Female Test Subject - Convince Me To Get Cryo

Ooh good observation. It can be so much harder to notice things that aren't there.

The answer to why I didn't make a social norm objection is simple: I don't have to tell anyone that won't understand. It's not like anyone is going to publish my name in the newspaper.

Interesting that they don't appear to realize this. Maybe the difference is that if you're talking to people in a non-anonymous context where others are overhearing, they will appear wary of cryo for social reasons, but I can't help but wonder if they then go away and think about it on their own, privately considering it's merits. After all, this is life or death, right?

Maybe the only thing that you have to do to overcome this is tell people it can be done privately (I'm only assuming that it can be, can it?) and to present cryo to them when nobody else is around.

Or you could open the cryo discussion with something to the effect of "If everyone else were jumping off a cliff, would you do it just because they were?" If no, which is likely, then: "If there was something that could keep you from dying but it wasn't popular, would you say it was jumping off a cliff with them if you would not even consider it?" If yes, then: "Cryo could stop you from dying. It isn't popular, but would you consider it anyway?"

That pits an even more socially unacceptable thing, being such a sheep that you die, against something that can't possibly be as unacceptable since it doesn't require you to knowingly make a decision which leads to your own death. Unless survivor's guilt is prevalent, in which case the irrational notion "But I shouldn't kill everyone else by surviving!" trumps "I can't jump off a cliff like an idiot."

I wonder if women experience stronger survivor's guilt than than men.

If I were to make a prediction for an experiment, I would guess no, because men are conditioned to see themselves as more expendable. I'm guessing that the same norms which led to more women in steerage class making it off the Titanic alive than men in first class would lead to men having stronger survivor's guilt than women.

My guess is he said (or meant to say) "life insurance" rather than "health insurance". I don't think there's health insurance that covers cryonics. The idea that freezing yourself will save your life is indeed a weird one that should be carefully researched before you adopt that position. As you probably realize by now, cryonics involves (an attempt at) vitrification of the brain, which means that unlike normal freezing, ice crystals are (at least in ideal cases) prevented from forming.

Highly concentrated cryoprotectants must currently be used, and this does significant damage which needs to be repaired later. Thus it's a conditional bet about scientific unknowns -- if technology reaches a certain level, having my brain vitrified may turn out to save it well enough that science can restore me to a healthy existence (which may or may not be all digital). Most cryonics advocates do not take the hard line of belief that it definitely will save their life, but that it presents a good enough chance to be worth it given the sum of current scientific knowledge.

In my opinion, the chance of it working must exceed something in the range of 1% to be reasonable and not considered quackery. My reasoning is that the cost is in the $50k range ($28k-$150k) whereas actuaries budget somewhere in the range of $5M towards saving human lives in matters of public safety. Spending $50k on a procedure with .01% chance of working is only for rich egoists and/or people who assign a much higher value to the longevity and self-improvement opportunities of the future. Go too much lower than that and you end up with a "pascal's wager" kind of scenario, which could conceivably justify all kinds of quackery. In any case I think it is safe to say that if the chance is greater than 1%, it is something that everyone should have access to, and should ideally be covered by medical insurance.

The chance of it working seems to be much higher than that, in the average person's mind. But then, average people often accept all kinds of weird ideas so that's probably not the best metric available to us. How scientists (especially those with relevant expertise) feel about it is the major question. I would be curious as to what a survey of scientists with relevant expertise would turn up. What is disturbing to me (and what turned me from a fairly neutral party into something of an activist) is how unimportant the topic seems to be treated by both the scientific community and the nonscientific world. This should be hotly debated, not dismissed out of hand.

I suspect social causes are a dominating one, and I suspect women on average may have a better grasp on the social causes than men on average. So my plea to females (since that's the point of this thread, coming up with more female-appealing arguments) would be to at least try and understand this from the perspective of advocates and why we are passionately in favor of it. Read Kim Suozzi's description of her reasoning -- it is a logical step to take when you don't feel you are done living and think science is likely to conquer the problems involved.

As to the creepiness of freezing people, well, while a negative visceral first reaction is understandable, there's nothing about it that is any creepier than what emergency and surgical medicine already entails, and more science is (usually) a good thing for humanity. We've been shipping organs on ice and transplanting them for decades, and we've reanimated stopped-heart "dead" patients for even longer.

Another reason might be that it seems like "mad science". Mad science as seen in fiction is ambitious (which cryonics also is) but it is also cruel and morally indifferent. This is where the chance of it working is important, because if there is a sufficiently good chance of it working, cryonics becomes something that compassionate people are motivated by, not just egoists.

