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Comment by biolurker1 | Hacker News Reader

I wish more people would learn about cryonics. It's either 0 or something above zero probability.

I have not seen a reason to think cryonics will work at all.

Even if we actually do find a way to restore frozen near-death people to life, you'd better write a heck of a pitch as to why future humans should spend resources on reviving and healing you.

Never mind all the resources being spent on keeping you properly frozen all that time.

That's all assuming the company running your freezer doesn't just go belly-up after ninety years, leaving you to thaw and rot after all that expense was dumped into keeping your now-corpse uselessly preserved for decades.

Cryonics actually plays the role so many atheists believe religion plays for the religious - comfort in the face of The End that is inevitably coming to you.

It is false hope, a tool to help you deceive yourself into thinking you can defeat death.

the argument is this: certain death vs a miniscule one in a quadrillion chance or lower. It will always tilt the other way no matter what the current scientific status quo is saying because it's possible in theory and it has happened to living organisms before just not humans. Whether it's good for environment, your siblings pocket etc is not part of the core argument.

I think even if you ignore the environment, and cost, the argument for cryonics is not very good.

Let's say someone is successfully revived, there's still heart attacks, cancer, crime (and not just "lowly" criminals, crime also happens within families for inheritance, for example), accidents (car, or just slipping in the shower), earthquakes, ... The list is pretty much endless.

Death is unavoidable, IMHO it's best to learn to cope with it, and focus efforts on reducing what most people would consider the worst deaths (infants, long and painful diseases, wars and torture, etc).

That said, as long as not many people try this (the environmental cost would be high), if many people think about this possibility and that helps them cope with their mortality, and that of their loved ones, good for them.

Learning to cope with death is not actually mutually exclusive with taking a punt on cryonics! A 1% chance of survival is still a 99% chance of death, so you'd better have made your peace with it either way.

Yes, if only for the legal status of property/inheritance: if you are to be revided, who owns your wealth? Do you children inherit? And/when you are revived, what resources do you have? Is your family/descendants in charge of you, or you of them?

Cryogenic preservation is treated like mummification, you’re just declared dead. At which point your assets are likely to just get spent.

If you want to be safe, set up a trust that pays to you preferably and if not then to any descendants you have. That’s unlikely to work if you’re somehow revived in several hundred years, but it’s better than hopping random people will hand you money voluntarily.

You can't have a trust with no trustee. Is your trustee really afraid of getting sued by a corpse with no heirs?

Deposit your savings in the Alan Turing school of investment, AKA buried treasure: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-markets-saft/saft-on-weal...

The argument is zero vs non-zero and anything else is noise

zero vs non-zero of what? If you say the argument is dying now vs dying later, sure, I'll agree.

Zero chance of living VS non zero chance of living. I thought that was a coders forum.

Which one is that forum you're talking about?

If you meant this one, it should be obvious that it's not exclusively about coders. Even if it was, your argument is quite weak if you don't qualify the non zero part a bit more. Zero chance of living how much longer than you would have otherwise? under what conditions? At what cost?

That's precisely why strict logic is required. You are putting more restrains into a very simple condition. Dead or infinitely small non zero chance of not dead. As said previously, anything else is noise

Respectfully, I disagree. I think the condition may be simple if looked at it from, say, a programming logic point of view. But given the costs involved, I think the other constraints are not noise: they're the signal needed to make the right decision.

Specifically, since you brought this up in the context of someone who will die of cancer, the tradeoff calculation must take into account that even if cryonics work (which is already a giant leap of faith right now), this person would also need science to advance enough so that a cancer that is terminal now will be somehow reversible in the future. Additionally, all the people he cares about would have to have survived too for this to matter. Again, this is all context, this is within the context of a dying person that says "Almost immediately I realised I just couldn’t do it. Life for me is about living, not just clocking up the years.". I don't think all of these extra constraints would be seen as noise by someone like him.

Yes and aaaaaaaall this that you say and even if you write a 5000 word essay still is more than zero. And people need to know there is more than zero.

Even though Death is unavoidable, it’s still a good idea to wear a seatbelt.

