Cryonics without freezers: resurrection possibilities in a Big World

The only downside I can see here is that I have less measure (meaning I exist in a lower proportion of worlds) than if I had signed up for cryonics directly. This might be a problem if I think that my existence benefits others - but I don't think I should be concerned for my own sake.

Yvain is quantum suicidal? I didn't expect that! People whose preferences 'add up to normal' do (implicitly) care about measure.

Isn't dissolving the concept of personal identity relatively straightforward?

We know that we've evolved to protect ourselves and further our own interests, because organisms who didn't have that as a goal didn't fare very well. So in this case at least, personal identity is merely a desire to make sure that "this" organism survives.

Naturally, the problem is defining in "this organism". One says, "this" organism is something defined by physical continuity. Another says, "this" organism is something defined by the degree of similarity to some prototype of this organism.

One says, sound is acoustic vibrations. Another says, sound is the sensation of hearing...

There's no "real" answer to the question "what is personal identity", any more than there is a "real" answer to the question "what is sound". You may pick any definition you prefer. Of course, truly dissolving "personal identity" isn't as easy as dissolving "sound", because we are essentially hard-wired to anticipate that there is such a thing as personal identity, and to have urges for protecting it. We may realize on an intellectual level that "personal identity" is just a choice of words, but still feel that there should be something more to it, some "true" fact of the matter.

But there isn't. There are just various information-processing systems with different degrees of similarity to each other. One may draw more-or-less arbitrary borders between the systems, designating some as "me" and some as "not-me", but that's a distinction in the map, not in the territory.

Of course, if you have goals about the world, then it makes sense to care about the information-processing systems that are similar to you and share those goals. So if I want to improve the world, it makes sense for me to care about "my own" (in the commonsense meaning of the word) well-being - even though future instances of "me" are actually distinct systems from the information-processing system that is typing these words, I should still care about their well-being because A) I care about the well-being of minds in general, and B) they share at least part of my goals, and are thus more likely to carry them out. But that doesn't mean that I should necessarily consider them "me", or that the word would have any particular meaning.

And naturally, on some anticipation/urge-level I still consider those entities "me", and have strong emotions regarding their well-being and survival, emotions that go above and beyond that which is justified merely in the light of my goals . But I don't consider that as something that I should necessarily endorse, except to the extent that such anticipations are useful instrumentally. (E.g. status-seeking thoughts and fantasies may make "me" achieve things which I would not otherwise achieve, even though they make assumptions about such a thing as personal identity.)

This, along with the simulation argument, is why I'm not too emotionally stressed out with feelings of impending doom that seem to afflict some people familiar with SIAI's ideas. My subjective anticipation is mollified by the thought that I'll probably either never experience dying or wake up to find that I've been in an ancestral simulation, which leaves the part of me that wants to prevent all the empty galaxies from going to waste to work in peace. :)

Also, we can extend the argument a bit for those worried about "measure". First, an FAI might be able to recreate people from historical clues (writings, recordings, other's memories of them, etc.). But suppose that's not possible. An FAI could still create a very large number of historically plausible people, and assuming FAIs in other Everett branches do the same, the fact that I probably won't be recreated in this branch will be compensated for by the fact that I'll be recreated in other branches where I currently don't exist, thus preserving or even increasing my overall measure.

If anthropics makes any sense, then cryonics in a Big World is still controlling what you should mostly expect to experience. The anthropic escape valves for a version of me who experiences death and remembers not being signed up for cryonics range from Boltzmann brains to lunatics to completely random ancestor simulations, and I think I value experiencing the mainline expected cryonics outcome more highly than I do experiencing these.

And even if anthropics doesn't make sense, then as a matter of decision theory I value actually being around in a substantial fraction of the futures of the current world-state.

If all copies count as you, then that includes Boltzmann brains who die in the vacuum a second after their formation and copies of you who awaken inside a personally dedicated hell. And this is supposed to provide hope?

There is clearly a sense in which you do not experience what your copies experience. The instance of you who dies in a car crash on the way to your wedding never experiences the wedding itself; that is experienced by the second instance, created from a backup a few weeks later.

