The whole stick behind placing the money to pay for the service, the energy and resource consumption, having people work to maintain that infra... That's rich people carrying their dominance beyond their own death, having breathing people slaving out for them, there's a revolting aspect to it.
There's nothing revolting to wanting to see if by some change in technology or chance, you can live longer than normal, or be revived, so long as you're not taking from someone elses life or well-being to do so.
Also, the electrical requirements behind these services are miniscule compared to those of many, many other at least as frivolous (and i'd say often more frivolous things, some of which people right on this site earn their money from.
It's stunning how many people extrapolate their own completely emotional, subjective reactions to certain things that do them no harm into wanting to destroy or stop them.
I don't get the ignorance/hostility that people seem to have towards cryopreservation, or things like longevity research that even in the short term could have tangible benefits for letting people at least live out their later days without feeling like their bodies are breaking down and decaying, a more respectful sunset to one's life.
But at the same time, I never got how people can be okay with the concept of dying - to me and some other people, that's the single most scary thing out there. With most research telling us that essentially after death the mind just... ceases. No more passage of time, no more conscious thoughts or experiences, ever. I'm not okay with that and claims about "living on" in people's memories, or leaving a legacy - that wouldn't do me much good.
It's likely that cryonics is just storing corpses that will never be revived due to our current methods being too primitive. But a 1% chance or even a 0.01% chance of fighting off entropy for a while longer seems worth it, versus guaranteed doom. Aside from that, it would be interesting to see how people would act if they had lifespans of a thousand years - knowing that what you'll do to the environment, you'll have to bear the burden of yourself.
EDIT: on reading a bit more, that may be an oversimplification. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow-wave_sleep
Science doesn't really tell us what happens to your consciousness after death. It doesn't say much of anything about your consciousness at all - in fact, it is still largely mystified as to why you aren't just a flesh robot following straightforward evolutionary imperatives with maybe a little quantum randomness thrown in. What you think about your conscious mind largely comes down to belief, and it looks like you believe that there is nothing more than the flesh robot, which I guess has some emergent properties that result in a conscious mind. If there really is nothing to it but what we have observed, then that's true, but there are a lot of things in the universe that we haven't observed, and this may be one of them. For all we know, any one of the religions could be right about life after death or the existence of some sort of "soul," including yours, which denies the existence of one.
As to selfishness, why spend the $100k+ on having your body frozen rather than passing that along to your descendants? Do you believe that there's something special about you and/or inadequate about other people that makes your greed over a chance at a few more years of life worth the money and time you are taking from them? Why is life about what will "do me much good"? Is that all you think your life is worth? It's just about accruing a bunch of stuff so that you can hopefully spend it on becoming immortal before your clock runs out?
There has always been a slice of the elite that thinks they can cheat death by doing this, and usually it doesn't go well. Usually, they are also part of some weird cult, too, that convinces them that they can beat the odds. Is this time different because instead of drinking lead or drying your body, you've chosen to freeze it instead?
Death is ultimately a natural part of life, and I guess the unknown part of it is so terrifying that we spend so much of life futilely trying to prevent it. I think it's a lot better to embrace the fact that you get about 100 years on this rock to advance the state of the world as much as you can before passing the job of being its steward onto the next generation.
Death does not strike when it is just. Death comes at random. Who are you to judge when people should die? Is it selfish for someone who dies at 25 years old to participate in this scheme?
> Science doesn't really tell us what happens to your consciousness after death.
Currently it doesn't really tell us that there's a consciousness of any sort afterwards. The concept of an afterlife might as well be a coping mechanism and the burden of proof should lie on those in favor of those claims. Maybe some day we'll have an answer. Until then, it's best to stick to what we know. What we know is that one's physical body shapes their mind or at least its expression a great deal, like the case of Phineas Gage and others. Similarly, even the casual descriptions of going under for surgery convey a sense of "lost time", just nothingness.
If I have some sort of a "soul" then it will become more relevant once I'm dead. Until then, it makes sense to look after my body in whatever ways are possible, which includes things like eating well, getting enough sleep, not acting reckless or engaging in risk-taking behavior, limiting intake of harmful substances and so on. It also might include preserving my body around the time of death in case my brain activity can be restored later.
> As to selfishness, why spend the $100k+ on having your body frozen rather than passing that along to your descendants?