However even if the chances are too low for compassionate motives to come into play much, there does not appear to be any reason to regard it as cruel, since patients are completely unconscious (some of the drugs perfused in the legally dead patient are strong anesthetics) before they are cooled. And it is something patients choose for themselves rather than having it forced upon them.

Thanks for posting that-- I wasn't raised Christian, and that objection never would have occurred to me. Do you have a feeling for whether it might be a common Christian objection? The Christian objection I've heard is that great longevity means putting off going to Heaven. I've never heard a Christian say that great longevity increases the odds of repenting and avoiding Hell.

My exposure to anti-longevity/immortality thoughts are from science fiction and fantasy, which doesn't just have a wide streak of "you'd need evil methods" (see also Bug Jack Barron, in which it takes killing poor children for something from their glands), but a very strong streak of "if you were immortal, you wouldn't like it". You'd be bored or you'd go mad. I think it's sour grapes.

You might say living forever on earth is associated with being tempted by the devil. But the fundamental (it seems to me) temptation offered by Christians in trying to sign up new members and keep old ones is the promise of eternal life in heaven. Indeed, many retail christian outlets declare you will get an eternal life no matter what you do, and the reason to sign up is so that your eternal life isn't an eternity of torture.

Just interested in pointing out that "eternal life" is not something Christians typically run from.

Funny, I was aware of this meme in Western culture but I never associated it with religion. (I was raised mostly secular, modulo a little residual Catholicism in my family.) Immortality often shows up as a goal in media, but almost exclusively as a villainous one: heroes accept their fate, villains fight against it. Often the methods of obtaining immortality lean towards the cartoonishly evil (the mythical version of Elizabeth Bathory bathing in virgins' blood; Lord Voldemort's horcruces), but just as often they're fairly benign and the pursuit itself is seen as hubristic and therefore evil. At best, a hero (Gilgamesh, say) will pursue it for a while before learning better, but this is actually pretty rare.

This seems to tie into another thought of mine about how villains and heroes get constructed in our culture, but that'd be a bit of a sideline in this context. I don't think I'm familiar with the construction of immortality in a Christian context, though, aside from incredibly esoteric stuff like medieval alchemy; can you tell me more?

Living forever isn't quite impossible. If we ever develop acausal computing, or a way to beat the first law of thermodynamics (AND the universe turns out to be spatially infinite), then it's possible that a sufficiently powerful mind could construct a mathematical system containing representations of all our minds that it could formally prove would keep us existent and value-fulfilled forever, and then just... run it.

Not very likely, though. In the mean time, more life is definitely better than less.

Actually trying to live forever ("saving your soul") is the central stated point of religions such as Christianity and Islam.

Religious opposition to cryonics could stem from the fact that cryonics is preceived (correctly, IMHO) as a competing religion. Note that there is no strong religious opposition to most other procedures that promise a lifespan extension.

I don't see why extending your life would have to qualify as sinful.

This is speculation: I'm not a Christian.

In Christianity, death brings the judgment of God who sends you to heaven or hell (or purgatory).

If you expect heaven, you don't want to put off death. Suicide is a sin but as long as you don't see non-cryonics as willful suicide, you would want to die early to get to heaven early.

If you expect hell, then you think you've sinned mortally. Most brands of Christianity allow for redemption by various means. If you think you're a sinner, trying to put off death means trying to avoid the judgement of God, which is both just and good; so struggling against it would make you evil. If you fear hell, instead of focusing on avoiding death, you would focus on expiating your sins in order to go to heaven.

In addition, some but not all brands of Christianity have the meme that this world is impure, and one should abstain from it, and not be attached to it. Trying to live longer than is natural is attachment to the profane; one should instead spend their lives thinking of God, praying, abjuring the pleasures of the flesh, etc. in order to obtain heaven.

You've got a search engine. Use them. Convince yourself.

That was my first instinct, but then I remembered that there was a consensus in another thread that women are impossible to convince. In that thread, the poster wanted to convince his mom to sign up for cryo but didn't know how to. A lot of people here might want a chance to figure out how to convince women to get cryo. So instead of convincing myself, I gave them an opportunity to practice on me.

Do you think you've brought up any arguments that haven't been discussed before?

I have no way of knowing that, seeing as how I avoided convincing myself so that other people could experiment on me. I am open to reading articles that people feel are convincing, as I realize that it would be pretty boring to explain the same stuff all over again. It says that in the OP.

This depends heavily on assumptions. Consider this : the oldest cryonics patients have survived more than 30 years. The loss per decade for reasonably well funded cryonics organizations is currently 0.