Any extension of identity beyond the "current instance" level is therefore an act of imagination or chosen affiliation. Identifying with your copies and almost-copies scattered throughout the multiverse, identifying with your descendants, and identifying with all beings who ever live, all have this in common - "you", defined in the broad sense supplied by your expansive concept of identity, will experience things that "you", defined in the narrow but practical sense of your local instance, will never experience.

Since it is a contradiction to say that you will experience things that you will never experience, it is desirable to perceive very clearly that these expansive identifications are being made by one local instance that is choosing to regard a multiplicity of other distinct beings as other parts of its extended self. Of course, once you perceive this distinction, between local self and global self, and especially once you notice that the same local self can have arbitrarily expansive or delimited beliefs about who gets to be a part of its global self... you might begin to doubt the meaningfulnss of any notion of global self other than "the whole of reality", or indeed you might doubt the meaningfulness of any notion of "global self" at all. Perhaps in reality you are just your local self and that's it; all other identifications are fantasy.

When that attitude is taken to its limit, it usually leads to disconnection between one moment and the next. Each moment's experience is only had by that momentary self. You could make a slogan out of it: "instances are instantaneous", meaning that if you apply this philosophy consistently, you have to deny that the "local self" extends in time.

But this part I don't believe, because I do believe that experiences are extended in time. There is such a thing as change, the flow of one moment into the next, and not just a static difference between static moments each containing its own encapsulated illusion of flow-connectedness to other moments. The reduction of time to simply another spatial coordinate, and the consequent relegation of the experience of time passing to the category of illusion, results from the cultural hypertrophy (that's the opposite of atrophy) of "logical perception" in scientific culture, at the expense of more "phenomenological" capacities, like a sensitivity to the actual form of consciousness. If people took appearances more seriously, their response to the difficulties of reconciling them with scientific theory would be to look for a better theory, not to call the appearances illusory or nonexistent. It's not at all easy even to get the ontology of appearance right, let alone to conceptually reconstruct the ontology by means of which we understand our mathematical theories of nature, so as to include the ontology implied by appearance.

In fact, an extra layer of difficulty has been added by the attempted reduction of epistemology to computation - it means that the epistemological claims of phenomenology, e.g. that we can know that time really passes or that change is real, struggle to get a hearing. Computational epistemology in its existing forms presupposes an inadequate ontology, and therefore offers a new, methodological barrier to any truth from outside that ontology. One needs to remember that computation is about state transitions in state machines, and says nothing about the "intrinsic nature" of those states or how that intrinsic nature may be related to the causality of the state transitions. So any ontology featuring causal interactions between things with states contains computation, in the same way that any ontology containing multiple things contains arithmetic; but you can't bootstrap your way from computation to ontology, just as you can't bootstrap your way from arithmetic to physics.

In my polemic I have strayed far from the original topic of Yvain's post, but any discussion of the ontology of persons eventually has to tackle these "hard problems".

I like this post! Two comments barely related to the post:

1. I would be interested in those calculations about how big the universe would have to be to have repeating Earths if anyone recalls where they saw them.

2. A meta-LessWrongian comment: A great part of the value I get out of LessWrong is that there's always someone out there writing a post or comment tying together various thoughts and musings I've had into coherent essays in a way I don't have the mental discipline to do. So this is a big thanks to all of you writing interesting stuff!

And a comment more directly related to the post:

I can only assume that some other type of intelligence would be bemused by our confusion surrounding these issues in much the same way I'm often bemused by people making hopelessly confused arguments about religion or evolution or whatever.

Other Intelligence: "Of course continuity isn't important! There's no difference between waking up after a coma, being unfrozen, or your clone in a Big World! Sheesh, you humans are messed up in the head!"

(Or maybe OI would argue that there is a difference.)

If you don't care about measure then why try to solve friendly AI? In a VERY BIG world some AI's will turn out to be friendly.

It should be mentioned that when considering things like Cryonics in the Big World, you can't just treat all the other "you" instances as making independent decisions, they'll be thinking similarly enough to you that whatever conclusion you reach, this is what most "you" instances will end up doing. (unless you randomize, and assuming 'most' even means anything)

Seriously, I'd expect people to at least mention the superrational view when dealing with clones of themselves in decide-or-die coordination games.