I will have no descendants. This is not a world where I'd want any, or worse yet, pursue parenthood due to selfish motivations or societal pressures. It's challenging to do it right and it is not for everyone. Props to the good parents out there, shame on the bad ones, or those who are not ready or qualified to be parents, yet choose that anyways.
> Do you believe that there's something special about you and/or inadequate about other people that makes your greed over a chance at a few more years of life worth the money and time you are taking from them? Why is life about what will "do me much good"? Is that all you think your life is worth? It's just about accruing a bunch of stuff so that you can hopefully spend it on becoming immortal before your clock runs out?
Nothing special at all, just self preservation - I experience life from my own perspective. I would like a continuation of that, within my means. I'm not stealing the last bite of food out of some descendant's mouth, merely using my own capital as I please, after the corresponding taxes have been paid and other investments made, charity donations done and so on. That doesn't seem like an unreasonable thing to do, given how we typically get capital for our contributions to society in one way or another (hopefully that's the case).
We don't tell people that they shouldn't buy nice clothes or cars for themselves because their future descendants could use the resources better, even knowing that those clothes will tatter and those cars will turn into heaps of rust. We don't tell people that they shouldn't buy medicine or medical procedures that might improve their health just because of them being a certain age, or more bluntly, we don't tell them that they should die so that the state and their descendants can take whatever inheritance there is.
> Usually, they are also part of some weird cult, too, that convinces them that they can beat the odds.
I think it probably boils down to simple maths: 0.01% is still better than 0%. Probably depends on how much you want to live. On the flip side, there are also those who say that a lifetime is more than enough and they're happy to have an end to a life well lived.
> Death is ultimately a natural part of life, and I guess the unknown part of it is so terrifying that we spend so much of life futilely trying to prevent it.
Unfortunately, infant mortality was also a natural part of life, until we took an effort to improve things. There's no reason why death or even deterioration at a late age couldn't be engineering problems to be solved. A world without Alzheimer's or cancer would be a better world, even if both of those are also natural. Imagine if you could preserve someone terminally ill or someone in need of an unavailable organ donation, until later.
> I think it's a lot better to embrace the fact that you get about 100 years on this rock to advance the state of the world as much as you can before passing the job of being its steward onto the next generation.
There is no reason why someone couldn't live with this assumption (regardless of whether they choose to have kids or not), while hoping for or investing in healthcare advancements, or even set aside some money for cryonics if they want, instead of buying more real estate or whatever. All in all, I don't expect to change any opinions, because mine is as alien to you as yours is to me. I don't appreciate that some of it reads condescending and so accusatory, though.
However, I think the desire to beat death itself, and otherwise treat death as a curable disease, is separate from this, and is ultimately a very destructive ideology. Instead of seeing yourself as a temporary steward of the universe responsible for preserving it for future humans, immortality seekers see it as their own to exploit in the foolhardy quest to defy all of the current science on death and dying. Nothing beyond what you can experience in your lifespan matters, so you might as well go to the literal ends of the earth to pursue its extension.
I'm not sure that's what you in particular think about this, but it is the natural consequence of a moral philosophy built around the idea of "0.01% is still better than 0%" and "I experience life from my own perspective. I would like a continuation of that." Any other belief about what you ought to do in the world is inconsistent with the division by 0 that you get from "0.01% is still better than 0%"
I think that this is the reason why many billionaires have stopped doing things like building libraries and universities, and focus instead on funding increaslingly-quackish research into ways of cheating death. This ideology brings you blood boys and transfers of organs from the young to the otherwise-relatively-healthy old (done for money), as well as things like cryogenic freezing.
> I think it probably boils down to simple maths: 0.01% is still better than 0%.
The cultish belief in itself is that you actually have a chance greater than 0 of beating death, which isn't supported by any form of science. That idea is as much a religion as the idea that your "soul" lives on after you die.
> I will have no descendants.
Even with no descendants, you can still improve the human condition, and yes, people will remember you for it. I would encourage you to spend your money on things like building libraries and hospitals in Africa instead of beating death.
Everything you have said here comes from a perspective of "self over all others," and I would encourage you to examine your own worldview, for your own sake. I'm not suggesting a religious conversion here, but think about what actually makes you happy. Many people who pursue money over all other things ultimately die unfulfilled and unhappy, wishing they could have done something else.
