Cryo and Social Obligations

Bedford was frozen in 1967; how hard would it be to either collect or assemble a set of yearbooks, describing what's happened since then, and storing a small library of such reference texts at both CI and Alcor?

I think that, at least, is a solved problem, or at least as near-to-solved as we're likely to get, so no effort need be made on that front.

Wikipedia has encyclopedic overviews of each century - C20th, C21st - with further information available readily. And down to far more detail than a revivee is likely to want, apart from those areas and people that they had a personal/individual interest in. There are significant, well-organised and seemingly-sustainable efforts in place to keep this information up to date, to keep it safe, and to keep it readily available.

I think just giving them a tablet and a couple of minutes' instruction on navigating Wikipedia would work very nicely for that particular job. It'd also get them started with the online world, which is arguably the biggest shift in Westerners' daily lives since 1967.

(And if the process has temporarily impaired their vision or motor skills, happily Wikipedia is readily available in a wide variety of accessible formats.)

Promoting the idea that waking up from cryo will involve being enmeshed in a community rightaway. I'm not actually sure how this might be managed. (...) If someone was revived from cryonics tomorrow, would you be willing to at least let them crash on your couch for a few weeks?

It's not clear at all that there will be anything remotely resembling "ok, you can crash on my couch" at the point in time when the frozen dead can be reanimated. Will there be a community that would be recognizable to the freshly defrosted?

Cryopreservation advocates should not promote ideas that are based on speculation and wishful thinking ("you'll be enmeshed in a community [... that will fulfill your social needs]"), best not to oversell if you want to appear legitimate.

... [I]t remains just a subculture of a couple of thousand people or so.

Is this an accurate estimation?

... [M]ost of the objections people raise to cryonics seem to be off enough that, even if those objections were solved, those particular people still wouldn't sign up - that is, they feel some fundamental antipathy to the whole idea of cryonics, and unconsciously pick some rationalization that happens to sound reasonable to them to explain it.

Id est, "I observe that most people don't have a truly considered rejection to cryonics." Please correct me if I mis-paraphrase.

I have a strong hunch that one extremely strong reason people feel an emotional revulsion to cryo is, simply, that even if they do wake up in the future, they will have been cut off from all their social connections.

Condition one: the above is true. Condition two: the above is most people's true rejection to cryonics. Again, correct me if my breakdown errs.

What could we do to help [revived cryonically preserved persons] integrate into modern life...?

The proposal so far:

• It is observed that most people do not have a true rejection to cryonics.
• This observation is an accurate reflection of reality.
• Most people have an emotion revulsion to permanent separation from all persons in their life especially when the demise of same is a reasonable assumption.
• This observation is an accurate reflection of reality.
• The above causes most people's true rejection of cryonics
• Cryonics might work.

Thus:

• Brainstorming "[w]hat could we do to help [revived cryonically preserved persons] integrate into modern life..." is worthwhile.

Indeed, the conclusion does sound like a fun activity. In fact, I think a marketing campaign by cryonics companies would, from a Dark Arts perspective, either help the companies or simply pad the wallet of whoever pitches them the idea.

However, I broke down your post into its composite implied assertions and assumptions to illuminate how conditional the argument is. I've noticed in your other posts a tendency to take an idea and run with it, which is a wonderful tendency that often leads to fun ideas, but can also send you down a dead avenue of thought. I urge you to take care when conceiving possible worthwhile courses of action, and to duly consider the accuracy, veracity, and soundness of each observation, assertion, and conclusion in your argument or 'thought matrix' starting from the beginning (anyone have a better word for what I refer to?). Perhaps the thought process doesn't matter so much as the conclusion - then by all means test the conclusion. I just wished to make you aware, if you weren't already, of a tendency that could over time waste many productive hours.

I feel like you've hit upon a significant, salient objection with the whole "bereft of community" factor, but

One possible alternative approach might be to take the thought experiment - what if we could revive someone from cryo not next century, or next decade... but tomorrow. What could we do to help them integrate into modern life, instead of merely waking up in a hospital bed with the day's newspaper and being shown the door?

...So: If someone was revived from cryonics tomorrow, would you be willing to at least let them crash on your couch for a few weeks?

I think the "community" that many people are worried about losing is something beyond that which you're addressing here. People want a community that values and relates to them, not just one that accommodates them.

Framing it in terms of debt, as per the opening of your post, what they have is a relationship where others are indebted to them as well as their being indebted to others, and individuals account for themselves within the community and have opportunity to feel valued because of it. What they'd be getting upon arrival is a community which sustained their very existence without receiving compensation from them, for decades, where they're effectively being supported and acculturated into their new environment as an act of charity.

Beyond the issue of debt though, communities tend to be bound together by shared values and norms. Think of the mass immigration to America around the Industrial Revolution; immigrants tended to live in enclaves among other immigrants. Suppose you were an Italian immigrating to America, but there were almost no other Italian immigrants, so few you would probably never meet one. Suppose further that there were also so few Catholics in America that there would be no church groups you could integrate into without outright changing religions. The immigration officials might say "sure, we'll take you," but you wouldn't be able to surround yourself with people you knew you shared cultural norms with. You might find acceptance, and maybe if you're lucky, people who value your contributions to society, but you'd have a damn hard time finding people who relate to you as an Italian Catholic immigrant, and you might have to change yourself in ways you're not necessarily comfortable changing in order to fit in.

So: If someone was revived from cryonics tomorrow, would you be willing to at least let them crash on your couch for a few weeks?

Yep. Anyone in that situation, send me a letter (or ask someone to "E-mail" me - they'll understand).