I have a feeling that I'm missing something and that this is going to be downvoted, but I still have to ask. In the event that a big universe exists, there are numerous people almost exactly like me going about their business. My problem is that what i would call my consciousness doesn't seem to experience their actions. This would seem to me like there is some factor in my existence that is not present in theirs. If a perfect clone was sitting next to me, I wouldn't be able to see my computer through his eyes. I would continue to see it through mine. This chain of experience is the thing I care most to preserve. I have interest in the continued existence of people like me, but for separate reasons.

I know the idea of an "inner listener" is false, but the sensation of such a thing and a continuous stream of experience do exist. I am emotionally tied to those perceptions. I don't know how enthusiastically I can look forward to the future if I won't be able to experience it any more than I can the nearest parallel universe.

First, I wish people stopped using this untestable Big World nonsense in their arguments.

For things to "add up to normality", your decisions should not be affected by a particular interpretation of QM, and so you should arrive to the same ones by sticking to the orthodox interpretation (or any other). If your argument fails without invoking a version of the MWI, it is not a sound argument, period. Similarly, your belief that in a galaxy far far away you are a three-eyed Pope named LeBron should not affect your decision of whether to sign-up for cryonics here and now.

Your other point is eminently worthwhile: since the cryonic resurrection is manifestly not exact, how much deviation from the original are you prepared to allow while still considering the resurrected object to be you for practical purposes? The answer is not objective in any way. For some losing a single memory is enough to say No, for others retaining even a small fraction of memories is enough for a Yes. The acceptable range on emotions, volitions and physical makeup can also vary widely.

Something oddly relevant: quantum insomnia:

http://quantuminsomnia.blogspot.com/

Of course that guy not being me or you, it is obvious that he is not a quantum insomniac, but there's a rather creepy thought: Today may be the day that you woke up for the last time in your life, and you'll remain awake forever, just because there will always be branch where you are awake, and you after a night's sleep is more different from you falling asleep, than you one second later, still awake. Good night. On second thought, I probably shouldn't joke like this here but for some reason I find that concept quite funny (and I don't believe in it for a second; it is very silly that QM would prevent you from falling asleep but won't prevent you from being cognitively impaired by insomnia, but i do fear that if i get insomnia, that may make me think of the MWI while my judgement is impaired, so hereby i'm trying to pre-commit not to think of MWI after more than 20 hours awake, which i really recommend to everyone here as well)

How many bytes in human memory? is a very brief article providing estimates of just that. Evidence from human learning experiments suggests that, after using a very good data compression algorithm, human long term declarative memory holds only a few hundred megabytes.

How much of that information is common knowledge, such as knowledge of the English language, memories from media such as books or television, or knowledge of local buildings and streets, is unclear.

Additional information specific to an individual could be gained from email, internet posts, and other personal electronic information and written records, such as diaries; as well as individual genomes, which will soon be ubiquitously available.

The modest information content of human declarative memory might be relevant to some of the discussions on this thread.

The simplest is the theory that the universe (or multiverse) is Very Very Big.

Do you mean this in an Occamian way? I suspect not, but I think you should make it clearer.

Anyway, this is a subject I've actually thought about a lot.

A lot of people (including Derek Parfit himself) think continuity is absolutely essential for personal identity / selfhood, but I don't. I've had such terribly marked psychological changes over the years that I cannot even conceive of the answer to the question, "Am I the same person as Grognor from 2009?" being yes in any real sense. I interpret this experience, along with of course the actual evidence from neuroscience, physics, and good® philosophers like Daniel Dennett to mean that personal identity doesn't really exist and is really just a sort of cognitive illusion that I don't understand and neither do people smarter than me.

That said, here is an excellent essay by reductionist atheist Occam's razor-wielding AI researcher Paul Almond arguing that there is no continuity of self. It is a good essay, but sadly it is a very boring essay.

Oh, and I'm not so sure about your assumption that personal measure should not be taken into account in determining whether to purchase cryonics. It's quite rational to maximize the probability that things as similar to you as possible exist, so that as many of them as possible get to count as "you" in whatever sense matters to whatever it is that does the decision making (tentatively, I'll call this "you").

You know, Stross tacitly considered an interesting form of resurrection in Accelerando--a hypothetical post-singularity (non-Friendly) AI computes a minimum message length version of You based off any surviving records of what you've done or said (plus the baseline prior for how humans work) and instantiates the result.