Edited to add: it’s hard to imagine a civilisation with the technology to successfully re-animate a corpse, but that is unable to treat heart disease & cancer. Not impossible I suppose, but seems highly implausible.

Sound just like the argument for the worship of god.

God wants your exclusive devotion. The freezer doesn't care what else you're doing to help you to cheat death, so you can spread your faith around more and hedge your bets.

Please don't take HN threads on generic tangents, especially generic flamewar tangents.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It's not a generic tangent - it's a direct reference to Pascal's wager [1]. Unfortunately the parent doesn't make their argument any more generic that Pascal's wager itself.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_wager

Ah I see. But then you should have said "Sounds just like Pascal's Wager". That's a great point and not generic at all.

The trouble with what you did post is that it landed with readers as generic religious flamewar whether you meant it that way or not. I realize it's not always possible to predict how things will land, but the burden is on the commenter to disambiguate intent. Here are some previous explanations on this theme if interested:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

You're describing Pascal's wager.

The same argument could essentially be applied to the resurrection

Or give the money to your children so they have a small head start that can use to conquer the world (eventually).

Also, what happens if you are revived?

Where are you going to live? Your home was probably sold a long time ago, or you must share it with all the intermediate revived generations. What about money?

Where are you going to work? Imagine the frozen time was only 100 year. It is difficult to predict what will happen in 100 years, but it is easier to look at the past. Medical doctors didn't have penicillin and Electrical Engineers didn't have transistors. You must take most of your university courses again and perhaps part of your high school classes too.

So what?

You're saying life is not worth living if you're not at least middle class with no big struggles?

Yes this argument could be repurposed into: if you are born in Africa there is no reason to live

Africa is a big continent, there is a wide difference in income and education level, from country to country and even inside each country.

If you have some spare money to pay a refrigerator for 100 years, you are probably spoiled and want nice living conditions afterwards.

Anyway, imagine you live outside a city and have only a small plot of land for subsistence. After the 100 years you don't have even the small plot of land and don't have the small herd that you inherit from your parents. How/where are you going to live? Farming has changed in the last 100 years. Artificial nitrogen fertilizers have slightly more than 100 years, now there are genetically modified crops, the preferred crops have changed. (Do you know how to harvest soy?) The cattle management has also changed, antibiotics, vitamins supplements, the number of free range herds is decreasing,...

You are generalizing the argument giving conditions where life is worth it or not. That's not the point. And stop downvoting.

There is a trade off:

* You can invest X money for a Y% chance that you will be revived in the future.

* You can invest X money for a Z% chance that your children will survive in %W case of a problem. Like a better surgeon in a heart operation or cancer treatment, or more food stored before a famine, or a home that is not in a floodable area, or more education to get an points to get a visa to another country, some swimming classes to be more healthy, more airbags in the car in case of a collision, ...

Money can buy survival rate when it is correctly invested, the question is which one is the the one that gets more bang for the buck.

PS: Just in case you are wondering, I didn't downvote you.

The best bang for the buck is to buy malaria nets.

I mean if we're talking about saving the life of people who are not yourself. But that would be a huge change in topic.

> If you have some spare money to pay a refrigerator for 100 years, you are probably spoiled and want nice living conditions afterwards.

You'd want nice living conditions no matter what you're used to. I really don't understand your point.

Is it "nah, if I can't have netflix I'd rather just die"?

People are very adaptable. What happened more than three months ago doesn't seem to affect your happiness.

So absolute worst case you are thawed out (because you paid for it), but are now completely broke and unemployable, there is zero social safety net or UBI, and no chance for you to even steal food. You are 100% certain to starve to death. So kill yourself then? At least your got a brief glimse of how it all turned out.

I'd rather be alive and work for food in a circus as "the millennial man" than die and do nothing.

They should revive you because you paid for it.

Finding some 50-300 years in the future that cares might be a problem.

One would hope that the rule of law and private contracts still exists in 50-300 years.

There's an expression called ruling from the grave to reflect the difficulty of enforcing a contract after you are dead. The same principle applies as those frozen people are dead in every legal sense and practical sense and likely any biological sense.