That is actually the central concept of religion. The soul you take to the afterlife is the soul you tended to in life.
If you have some sort of a "soul" then they say it is at its most relevant now.
Personally I don't believe, but the small risk of being perceived as an arsehole for all of my life, let alone all of eternity, is enough reason to work on not being an arsehole, and those are "soul" issues. All self-improvement stuff that isn't about wealth generation is.
It might be wrong, but that’s a different question.
Our level of understanding of neuroscience basically stops at understanding what regions and receptors in the brain are tickled by what sensations, and we still have very few actual ideas as to things like how your brain computes 2 + 2, let alone how your brain computes things like right and wrong.
Our level of understanding of neuroscience is irrelevant, but also far more detailed than you just described. The brains chemistry for example is a huge area of study with a lot of useful information. We also know many functional details such as how vision works down to enough detail for people to have come up with new classes of optical illusions. etc etc
But again neuroscience is overkill, science made the blood flow consciousness connection hundreds of years ago.
It is very legitimate to say that the latter definition doesn't exist, but that is as much a belief as the idea that it does. I personally don't believe that it exists, but I think it's hubris or folly to say that science shows that it definitely doesn't.
You will for example lose memories under specific conditions. Exclude everything that is disrupted by such trauma and what’s left is the empty set.
I think you're taking an extreme view for the sake of argument, but there is still quite a bit unknown about how we actually process information. There is a clear biological component to all of it, but the biological processes fall well short of a complete explanation of things like creative processes and the sense of self (let alone logical thought), and you seem well-versed enough in the literature to know that.
That’s not how science operates, it accepts best fits for existing data even in the absence of absolute knowledge.
We didn’t need the DNA of every creature to have ever lived to construct the tree of life. It’s a model initially created from examining the structure of organisms both living and dead, which has been refined over time as we slightly alter things based on new evidence such as DNA.
As a consequence things aren’t static, astronomers etc constantly refine existing models to fit new data. Thus the conclusion about what happens after death is subject to change in response to new data, but what we have today is still the current explanation based on existing evidence.
What makes science useful isn’t exact answers it’s being generally close enough to correct as to be useful. Is Quantum mechanics a full explanation for every physical phenomenon? No, but it’s really difficult to notice the edge cases in your daily life.
By the way, I agree with you that it's not the state of science today, but I can imagine a world where we actually can do that if we get to the point where there is nothing unobservable about the mind.
That doesn't make it scientific to categorically deny the existence of things that we don't know about the existence of.
Personally, I have yet to see any evidence that supports your claim that the second type of consciousness actually exists in any way, other than as a concept in purely theoretical philosophical discussions. I am not making the claim that it doesn’t exist; just that right now I don’t believe _your_ claim that it does. I don’t need to provide any evidence to have this position, as I am not the one making the claim.
My default position on any claim, including this one, is one of non-belief, as it is nonsensical in my opinion to hold a belief in some claim until and unless that belief is supported by evidence.
So, I can rightfully say that I don’t believe the latter type of consciousness exists, and I don’t think this position is hubris or folly; rather, it’s the only rational position to take given the evidence presented (at this point, essentially none). I’d genuinely love to see some evidence compelling enough to be convinced otherwise, though.
If anything is selfish, it's making all sorts of unfounded assumptions about why people choose to try extending their lifespan and then moralizing based on those assumptions. People may have all kinds of reasons for wanting to try this, and they need not be materialistic or accumulation-based at all. Ultimately, it's their personal choice, with their money, and even if they spend $100,000 on paying for it, or more, it doesn't mean they didn't leave other assets or things for their descendants.
By making a moral claim for why YOU decide that spending that money isn't justified, you're going down one very arrogant and ultimately silly road of making the same claim to so many other things people spend money and effort they've worked hard for on specific personal preferences, be they material or otherwise. Maybe you buying a $700,000 house vs. a $600,000 house is just as idiotic then? Do you really need the extra floor space or bathrooms?
>There has always been a slice of the elite that thinks they can cheat death by doing this, and usually it doesn't go well.
It isn't just a slice of the elite that would love to have extra years of life in the face of a total unknown darkness. It's something that many people would love, and if a few with more resources are willing to pay more (and again, the prices of these services aren't absurdly expensive) to hopefully move forward a technology that gives that to both rich and poor at some point, it's fundamentally a good thing, and certainly not something that should be hammered down because of very shaky and subjective moralizing.
