Cryonics Questions

Some of these questions, like the one about running away from a fire, ignore the role of irrational motivation.

People, when confronted with an immediate threat to their lives, gain a strong desire to protect themselves. This has nothing to do with a rational evaluation of whether or not death is better than life. Even people who genuinely want to commit suicide have this problem, which is one reason so many of them try methods that are less effective but don't activate the self-defense system (like overdosing on pills instead of shooting themselves in the head). Perhaps even a suicidal person who'd entered the burning building because e planned to jump off the roof would still try to run out of the fire. So running away from a fire, or trying to stop a man threatening you with a sword, cannot be taken as proof of a genuine desire to live, only that any desire to die one might have is not as strong as one's self-protection instincts.

It is normal for people to have different motivations in different situations. When I see and smell pizza, I get a strong desire to eat the pizza; right now, not seeing or smelling pizza, I have no particular desire to eat pizza. The argument "If your life was in immediate danger, you would want it to be preserved; therefore, right now you should seek out ways to preserve your life in the future, whether you feel like it or not" is similar to the argument "If you were in front of a sizzling piece of pizza, you would want to eat it; therefore, right now you should seek out pizza and eat it, whether you feel like it or not".

Neither argument is inevitably wrong. But first you would have to prove that the urge comes from a reflectively stable value - something you "want to want", and not just from an impulse that you "want" but don't "want to want".

The empirical reason I haven't signed up for cryonics yet is that the idea of avoiding death doesn't have any immediate motivational impact on me, and the negatives of cryonics - weirdness, costs in time and money, negative affect of being trapped in a dystopia - do have motivational impact on me. I admit this is weird and not what I would have predicted about my motivations if I were considering them in the third person, but empirically, that's how things are.

I can use my willpower to overcome an irrational motivation or lack of motivation. But I only feel the need to do that in two cases. One, where I want to help other people (eg giving to charity even when I don't feel motivated to do so). And two, when I predict I will regret my decision later (eg I may overcome akrasia to do a difficult task now when I would prefer to procrastinate). The first reason doesn't really apply here, but the second is often brought out to support cryonics signup.

Many people who signal acceptance of death appear to genuinely go peacefully and happily - that is, even to the moment of dying they don't seem motivated to avoid death. If this is standard, then I can expect to go my entire life without regretting the choice not to sign up for cryonics at any moment. After I die, I will be dead, and not regretting anything. So I expect to go all of eternity without regretting a decision not to sign up for cryonics. This leaves me little reason to overcome my inherent dismotivation to get it.

Some have argued that, when I am dead, it will be a pity, because I would be having so much more fun if I were still alive, so I ought to be regretful even though I'm not physically capable of feeling the actual emotion. But this sounds too much like the arguments for a moral obligation to create all potential people, which lead to the Repugnant Conclusion and which I oppose in just about all other circumstances.

That's just what I've introspected as the empirical reasons I haven't signed up for cryonics. I'm still trying to decide if I should accept the argument. And I'm guessing that as I get older I might start feeling more motivation to cheat death, at which point I'd sign up. And there's a financial argument that if I'm going to sign up later, I might as well sign up now, though I haven't yet calculated the benefits.

But analogies to running away from a burning building shouldn't have anything to do with it.

From what I see, your questions completely ignore the crucial problem of weirdness signaling. Your question (1) should also assume that these hospitals are perceived by the general population, as well as the overwhelming majority of scientists and intellectuals, as a weird crazy cult that gives off a distinctly odd, creepy, and immoral vibe -- and by accepting the treatment, you also subscribe to a lifelong affiliation with this cult, with all its negative consequences for your relations with people. (Hopefully unnecessary disclaimer for careless readers: I am not arguing that this perception is accurate, but merely that it is an accurate description of the views presently held by people.)

