Why Cryonics Makes Sense (2016)
waitbutwhy.com
waitbutwhy.com
I also think it's unlikely that a future society will allocate resources to revive these people, even if we suppose technology exists and the bodies are well preserved enough. Everyone who knows these people today will surely be dead by that point.
Furthermore, many of the people paying for this seem to believe in the inevitable emergence of a utopian society with unlimited resources, which seems almost a necessary condition for these people to be revived. Personally, I'm not banking on that happening either.
An aside: when I was younger, my brother and I had an idea for a post-apocalyptic short story related to this subject. The plot goes something like this: after the collapse of human civilization, a group of survivors exhaust the remaining food supply and begin to starve until they discover a solar-powered facility full of thousands of perfectly preserved corpses, which (the story would have implied) will feed them for decades to come.
This seems like a feature. If a Utopia arises you'll be revived into it and if not you won't have to live in the alternative.
As for motivation for future generations to revive you it seems prudent to will all your resources into a trust upon your death to be paid to whoever brings you back.
"Very unlikely" seems too pessimistic. Alcor is almost half a century old, and their finances and governance are more secure than ever.
> I also think it's unlikely that a future society will allocate resources to revive these people, even if we suppose technology exists and the bodies are well preserved enough.
The brains aren't tossed into a freezer and forgotten. Alcor uses interest from a trust fund to pay for maintenance (mostly topping-off the LN2). Likewise it would probably be Alcor (or some organization paid by them) doing the reviving.
> Everyone who knows these people today will surely be dead by that point.
Hospitals work despite the fact that the staff don't personally know patients. Even so, Alcor's Patient Care Trust Board is required to have a majority with relatives or significant others currently in cryopreservation.[1] The incentives are aligned as closely as possible. (I wish people would look this stuff up instead of making false assumptions. Alcor isn't run by fools. They've built an organization that is resistant to the commonly-conceived failure modes of cryonics.)
There are other incentives to revive people: If historians could resurrect some people from the 1800's, they'd probably try. Another possibility is that some person or organization wants to show off their technical prowess. And don't forget general altruism. A world in which revival is possible -but doesn't happen- is one where everyone in the world decides against investing resources. It also requires they all stick with this decision as the cost of revival decreases over time. That seems incredibly unlikely to me.
> Furthermore, many of the people paying for this seem to believe in the inevitable emergence of a utopian society with unlimited resources, which seems almost a necessary condition for these people to be revived. Personally, I'm not banking on that happening either.
Compared to 150 years ago, we are a society with absurd resources. The world economy has grown 100x. More people die from obesity than starvation. In developed countries, sick people are transported to hospitals where diagnostics can include injecting them with gadolinium and shoving them inside a superconducting magnet. If rates of economic and technological progress continue, we'll scarcely be able to imagine the wealth and abilities of our descendants.
Please note that all of your arguments against cryonics involve complications that make it less likely, not show-stopping issues that make it borderline-impossible. Most who are signed up for cryonics think it probably won't work. But if a doctor says, "You have cancer. Your only hope is an experimental treatment.", I doubt you'll reply, "There's a good chance it won't work? Nevermind."
If you're like most people, you'll consider the costs and possible outcomes. Maybe the treatment is expensive, painful, and incredibly unlikely to work. In that case, it makes sense to skip it and leave your family with more money after you're gone. Or maybe it's cheap, painless, and has a 5% chance of success. In that case, it's worth a shot. Depending on your estimates, cryonics can fall into either camp. But it's important to actually do the expected value calculation instead of reflexively objecting to it.
1. https://www.alcor.org/AboutAlcor/patientcaretrustfund.html
Dead in Irons by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro[0]
Survival by John Wyndham[1]
If society could re-animate a Roman citizen from 1000AD, historians and social anthropologists would be climbing over each other to push the button. Just look at the interest (and money spent) around Otzi the Iceman.
Obviously things like land on earth are limited but there will almost certainly be ongoing growth in the sort of tech you would need so I'd guess it's statistically likely the resources will be there.
This is the easy part. If a cryonics company survives that long, they will get a lot of new customers if they manage to revive an old one.
https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2016/07/finally-signed-u...
https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2016/05/overfund-the-lif...