I'm having real trouble proving that's not more-or-less me, and what's more, that such a resurrection would feel any different from the inside looking back over its memories of my life.

I still have yet to see anyone adequately address how I am supposed to relate in any way to the magical copy of me a universe away.

If they have a shitty day, I feel nothing. If they have a good day, I feel nothing. If they die, big whoop. When I die, I will not be magically waking up in their body and vice versa. I will be dead.

Is the amount of bits necessary to discriminate one functional human brain among all permutations of matter of the same volume greater or smaller than the amount of bits necessary to discriminate a version of yourself among all permutations of functional human brains? My intuition is that once you've defined the first, there isn't much left needed, comparatively, to define the latter.

Corollary, cryonics doesn't need to preserve a lot of information, if any, you can patch it up with, among other things, info from what a generic human brain is, or better what a human brain derived from your genetic code is, and correlate that with information left behind on the Internet, in your writings, the memories of other people, etc., about what some of your own psychological specs and memories should be.

The result might be a fairly close approximation of you, at least according to this gradation of identity idea.

suppose that a Friendly AI fills a human-sized three-dimensional grid with atoms, using a quantum dice to determine which atom occupies each "pixel" in the grid. This splits the universe into as many branches as there are possible permutations of the grid (presumably a lot)

How is that a Friendly AI?

Once again, Nick Bostrom's Quantity of experience: brain-duplication and degrees of consciousness comes to the rescue. Cryonics greatly expands the proportion of "you-like" algorithms as opposed to "!you-like" algorithms, for the same reason that quantum russian roulette greatly shrinks that proportion.

Pfsch, silly. I couldn't wake up as someone from another part of the universe - he's already busy waking up as himself :P

Several of your examples are also equivalent to quantum suicide situations. Similar comments about measure apply, except in this case we have a process (cryonics) that actually can restore measure (therefore, we can ignore all differences from our intuitive idea of resurrection).

See Tegmark's "Multiverse Hierarchy": http://arxiv.org/pdf/0905.1283.pdf Also there has been good work done showing that a spatial Big Universe is a realization of the quantum multiverse in 3 spatial dimensions. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2011/05/26/are-many-worlds-and-the-multiverse-the-same-idea/

Pretty ok article.

It has been years since I've last thought about personal identity. The last time it seemed a pretty reasonable and obvious conclusion to slightly less value the "me" stored in my body and value humans who where similar to me a bit more.

There seemed to be little point in (ceteris paribus) me being willing to spending more to save "my" life compared to saving the life a of a random average human A and not also expending at least something extra on person B who is say half way in "meness" between said random average human A and the part of me currently stored in my brain. And then expending a bit extra over that on person C who is halfway between me and person B. ect.

Like Robin Hanson said, if there is a imperfect copy of his brain running on a computer and you shot meant-Hanson in the head, Robin didn't really die but he did get smaller. Dying is in the modern era basically getting a lot smaller in the world and time you happen to care about.

Nearly all other humans dying or my culture & value-set going extinct might as a step actually make "me" much smaller than the death of my body would.

Edit: Some feedback besides the down votes or a counter argument would be very much welcomed. As I said it has been a some time and I need to review this cached opinion.

I'm signed up for cryonics, and I believe you're leaving out two crucial motivations for cryonics. These are not particularly smart reasons. You don't logic your way into them. But they are emotionally strong reasons, and emotions are the primary motivators of humans.

The first is that it reduces my fear of death significantly. Perhaps unreasonably so? But the fear of death had been a problem for me for a long time, and now not as much.

The second is that I want OTHERS to be frozen for MY sake. I want to see my parents and brothers and friends again in this iteration. In typical coordination problem solutions, I should also freeze myself for their sake.

There's also the fact that I think it may be a good idea to maximize the number of people in any particular world like me, and this is one way of doing that. But that's not really emotionally motivating, just an abstract thought.

As I've said elsewhere, I mostly think that any notion of preserving personal identity (from moment to moment, let alone after my heart stops beating) depends on a willingness to acknowledge some threshold of similarity and/or continuity such that I'm willing to consider anything above that threshold to share that identity.

