The world doesn't have to be like this. Not anymore. It's too late for my little brother - but Kim Suozzi made it, and it's not too late for you, or any of your loved ones who are still alive.
Right now, the primary barriers to its widespread addoption are still probably incredulity and religious objections, but I think those would quickly fall by the wayside if it didn't cost as much as a house.
Perhaps an X-Prize style competition to develop more cost-effective technologies and techniques?
Alcor has published a cost break-down http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/CostOfCryonicsTables.txt and explained it at http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/CostOfCryonics.html
A big chunk of cash is spent keeping a team on-site while waiting for the person to die. Assisted suicide for the terminally ill would help reduce costs significantly.
Oh come on, quoting the cheapest price isn't fair or realistic. How about showing us something more representative, or at least quoting the most expensive rate as well?
I didn't quote the cheapest price. I quoted what I pay. I have no idea how much older people pay for life insurance. If you looked at their website, you'd see that Alcor dues are $800/year. Neuropreservation is $80k and whole-body is $200k (http://alcor.org/BecomeMember/scheduleA.html). This may sound like a lot, but the standard way to pay is to buy life insurance. When you die, the policy pays Alcor. You can see the cost break-down in my GP comment.
Alcor is expensive. Cryonics Institute is the budget option. CI dues are $120/year and whole-body preservation costs $35k. CI members usually pay with life insurance as well. CI can charge less because they have less staff. Their research budget is practically zero. Most importantly, they won't camp at your deathbed. IIRC, Eliezer is signed up with CI and pays around $300/year. That's the cheapest price possible.
It's often said that getting cryopreserved is the second-worst thing that can happen to you. Cryonics gives you a small chance of living a much longer life. I'll be the first to admit that it's highly unlikely to work. But for myself and many others, the expected value calculation heavily favors signing up. After all, consider the alternative: You die slightly wealthier.
The alternative is that you do a little bit more with your life, because you don't spend $120/year and all the mental energy for planning your after-life.
If cryonics works, this is the sort of evidence you'd expect to see today. Demanding a revival doesn't make sense, because cryonics relies on the vast gap between preservation tech and revival tech.
> Defying death will always be lucrative
As it should be! I'll pay literally every cent I have not to die.
> the actual demonstration of results will always be forthcoming
This is nothing but speculation on your behalf.
Yes, Cryonics is speculation - no one claims otherwise. But you're also speculating in saying that it will never work, which is what I understood from your statement.
You're very likely right. But the upside of Cryonics actually working would be worth a lot to most people, if they'd stop to think about it, and afaik might very well make a sensible investment.
I look forward to hearing precisely how you figure I'm going to lose 100% on an investment I'm not making. You're comparing the 100% likely outcome that I do not live forever having spent my money on non-snake oil with the 100% likely outcome that you do not live forever having spent your money on snake oil. The idea that something impossible is going to be more likely because you're spending money on it is just assuming the outcome you want. Unicorns continue not to exist despite every little girl wishing for them. I point out that spending money on unicorn research isn't going to generate them any faster.
The expected value of lotteries is less than the ticket price, so it's not a sensible investment, if we assume "sensible investment" means maximizing expected value on every dollar spent (which is what you seem to be doing implicitly. Feel free to suggest another definition).
On the other hand, people will tend to put very high utility on living longer, and if cryonics works, the potentially vast number of added years is amazingly valuable.
Run an expected value computation on this, and because of the crazy upside of cryonics, you can have very low levels of confidence that it will actually work, and it will still be worth it from an expected value point of view.
That you've managed to convince yourself that p > 0 with cryonics is just evidence that snake oil production is a better investment.
In that case, do you have any reason to think it's 0? My main evidence to the contrary is:
1. A smart group of people say that the probability is > 0: (Eliezer Yudkowsky, Robin Hanson, various others at LessWrong). They have nothing to gain from selling me on it, so I don't think they're biased.
