Hacker News Reader

Comment by ignoranceprior | Hacker News Reader

Larry King previously stated that he wanted his body to be cryopreserved after legal death:

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/30/magazine/larry-king-is-pr...

> He has arranged to have his body frozen and then thawed out when researchers discover a cure for whatever killed him — the so-called cryonics approach. (Unlike Williams, King does not wish to have his dead head cut off.) King told me later that the people behind cryonics are ‘‘all nuts,’’ but at least if he knows he will be frozen he will die with a shred of hope. ‘‘Other people have no hope,’’ King said.

Also see his interview on Conan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PF7NpKG_S8g

I wonder he actually ended up signing a cryonics contract or not.

View on HN

Neal Stephenson's most recent novel "Fall; or, Dodge in Hell" is about cryonics. As usual, it's sprawling and arguably too long, but as usual, there are interesting ideas in there on the economics and politics of the idea, on simulation vs resurrection, etc.

I found it an enjoyable read.

That's a good book, actually.

From another one, different author, same theme:

"Case, promise me one thing: when this gig is over, erase me, ok?"

https://williamgibson.fandom.com/wiki/Dixie_Flatline

I'm a fan of Stephenson's work but I couldn't finish Fall. Such a waste of paper.

I agree it's not his best work but it actually has some pretty good stuff. It's just not as tight as his other books.

It seems that like with Stephen King that the more famous the author gets, the less power the editors get to push back.

In the case of Stephenson, this is counteracted a bit by Stephenson improving his craft somewhat over the years. His earlier novels all had very weak endings in my opinion, and that improved somewhat. But his never novels could use tightening.

Larry Niven wrote an excellent series of short stories on the same premises decades earlier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatlander_(short_story_collec...

Great book, but it was not about cryonics. You can move the "mind" into a computer. And those computerized minds start to create a world of their own. People outside can only watch this chaotic activity and grant more resources. Simply because it is truly entertaining.

no such thing as long or too long

"at least if he knows he will be frozen he will die with a shred of hope. ‘‘Other people have no hope,’’ King said."

I've always found it interesting how for most people and in most religions the hope is to be resurrected, go to heaven, and/or live forever, while in Buddhism the point is to escape the cycle of death and rebirth.

It's a completely different approach, which sees more life as something to be avoided rather than desired.

I'm Buddhist and I'm currently happy with the "cycle of death and rebirth" for now. I have infinite time, after all. And this Human game is fun for now.

Buddha shows the path forward; I'm walking slow.

Why wouldn't you do this if you have the money? :-)

If your don't want to be frozen and want to do something useful with your money. If you care about preserving yourself, spread your genes or memes is a more effective way

In 500 years when we have the technology to revive him and he can live a few hundred additional years, wouldn’t his investment now be better?

The understanding of aging, disease, and death is progressing slowly but a few centuries of research will likely make significant discoveries.

Spreading your memes for money is known as advertising. Not particularly cheap or effective. Didn't hear about anything similar for genes. These two are much better done by investing your own time and your own effort.

Of the remaining important things that money can buy, I think cryogenics is a very decent gamble.

> Didn't hear about anything similar for genes.

Probably the most successful at this that I'm aware of (morality aside) are the IVF doctors who use their own sperm to impregnate women.

Some with many biological children from this. Results from a quick online search:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertold_Wiesner

* https://edition.cnn.com/2019/02/14/europe/jan-karbaat-fertil...

Oh, this looks relevant too and suggests some other approaches. Harem's and/or being a king seem like winners for those so inclined:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_with_the_most_c...

Pascal's wager for the irreligious

This sounds different than Pascal's wager because it's binary: you have nothing to lose, so preserve or don't preserve.

Whereas in Pascal's wager you have to choose one religion, which by definition excludes other religions.

Here you have to choose a single company to freeze your head. If you choose the right company you get an afterlife, so you might as well choose one, even if they all seem like total bullshit. It is exactly Pascal's wager.

1. Choose the wrong religion or no religion and you may suffer a fate worse than simple nonexistence. Not so with cryopreservation.