If you check a chart of causes of death, the overwhelming majority of causes are ones where a cryonics team could be there.

You would have to choose a legal method of suicide in some of these cases, however (like voluntarily dehydrating yourself to the point of death), or your brain would deteriorate from progressive disease to the point of probably being non-viable for a future revival.

As for long term risks : ultimately these depend on your perception of risks to human civilization and the chance of ultimately developing a form of nanotechnology that could scan your frozen brain and create an emulation at minimal cost. I personally don't think there are many probable causes that could cause civilization to fail, and I think the developement of the nanotechnology to be almost certain. There is no future world I can imagine where eventually a commercial or governmental enitity would not have extreme levels of motivation to develop the technology, due to the incredible advantages it would grant.

This is my personal bias, perhaps, but let's look at this a bit more rationally.

a. How could a civilization ending event actually happen? Are nuclear escalations the most likely outcome or are the exchanges ending at a city or 2 nuked more probable? b. What could stop a civilization from developing molecular tools with self replication? Living cells are an existence proof that the tools are possible, and developing the tools would give the entity that possessed them incredible power and wealth. c. Cryonics organizations have already survived 30 years. Maybe they need to survive 90 or 120 more. They have more money and resources today, decreasing the probability of failure with each year. What is the chance that they will not be able to survive the rest of the needed time? In another 20 years, they might have hardened facilities in the desert with backup power and liquid nitrogen production.

And so on. This is a complicated question, but I have an educated hunch that the risks of failure for cryonics are lower than many of the estimates might show. I suspect that many of the estimates are made by people who suffer from biases towards excessive skepticism, and/or are motivated to find a way to not spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, preferring shorter term gains.

1. Currently, I think most people just get their brains preserved. So they'd have to give you a whole new body or just have you as software anyway.

Early adopter for being preserved doesn't mean early adopter for being revived. In fact, it probably means the opposite. Since the easiest people to revive will probably be the people preserved with the most advanced technology.

You are overwhelmingly likely not to wake up in a body, depending on the details of your instructions to Alcor.. Scanning a frozen brain is exponentially cheaper and technologically easier than trying to repair every cell in your body. You will almost certainly wake up as a computer program running on server somewhere.

This is not a bad thing. Your computer program can be plugged into software body models in convincing virtual environments, permitting normal human activities (companionship, art, fun, sex, etc.), plus some activities not normally possible for humans. It'll likely be possible to rent mechanical bodies for interacting with the physical world.

A bad body is better than no body at all. It's not uncommon for abled people to go "Ew, I'd rather die than get $disability", but when they do... actually I don't know if they're as happy as before after 18 months, because everyone mentions that but gives no cite. Anyway, people after a bad event are less unhappy and get happier faster than they predicted, and will remember afterwards. At least for some disabilities, this depends on people adapting to their condition, rather than putting their life on hold until they get better. (More affective forecasting papers.)

Poke around in the disability blogosphere for more perspectives on that. They range from "My body is awesome, but because it's not the type you build your world for you call it 'disabled'", through "It kinda sucks that you're not an Olympic-level athlete and you don't obsess over that all the time; I feel the same way about my disability", through "It's miserable when you're not used to it, but once you adapt it's not so bad", to "It's awful, but still better than being dead".

The things you're afraid of aren't even particularly freaky ones: weakness, limited mobility and endurance, need for support systems, body dysphoria, inability to live as you used to. People live with that every day.

I admit I have no idea what would happen if you lacked a body completely. A head-in-a-jar scenario sounds like locked-in syndrome, which is still better than death. The other scenario could be anything from total sensory deprivation (yeah, that one is probably worse than death) to living in a simulation.

What the heck? What if any technology X causes misery? It was argued that in vitro fertilization would cause soulless humans to be born (seriously) with all sorts of ramifications (from them destroying society, to their existence being constant agony). This claim has been made repeatedly about all sorts of medical interventions, from organ transplants to cloning. Right now there are people who claim aspartame is turning us into zombie-like horrors.

There is always a risk from any medical intervention. A bad anesthesiologist can give you brain damage and turn you into a zombie when all you wanted to was have a wisdom tooth pulled. This objection is so generalized that I'm not sure it's a true objection at all. I think you may be searching for other objections rather than stating a true objection.

There's no reason to experiment o cryo patients. Lots of people donate their brains to science. Grab somebody who isn't expecting to be resurrected, and test your technology on them. Worst case, you wake up somebody who doesn't want to be alive, and they kill themselves.

Number two is very unlikely. We're basically talking brain damage, and I've never heard of a case of brain damage, no matter how severe, doing that.