"I have put off signing up for cryopreservation for a decade or so. This isn't uncommon; after all, it involves paperwork, adult responsibility, planning ahead, thinking about unpleasant events, and all that. People put off many other things for these and similar reasons. Writing wills, buying houses, getting married, starting companies, and so on. That doleful feeling of some unknown scope of paperwork that will have to be accomplished in the event that you do get your act together and set forth to be a responsible adult is ever a strong deterrent. Still, sooner or later all these tasks have to be carried out, and while no-one enjoys wading through legal documents, it is never as bad as you think it is going to be. If you are unfamiliar with the process of signing up for cryonics organization membership and cryopreservation, let me tell you that it is much less work than buying a house. It is about two and half times the work of getting a life insurance policy, if that helps calibrate things any better."
Suppose a theocratic world order identifies you as an enemy of the state, and in an effort at "penance", places your brain into a machine that simulates torture, where not even suicide can bring about escape?
A curt reminder that historical "progress" is neither linear nor clearly defined was all I needed to reject the concept. If you assume technology will be fantastic enough one day to revive your perished brain, what holds back the caution that this same technology cannot be used to subject you to inescapable torture?
You may view information-specific death as optional now, but one day, it may be outright banished from your set of choices. The world you return to may not afford you the luxury of choosing to die.
It's possible that tomorrow, the United States will collapse into an evil theocracy that decides to both torture me and devote all of its resources to prolonging my life indefinitely. I could commit suicide today to escape that possibility, but I don't because I judge it to be extremely unlikely.
You could, but it would make less sense.
> It's possible that tomorrow, the United States will collapse into an evil theocracy that decides to both torture me and devote all of its resources to prolonging my life indefinitely
It could, but the information available to most observers makes both the policy transition described unlikely tomorrow, and he technology development improbable in the time necessary to have a meaningful effect even with the policy transition.
OTOH, such a policy transition is much more likely between now and whenever the technology to restore life to a frozen cadaver is developed, and at least a large portion of the technology development necessary to effect the extended torture is certain with the ability to revive frozen corpses.
The scenarios aren't parallels.
This is a sci-fi scenario, not a realistic one. Even so, Alcor has policies in place to prevent it. All five members of the Patient Care Trust Board must be signed up for cryonics, and the majority of them must have a relative or significant other currently cryopreserved.[1]
Also, the dewar flasks must be topped-up every few months. If Alcor succumbs to some disaster, the brains will warm up and be destroyed. There's no scenario where evil future archaeologists unearth brains to revive and torture.
Again, I must stress how ridiculously implausible this scenario is. Torture requires that a future society expend resources to resurrect some random people from the past, then inflict harm on them. There's no way to profit from those actions. It would require a society that intrinsically valued the torture of strangers.
1. https://www.alcor.org/AboutAlcor/patientcaretrustfund.html
Instead, imagine that a company pays for your revival by writing extreme brand-loyalty onto your psyche.
Those who choose not to take that option, please remain in your seat—this will be over soon, and you will feel no pain.
Why does this argument strike me as analogous to Pascal's Wager? You can pray for an afterlife, or not. Your choice. Which do you choose?
I can't force myself to believe something, but I can just choose to sign up for Alcor
In my view, cryonics is just a synthetic religion that has been constructed to replace supernatural stuff with technological-sounding stuff. It should appeal to people who have rejected the supernatural but are still afraid of the finality of death.
"You must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong. The modern method is to assume without discussion that he is wrong and then distract his attention from this (the only real issue) by busily explaining how he became so silly." - C.S. Lewis
In this case, the real issue (how likely cryonics patients are to be revived) is replaced with the alleged motives of the debater ("fear of death", although I'd argue that almost everyone is afraid of death; most people would feel fear if a gun was pointed at them).
It's a puzzling situation. I don't think it's possible to prove that cryonics is wrong, because it strikes me as a non-falsifiable proposition.
- If neuroscientists find that long term memory is encoded in something not preserved by cryonics. (Such as pH levels around certain neurons, or some weird quantum phenomena.)
- If small animals such as mice are trained to perform some task, then fail to demonstrate that training after being cryopreserved & revived. This requires technological advances, but not as much as human-level revival.
- If scientists discover a theory of consciousness that precludes its resumption after cryopreservation-like circumstances. (This would also mean that philosophical zombies are possible.)
Some of these may seem like a tall order, but if cryonics doesn't work, then that would tell us something new about biology, physics, and/or the nature of consciousness.