This may be somewhat besides the point of the OP, but "cryonics" + "social obligations" in the context of the old headache about the popularity of cryonics reminded me of this:

The laws of different countries allow potential donors to permit or refuse donation, or give this choice to relatives. The frequency of donations varies among countries.

There are two main methods for determining voluntary consent: "opt in" (only those who have given explicit consent are donors) and "opt out" (anyone who has not refused is a donor). Opt-out legislative systems dramatically increase effective rates of consent for donation.[1] For example, Germany, which uses an opt-in system, has an organ donation consent rate of 12% among its population, while Austria, a country with a very similar culture and economic development, but which uses an opt-out system, has a consent rate of 99.98%.[1][2]

~ Wikipedia on organ donation

I don't think that's what prevents cryonics.

For the vast majority of people, cryonics is weird. It's not something they would do, for the same reason that prevents them from moving to Australia, even if they agreed it would be far better for them and they had no strong communal ties.

This explains how, even after LWers are convinced that cryonics is the rational thing to do, there's still a strong alief against doing so.

most of the objections people raise to cryonics seem to be off enough that, even if those objections were solved, those particular people still wouldn't sign up - that is, they feel some fundamental antipathy to the whole idea of cryonics, and unconsciously pick some rationalization that happens to sound reasonable to them to explain it.

I really would sign up for cryonics if I thought it was at all likely to work. Even at a 1 in 30 chance I'd take it. But there are so many ways for it to fail that I just don't think the odds are good at all.

What's even more interesting is that if this idea has any actual basis in reality... then it offers the possibility of coming up with approaches to counter it: promoting the idea that waking up from cryo will involve being enmeshed in a community rightaway.

Do we expect that to really be the case, though?

A society that isn't willing to put energy into reintegrating individual is unlikely to spend resources on reviving cryonics patients.

I recommend Return from the Stars (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_from_the_Stars)

I have a strong hunch that one extremely strong reason people feel an emotional revulsion to cryo is, simply, that even if they do wake up in the future, they will have been cut off from all their social connections

[pollid:396]

This is a good point and worth making, but if I can mega-nitpick your writing style for a moment, I think this post overuses ellipses. It's noticeable and distracting, and I don't see how it adds anything to the post.

If at some point a working cryonics technology is invented (eg. instant vitrification), it makes financial sense to create a new company, without enormous potential liabilities from hundreds (thousands?) of damaged frozen bodies. After a successful demonstration, existing companies without this technology are going to become bankrupt. The old bodies are useless - reviving somebody after a year of being frozen has roughly the same value as reviving somebody after a hundred - it proves to the public that it's possible. Media coverage is going to be roughly equivalent. Even if existing cryonics company were to invent this, it makes sense to create a new one, sell the technology to it for all attainable money, and dump the indebted corpse. It's standard business practice when the market changes drastically.

The year a working cryonics technology is proven to work is the year in which old frozen bodies are burned in an incinerator. Living relatives of frozen people may try to stop this, but it's going to be an exception, especially because people with close relatives probably aren't going to freeze themselves and because of time requirement. Also, while the bodies probably aren't, the freezing equipment is company property. So the relatives wouldn't have to pay for revival only, they would have to pay an arbitrary price for, effectively, a frozen body, as a body without equipment is completely dead. It's a sellers market :)

Remember: frozen people are legally dead. The don't have assets. They can't pay for their revival. They're a liability, they're literally worthless for a cryonics company.

These are the reasons why I wouldn't pay for cryonics for me, as the only possibility of revival is suicidal insanity of company's management. However, company with insane management won't last long. So the probability of being revived is basically zero. It's better to spend the money before death on fun things, or give it to someone I care about.

I don't know to what extent fear of being isolated in an alien culture is a motivation for people opposing cryonics. I don't think it's an irrational fear-- it's a thing that could happen, especially if few people from your own time choose cryonics, and there's been a fair amount of science fiction about being the only one from your time.

On the other hand, I've never been revolted by cryonics and the people who hate the idea don't seem terribly good at explaining their premises.

Whatever is going on, it seems to be on the alief level.

You've got me wondering whether one of the reasons is the opposite, not so much fear of being out of one's social net, but hatred of people who get to default on all their obligations while still being alive.

In any case, one solution would be leaving directives that one should only be revived if particular other people are also revived and/or a certain number of people from one's time are revived. On the other hand, medical directives are routinely ignored these days, so I can understand not having trust in directives.

I don't know of any science fiction which includes people from different time peoples forming sub-cultures after revival, though this seems like a likely outcome.

That's certainly the first time I've heard of such a rationalization for people avoiding cryo. I usually just assumed it was because of lack of public knowledge (most people I've talked to assume that once you're dead, you're dead, and there's no way to bring you back) and a abhorrence of being stuck in a refrigerator at the mercy of anyone who happens to be passing by (something I can certainly understand - I wouldn't sign up for cryonics if I didn't have some assurance that my body will not be messed with until the revival time comes).

This social isolation is definitely a part of why I'm not signed up. I've heard it suggested that females are more prone to this reasoning, thus the lower rate of sign up.

Beyond personal relationships, if you are resurrected all f your knowledge and skills will be obsolete. For most people their identity is strongly tied to what they know about the world and what they are good at, having to start again is dispiriting. At best you have decades of retraining, more likely you'r a glorified historical artefact.

Have you read Transmetropolitan? This is actually a major sub-plot. There is a significant quantity of people who had cryonics, were thawed, were released under their own recognizance in to an unrecognizably bizarre future, and promptly became homeless, desperate vagrants.

edit: ignore this comment, redundant with discussion from DataPacRat

even if they do wake up in the future, they will have been cut off from all their social connections. This may not sound like much

Not much? If I don't get to interact with my friends etc., how is being revived as a cryo patient any better than being revived as a Boltzmann brain or something?