If cryonics suddenly worked, we'd need to face the fallout
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I think this is probably a bit misleading. I can't imagine de Grey being anything other than reductionist in his views about the mind, so I can only imagine his interpretation of this question to be as follows: "has the scanning process captured all the relevant information about the person's mind?" Have you created a new person (by missing out some information from the original's physical instantiation), one who is perhaps very similar to the original, but where some details are different because the scan was not of high enough fidelity?
Of course, it's still unknown whether it's even possible to extract sufficient detail from the brain; if by unhappy chance it turns out that some of the quantum details of the brain's state are important to the mind, then it's possible we may simply never be able to copy a person. Let us hope that is not the case.
I should think that such a circumstance would mean we wouldn't be able to copy a consciousness while being able to copy the mind. Of course, this would bring in to question exactly what person would mean.
What if the way to teleport was to make a copy of you at the new location, and then disintegrate the old you.
What has happened here, esp. wrt. consciousness? Is the copy really you? Is the old you OK with being disintegrated? What if the old you escapes, are there now two of you, and what does that mean? etc.
If he had gotten off the planet instead of me, don't you think he would have made the same choices that I made?
I always felt this line showed how disconnected Riker was about the situation. As if there actually were two of him on the planet before the transporter accident, and it was left to random chance which one of those two it was that left and which one stayed.
If that prospect makes you a little uncomfortable, you are intuiting the problem of "pattern identity" vs "continuity identity".
What if one did this regularly? Would battle-hardened cloners become insensitive to "retirement" of their doppelgangers, or as the last survivor of the series of slayings would they start to feel hunted?
Really feels at least a few centuries too early to even gauge whether it is possible to substantially capture (let alone reproduce) the state of a brain. Sure would be disappointing if it turned out you could get 90% of the functionality with a ten-state DFA featuring frowning and pooping, but it would make cryonics a whole lot easier. "Just leave me enough brainstem to get home."
But I take it I am unusual in this.
Analogy: impregnating a woman and (eventually) causing her to give birth - that is, "duplicating" her, although the copy is actually not very like her - doesn't give you the right to kill her.
I'm fine with teleportation, if that's what you mean, but I go into that with the intention of the death of one of the copies. It's effective suicide, not externally-imposed murder.
I would hope that that is indeed the case...
For people who are into anime, there is a very nice one about this issue called Kaiba [1] that envisions a future where everyone is freely able to modify their memories and swap them across bodies.
http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/34190/...
http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/2169002...
http://oregonstate.edu/ua/ncs/archives/2015/nov/discovery-co...
It is also the case that a rabbit kidney has been vitrified, thawed, transplanted, and it worked for a while. See:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2781097/
I think that progress towards reversible vitrification of organs is one of the most important drivers of growing support and acceptance of cryonics among those who write and opinionate. It is hard to throw out the evidence for preservation of fine structure in the brain when there is earnest progress towards preserving the similarly fine structure needed for organ function.
Sure you can. Just a couple paragraphs previously, you were making the point that cryonics is "just medicine", and medicine and (for example) agronomy advance at very different rates. I can easily imagine a future in which we have the technology and medicine to revive all of the frozen cancer patients, or all of the frozen ALS patients, but are still struggling with drought, climate change, and widespread poverty.
In seriousness, people who will wake up will face a form of Future Shock that will look tame by our standards. The Forever War touched on this incredibly well.
Only seen it once, it made me feel too depressed.
[0] - http://amzn.to/1Tzbd5T
But the idea is definitely an interesting one. More so if humanity decides to avoid the science fiction cliche of the simulated worlds all being like modern day Earth and actually has them based on any wacky theme you can imagine. You could let people live in a simulated version of the time period they were originally frozen in. Or an historical period that'd just be interesting to experience. Or even a fictional world with fantasy elements, cause there's probably a certain amount of people that would love to live their main existence in the likes of World of Warcraft.
2) as long as immortals don't have more children than mortals, then immortality has a surprisingly small effect on population growth.
The effects I'd be worried about would be the effects of having the majority of the world's wealth and power being held in the hands of immortals and cryogenic trusts.
http://variety.com/2016/tv/news/netflix-altered-carbon-serie...
So saying each person gets one child is basically equivalent to saying each couple gets one child, except there's no need to include the concept of a "couple" in the equation.
That's not nearly as much of a problem as people think it would be.
About 60 million people die per year, and about two-thirds of that comes from age-related causes.
Something like 75 million babies are born each year, and that number is gradually but constantly shrinking as standards of living rise and people have fewer children.
The most likely result in a world of reliable anti-aging treatments would be a gradual slowing of new births to a trickle long before the reduced death rate ever became a real logistical problem.
That's a great future problem to have, and it's the same problem that people brought up at the dawn of the age of antibiotics. Our lives have gotten better for it.