2. Many religions logically exclude other religions, i.e. if they are correct then other religions are not. This is not the case with cryopreservation, where there is a nonzero chance that more than one company may successfully resurrect you.

3. Various monotheistic religions don't accept "I think it's total bullshit but I'm going to act as if I believe it anyway" as belief (opinions vary on what exactly is required), whereas cryopreservation companies are happy to take your money regardless of what you privately think.

1. You're comparing death to death here but the correct comparison is room-temperature death to Hell. Dead-but-cryopreserved is the pre-afterlife state equivalent to death in traditional religions.

2. How do you revive the frozen heads from companies that couldn't pay their freezer bills three decades ago? You don't. Those heads picked the wrong company. Expecting a just god from some other religion to let you into the afterlife anyway is a common response to Pascal's wager.

3. Is the word you're looking for here "faith"? I don't think that word helps your argument. I will concede that there's probably no condition where the company unfreezes you and then kills you because you're not up to their standards. Well, unless they find those old bad reviews you left...

AFAIK, there are numerous competing and mutually exclusive preservation technologies, none of them with any track record of success.

Which is obviously entirely different from My Religion which is Known To Be True.

It’s different, because it provides an excuse to the rich to hoard their wealth more by preserving the coordinates of ice crystals.

At least religion offers people an excuse towards charity because ‘you can’t bring anything to the afterlife.’

Honestly I would be worried of it because of all the crazy distopia sci fi stuff one that always resonated to me as "I could see it happen" is those where bodies are donated / preserved by a private entity which ends up changing hands god knows how many time until you wake up in a nightmare later on.

Playing SOMA might have ruined it for me...

What has historically happened is just that the company goes bankrupt, the bodies defrost in random warehouses and is finally disposed of in less-than-respectable fashion.

There is pretty much zero chance that a cryopreserved individual would be revived. They're frozen when dying or dead, the process itself causes significant damage (with every mitigation just trading in a different severe form of damage), and even if future technology could undo all that and somehow make this severely damaged body somewhat operational, why in the world would anyone bother?

The person is forgotten, replaced, and has nothing in their name any more. There is no gain for those reviving them.

> why in the world would anyone bother

Why do people want to resurrect the woolly mammoth? ;-)

Because it's extinct.

That's actually possible, because you're not resurrecting a specific, dead wooly mammoth, you're growing a new one. Natural reproductive processes are an effective way to create living things, unlike thawing corpses with what are almost certainly irrevocably damaged brains.

Would a dying person be able to set up a trust fund or a bank account/investment that would "live on" when they die. Issue I see here is that the law does not recognize "crypreservation" as continuation of life so all your assets are probably inherited.

I'm sure cryo companies offer this type of safekeeping of money or investment.

it's hard to have faith that such an account could exist long enough to pay for your revival many years in the future. it would be very tempting for the living to raid large funds that are earmarked for reviving dead people. who would stop them?

One solution is to store frozen bodies in a lava tube on the Moon or Mars. Then the company can go bankrupt and that would have no effect.

Not so simple solution.

That's a solution to staying cold, not a solution to avoid getting severely damaged by the freezing process, already being weak/sick/dead at the time of freezing, and there being no realistic outcome other than being reduced to a sad meat popsicle.

Yeah, I know. But at least it addresses one more issue than the current state of the art ^^

I know personally, if I had the opportunity, I would gladly spent time bringing someone frozen back to life. I don't gain anything, but I also don't gain anything when I donate to charity either. The simple chance to do something good in the world is all the motivation I need.

I assume the cost to even try would be in the hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars.

Spend that on the living instead. We're already too many as is anyway, no need to also bring the dead back.

> What has historically happened is just that the company goes bankrupt, the bodies defrost in random warehouses and is finally disposed of in less-than-respectable fashion.

Source? Based on my research, no cryonic institution has failed in this manner to date.

I think op was refferring to the first uhhh, cryonics attempts. They were sad, I recommend giving this podcast a listen: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/354/mistakes-were-made

I'm not sure if any actual official institutions failed in this way.

"... all but one of the documented cryonic preservations prior to 1973 ended in failure, and the thawing out and disposal of the bodies.". There are a decent number of articles and documentaries on the matter.