So far, we've seen all the evidence you'd expect to see if cryonics works: Memories are preserved even after cessation or disruption of electrical activity in the brain. Embryos and other tissues are cryopreserved and thawed without problems. Small mammal organs have been successfully cryopreserved and thawed, and remained functional. SEM micrographs of cryopreserved brain tissue show intact structure, including axons and synaptic vesicles. Most of the problems seem to be in the implementation, not the principle itself. (eg: avoiding warm ischemia when people die suddenly)
Wow, nice rhetorical dodge there. No one cares too much if small mammal 'organs' have been successfully cryopreserved and revived because we can replace your kidney and you are still you. Tell me about the small mammal BRAINS that you have cryopreserved and revived with any evidence of retention of memories or prior training. Tell me about any nervous systems at all which you have successfully preserved and revived. Doesn't have to be a mammal, I would settle for an insect. Tell me about those please.
Until you can do this you are just selling another version of snake oil.
Nobody has revived a small mammal brain because unlike kidneys, we don't yet have the technology to transplant brains. Brains are easier to perfuse with cryoprotectant than kidneys, so they tend to be preserved better. Cryoprotectants seem to be tolerated well by neurons. It is currently possible to cryopreserve & thaw rat hippocampal slices while keeping structure intact and over 90% of cells viable: http://www.21cm.com/pdfs/hippo_published.pdf
> Tell me about any nervous systems at all which you have successfully preserved and revived. Doesn't have to be a mammal, I would settle for an insect. Tell me about those please.
People have cryopreserved & thawed nematodes with an 84% survival rate: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23995406 The cryopreservation of many kinds of insects (usually in larval or embryonic form) is doable as well. Some of these organisms have thousands of neurons.
The whole point of cryonics is to take advantage of the difference in technology required for preservation versus revival. Saying, "Cryonics is snake oil because revival doesn't work yet." is demanding evidence that can't yet exist even in the case that cryonics works.
The traditional afterlife of religion was constructed to obey physics as it was understood at the time.
With cryonics, though, you can be pretty sure that you are not going to be more dead. There is a small probability you will be revived in a dystopian world and regret it. You can never know for sure, but you can at least reason about it and think about the probabilities given what you know about human nature and history and so on.
Cryonics has a large (but still finite) reward. If you think the chances of cryonics are low enough, then it's not worth pursuing.
All that aside, there's zero evidence to believe in an afterlife. With cryonics we in theory understand it, if the brain is just its atoms, then it's quite conceivable that the information might be able to be reconstructed.
I don't see how they are comparable.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2016/01/29/how-can-y...
Fundamentally this boils down to a pretty simple question: what's the likelihood that cryonics will "pay out"? If your answer is 0.00001%, sure, don't sign up. But if your answer is, say, 2%, then maybe it's worth it.
What surprises me is that Alcor doesn't have more clients. 200K (80K for a head) is not a lot of money relatively speaking. Any senior engineer in a tech company could afford to put apart 80K in a trust fund for this and sign up. And you'd expect most engineers think the same way as the article: cheap for a potentially infinite payoff. But afaik they only have a few clients.
I offered to have my gran done as I liked her and 30k wasn't a big deal at the time but she said no way. I guess most people aren't that in to the idea. Maybe they're thinking a reanimated corpse having a rough time whereas I think a more virtual upload to a sort of digital heaven might be jollier. But with the ability to do stuff like compose like Beethoven rather than just hanging out on clouds. I wonder how things will actually pan out.
P: (cryonics works | God is real)
If !P and you don't play along, no outcome
If P and you don't play along, "bad" outcome
If !P and you do play along, no outcome
If P and you do play along, "good" outcome
∴ You are dumb not to play along, just in case.
Cryonics snake oil salesmen are modern-day alchemists, promising you that they will figure out how to turn lead into gold any day now and if you just set up a small annuity on their behalf they will make sure that a golden statue proclaiming your magnificence will be the first thing they create upon success. Surely you could not doubt them, for it is obvious that lead exists, and that gold exists, and we have seen how various substances and processes transform materials in ways that defy explanation. With a little bit more money to fund the research they are absolutely going to figure out how to convert one to another...
I think cryonics is as much snake oil as Pascal's God.
I'm baffled that I should need to clarify that, given that's what I analogized the argument to.
To borrow from the array of Inception memes, your sense of time in the dream world is distorted, which is why dreams can feel like days-long ordeals even though you’ve probably never had a dream last even 2 hours, let alone 8. So if you do come out of it with trippy dream-like memories or weird emotional feelings as residue from nightmares, what will they amount to? I guess it could be unpleasant, but if you’re going to get on living, you’ll have to figure out a way to get over it and move on.
I mean, whatever baggage you wind up with is going to be stacked next to what amounts to an (almost assuredly unsettling) near death experience, and waking up alone anyway, with (very likely) no friends or loved ones to offer support after you wake back up, so you’ll have that to cope with as well. No one promised that living forever would be easy.