As for number three, that shambling horror would not be you in a meaningful sense. You'd just be dead, which is the default case. Also, I have my doubts that they'd even bother to try to resurrect you with that much damage if they didn't already have a way of patching the gaps in your neurology.

As for number four, depending on the degree of the disability, suicide or euthanasia is probably possible. Besides, I think it's unlikely they'll be able to drag you back from being a corpsicle without being able to fix problems like that.

See disability arguments on the other comment for personality-preserving brain damage.

Then I would have to live as a sort of zombie-like horror.

Well, no. You'd just be dead. There'd be a Schiavo-like body looking like yours, or a new person in a body looking like yours, but that doesn't seem to add much to the horror of death.

this goes on for some prolonged period of time where they're assuming the reason I'm miserable is because of the shock of waking up in a world where so many of the people I know are dead and everything else is changed or gone, so nobody has any idea that it's due to a chemical or structural problem in my actual brain.

That sounds like a weird change. Right now the DSM allows a depression diagnosis two months after a traumatic event, less if it gets really bad, and even less in practice. How prolonged are you thinking of?

People who age often get depression, and get the worst disabilities because they can't adapt fast and their disabilities keep increasing. Do you accept "I should kill myself now, so I don't run that risk"? If not, how is that different.

horribly unfair that the bad guys could live forever

There's a common attitude that eternal life is a very special prize - something a few great heroes might deserve, and if you seek it out you're basically claiming to be a deity or something impossibly high-status along those lines. I have no idea where that comes from; it's like someone proposed advances in agriculture and people went "But famines are part of life!".

What cartoon was this?

No, seriously, what cartoon is this. It sounds awesome.

You should provide an argument as to why it would be more likely to be born into a post human society. For a post human society to exist, a human and pre-human world would probably, although perhaps not necessarily, have to exist first. Even if it is more common to exist in transhumance state, there would still be non-transhuman minds.

What if the future is hellish and I won't be able to die? (Current objection)

From this post (which is a great source of insight on many particular cryonics objections):

(5) You somehow know that a singularity-causing intelligence explosion will occur tomorrow. You also know that the building you are currently in is on fire. You pull an alarm and observe everyone else safely leaving the building. You realize that if you don’t leave you will fall unconscious, painlessly die, and have your brain incinerated. Do you leave the building?

Answering yes to (5) means you probably shouldn’t abstain from cryonics because you fear being revived and then tortured.

(This comment, including copying over text and links, was composed entirely without the mouse due to the Pentadactyl Firefox extension.)

Here's the reason I don't find this very scary. As a frozen person, you have very little of value to offer people, and will probably take some resources. Thus, if someone wants to bring you back it will likely must be mostly for your benefit, rather than because they want to enslave you or something. If the universe just has people who don't care about you, then they just won't revive you, and it will be the same as if you had died.

In order for you to be revived in a hellish world, the people who brought you back have to be actively malicious, which doesn't seem very likely to me.

What do you think?

Consider that you might reach such a future in your natural lifespan, without cryonics. Does this cause you to spend resources on maintaining a suicide button that would ensure information-theoretical erasure of yourself, so no sudden UFAI foom could get hold of you? If not, what is the difference?

Read this hypothetical objection:

Some optimistic future scenarios speculate that we might be able to revive even those who don't cryopreserve (current cloning techniques on preserved remnants can recreate genetic phenotypes; some sort of simulation on records of your behaviour might be able to recreate your behavioural phenotype, and so on for every part that makes up you). That applies to the pessimistic future scenarios too: if you don't sign up for cryo, you'll be taking a risk that the future is hellish as well.

It would be extremely surprising if our current or traditional death ceremonies are the optimal minimisation of that risk. Almost certainly, we should be trying to minimise the risk further. Cremation, destruction of records pertaining to ourselves, erasure of Facebook profile, planting deliberately false information, and other such tactics should be considered.

Does this objection strike you as reasonable, or unreasonable?

I don't have reading material on these, but there are unexpected consequences to anything we do. Should we stop using electricity because there could be unexpected consequences to it?

More to the point, most of these are possible consequences of simply continuing to live. Two centuries from now it's likely most of your current skills will be useless and everything will have changed. Living for an extra century will not have zero environmental impact. Etc. Is the best solution to these problems personal annihilation? Is that even in the top ten? There are better ways of solving these problems than death.

If the chances of death is high, why unexpected consequences would be a objection?

The main reason to not sign is the low probability of sucess, in cases where people already know what cryo is, and have the money. If they will die anyway, losing money now makes cryo a bad investiment.