Even now it's a fringe psuedoscience with little support or even regulation. Expecting a company to be both able and willing to pay the bill to store and freeze your body in perpetuity seems... Naïve. Looking at average company lifetimes might be a useful metric here.

They may get lucky. In Heinlein’s The Door into Summer the protagonist only survives the long sleep because he ends up put into storage with the wrong repository, but that happened to be the one that kept the lights on for 30 years.

I agree with everything that you've said except this:

> why in the world would anyone bother?

I think that historians in a hundred years would find opportunity to revive Larry King to be priceless.

Cryonics simply assumes the eventual development of molecular nano-technology per Drexler is able to repair both the freezing damage and any medical problems too. Not at all unlikely in a few decades, and almost certain within a century.

As for who would want you back ... your children, hopefully. And if there's no repair before they die ... hopefully their children would want them back. Etc.

I hope this doesn't ruin SOMA for me.

Don't worry, it doesn't at all. Play it, it's a fantastic game.

Because I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.

Cryonics (I'm signed up with Alcor) can reduce the measure of you being tortured. Assume a multiverse where some versions of you are going to be tortured for a long time. If you sign up for cryonics, if you get brought back most likely you won't get tortured and so this might reduce the percent of you across the multiverse that is not being tortured.

I’m open to this, but I’m not following how getting brought back equates to less torture. Can you elaborate?

Let's say that across the multiverse all versions of you are going to collectively live for 1 billion years. Unfortunately, some versions of you will be tortured and let's assume that collectively you will be tortured for 10,000 years meaning that the measure your torture is 10,000 / 1 billion. But if you sign up for cryonics you most likely only get brought back in a world that has cured death and isn't evil. If many versions of you do sign up for cryonics say you live collectively for 2 billion years and are only tortured for 11,000 of these years so the measure of you being tortured is 11,000/ 2 billion.

Ah, it was the “probably a non-torturous society will bring you back, since they are more likely to be altruistic” assumption that I was missing. Of course, it only takes one entity to bring you back for an eternity of torture to ruin this logic, as is the case in IHNMAIMS.

Infinity makes decision making really weird since infinity + 1 is the same as infinity so if you are going to be tortured for infinity years it wouldn't be irrational to volunteer to be tortured for an extra year.

In my opinion (also with Alcor), having an awesome template to build us from would make the torture just that much more real.

I also think it's not something worth worrying about. I think it'll be decendents simulating you to learn about their history or for advice.

I'd also hope we can eliminate suffering to a greater extent in the future, for everyone.

You can spend the money on something that actually helps other people instead.

After the Final Countdown people will be delighted to find a warehouse full of cryo-preserved well-seasoned meat.

Yawn.

Actually it helps other people: it's used for researching more efficient ways of cryopreservation, thereby making it more accessible.

I believe the chance that anyone who is cryopreserved today will ever be revived is exceedingly small, so I look at the whole venture as futile and in the same way I might look at an overly expensive funeral. Personally, I would spend my money to enjoy my life more while I'm alive, or else to help others in some tangible way.

Actually it is important tech for living people as well. The technology De Greg Fahy is working on can be used to freeze and unfreeze organs. It may save your (living) life if you get an organ just at the right time.

The same money could be spent on increasing the rate of research in this area by 100-1000x if we could solve how to do this on mice first...

The effectiveness of cryogenics goes way down when you don't freeze yourself.

You don't even need much money all at once, you can use life insurance.

https://bobiverse.fandom.com/wiki/We_Are_Legion_(We_Are_Bob)...

God I love that series.

> Why wouldn't you do this if you have the money? :-)

I've had these fantasies, too and then I thought, "Why wouldn't you just leave a few cells and then have someone re-clone you?"

The obvious answer is that your memories/experiences are wiped out and what I _really_ want is to continue on with my pre-existing memories/experiences. It would be more optimal if you could pickle your memories, clone yourself and then (at some appropriate time later in life) "re-implant" the memories into your clone. I think that's what people like Larry King are really hoping for.

But then there's all sorts of problems with this (e.g., your loved ones will presumably be gone, so who's going to give a shit about your memories? etc. etc.).

