up and grant them rights.
[0] http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/163051-simulating-1-secon...
The Cookie Monster[1] by Vernor Vinge
Glasshouse[2] by Charles Stross
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cookie_Monster_%28novella%... (WP link, contains spoilers)
What Moore's law? This has already stopped.
So this "2.5 years" is just the first slowdown -- it gets worse. It's not like we just change 2 to 2.5 and continue for the next 10-20 years.
Probably not even 2 or 3. After 10nm, which is already challenging, you're basically screwed with any kind of process known/used today. And the costs for a fab are into the billions (and get higher with lower sizes), so it's not like small players can even compete in that field.
And that's for multicore -- so unless we also get a way to write more programs to be massively parallel (which lots of algorithms cannot be made) -- we don't get the "free boost" from Moore's law with regards to speed that we used to get.
Not only it's dropped to 2.5 years, but it's also more useless, just giving us more transistors in not readily usable cores.
That's why Intel devotes large part of the CPU to the embedded GPU -- it doesn't have much else to do with it.
I don't quite understand your point here, but if you were intending to refute my point regarding GPU computing, I think you are not understanding the nature of the CPU to GPU shift. GPGPU computing is a way to increase effective computing power without advancements in semiconductor technology. GPUs have a fundamentally different architecture that allows them to get much more processing power from the same silicon. They work differently to CPUs (amortizing memory access latency across many hardware threads instead of trying to minimize it, sharing control flow across many cores to minimize that cost, and requiring manual control of memory locality) but on many domains including training neural networks, they are much more powerful.
So GPUs are certainly not a diversion CPU makers get into when they can't make progress on CPUs.
I do. It's just not a general way to bypass the Moore law slowdown because there are domains that are inherently non parallelizable, and there GPUs don't do much.
Besides, I'll already covered GPUs in a sense when I talked about the need to make software to work well in many cores. Part of the work for that translates to GPU computing too.
But there's no general "shift" from CPU to GPU computing, as in "here's a new paradigm that will solve the Moore slowdown". It's, and will remain, more of a special purpose thing, for graphics, rendering, number crunching and yes, neural networks.
>So GPUs are certainly not a diversion CPU makers get into when they can't make progress on CPUs.
GPUs in general might not be, but for integrated CPUs and especially those from Intel, they are.
Apparently, we've decided that it has a hard problem to guarantee that we can communicate with the future, even about really bad stuff:
http://www.wipp.energy.gov/picsprog/articles/wipp%20exhibit%...
This is about warning the future about nuclear waste, but could be adopted to "vault of frozen heads" (Assuming they haven't failed by then and there was sufficient coolant.)
Sort of flip the opening sentences around: "This is a place of honor!"
(Well, not quite "period", actually. If you let one instance run for a while (a second, a minute, a day?), then destroy it, that certainly looks like murder.)
That a machine is permitted to occupy and consume resources, that might otherwise be used by actual living people who are also trying to live meaningful lives. Which one wins?
I'd be a little bit afraid of being in an emulator written in C++ that makes heavy use of Boost, though.
The emulation of a human is a human.
If you want to preserve your ideas, then writing books, articles and public comments on Internet is the way to go.
The chance of successful recovery of frozen dead brain after 100 years is very close to zero (assuming that the recovery process was never tested). Kim Suozzi's “1 or 2 percent chance” is extremely optimistic forecast.
While it's impossible to predict whether you'll be able to be revived it doesn't sit right with me that you, and many others, are making predictions about how future medical technology will work. Honestly, if we can keep progressing as quickly as we have been, it wouldn't surprise me that we couldn't do it after X years but could do it after X + Y years. Meaning if at some point we have the technology to start reviving people but can't do it reliably then wait another Y amounts of years and there is a significantly better chance.
Honestly, unless the brain is just completely ruined or something bad happens to the handling of the brains, it wouldn't surprise me if they're all eventually revivable. At this point we may be talking 200+ years away but they're frozen, who cares?
> but they're frozen, who cares?
That is another problem with cryonics: why would future civilization care about dead brains frozen 200 years ago?
Imagine that we already have technology that can unfreeze and revive people. And we just found 100,000 frozen medieval people to unfreeze.
