Cryonics and Regret

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I can easily accept most of the mistakes I made, I can live with my past shortcomings. But this I do regret, and I do not think that my regret will ever vanish, that I did not arrange for a second chance for my dad.

I have huge respect for the intellectual honesty here. My heart goes out to you.

On my end, I have both "succeeded" and "failed" to cryopreserve loved ones. The regret of failure remains. I take some solace in the fact that information is conserved in our universe. I do not know whether it is physically possible, let alone tractable, to info-resurrect the ones I love, but I know that as long as I exist, I will try. Such is my transhumanist oath.

It is painful to fully acknowledge that one has lost something irreplaceably beautiful in the death of a loved one. Thus why society encourages us to "move on". I find such a practice to be dishonest and dishonorable to love itself and, while perhaps soothing, ultimately a self-destructive severing from what matters most. I believe we do not rent the ones we love, we own them. And they us. There is more to say here, but it turns out, at least for me, the oath is an inspiration engine, sublimating vast pain into seemingly unlimited life fuel. If there is a way to resurrect the ones I love, I will find it, even if every stone in the universe must be turned over a trillion times. Anyone who feels the same will always find a true friend in me.

Success at cryopreserving a loved one creates a feeling of vast accomplishment. I share this tenderly, in the humble hope of further encouraging your (and others) efforts for those currently living. It's under discussed how even a mediocre cryopreservation can feel like your crowing life achievement. If you'll bear with me, earning a full merit scholarship to university, publishing cited AI safety papers, and gaining millions in paper net worth are events that made me proud... but are mere candles compared to the blazing sun of glory from cryopreserving my beloved mom. Staggering, absolutely staggering, feeling of achievement even 5 years later and I am eternally grateful to my friends here who were instrumental in helping make it happen. 

FWIW I have heard similar feelings described for cryopreserving pets.

Take care and thank you for sharing your story and dad with us.

You can start collecting and preserving all remaining data about him including your memories and his DNA samples, so future superintelligent AI will be to create a good model of him.

My heart aches to read this. I wish you freedom from self-blame. But I do understand.

I grew up in cryonics. My parents signed me up when I was a child. The ache of "If only I'd brought this up sooner, better, the right way" stayed with me a very long time. For every friend and relative who shrugged these things off. Especially for the handful already in graves now. So, so young.

I used to frequently imagine how, some decades or centuries from now, I'd be standing on a colony of the Moon looking up at our ancient cradle, the Earth. Standing there with the friends & family who'd made it. And younger folk too who love us and whom we love, hearing our stories of Ancient Earth when the chances were so slim.

And then we would sing the names. Those who could only continue as whispers on our lips. The beloved who did not make it.

I often find myself reciting Eliezer's ode to Terry Pratchett:

Even if the stars should die in heaven,
Our sins can never be undone.
No single death will be forgiven
When fades at last the last lit sun.
Then in the cold and silent black
As light and matter end,
We'll have ourselves a last look back
And toast an absent friend.

I am deeply sorry for your loss.

All the more aching for what might have been, had things been different.

We are all doing the best we can.

Even you, in your failures.

And me, in mine.

And it is heartbreaking, the cost of our learning. That sometimes it comes at the eternal loss of a beloved.

But all we can ever do is our best.

Setting aside our anger and self-blame,

out of deep heartfelt caring

we shall build a kinder world.

Or we shall die trying.

My mom was dying of throat cancer. I tried to get her to consider cryonics, no go. Suggested it to my Dad, no go. He died in the hospital after an accident. Suggested it to my wife, no go. Suggested it to my daughter, no go. Suggested it to my older brother, no go. With all of these people I offered to pay for it.

Most of the time the answer to “Would you consider cryonic suspension?” will be “Not a chance”. Hopefully the Overton Window will start to shift quickly. We are losing lots of people permanently.

I recently had a melanoma scare. Turned out to be nothing, but I found my ALCOR contract quite comforting.

Someone should work on this. This should be its own science, probably an area of study for people not good enough at math to do alignment research, or something. It seems like there's tons of easily-shared low hanging fruit here with family psychology. The failure rate with parents and grandparents is just too high. I successfully convinced both of my parents to take AI safety seriously (they are in their 60s), but my attempts to persuade them to go for cryonics didn't go well.

Right now, the strategy I'm trying is "figure out how to successfully approach them such that you ultimately convince them to read HPMOR" and I've already got one of them to start reading it and they're loving it, but it's easier to imagine that failing than succeeding [LW · GW] e.g. they say "A agree with Harry with most of his statements but not everything, including cryonics" and they stick with that stance before they even get to the last third of HPMOR when cryonics stops being something Harry rants about and starts being real. 

Projectlawful [LW · GW] is obviously a no-go, the first quarter of the story is meeting all these interesting relatable people, ~50% of whom are completely failing to realize that their day-to-day life is a distraction from the fact that they ought to be dropping everything and trying as hard as they can to die all the way ASAP so that they don't get infinite torture (not a spoiler). Yud and Hanson's dual posts supporting cryonics didn't work at all, failed the first impression in fact. I'm thinking that in order for it to work, it needs to 1) dazzle the way that HPMOR dazzles people, and 2) successfully convince them to notice that the society and culture they grew up in is confused, ill, and deranged. On the front of #2, obviously eliezerfic and the sequences are good, but the first 5 pages of Bostrom's paper existential risk as a global priority might also go a long way to show them that orienting towards reality means orienting away from the unreality that's currently dominant in every country. Has anyone tried chapter 1 of WWOTF? Are there lots of moments with highly optimal combinations of words there?