As for question (3), the trouble with such arguments is that they work the other way around too. If you claim that the future "me" 20 years from now doesn't have any more special claim to my identity than whatever comes out of cryonics in more distant future, this can be used to argue that I should start identifying with the latter -- but it can also be used to argue that I should stop identifying with the former, and simply stop caring about what happens to "me" 20 years, or one year, or a day, or even a minute from now. To which I can respond that yes, there is no rational reason to care about the fate of the future "me," but I just happen to be a sort of creature that gets upset when the future "me" is threatened and constantly gets overcome with an irresistible urge to work against such threats at the present moment -- but this urge doesn't extend to the post-cryonics "me," so I'm rationally indifferent in that case.

If you believe that this conclusion is false, how exactly would you counter it? (This objection obviously has implications for your question (6) too.)

I'm often presented with a "the cycling of the generations is crucial. Without it progress would slow, the environment would be over-stressed, and there would be far fewer jobs for new young people" argument. I reply with question 8.

1. All of these are simply increased intensity of problems that already exist. We could solve all these problems right now by killing the elderly. Are you willing to commit suicide when you reach the age of 60 (or 50, or take-your-pick) to help solve these problems? Or are you willing to grant that death is a very (ethically) bad solution, and much better solutions could be found if death was taken off the table?

I'm willing to answer yes to 1-6 and to Eliezer's 7, but I am not signed up and have no immediate plans to do so. I may well consider it if the relevant circumstances change, which are:

1. I live in the UK where no cryonics company yet operates. I would have to move myself and my career to the US to have any chance of a successful deanimation. The non-cryonic scenario would be:

8. You suffer from a disease that will slowly kill you in thirty years, maybe sooner. There is a treatment that has a 10% chance of greatly extending that, but you would have to spend the rest of your life within reach of one of the very few facilities where it is available. These are all in other countries, where you would have to emigrate and find new employment to support yourself for at least the rest of your expected time.

And I really would not give a whole-hearted yes to that.

2. I am too old to finance it with insurance: I would have to pay for it directly, as I do with everything else. I probably can, but this actually makes it easier to put off -- no pressure to buy now while it's cheap.

What I am moved to do about cryonics is ask where I should be looking to keep informed about the current state and availability of the art. Is there a good source of cryonics news? At this point I'm not interested in arguments about whether not dying is a good thing, fears of waking up in the far future, or philosophising about bodily resuscitation vs. scan-and-upload. Just present-day practicalities.

If you answered yes to all six questions and have not and do not intend to sign up for cryonics please give your reasons in the comments.

• I do not wish to damage the ozone layer or contribute to global warming.
• I think the resources should be spent on medical care for the young, rather than for the old. Do you know how many lives lost to measles one corpsicle costs?
• If I am awakened in the future, I have no way to earn a living.
• I used to like Larry Niven's sci fi.

Yes, these answers are somewhat flip. But ...

I can easily imagine someone rational signing up for cryonics. What I have more trouble imagining is someone rational becoming evangelical on the topic. Surely there are lives easier and cheaper to save than mine. Why is it important to you to convince me on this? Why aren't you asking me to contribute to Doctors without Borders? Are you perhaps seeking validation of your own life choices?

1 should be more like: You have an illness that will kill you sometime in the next 50 years unless you have an operation right when you die but not too late. The clinics that can perform this operation are so far away that the chances of you reaching the facility in time is negligible. Do you sign up for the operation?

Edit: The correct choice of course is to move nearer to the clinics in about 20 to 30 years.

Edit2: Also there is a chance that with some more research in the next couple of years a method could be developed that might not cure you but will vastly lengthen the time until you die with a much greater chance than the operation has. Do you pay for the operation or fund that research?

1. yes 2. yes 3 sort of 4 yes 5 yes 6 yes

I havent signed up yet because at my age (31) my annual unexpected chance of death is low in comparison to my level of uncertainty about the different options, especially with whole brain plasticization possibly becoming viable in the near future (which would be much cheaper and probably have a higher future success rate ).

A little nit-picky, but:

A friendly singularity would likely produce an AI that in one second could think all the thoughts that would take a billion scientists a billion years to contemplate.

Without a source these figures seem to imply a precision that you don't back up. Are you really so confident that an AI of this level of intelligence will exist? I feel your point would be stronger by removing the implied precision. Perhaps:

A friendly singularity would likely produce a superintelligence capable of mastering nanotechnology.