Where would you draw a line? Should other once-implausible life enhancement therapies that are now widely used and accepted also be forsaken? How about organ transplants? Gene therapy? highly expensive cancer treatments that all have extended life beyond what was previously "natural" for many people? Often these also start first as speculative ideas, then experiments, then just options for the rich, but later become much more widely available.
>they are also part of some weird cult, too, that convinces them that they can beat the odds. Is this time different because instead of drinking lead or drying your body, you've chosen to freeze it instead?
Let's separate completely absurd assumptions about people needing cult beliefs to be open minded on weird science from the much more straightforward and reasoned logic of wanting to live a longer life, or experimenting with interesting new technologies. Here you're just smearing for its own sake. Also, cryogenics, for all its still tenuous science, is a far cry from purely mystical beliefs like medieval alchemy. By fixating on how absurd freezing seems to you only because current medicine can't reverse it yet without damage (though nothing material makes the idea impossible), you're scoffing at the idea in the same way as a priest from the 16th century probably would if you explained completely workable modern gene therapies and organ transplants to them.
lol what? No. When you die your brain ceases activity. There is no scientific evidence to support that there is some underlying, persisting system that drives consciousness - literally everything points to consciousness being driven by brain activity.
When you die you die. That is it.
> Death is ultimately a natural part of life, and I guess the unknown part of it is so terrifying that we spend so much of life futilely trying to prevent it.
Just because it's natural doesn't mean it's good or something to accept. Disease is natural, do we just go "well it's part of life!" - no, we cure it. And none of this is unknown, it's the known part (ie: "I will cease") that is horrifying.
Similarly, there's no scientific consensus on what consciousness even is. Neuroscience has some idea (e.g. "its related to brain activity") but that's it. The psychologists, in typical psychological fashion, have even less of an idea.
That's not to say the lack of evidence proves that your consciousness ascends to a higher plane after you die. Simply a fact that _consciousness_ is one of the millennium problems of brain science. You cannot tell yourself apart from a well programmed LLM. Does this imply the LLM is conscious? Well according to the Chinese Room Argument the answer is no. In a practical sense, your argument is leading you to that conclusion. In that case, the view is that people are just deterministic meat robots with some randomness component is probably accurate. However, even for stanch atheist the idea that they are nothing more than a deterministic meat computer featuring programmed self-death is understandably disturbing. It's hard to separate the thought of death (and your ideas around it) from your own self-preservation mechanism.
The next 100 years of neuroscience will be very interesting.
It literally does not matter. We know that it is something that exists within the body, primarily if not exclusively the brain/nervous system. Therefor if the entire body dies you don't need any more information to know that consciousness is gone. It would require additional evidence to the contrary for one to take on the theory that consciousness somehow exists outside of the nervous system.
What you're saying just flat out does not matter. What consciousness is does not matter. If you destroy someone's brain you can be assured that consciousness ends.
To be consistent with your first statement, the person making the claims should provide the proof. Do you have proof of this statement?
The fact of the matter is that we don't know one way or the other, so anyone making claims about this will be doing so entirely on belief.
Do I have proof that thoughts come from the brain? Uh lol excuse me if I don't rush to find sources for that claim
If you want to claim that consciousness continues after death, you’d better bring some evidence along with that claim.
Death is a natural part of life, but so was smallpox until it wasn’t. Nature fucking sucks and we should bend it to our will.
There are a lot of things science doesn't currently tell us. That doesn't mean every possible alternative is equally reasonable.
Either consciousness is physical or non-physical. If it's physical, then everything we know about the brain and the laws of physics suggests that it can't survive the death of the brain. If it's non-physical, then it must still interact with the quantum fields of physics. Otherwise, how would we have any experience of physical reality? The slogan in these situations is "show me the equations". If you're claiming that there is a non-physical substance that interacts with quantum fields, there should be equations governing these interactions. Until these equations have been provided and confirmed to predict the results of experiments, why should we believe in it?
>Death is ultimately a natural part of life
This is the naturalistic fallacy. Just because something is natural does not automatically make it good. If 100 years on this rock is better than 25, why wouldn't 1000 years be better than 100?