I'm not aware of there ever having been any actual supervillains. I'm aware people are enslaved and forbidden from killing themselves but almost never are they actually prevented from doing so.

One thing behaviorally close to actual supervillains is bureaucracy.

So the realistic antiutopian scenario is that you are revived by employees of some future Department of Historical Care. Personally, those people don't care about you at all; just are just another prehistorical ape for them. All they want is to have their salaries, with as little work as possible.

They don't care about costs of your revival, because those costs are paid by state; by taxes of citizens who get some epsilon warm fuzzies for saving prehistorical people. They don't care about your pain, because emotionally you mean nothing for them; they emotionally don't even consider you human. But they do care about your life -- because their salaries depend on how many revived prehistorical people will survive. So their highest priority is to prevent your suicide; and they can use the technology of future for this; for example they can prevent you any movement and feed you intravenously.

People outside the Department of Historical Care will not save you, because they honestly don't care about you. They get some warm fuzzies from knowing that you are alive (and imagining how grateful you must be for this), but they have no desire to meet with you personally. It's a future, where they have things much more interesting than you; for example genetically engineered pokemons, artificial intelligences, etc.

If not you can always kill yourself.

Not if you don't have courage to do such things. Not if you wake up damaged and unable to access / use suicidal weapons. Not if you wake up as a subject of medical experiments. Being a slave isn't the only horrible outcome that could happen.

Prisoners are generally prevented from killing themselves, as are the insane. What if the society of the future simply thinks it's wrong for you to kill yourself and won't let you do it?

There's a general category of waking up to find yourself in a low-status situation. This would include slavery, torture, imprisonment (we don't know what they'll consider to be a crime), and the one I think is most likely-- that you'll simply never be able to catch up. If you're going to be you, you're going to have a mind which was shaped by very different circumstances from the people in the future. Life might be well worth living or intermittently well worth living, but you will never be a full member of the society.

Is there any science fiction about fairly distinct cohorts of people from different times in a high-longevity and/or cryonics society?

If you're revived via whole brain emulation (dramatically easier, and thus more likely, than trying to convert a hundred kilos of flaccid, poisoned cell edifices into a living person), then you could easily be prevented from killing yourself.

That said, whole brain emulation ought to be experimentally feasible, in what, fifteen years? At a consumer price point in 40? (Assuming the general trend of Moore's law stays constant). That's little enough time that I think the probability of such a dytopian future is not incredibly large. Especially since Alcor et all can move around if the laws start to get draconian. So it doesn't just require an evil empire - it requires a global evil empire.

The real risk is that Alcor will fold before that happens, and (for some reason) won't plastinate the brains they have on ice. In which case, you're back in the same boat you started in.

If not you can always kill yourself.

WRONG! If they're able to re-animate preserved people, what makes you think they won't be able to prevent suicide?

What if they don't believe in a right to die? There's no guarantee that you'll be able to die, if you wake up in a world where cryo revival actually worked.

Or, if I woke up disabled or in an R2D2 robot body, how would I actually go about killing myself? I mean, you can say "roll off a cliff" but if there are no cliffs nearby, or the thing is made out of titanium?

There is no guarantee I'd be able to die in that scenario.

Also you are probably underestimating the extent to which advancements over the years would improve your quality of life.

I think you're underestimating the extent to which advancements may cause catastrophes. We made all these chemicals and machines, now the environment is being destroyed. We made x-ray machines, the first techs to use them used to x-ray their hands to see if the machine was on in the morning - you can imagine what resulted. We've learned a lot about science in the last 100 years, great, but now we have nuclear bombs. We may make AI, and there are about 10,000 ways for that to go wrong. I don't assume technological advancement will lead to a utopia. I hope it does. But to assume that it will is a bad idea. I'd be very interested to see a thorough and well thought out prediction of whether we'll have a utopia or dystopia in the future, or something that's neither. I'm really not sure.

I am planning to put a list of my objections with links and whether they're resolved into the OP. So there will be some organization to it.

I'm not sure that LW wants more guinea pigs, some feel that this is a waste of time - you can tell by the karma on my thread that this isn't really popular. Thanks for the compliment, though.

Also, I am not expecting to be convinced. I'm actually leaning toward "no" right now, as surprising as I bet some think that is. I'll explain that when I make my next run of responding to comments again.

You know, I think we should argument map the whole friggin site. Except that I WOULD NOT want to see that being put onto someone else's software. They'll have control of the data. I'd prefer to see it in open source software, editable by the world, and copyright free so anyone can make it backup without a problem.

To me, death is merely non-existence. I won't suffer after that. I won't know that I'm dead.