Who knows, maybe by the time immortality is possible, Earth won't be our only home, so population will be less of a problem.
It always looks like that from the "before" side of things.
Our lives have gotten better for it.
That is the historical trend. But it's only a trend, so beware of inductive reasoning. It's not firmly anchored in any kind of mechanism or theory. There are reasons to believe that immortality overlaid on a capitalist free-market system might be horribly dystopian.
More likely, horribly dystopian and utopian all at once. In fact, I'd say the Bay Area is already horribly dystopian and utopian all at once.
There is still no guarantee we won't end up in that situation again.
"A common objection against starting a large-scale biomedical war on aging is the fear of catastrophic population consequences (overpopulation). This fear is only exacerbated by the fact that no detailed demographic projections for radical life extension scenario have been conducted so far. This study explores different demographic scenarios and population projections, in order to clarify what could be the demographic consequences of a successful biomedical war on aging. A general conclusion of this study is that population changes are surprisingly slow in their response to a dramatic life extension. For example, we applied the cohort-component method of population projections to 2005 Swedish population for several scenarios of life extension and a fertility schedule observed in 2005. Even for very long 100-year projection horizon, with the most radical life extension scenario (assuming no aging at all after age 60), the total population increases by 22% only (from 9.1 to 11.0 million). Moreover, if some members of society reject to use new anti-aging technologies for some religious or any other reasons (inconvenience, non-compliance, fear of side effects, costs, etc.), then the total population size may even decrease over time. Thus, even in the case of the most radical life extension scenario, population growth could be relatively slow and may not necessarily lead to overpopulation. Therefore, the real concerns should be placed not on the threat of catastrophic population consequences (overpopulation), but rather on such potential obstacles to a success of biomedical war on aging, as scientific, organizational, and financial limitations."
Only 22% per 100 years? That's, like, 7 times over 1000 years, and 50 times over 2000 years. Two millenia is really not that long period when we're talking about immortality.
There are many propositions out there that claim infinite reward, but we can't be compelled by reason to do all of them can we? The major difference here is that there are some preliminary results that seem to point in a reasonable direction, but we're still pretty far short of something compelling.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/z0/the_pascals_wager_fallacy_fallacy...
Large payoff and small chance (with a wide confidence interval) has nothing to do with "infinite" payoff and "infinitesimal" chance. There are valid and interesting decision theoretic problems and paradoxes that arise with unbounded payoffs, but those aren't real-world in the way that outlier risk scenarios are real-world in banking and investment.
Cryonics is absolutely real-world in that sense, and we can and should hang some expected value tag there.
I have a fairly low confidence that cryonics will in fact work, but I wholly stand by my point that if it turns out to work, then that should be cause for a huge "we fucked up" moment coupled with a copious amount of soul-searching. But this shouldn't be put into a reference frame centered on "guilt" or "responsibility", although such things would be inevitably involved. Rather, it's a case of established models turning out to be wrong, and what matters is that everyone updates and learns from it as quickly as possible. Ignorance can be condoned but not willful and destructive ignorance in the face of ample evidence.
I've considered cryonics for myself, but being relatively young still, I haven't looked into it too seriously. That said, if I did eventually go through with it and it did turn out to work, I could see feeling massive remorse for all the people I didn't convince (and financially support if necessary) to do the same. If I do decide to do it, I would certainly try to have my wife and children do the same, but what about my parents? Or my wife's parents? Our siblings? And then what if my kids only go along with to humour me, but their (future) families don't? Not to mention friends... In a sense you would feel like you let all those people die, because you knew of something they could do, but didn't do everything possible to see it happen.
Of course, even if that's how it felt after the fact, ex-ante it's far from a sure thing. Even the most optimistic likely see it as a significant long shot. And even if you were particularly confident, pushing freezing on everyone you know would basically make you the scientific equivalent of a religious zealot.
Still, more than just waking up having lost most or all of the people you know, you would be dealing with that, and the knowledge that their deaths were preventable. That would be tough.
I think the only way forward is a compelling demo that makes it feel real. Once you have a mouse woken up funding will increase. Once you do a human, people will be clamoring for it.
We'd all like to act as if each human life had infinite value, but unfortunately, we don't have infinite resources to act with.
Lady gets reanimated in some sort of assembly-line mass process, gets a few days in a shelter, then gets kicked out into society at large. She then basically has some sort of culture shock and ends up homeless again.
This I expect will converge with cryonics.
This basic misconception is just the tip of an iceberg of delusional thinking. Disease would have to already be conquered. There would be no economic incentive for reanimation, etc. etc.
History's greatest cultures focused on what they could achieve, not longevity. Remarkable people often die young, and there's more to that than coincidence. This vapid quest to live forever is part of the banality of our time.