I would be extremely motivated to revive them and promote reviving them because I would also want to be frozen and revived. I assume this would be even moreso the case if society develops reviving technology, and therefore knows it actually works.

Yet people, doctors and civilians, try to save people who are legally dead every day…

We're constantly digging up old and dead things because we care.

But they stay dead and we can study them at our leisure. If it was people who started walking around again doing stuff, we'd have a different opinion.

You really think if we could reanimate some ancient person, we wouldn't? Imagine what we could learn from important people in those times.

It depends. If cryonics becomes widespread, "ancient people" in suspended animation would be pretty common. There wouldn't be that much to learn from reviving all of them.

Ahh, the afterlife, now available by payment plan, and much easier than that Kingdom-of-God stuff....

Not afterlife. It's just another medical treatment. And not one that much different from the current system world wide. If you have money/power you get better access to healthcare.

Sure, basically-everywhere-but-the-US has socialized medicine, but still everywhere if Jeff Bezos got sick he could go "I'll buy this hospital end every doctor in it. Do your best to cure me".

Freezing isn't magic. Just think of it as a better CPR. You wouldn't say this woman got "afterlife", even though apparently her blood wasn't pumping for 40 minutes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_B%C3%A5genholm

Also this: https://www.nytimes.com/1988/07/26/science/the-doctor-s-worl...

Not sure why I'm getting -3 for stating the obvious fact that one should get what one has paid for and has a contract for.

So true. Even in the best case scenario if they manage to revive you perpetually, the universe will eventually end and then you'll be there to experience it... For someone who is afraid of dying, I can't think of a worse way to go.

To an atheist, uncertainty is the source of all hope.

>To an atheist, uncertainty is the source of all hope.

Isn't that somewhat backward? To an atheist, the certainty that they won't be going to an afterlife seems to be a source of hope, and for the religious person, the idea that they might is the same.

I don't know about other atheists, but I get some comfort knowing that the universe will continue to exist long after I die. I don't believe that there is a god but that doesn't rule out the possibility of some kind of afterlife or reincarnation or alternative form of consciousness. There are still a lot of possibilities on the table and these possibilities are a source of hope.

When you think that your consciousness is special, irreplaceable and irreproducible, death becomes a lot more frightening.

On the other hand, if you believe, based on empirical evidence, that your consciousness can be manufactured out of a piece of meat with some chemicals and electricity as the result of a totally random natural process (evolution), that gives a lot of hope.

> based on empirical evidence

Small nit but my so far amateur understanding of philosophy of mind indicates to me that there isn't empirical evidence connecting Mind to neurochemistry so clearly. Neither, of course, is there any evidence of the reverse, that a non physical Mind can magically influence the physical world through the brain interface.

As an atheist, delving into the materialism vs dualism philosophical debate was fascinating. I was always a stout materialist but learning it hadn't managed to fend off every philosophical thrust was difficult but enlightening.

There is solid empirical evidence that every human was created out of basic physical materials (e.g. DNA, proteins). If this is the case, and you believe that every human is conscious then clearly the 'soul' must be derived from these physical materials and the processes which were applied to them.

Human bodies being made from matter does not imply that a hypothetical soul must also be made of physical matter.

It may not be scientific to propose that souls exist independent of matter (it seems a hard hypothesis to confirm or deny experimentally), but an idea does not need to be experimentally testable to be possible.

It doesn't even need to be that there are "souls," we just need to find a way to explain what Thought is. Saying it's the lights on an MRI aren't good enough - all the MRI tells us is that blood goes to certain parts of the brain during certain thoughts. Just like a radar gun displaying 50MPH isn't the car actually going 50MPH, so too do we need a way to explain what a Thought or Mind actually is.

So far this hasn't happened. If it had, it would be breaking news, because consciousness would be "solved."

> There is solid empirical evidence that every human was created out of basic physical materials (e.g. DNA, proteins)

Correct.

> If this is the case, and you believe that every human is conscious

At the very least, I know I am conscious, but let's continue.

> then clearly the 'soul' must be derived from these physical materials

Too far a stretch.