Defining that threshold such that entities in other universes share my identity means there's lots of me out there, sure. And defining that threshold such that entities elsewhere on Earth right now share my identity means there's lots of me right here.

It's not clear to me why any of that matters.

This is an interesting argument that I have been giving a lot of thought to lately. Are all randomly occuring me-like entities out there in the big universe just as much me as the ones I anticipate in the future?

Well, there's one difference: causality. I'm not so sure a me with no causal relationship to my current self is something I can justifiably consider a future me. When I step in a teleporter that vaporizes my molecules and reconstructs me, I still have a very well-defined causal relationship with that future self -- despite the unorthodox path by which the relationship was maintained, the likelihood of there being such a me after the event approaches 100% almost as closely as ordinary continuity generally does.

I don't have that kind of relationship with a Boltzman Brain or a 3D grid of "all possible humanoids" that some AI is doubtless running with quantum dice in a completely uncorrelated universe.

On the other hand, I'm having a hard time coming up with a consequence-based reason that it matters, apart from the fact that such beings seem like they must be awfully rare compared to straight up continuations of me.

If that's the only reason it matters -- relative scarcity -- then it follows that as aging and other (perhaps more constant) risk factors make my life less likely to experience ordinary continuity, these other forms of continuity become increasingly likely to represent my future experiences. If so, we can speculate as to what form that actually takes. Perhaps being spontaneously cured of aging due to a freak biological accident is much more common than any of the competing possibilities, resulting in most people spending large portions of their existence as a "lonely immortal" watching their friends die but never aging (or at least never croaking of old age). On the other hand, perhaps the lonely brain dying of explosive decompression is a much more common fate, because there's just so much space out there that it happens much more often.

Perhaps the way to sell cryonics is as a way to avoid a lonely and unpredictable future existence. Even if you only survive cryonics with one in a billion probability or something like that, it is still a better chance than the competing scenarios and thus more likely to win the existence lottery in a way that gives you a link to the history and world you actually remember coming from.

Whenever I think about anthropics I'm always worried that I'm only experiencing thinking about anthropics because I'm thinking about anthropics, as if anthropics itself is the domain of some unfathomably powerful god who can change relative measures at whim and who thinks it's really fun to fuck with philosophers.

There may be another alternative to cryonics that doesn't require a Big World - indirect mind uploading (scroll down to "Using ‘indirect mind uploading’ to avoid staying dead"). The idea is that if you record every second of your life (e.g. on video), using this information a future AI might be able to converge on a specific brain configuration that is close to your original brain. Since only certain brains would say, write, do or think (although we currently can't record thoughts) the things you recorded yourself saying, writing and doing, depending on the amount of information the AI has about you, it might be able to narrow it down and the scenario becomes similar to Yvain's 'gradations of identity' scenario in this post.

Right now I don't go to bed at night weeping that my father only met my mother through a series of unlikely events and so most universes probably don't contain me; I'm not sure why I should do so after having been resurrected in the far future.

Because you understand that you can't change it:

For nothing is more certain, than that despair has almost the same effect upon us with enjoyment, and that we are no sooner acquainted with the impossibility of satisfying any desire, than the desire itself vanishes.

I don't think this claim is true in all cases, but it seems plausible here. There's no adaptive value to learning about "risks" you were subject to before you were able to do anything about them, so I don't feel how bad it was that I almost wasn't born as myself. But I did feel a kind of possible-worlds regret when I stepped out into the street without looking and almost got hit by a bus, since in some likely possible worlds I did get hit by that bus.

Parallel copies of me are not me. Dying in X% of Everett branches has X% of disutility of dying.

Gradual change feels OK. Less gradual change feels less OK (unless I percieve it as an improvement). Going to sleep at night and knowing that in the morning I will feel a bit differently already makes me nervous. But it's preferable to dying. (But if I could avoid it without bad consequences, I would.) Small changes are good, because more of the future selves will be more similar to my current self.

How exactly does one measure the similarity or the change? Some parts of myself seem more important to me than other parts. Maybe if I make a matrix of how much some parts of me influence other parts of me, it would be some eigenvector. A part of me that strongly influences other parts of me, is more me. You can change my taste for ice cream and the rest of the personality remains pretty much the same, so I would be willing to sacrifice the taste for ice cream for survival or even some minor benefit of the remaining parts.