I am in disbeleif that people like this exist. U really have a problem about my beleifs or how I spend the money I earned myself? You could literary burn yours during your life or death and I wouldnt care at all. You can literary invest in pink elepanths reviving you millenia after your death and I would not lift an eyebrow...
Its you who is selfish not the OP. You and your beleifs... you judging others not to be good enough by your metrics. Did you even read yourself before posting? Nothing?
How people would act? The masses would never change their way of thinking, meaning there would be no progress / change of culture as well as the danger of a bad culture persisting for millenias. At the same time you would see those in power conentrate even more power and it would be certainy power like you see in non-democratic countries, where one individual rules everyone, except that individual would never ever die. Imagine if Stalin has lived to this day. Now considering that, you would think that a 1984-like goverment with a supreme leader that lives for centuries would let the average person live forever in the first place?
> versus guaranteed doom
I would not call the death, complete absence of everything, following a life well lived, doom. Everything has an end. Of course if that happens too soon, that's a tragedy.
> No more passage of time, no more conscious thoughts or experiences, ever.
It's interesting to look at the opposite. If following death, there's no experience, no awareness, nothing. Then what is the now? what it means to be alive right now, to perceive and how is it different from the memories of the past and ideas of the future? It may sound far off, but in a way, we die every moment. And on a larger scale, the 8 y/o me, the 16 y/o me is no more, not in just terms of being made of different atoms, but in terms of identity. So you can also imagine that if a person lives thousands of years, they either experience many "deaths" over time or they live the same dull life for thousands of years - in which there was no point to live that long in the first place. I can share that fear though, but it would be more in the context of "you have x months / years" to live heard at a relatively young age with life feeling far from finished, but the longer I live and the more things I do and experience that I wanted to do and experience, I imagine the easier it is to come to terms and be grateful for what has happened already.
Don't have anything against what they are doing and heck, if I could easily afford it, maybe I would even sign up - one way ticket to see what the future would be like (vs. nothing like you said). But I don't think it's that important and if humanity reverse engineers the brain so that a person can live for thousands of year, or potentially infenitely (I think that would be the biggest challenge that goes far beyond just stopping death, I would not expect a brain to work for hundreds of years without serious modifications), if everyone has an access to it, it's like one of those things like an omni-intelligent AI, something you would think everyone would be better off if it was never developed.
I think it would be cool if aging was stopped (the prime years of adulthood are so short) but I'd wish there was some natural cap of say, 200 years max were the brain would just break down at the end and it would be very hard to make it work longer).
That said, my only comment to this train of thought is that at least the building in the video takes up less space & resources than a pyramid.
Empirically, we're obviously way ahead of where humans were at the time of mummification, so I think it's a silly comparison anyways.
Depending on your values the scientific veneer may be more appealing than the religious one, but neither is founded in particularly strong observational evidence.
Step 3 is still very much not compatible with known science either, so as far as you can tell the success rate is the same as it was back then
That one Star Trek TNG episode from 1987 had this right. The accidentally discovered 21st century cryogenists are stunned to find their former wealth and status are irrelevant in Picard-era Federation.
I think the question at that time would be: “Do we bring these likely brain-damaged people into a world they can’t understand and which would cause them pain” — and the answer might be “No, that would be cruel”.
Some people already paid to maybe suffer that cruelty in the future, the same way some people already paid to go to the Titanic in an uncertified submarine and die.
There's an old saying "you can't take it with you".
Shabti are so common that they are the only actual artifacts you can export from Egypt without special permission/licenses. Most are going to be fakes or replicas. Some can be rather dull looking. The ones made out of faience tend to be fabulous.
There was at least some basis to thinking there was an eventual way to get there, even if now it seems cargo cult-ish
Science is some people religion nowadays
Other than that, you don't deserve to use computers, networks, electricity, radio, cell phones, AI, room temperature superconductors, cars, air conditioning, mathematics, logic, antibiotics, or medicine, if you falsely believe science is a religion.
But if you're into religion, then logical consistency and truth seeking isn't your thing anyway, so you probably do hypocritically enjoy all the benefits and convenience of science anyway, while believing in invisible ghosts and magic, without a shred of proof.
If that's not sarcasm then you just proved GP's point.