I appreciate your emotional honesty. I don't know anything much about cardiovascular dementia, in particular whether or how much it destroys memories. In the case of Alzheimers, there is growing evidence that most memories are intact and the problem is one of access. I don't know yet if this applies to other forms of dementia. If anyone has information or pointers, I'll check them out. 

MvB: It won't help your father but perhaps you can take a little comfort in the possibility that your post will induce others to make cryo arrangements for their parents (if the latter are willing).

I truly hope the cost of cryo falls rapidly in the next few years. A back-of-the-napkin calculation I did shows that if I wanted to pay forward for an option to cryopreserve my children (should they ever need it) I would have to save money for over 20 years, skipping on every life luxury for them and myself. It would be a bizarre life in which we would live like ascetic monks who spend most of their lives preparing to die and achieve Afterlife. Uncannily like religion.

If, aside from paying for cryo for my kids, I also wanted to pay for my own, my  SO's, and my parents, my brother etc, I would need to be effectively immortal just to put in enough work-hours.

Cryo might end up being the absolute pinnacle of elitist technology, because if you are not rich and Western enough, you are unlikely to ever afford it, and thus, destined to not only die, but watch your loved ones die as well while average Middle Class people from US or western EU would just chuck their sick loved ones into a freezer with a near certainty of their eventual survival and health.


The religions had it all wrong. In order to achieve Immortality in the After-life, you do not need to be good, or without sin, or pious, you just need to be able so save around 30-80k. If you can't, well, sucks to be you. Should have thought of it before you decided to be born poor.

Wow.  Thank you for sharing this.  That must have been a difficult and painful post to write.  I hope that it reaches somebody who needs to hear this — someone with a loved one not yet beyond saving.

I think most of us will feel this way about most people, after we've grown up.

It's odd that I cannot bring myself to feel this way about my own parents now.

Sometimes I try to. But I know that their present lack of knowledge or interest in cryonics is a result of their own choices, and their own vices, vices that are going to kill not just them but many other people who trusted them. I know that if I bring it up they will not be grateful. They will say something pigheaded and fearful, "do not give me the hope". They seem not to want it.
I believe, abstractly, that there must be more to them, an inner world, unique, but I cannot see it, it never comes to the fore.

There are a lot of people like this.

How can I want to save these people?

My condolences regarding your Dad's passing.  Although still in relatively good health, my parents are reaching the age at which their risk of dying substantially increases.  I've discussed cryonics with them, but they're not interested.   

The only thing you can really do is to make them aware of the opportunity.  Ultimately, people have to make the decision and take action themselves.   

A degree of orientation to reality is required here. 

Progressive vascular dementia is the gradual progressive destruction of cerebral tissue due to occlusions of distal arteries and arterioles in the cerebreal circulation. These occlusions result in the ischemia - starvation - of the tissue to which they supply oxygen and glucose. This occurs in most cases in an indolent and insipid manner, as a 'death by one thousand cuts'. Tiny occlutions occur in the tiny vessels, again and again, without either the person or their family noticing. The summation after many years is clearly seen, however, both clinically and on sectional imaging (MRI og CT). The brain volume is significantly decreased, with the brain no longer tightly pressed against the dura and skull holding it in, but instead floating freely in the bath of cerebrospinal fluid. The axons, or 'white matter' is often also destroyed focally. The volume loss can be so large that the distance from the brain to the skull is increased to such a distance that the bridging veins tear, causing bleeds in the subdural space. In a strange turn of fortune, their volume loss is protective in such cases, as the expanding blood causes far less pressure on the brain than it would a healthy individual. 

The important point to understand in the context of cryonics - and specifically the OP's regret - is that a large amount of the brain is permanently missing by the time that progressive vascular dementia is clinically diagnosed. The brain state that represented the person of your father - at least as you knew him in his premorbid state - aligns poorly with the state it was at his death. The amount of physical loss of neural tissue is immense, representing often billions of neurons and up to trillions of connections. The information is simply gone. *Some* of your father is there, but the significant part that is gone is not recoverable. There is no RAR/PAR file to which you can trick your way back. It is gone. Freezing his brain will only give the beings of the hypothetical enlightened future a chance to reanimate the demented state of your father, without any conceivable means of reverting him to the state you knew him before his deterioration.

So there is no realistic grounds for regret. Some things that are destroyed are irreversable and unrecoverable. Cryonics does not change that. 

I mean, the information probably isn't gone yet. A daily journal (if he kept it) or social media log stored in a concrete box at the bottom of the ocean is a more reliable form of data storage then cryo-companies. And according to my timelines, the amount of time between "revive frozen brain" tech and "recreate mind from raw information" tech isn't very long.

A trained psychologist on feelings of remorse and loss could help you. I know you know but it's good sometimes to be told.

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Hopefully, the review is better than karma at judging enduring value. If we have accurate prediction markets on the review results, maybe we can have better incentives on LessWrong today. Will this post make the top fifty?