Mind / Thought / Consciousness is a unique problem. It is the unique problem, one that was carefully separated out at the beginning of the age of enlightenment when scientists carefully defined "qualitative" from "quantitative." Before that, heat was the feeling of heat and nothing else. Now, we can describe the "quantitative" properties of heat, that is, how certain temperatures cause certain materials to react, how biological entities react to heat, etc. That isn't the same thing as saying what it is to experience heat. Even though we can put someone in an MRI and touch a hot poker to their arm and watch the entire neurobiological system react and cause the arm to jolt, we still can't quantify the "experience of feeling heat." It's entirely separate, in fact it's separate in our language and scientific systems by design, because the "experience of feeling heat" is qualitative, it is immeasurable.

This is the split between materialism and dualism. Dualists believe the qualitative and quantitative will never shown to be the same thing, that even if quantitative can affect qualitative (heat causes certain thoughts), and qualitative can affect quantitative (thoughts can manifest real-world actions and consequences), they are fundamentally separate, "made of different stuff" (if consciousness is made of anything at all).

The materialist instinct is strong. As an atheist, I feel it too. Dualism implies magic, doesn't it? And magic isn't real. Perhaps, but not necessarily. Quantum physics can at times feel magic, too.

The long and short of it is you can't assume materialism is correct until the problem is more solved. Despite all these technological advancements in brain imaging technology, the fundamental problem of what is Thought remains. Acknowledging this isn't the same thing as acknowledging the validity of religion, or the possibility of the existence of souls - for example, panpsychism is a dualist hypothesis that states that the core nature of all things is consciousness, and that the more complicated things get, the more "conscious" they get. Considering the human brain is the most complicated thing we're aware of, that is a fairly straightforward and, in my opinion, believable concept. Far more believable than the existence of ghosts.

> knowing that the universe will continue to exist long after I die

You can predict the future?

Why would they not want to revive you? How awesome would it be, if we could revive someone who lived around the year 1500, 1000 or even 0? I expect people in the year 3000 (if there are still people around and if they have it relatively good) would see it equally when looking to the year 2000.

The novelty will probably fall off quickly.

“Ugh, another idiot we need to explain quantum tablets and sensory implants to!”

> "How awesome would it be, if we could revive someone who lived around the year 1500, 1000 or even 0?"

One or two of them, maybe. Probably the most famous ones.

All of them, including ordinary people like you or I? Not a chance.

I would be much more interested in what a tenth century peasant had to say considering all the famous ones were the only ones whose perspectives we get to see.

The historical gaps concern the other 90% of the population.

The point still applies though. After you've revived 4 or 5 peasants, you've probably gotten most of the information you were interested in. And now you have 4 or 5 peasants who are poorly adjusted to the world they now find themselves in, and you have to take care of them for a long time. How many would you revive?

I imagine that your first 10th century peasant would be much more interesting than your 500th

That's great, but the peasant couldn't afford the long-term storage fees and his body got unfrozen and chucked 2000 years ago.

I'd be worried some rich psychopath (actually, probably an AI) would resurrect people and put them into a torture dungeon for eternity.

Imagine never being able to die. Only suffer.

No mouth, must scream vibes.

Who knows what the future holds.

But in the remote chance this is what the future holds, the AI may not even need your body. It might be able to simulate you up to the moment of your death. Or find some quirk of physics and pull you forward in time. To suffer forever.

Or maybe it's benevolent and lets us live in an eternity of bliss?

Maybe it gets bored and does this for all humans that ever lived. There might be some arbitrary criteria or some random number generator it uses to decide your fate.

I find all of this much more compelling than religion's perspective of the afterlife.

Take that, Basilisk. My machination is worse (or better).

So... Satan with a science fiction coat?

You really ought to read I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream. The author has already thought of basically the same thing and written a rather compelling yet disturbing short story about. In 1967, no less.

Oh, I have. It's fantastic.

But if we're going to give unfathomable power to such an AI, it's not much more of a leap to give it the ability to resurrect people from the past and subject them to whatever it desires.

Taking it even one step further and comparing it to the Simulation Hypothesis [1], perhaps we're already there. The machine might be making us live our lives again only at some point to surprise us with some unthinkable horror or delight.