Would making 2 copies of me double my utility? Well, it depends of what "my" utility means in this context. Neither of the copies would perceive the utility of the other copy, so neither of them would feel like anything has doubled. But there would be 2 people having the utility of being alive, so globally there would be twice as much utility for my future selves, just not twice the utility for any particular self. (Just like dying in 50% of Everett branches does not mean that there is a self which feels only 50% alive.)

If I had an opportunity to copy myself, assuming that each copy will have the same quality of life as I have now, I would do it. If I would have to pay for making the copy... I don't know how much would I be willing to pay. (Also money is not exactly the same thing as utility, so if I'd have to split my property in two halves -- a half for each copy -- it would be worth it, because each copy would get more than 50% of utility.)

Without cryonics or uploading or some other immortality treatment, selves die. Pretending that you continue to live in a galaxy far far away is like pretending that you continue to live in heaven. And by the way, that's not a cheap analogy, because in Tegmark universe there exists a heaven where you will be after you die, assuming "heaven" = a place where you get 3^^^3 utility, and "you, after you die" = a particle-level copy of you in the moment of your death, except that in heaven you will survive. And this is not a good news, because hell exists too, and maybe a random afterlife is more like hell than heaven, in which case a prolonged life in our universe is preferable.

Well, those copies, they are very very far away, and thus are more different from you than something nearby; it feels you are using the intuitions for things nearby, whose relative position is only a minuscule fraction of their total information content, for the things whose information content is entirely their position information. In principle we can recreate this conversation by iterating every value of every letter on a very powerful computer, but unless there's process for selecting this conversation out of the sea of nonsense, that won't constitute a backup.

Yes, to the degree that you accept the existence of a Big World, together with the usual assumptions about personal identity, you should expect never to die.

Even if there is no Big World, however, no one will ever experience dying anyway. Your total lifespan will be limited, but you will never notice it come to an end. So you might as well think of that limited span as a projection of an infinite lifespan onto an open finite interval. So again, one way or another you should expect never to die.

...

I'm curious how we distinguish copies of ourselves and near-copies of ourselves from ourselves. I mean, this intuition runs strongly through personal identity discussions: in this post you are identifying possible candidates for "clone of me", not "me". If it was the latter, we'd just go looking for ourselves in the Big World, which is a much simpler problem: "I'm me, and there's 863 of me here and there, some brighter than others." No concerns for them needing to be closer to some canonical source.

But we keep dragging in this "clone of me" designation.

An exact clone is more me than a clone with different ice cream preferences, who is more me than a clone who is a Hindu fundamentalist, who is more me than LeBron James is.

Put another way, I grant that you have a function that returns the "more-me"-ness of a clone (I do too). Should we dig into this function and find out what it cares about, hoping to find some variable we haven't yet treated in personal identity discussions?

Why do you care if you continue to exist?

Also, if you don't care about your measure, than why is the Big Universe even necessary? You already know you have a measure of at least how long you've been alive. You can't cease to have ever existed.

This is a restatement of quantum immortality, right?

But this is a slippery slope. If my recreation is exactly like me except for one neuron, is he the same person? Signs point to yes. What about five neurons? Five million? Or on a functional level, what if he blinked at exactly one point where I would not have done so? What if he prefers a different flavor of ice cream? What if he has exactly the same memories as I do, except for the outcome of one first-grade spelling bee I haven't thought about in years anyway? What if he is a Hindu fundamentalist?

These questions apply equally to the person who wakes up as Yvain tomorrow. Are you still "you" after a day's worth of loss of neurons in the ordinary course of things? After a minor stroke? After brain surgery? After a religious conversion? After changing in any way at all, including by reading this comment?

I've never seen the concept of degrees of identity formalised in a modal logic of possible worlds. The modal logics I've seen all consider each entity to either exist, or not exist, in each possible world. One can make toy mathematical systems out of this, but what practical use they are is less clear.

Since I inherently desire to struggle for life regardless of whether or not my efforts will have any effect this argument does not alter my motivations or the decisions I will make. I'm perfectly fine with struggling for a lost cause if the process of struggling is either valuable or inevitable.

In a Big World, the process of struggling is all that we have, and success doesn't matter so much.