2. It seems to me that future medical advances are pretty likely (based on history), including advances leading to being able to fix practically anything that kills people today. And it seems pretty sensible that cryonic preservation basically stops all processes at the moment of death. Combine the two, and it makes sense to me it might be possible to revive people.
I'm not saying the probability is > 50%, I'm saying it can be < 1%, but still over 0, and still be worth it.
> I'm not saying the probability is > 50%, I'm saying it can be < 1%, but still over 0, and still be worth it.
Well, we're simply going to have to disagree. I don't find endorsement by smart people compelling. We have plenty of evidence that medicine can extend lifespans, but we have no evidence that we'll figure out a safe way to revive someone cryogenically frozen and no reason to believe extension will reach infinity. If they only solve one of the two problems you're looking at wasting a lot of money on a very strange burial or a very disappointing revival.
If p < 1% but > 0 and it's worth it to you, great. But don't kid yourself about it being an investment. It's a huge gamble. And I retain the right to consider gamblers suckers.
That's the nicest thing someone's ever said to me on HN :)
"Well, we're simply going to have to disagree."
Yes, we will. Not that I've signed up to cryonics or anything yet (still checking how it works from outside the US), but I'm almost convinced that it's worth it. Thanks for another interesting viewpoint on the topic.
It so happens that quite a few rather smart people believe that cryonics has a non-zero chance of success, so if you have some conclusive evidence to the contrary, let's hear it. Otherwise, your uninformed opinion is just that.
So the true death is the information-theoretic death. Does current cryonics technology prevent that? I don't know, but it's a better shot than the alternative.
Here is what I believe instead:
"you" are the countless processes running inside your brain, interacting with each other. When these stop, you're dead. When you're asleep, they interact with each other less, and "you" are reduced. When you're in a coma, they interact with each other much less, and "you" are much reduced. But when you're frozen after your brain activity has stopped, anyone revived out of your body isn't "you" anymore. It'll be someone else with your memories. The only benefit of this would not be to you but to your family and friends (if they're still here) or to projects you're working on but want to have finished even if you won't see the results.
I suppose there's a chance cryonics can be useful, but only if it manages to "preserve" someone before their brain activity stops (which CAN be after the person is clinically dead, e.g. heart stopping != brain dead), and their brain activity continues at a very slow pace, but continues nonetheless.
Assuming as hypothesis that cryonics or some other technology manage to preserve all the information about your mind processes and that we can reinstantiate them in a new substrate, what is exactly the difference?
Exactly what property of these processes is lost when they stop, if hypothetically cryonics stores all the information? There is nothing else!
I think that we have an intuition of having some kind of "ineffable essence", but that's an illusion.
(I could accept that current cryonics is insufficient and that some information is lost in the process, but that is a completely different argument.)
I don't think so, even if information was perfectly copied!; from this point on whatever happens to the first web server might not happen to the second. Therefore they are difference instances.
Same with human cloning. You can make a perfect clone of me, and that person won't be me, just an identical copy, who from now on will have separate experiences than me. If I die first before the clone is made, it still doesn't make a difference; I am not my clone.
Now, if I died first, and a clone is made, you're arguing my information theoretic death is prevented. but nonetheless my clone isn't me. and I can't tell how cryonics preserving my body after I am _dead_, and then repairing my body, is different to cloning. It's basically just cloning but reusing my existing parts, and if that is correct, the revived person is not me.
The property is "process continuity" - as long as some of the processes that form "me" at this moment will be present in the next, I will continue to, at least be some part, me; If all the processes are stopped, then any processes after that point are no longer me.
I am saying there's a difference between processes running on hardware and the hardware itself. I am the emergent property of all the processes that are running in my body.
I can't either, but it might be, we just don't know enough to say for sure. People whose hearts have stopped beating have still been brought back, at what point do you declare that when they're brought back they're a "clone" and not their original selves? Where's the line between physical death and "soul"-death?
The idea of there not being any "process continuity" when someone is frozen just seems to be speculation on your part.
There isn't likely to be process continuity if you are freezing people after they are dead.