The prospect of death is frightening to most of us.

But even if your were to be cloned and your memories re-implanted, that would not necessarily be your consciousness

Agreed, but by that definition my consciousness in 15 years isn't me either, since most of the cells in my body will have been regenerated with different particles.

> what I _really_ want is to continue on with my pre-existing memories/experiences

This reminds me of an interesting philosophical question.

To state the obvious, even if the clone had an exact copy of your memories/experiences, that clone isn't you, you've died. If I had a teleportation machine that could "teleport" you to work by destroying you painlessly and instantly at the source location, and reconstruct you particle for particle at destination, how many would use it? I wouldn't, however irrational that may be, because "I" would be dead.

This bias is pretty interesting since by that definition we all die multiple times, as the particles that constitute our body are literally interchanging with the environment over time. But we don't feel uncomfortable about that fact.

> This reminds me of an interesting philosophical question.

Also known as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

> This bias is pretty interesting since by that definition we all die multiple times, as the particles that constitute our body are literally interchanging with the environment over time. But we don't feel uncomfortable about that fact.

I've wondered about that, is it strictly true? Aren't there heavy metals and other elements that are accumulated in the body over time? Or at least, they are eliminated so slowly that you'd never rid yourself of them completely before dying. I guess bones replace themselves every 10 years so any incorporated metals would have a chance to be eliminated on that timescale. But what's to stop a few of those elements making their way back into another structure after being ejected into the blood stream? Maybe we've all got a few persistent cadmium or lead atoms hanging out in our bodies from birth to death. Ship of Theseus crisis averted!

Great read... I’ve had similar thoughts before.

Question though: when that thought experiment is applied to the physical body of a person, aren’t our cells dying and being replaced constantly? Does that mean our identity changes over time and with new experiences? (Mind blown)

It's not really the Ship of Theseus. The question OP was referring to is about the self and the continuity of consciousness specifically. Derek Parfit first proposed it in his book Reasons and Persons.[1][2]

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

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasons_and_Persons

Because you believe in science, not sci-fi inspired scientism metaphysics, so you know it's 100% bogus...

If, and when, a real method for immortality/life extension emerges, we can jump on it.

Merely frozing a corpse with the idea of some bogus future ressurection technology (that will still retain memories etc) is wishful thinking.

Not to mention those cryo-preserves will be shut down with narry a thought in the first case of crisis...

Because it won't work?

Because it's profoundly selfish--you _might_ buy yourself more life in some unspecified future, or the same money today could definitely save and/or improve many, many lives now.

You should read Transmetropolitan [1]

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

As long as the structure of his brain (at an appropriate level of detail--- how much is enough though?) is preserved for the duration of his ice nap, why couldn't something like a continuation of him be reconstituted some time in the future?

I remember a short movie (from "The Outer Limits?") where frozen bodies where entangled spiritually and there was a psychopath in the group that was making a hell of their lives.

I do not remember the exact story but the idea was interesting to the 22yo me at that time (some 25 years ago)

EDIT: I think this is "The Refuge" (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Recap/TheOuterLimits1...)

sounds like Ubik

It seems he passed due to the coronavirus, so hopefully the people of the future have that handled before he is unfrozen.

If we can reconstitute frozen people with no ill effects, I'm pretty sure we can figure out the coronavirus problem.

I am surprised because I thought Larry King was of the Mormon faith. They have some interesting mind virii mythology about post death existence.

ETA: what I meant by ‘mind virii’ ; https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=mind%20virus .. certainly wasn’t being disrespectful towards anyone’s faith.

From: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viruses_of_the_Mind .. the vocabulary of atheism from my younger days still lingers even though I am on search mode now.

He was Jewish and agnostic

Got it. Quick googling shows that his ex was Mormon. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7970945/Larry-King-...

That's the Daily Mail, which should be taken with more than a grain of salt. According to Wikipedia he was indeed Jewish and agnostic.

I am actually ok with Daily Mail these days. Can’t tell the difference from main stream media except for the occasional typo and annoying ads.

I am not a news/media elitist anymore. Things have changed in the past few years.

Larry Kings former wife is a Latter-day Saint, he is not.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com