...At its best. That's not uniform across different fields; "social sciences" such as psychology are inherently a lot less rigorous than, say, chemistry. Also, there have been a few recent HN headlines about prestigious researchers withdrawing publications due to accusations of fraud. Let's not get into confirmation bias, tribalism, and whatnot, OK?
> But if you're into religion, then logical consistency and truth seeking isn't your thing anyway
It depends. Some claims based on religious beliefs are falsiable and happen to be scientifically dubious. However, many things are more philosophical in nature and aren't examinable by science. It seems there's pretty good evidence that Jesus died and resurrected, if only because the Roman soldiers probably wouldn't obscure details that would damage the credibility of Jesus' religion. Does this mean God exists and is as is described in the Bible? No, not necessarily. But you'd do well to consider that "science" isn't the end-all be-all answer to the universe. "Science", as we often deviate significantly from the spirit of scientific inquiry, which still isn't the key to omniscience.
What? What's the evidence that he resurrected?
Who's to say that future scientists won't find studying these modern-day mummies just as fascinating?
[1] https://sites.manchester.ac.uk/knhcentre/research/current/ma...
I fully understand. This was my initial reaction too.
Thinking about this for a while, I have a different view: If rich people pay for this, it means their money goes into the pockets of people who operate (and own) such storage places.
The alternative would be to pass their wealth to their few and already privileged descendants.
This is thinking too much within system. I don't know why you should need to keep frozen meat to get those resources
> The alternative would be to pass their wealth to their few and already privileged descendants.
There are alternatives (and more egalitarian and less useless) to the existing system of mostly unbounded inheritance.
I believe the COO in the video alluded to expenses at the time of "resurrection" but I can't imagine any more than a stipend is there for the "Sleeper".
After that it's a technical issue of how you would attempt to transmit money to someone who died and was resurrected. Ideas in this directions would be things like trusts or foundations which purpose would be your potential eventual benefit. No idea what's the current goto method for this. For example very long term such entities are illegal in some parts of the world, but legal elsewhere.
Same about this "wealth" scary object being passed from one person to un-deserving heirs to the possible detriment of the rest of humanity. Who owns that wealth is very irrelevant: most of it is invested and very productive.
imagine leaving your late-parent insurance policy in a freezer, only to have a random error and outright negligence (power, etc) blow up your last chance of having kids, that you always dreamed of.
I can feel for those aspiring moms and dads
There’s also a prominent example of expensive research being lost due to combination human and mechanical error [2].
[1] https://time.com/5198546/families-affected-freezer-failure-f... [2] https://www.businessinsider.com/janitor-turned-off-freezer-d...
Same is true of any funeral directors. Why are people "slaving" as opposed to being "employed", on assumption for a decent sum?
I wouldn’t be so quick to judge, they may merely have a different definition of death than you do.
In fact, it’s quite likely the line you’ve drawn for what death means to you would be sacrilegious in a previous time.
It’s all relative.
Everything past that is just superstition and belief in supernatural at this point.
Anything before and after is invalid?
I think/thought that’s a boxing term?
I just went through their inquiry page. They give 65 euros/month as the estimated price, for my selections. (I'm older than most HN commenters, which presumably means a higher price on the insurance. OTOH I picked neuropreservation, which should cost less than whole-body.)
Further, early adopters create a market which will predictably be served at lower cost as it grows.
Membership Fee: € 25 per month
Insurance Cost Estimate: € 40 per month (indicated as provisional at this stage of the price-quote)
Insurance Coverage Duration: 20 years
It's polite not to present speculation as fact. And you could already know your 200k was wrong since I said I chose neuropreservation, not whole-body, on the quote form.
I think the word you're looking for is "shtick" [0]
I find it most curious however that you consider supposedly high skilled people voluntarily working for an organization as “slaving out”. This tells me you have a problem with something else than people who pay 200k EUR for their funerals.
People take a job and get paid. They can leave. It's capitalism, not monarchy or feudalism or socialism.
That of course ignores basic limits imposed by biological, sociological and economic systems. Not to mention that the promise of eternal life is common among cult ideologies.
This is apparently business as usual for ultra wealthy technocrats who don’t have any actual contributions whatsoever but need to feel like a revolutionary. Or at least for Eliezer Yudkowsky. That and AI doomerism based on similarly shoddy philosophical arguments.