(Responding to old post)

This is ridiculous. Each objection makes the deal less good; several objections combined together may make it bad enough that you should turn down the deal. Just because each objection by itself isn't enough to break the deal doesn't mean that they can't be bad enough cumulatively.

I might read a 40 chapter book with a boring first chapter. Or with a boring second chapter. Or with a boring third chapter, etc. But I would not want to read a book which contains 40 boring chapters.

This is especially so in the case of objections 1 and 6. If you don't separate them you end up with "You have a disease and will soon die unless you get an operation. By some crazy coincidence the operation costs exactly as much as cryonics does and the only hospitals capable of performing the operation are next to cryonics facilities. Furthermore, by another coincidence, the chance of the operation actually working is the same as the chance of cryonics actually working Do you get the operation?" The answer is often "no"; an expensive but likely way to save your life is okay (#1) and an unlikely but cheap way is also okay (#6). But not one which is both expensive and unlikely.

I'd dispute the claimed equivalence between several of these questions and cryonics (particularly the first) and I'd also take issue with some of the premises but I'd answer yes to all of them with caveats and I'm not signed up for cryonics nor do I intend to in the near future.

The reason I have no immediate plans to sign up is that I think there are relatively few scenarios where signing up now is a better choice than deferring a decision until later. I am currently healthy but if diagnosed with a terminal illness I could sign up then if it seemed like the best use of resources at the time. I estimate my chances of sudden death as relatively low and many sudden death scenarios would likely greatly lower my chances of successful cryonic revival (due to causing severe damage to my brain) so cryonics doesn't seem a great investment currently.

Based on my age and health and the statistics I've seen I'd estimate a less than 1 in 1000 probability of dying in the next 10 years without sufficient warning to make arrangements for cryonics at the time but in a way that left my brain in a state where I'd have a non-negligible chance at future revival.

Quick Note: I found it mildly distract that the explanations (which all started with 'Answering' as the 1st word) were right under each question. I kept finding myself tempted to read the 'answers' first. I'd personally prefer all the explanations at the end.

Answering yes to [“Were you alive 20 years ago?”] means you have a relatively loose definition of what constitutes “you” and so you shouldn’t object to cryonics because you fear that the thing that would be revived wouldn’t be you.

Not necessarily. My definition of “me” may depend on the context. If someone asks me that question, I assume that by “you” they mean ‘a human with your DNA who has since grown into present-you’, regardless of how much or how little I identify with him.

Twenty years ago, I was eight years old. I think that I can honestly say that if you somehow replaced me with my eight-year-old self, it would be the same as killing me. (To a great extent, I'm still mostly the same person I was at fourteen. I'm not at all the person I was at eight.)

Even if someone answers yes to all six questions they could still rationally not sign up for cryonics. Aside from issues like weirdness signaling, they could not see any specific one of the six issues raised as sufficient to be an objection but consider all of them together to be enough. Thus for example one might combine 1 and 2 where the relevant payoff matrix for both issues combined (being sent into a possibly unpleasant future and having to pay a lot for an operation) combine to be enough of a concern even if neither does by itself. It seems unlikely that this would actually occur for someone and one would be deservedly skeptical of that sort of claim if they just had two statements. But the combination of 6 makes it more plausible.

I object to (2). I'm not at all sure that I would take that job. If I did, it would be because the NASA guys got me interested in it (the NASA job, not the bit about returning to Earth in the far future) before I had to make a final decision. If they only tell me what you said (or if the job sounds really boring and useless), then I wouldn't do it. Being cyrogenically frozen isn't exactly boring, but it is useless.

And in light of that, I also object to cryonics on the basis of cost. Instead of

Answering yes to (1) means you shouldn’t object to cryonics because of costs or logistics.

it would be better to say

Answering yes to (1) means you shouldn’t object to cryonics because of costs or logistics if you have no other objection.

If it were free and easy (and I knew that I was useless as an organ donor, which is an opportunity cost), then I might sign up on a whim, but high cost means that I won't. But this comes into play only after I decide that I don't want cryonics, on grounds analogous to (2).