If such a machine arises and is capable of these feats, then we might currently be living in re-simulations of our past lives that have already ended.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_hypothesis

Yeah, I prefer just denying the philosophical coherency of death (only experiences exist and being dead is not an experience), or alternatively relying on a quantum multiverse or other levels of the multiverse that imply one cannot die because they'll always live on somewhere.

But not giving your family closure, and an indefinite cost to the environment/them, for 0 or something above 0 success.

Alcor, for example, charges what amounts to a fee to perform the preservation and a fee to go into a fund that will be invested to pay for your ongoing preservation. "Not giving your family an additional $80,000 on your death" amounts to the same thing as "taking $X from them in perpetuity", but it's psychologically different. It's all about the cost-benefit analysis, whose outcome may be different for different people; some people just don't value their lives very much and are more willing to die the true death, some people have family who are getting on just fine without the cash injection provided by their death so are more willing to spend the money on preservation, and so on.

"Not giving your family closure" is something you just have to discuss with your own family. I, for one, would treat cryopreservation as effectively death with a rather unusual body-disposal mechanism, for the purposes of grieving etc; there's certainly almost no chance I'll see a cryopreserved person again before my own first death. For a family made up of people like me, that particular argument holds no water at all.

"Alcor, for example, charges what amounts to a fee to perform the preservation and a fee to go into a fund that will be invested to pay for your ongoing preservation."

Which just adds another gamble. What are the chances of the economy having enough consistent growth that those investments last longer than it takes to revive you?

Are you saying life is a gamble and immortality is not guaranteed? Yes, most people know that.

That depends on how cynical you are. There's also a non-zero probability that you're woken up in some sort of dystopia, made immortal and tortured until the heat death of the universe. Basically "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream." Death isn't the worst outcome imaginable.

Surely mass cryogenics is a non-starter in this day and age when we are concerned with lowering carbon emissions. All that refrigeration in perpetuity would consume so much energy, and keeping the dead frozen would erase the gains that we expect to get from the gradual decline in birthrates.

Are the carbon emissions that big of a deal? Every house in North America has at least one freezer. What scale are you envisioning when you say "mass"?

I've sometimes fancied that the discovery of immortality might be good for the environment, it changes the incentives for the biggest abusers. With that said, I'm not entirely confident of that in practice.

> Every house in North America has at least one freezer.

Cryonics requires the maintenance of a temperature far colder than any household freezer.

> What scale are you envisioning when you say "mass"?

I just mean that it might hardly seem acceptable to freeze more terminally ill people than just a few ultra-wealthy eccentrics.

Volume scales cubically while surface area with the square of the length. It should be possible to build large scalable cooled facilities.

I do agree though that we aren't ready for such a system yet, both legally (currently a frozen person counts as dead, leading to their assets being taken away) and ecologically (carrying capacity limits of our planet). One day we might, who knows.

I'm a fan! Seems like a nice way to die.

Would you have a planned death at 75 to potentially get resurrected in 200 years? I say yes. I like how it creates death planning. Just better hope the interest keeps compounding!

Either that or learn to accept death.

...or understand you were never born in the first place.

explain

We are told we are born form our parents and from our culture. What if there was another story? what if we are dreaming, asleep? Or as I said before, maybe our birth is actually a death. Logically and superficially, yes, there is a thing we call birth. But what is it if you do not name it?

What did your face look like before you were born?

I think you'll have better luck trying dark majycks to become a ghost personally.

… por que no los dos?

What, risk waking up to be transported to a "re-education" facility because what you did (or believed) in the past is no longer acceptable/legal to the current Maoist/Rightwing/Religious/Populist nut jobs in charge. Wake up to find the planet inundated and starving. Wake up to find that every single person you loved is now dead ... seems a bit of a hard sell.

My gut says that people into cryogenics aren't big on human relationships.

Wake up to get put to work for another 100 years so you can pay more bills and then either die or be frozen again if you can afford it.

Actually this would be a cool short story about someone who has to constantly go through this process, each time working deeper and deeper in the future only to be frozen again.

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