So for the same price we can either unfreeze and revive 100,000 people or we can extend lives of 100,000 modern people who are facing terminal illness today.
How many medieval people do you think we would unfreeze&revive given such choice?
> How many medieval people do you think we would unfreeze&revive given such choice?
That is a false choice; why are the resources constrained so that the choice is between reviving 100,000 people or extending the lives of 100,000 people? Arguably we should have more resources in the future than today, more professionals, etc so why can't they do two things? Have we stopped scientific research to the point where no one is concentrating on historic man or reviving past humans?
People are curious, obviously we would do it. At the very least it would be interesting science. Can we bring back people frozen 200 years ago? Who knows until we try!
Because resources are always constrained. The only difference is the level of constraint. Consider slightly modified choice: between "extending lives of 1M modern people + revival of 0.1M medieval people" vs "extending lives of 1.1M modern people".
Or another choice: "Revival of 1M medieval people" vs "producing 1M clones of modern people".
Curiosity about history would make sure that some medieval people would be revived. May be a thousand total. After that resources would be redirected toward cloning best performing modern version of people.
Today sure. Tomorrow? Probably. But if you subscribe to the Kardashev scale then we'll likely become a type 2 or 3 civilization at which point I would consider it very likely that we are resource constrained to the point where this can't be done. I just don't think that would make sense.
When we become a type 1 we still might not have any real resource issues but that's harder to predict. So why wouldn't we revive everyone at some point? Seems silly to just let everyone thaw if we have the technology and resources at some point.
It does not really matter how much resources you have: if you have a lot, then you clone a lot of modern people, but still ignore obsolete stuff.
Would you pay a company to be frozen if you know they have 100,000 clients they haven't revived, even though they're capable of it?
I also would not pay even if they do revive bodies they have frozen.
Why freeze myself if revival is available already?
The only compelling reason to freeze the body if unfreezing alive body is a proven process, but some disease is not curable yet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryonics
http://alcor.org/sciencefaq.htm
http://www.brainpreservation.org/competitors/
The evidence assembled to date provides a reasonable expectation that the fine structure of the brain responsible for storing the data of the mind is preserved by vitrification, based on scanning electron microscopy and current best understanding of where that data is encoded.
There are a few organizations that span the intersection between organ preservation and cryonics, such as 21st Century Medicine. The focus there is on reversible vitrification, such as the paper linked below in which a rabbit kidney is vitrified, restored, and implanted.
http://www.21cm.com/pdfs/12FahyORG5-3%5b1%5d.pdf
There is a sizable fraction of the futurist community who approach cryonics with the pattern identity view of being satisfied with a copy of their mind running in emulation at some point in the future, the original vitrified substrate then discarded. Not very satisfying from the continuity identity perspective; a copy of you is not you. I'd be stipulating a restoration of the original tissues; probably a harder problem, but one that can be understood and foreseen. Advanced molecular nanotechnology and complete control over cellular biology would be requirements, for example, but that looks like being feasible later this century, just like the process of scanning and emulation.
The madness of it all is that cryonics is very plausible and could be far more cost-effective at volume. Yet no-one cares. Just like the problems encountered in trying to persuade anyone that working on rejuvenation biotechnology for indefinite healthy life spans is a good plan, in the matter of cryonics the population world is content to slow-walk off the cliff of aging and death without doing anything about it. There is no status quo so terrible that it won't be embraced and defended. Billions are lost to oblivion in an age in which the technological capabilities exist to prevent the overwhelming majority of those deaths. And no-one cares. The future will look on us as suicidal, ignorant barbarians, and rightly so.
Neither are you, you you from yesterday or the day before - conscious continuity is illusory. How do you know that your body isn't replaced with a new copy each night (thought experiment)?
restoration of the original tissues...Advanced molecular nanotechnology and complete control over cellular biology
You run into a Ship of Theseus problem with this approach, which gets back to your original qualia problem.
The biological body is not made to last - you'll need to be converted to something more durable if you want an unbroken conscious experience longer than ~100 years.