I answer yes to (1,3,6). I'm a little worried about (5); I want to ask what else I know about this imminent singularity. But if it's just what you say in the question, then … yes. I haven't become too pessimistic about the singularity yet!

As for (4), I don't want to answer; one reason that I'm reading this site is to find out! So far, however, I'm leaning towards no, but also I don't think that it matters very much; who cares how long it takes? Except that this affects (2); if I believed that a friendly singularity was likely this decade, then we should rewrite (2) to refer to a decade-long trip, and then I lean towards yes! (The point is that people that I know will still be alive and remember me.)

Thanks for an interesting set of questions.

My answer to (3) is "no" for rather trivial reasons, as my state 20 years ago is most comparable to someone who died and was not a cryonics patient: the thing that existed and was most similar to "me" was the DNA of people who are related to me. I don't count that as "alive", and I doubt that most people would.

Ask me (3) in the future, and I will probably have a different answer. (Wait until I'm 24, though, because I don't really identify so well with infants.)

1. What is "non-trivial but far from certain"? If operation's chances were as low as my estimation of cryonics I wouldn't bother so "no". With high enough chance "yes".

2. Maybe. I don't really trust my ability to place myself in such hypothetical scenarios and I expect my answer to result more from framing effects than anything else.

3. Sort of.

4. Definitely not.

5. Framing effects etc. I don't think I can reason about this clearly enough.

6. Definitely yes.

So there's one yes. It shouldn't surprise you that I consider cryonics waste of money with negligible chance of success, but I'm a huge fan of SENS, which has realistic chance of significantly reducing worst effects of aging at least.

And back to your arguments:

• 1 - costs/logistics are only relative to chances of success, so this point fails hard.
• 2 - waking up in the future is still worse than waking up now, so it works as partial objection even if you prefer it to never waking up.
• 3 - magnitude of change matters, and future "you" can easily be far outside what you'd still consider "you", so your argument fails
• 4, 5 - I'll leave it up to people who believe this, I consider the entire line of thought delusional

The article assumes that people make such decisions rational, which is just not the case. If you ask someone 'which argument or fact could possibly convince you to sign up, or lets say at least treat the cryo option favorably' you do not get a well reasoned argument about chances of it working or personal preferences or so, but more counterarguments. Throwing more logic at the problem does not help! If you find a magic argument that suddenly convinces someone that is not convinced yet - or does the signing process more immediate than planned, then you probably learned something useful about human nature that can be applied in other areas as well.

Shouldn't you be asking things like, So you're pro-cryonics. Why would you change your mind?

Answering yes to (2) means you shouldn't object to cryonics because of the possibility of waking up in the far future.

An astronaut after coming back to Earth would likely have much higher social status than a cryonic patient after being revived.

Answering yes to (1) means you shouldn’t object to cryonics because of costs or logistics.

The fact that I'm willing to spend $X in order to die at 75 rather than at 25 doesn't necessarily imply that I must be willing to spend $X to die at [large number] rather than at 75.

I say yes to 2, 5, and 6. I'd personally prefer not to be tortured or wake up in a future where humans may have been wiped out by another sentient race (I doubt it).

The conclusion from 6. doesn't follow.

But what if I don't sign up for cryonics because I simply don't want to live in another time, without my friends, my family, people I owe duties to,...? What if I simply think it a dishonest way out? (I mean, I'm okay for cryopreserving other people, especially lethally ill. I don't care for the weirdness, also. But myself, no; I have a life, why would I decide to give it up?)

Some of your analogies strike me as quite strained:

(1) I wouldn't call the probability of being revived post near-future cryogenic freezing "non-trivial but far from certain", I would call it "vanishingly small, if not zero". If sick and dying and offered a surgery as likely to work as I think cryonics is, I might well reject it in favor of more conventional death-related activities.

(3) My past self has the same relation to me as a far-future simulation of my mind reconstructed from scans of my brain-sicle? Could be, but that's far from intuitive. Also, there's no reason to use "fear" to characterize the opposing view when "think" would work just as well.

(6) What Yvain said.