Because the workmanship keeps getting worse and worse. ;-)
Conscious continuity "might be" illusory. (Unless you have a proof or evidence; unlikely).
And favoring mind uploading over bio-longevity based on a "might be" is a very unsafe bet.
Since we loose continuity when we sleep, is the people waking up "us"? The only reason we say "yes" to that, is because it's the same body -- not because continuity of conscious existence wasn't lost.
>Not very satisfying from the continuity identity perspective; a copy of you is not you.
Consider the classic "Ship of Theseus" way: while the subject is awake, his brain is replaced neuron by neuron by artificial neurons. He is conscious for the whole process.
In the end of the procedure, his whole brain is now an electronic one. We follow the same steps and replace all his body parts.
Now consider that at the same time, the old body is re-assembled from the parts taken out.
Is his new electronic copy or the old one the real "he"?
I'd say, favoring continuity, and since the electronic brain/body remained always conscious as it was being built, whereas the meat-brain got conscious after the transfer was over (brain matter being placed there piece by piece), it's the electronic one that's the real.
At least that is the case according to this blog:
Would you donate to this rather than to social services for, for example, thousands of homeless children in New York City alone?
Why do you have to be mean? My comment wasn't mean, it was a criticism of the direction of our culture. Social progress doesn't happen without critique.
I find it ironic that I'm being downvoted for speaking a valid but un-PC thought in a community that normally complains about the ills of political correctness.
It is just bizarre to reduce the beauty of life to some some little affair of holding on to someone's memories.
Death is as beautiful as birth. We should break past the ridiculous taboos surrounding death and discuss it openly as to what it means to die.
Edit: Jiddu K on death, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_OzCrmqxRE
It's bad enough we missed out on all the stuff that happened before we died.
Missing things is considered a bad thing when you can experience the frustration of not being able to do things you would like to do. But if you don't exist, you can not experience this frustration, thus not being able to do stuff does not mean anything to you because nothing does.
The only frustration you can feel is the idea that in the future you won't be able to do stuff that you would like to do now while you're alive. So you're suffering from an idea. It's all in your head.
Fear of death is a self-inflicted pain. Best attitude towards death is not to think about it.
Like in this movie:
- A hundred years from now there won't be one
sad f.ck to look at any of this. What keeps you going?
- You know what it is, Theo? I just don't think about it.
Dying protects you from feeling sad about missing things, but you are still missing out on things.
If you think only the feeling matters and not the missing out itself, you might as well spend the rest of your life on pleasure-inducing drugs.
Most people care about things other than their own subjective experience.
That may have been the best attitude in previous centuries. But now we're getting to the point where we might actually be able to do something about it, and holding on to that attitude may result in the unnecessary annihilation of billions of sentient beings.
But I can miss things while I do exist. I miss 'doing things as a healthful immortal' already! And I'll miss them more and more as my health declines and I age.
Also pekk is correct. You would totally "miss out" on doing things if you're dead. Because you were alive at some point and could make it far into the future to enjoy commercial space travel or something more, but instead you died.
Only a universally non-existent human would not miss out. By 'universally' I mean one who never existed in the past and never will in the future (like an imaginary human). But you and I are not imaginary. We've already had 'the taste of existence', and we can never be the same again!
But do come back when you've figured this all out and you know how to create a new consciousness in any way except for the obvious way.
I don't see why we humans should die I think if all science put their efforts together (as done in world wars) we could extend human life quite a bit.
The only concern I have is the difference in culture for example imagine a 20 year old versus a person 200 years old. Even today the generation gap between 20 and 40 is big and causes problems when interacting even just music alone as one example.
(But really I bet wars could be fought over it, Bieber vs The Eagles)
Had not heard that term before. I'm glad someone gave it a name. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_de_Grey#Pro-aging_tranc...
Death may be beautiful. I disagree, but I can see how some people might think that. I hear that the view from the top of mount everest is quite something, but does that mean there's no reason you might complain if someone broke into your house, dragged you off, flew you up there, and dumped you at the top against your will?
I absolutely agree with you that it would be great if we could learn as a society to discuss death more openly. I think that a big part of what might help that happen would be sufficient medical technology that death mostly only happens voluntarily.