We really need a "cryonics sales pitch" article.

This is from my book Singularity Rising:

I have encountered many of the same objections to cryonics in the numerous conversations I have had on the subject, and I’m going to assume that you object to cryonics for one or more reasons I have heard before. Below this paragraph is a list of cryonics objections, and beneath each objection is a question. For reasons that either I will provide or should seem obvious, answering any question in the affirmative means that its corresponding objection shouldn’t block you from joining the cryonics movement.

Objection 1: Cryonics is unnatural.

Question 1: Would you support a law prohibiting all medicine not used by our hunter-gatherer ancestors?

Objection 2: Once you have died, you are dead.

Question 2: You fall into a lake while ice skating, and your body quickly freezes. A year from now your body thaws out and for some crazy reason, you think, look and act just as before. Are you alive?

Objection 3: Even if cryonics works, the “person” that would be revived wouldn’t really be me.

Question 3: Were you alive ten years ago?

If you answered yes, then you are not defining “you” by the physical makeup of your body, because almost none of the atoms in your body today are the same as they were ten years ago. Your body has undergone many changes over the last decade, meaning that if you still identify as you, you must be defining yourself by some broad structure and not merely by the exact arrangement of the molecules that compose “you.”

Also, imagine that a year after joining Alcor, you wake up one morning in a hospital bed, and see the smiling face of your (now much older) child. Although thirty years has passed since you died in your sleep, no subjective time has transpired, and your body has the exact same look and feel as it did before you went to bed. Indeed, had Alcor placed you back in the room in which you died, you would think today was a normal morning. Are you still you? Are you glad you signed up with Alcor?

Furthermore, consider two 40-year-olds named Tom and Jane. Tom legally dies in 2020, is cryogenically preserved, and is then revived in 2045 by a process that restores his body and brain to the condition it was in before he legally died. Jane survives to 2045. The Tom of 2045 is vastly more similar to the Tom of 2020 than the Jane of 2045 is to the Jane of 2020, as the Jane of 2045 has undergone twenty-five extra years of aging and life experience. So if you believe that Jane has stayed Jane over the time period, then you should think that the pre-cryonics Tom is the same as the post-cryonics one.

Objection 4: I don’t want to wake up a stranger in a strange world.

Question 4: While driving, you get into an accident. When you wake up in a hospital, an FBI agent tells you that the son of a Mafia leader died in the accident, and although the accident wasn’t your fault, the leader will hold you responsible. If the Mafia thinks you survived the accident, it will kill you. The agent confesses that the Mafia has infiltrated the FBI, and so the government will never be able to protect you. The agent provides one option for survival. He will fake your death, and make people think your body was burned beyond recognition. The agent will then give you a new identity, and transport you to another country, one very different from your own. You will never be able to contact any of your old friends or family again, because the always suspicious Mafia will monitor them. Do you accept the agent’s offer?

Objection 5: If revived, I wouldn’t have any useful skills.

Question 5: You have a fatal disease that has only one cure, but this cure costs $1 billion, which you can't possibly raise. NASA, however, makes you an offer. The space agency is launching a rocket that will travel near the speed of light. Because of Einstein’s theory of relativity, although the mission will take you only one subjective year to complete, when the rocket returns to Earth, one thousand years will have passed. Because you are the most qualified person to fly the rocket, NASA will pay the cost of your disease’s cure if you accept the mission. Do you accept? .

Also, you are only likely to get revived in a friendly rich world.

Objection 6: The people who revive me might torture me.

Question 6: If you knew an intelligence explosion would occur tomorrow would you commit suicide today to avoid the chance of being tortured?

Objection 7: I don’t cherish my life enough to want to extend it with cryonics.

Question 7: You will die of cancer unless you undergo a painless medical procedure. Do you get the procedure?

Objection 8: It would be morally superior for me to donate money to charity rather than spending money on cryonics.

Question 8: Same as Question (7), but now the operation is expensive, although you can afford to pay it.

Objection 9: It’s selfish of me to have more than my fair share of life, especially since the world is overpopulated.

Question 9: Same as question (7), except that your age is well above the length of time the average human lives.

Objection 10: I believe in God, the real one with a capital G, not an extremely smart artificial intelligence. I don’t want to postpone joining him in the afterlife.

Question 10: Same as Question (7).

Also, even the extra million years of life that cryonics might give you is nothing compared to the infinity you believe you will eventually spend in heaven. If you believe that God wants you to spend time in the physical universe before joining him, might he not approve of you using science and reason to extend your life, so you can better serve him in our, material world?

Many faiths believe it’s virtuous to have children, raise these children to understand God, and then hope these children beget more children who will carry on the faith. If there is a God, he appears to have started us out on a tiny planet in an empty universe. People who make it to the Singularity would likely get to “be fruitful and multiply”, and populate God’s universe. (Don’t worry if you are past childbirth age: any technology that could revive the cryogenically preserved could be used to help you have children.)

Objection 11: If people find out I have signed up for cryonics they will think I’m crazy.

Question 11: Same as Question (7), but now most people think the type of operation you will get is crazy.

The stigma of cryonics is real and has even made this author nervous about outing himself, for fear that it might make it harder for me to find alternative employment, should I choose to leave or get fired from Smith College.

Objection 12: Cryonics might not work.

Question 12: Same as Question (7), but now the procedure only has a 5% chance of saving your life.

Here is my final question for you:

One minute from now a man pushes you to the ground, pulls out a long sword, presses the sword’s tip to your throat, and says he will kill you. You have one small chance at survival: grab the sword’s sharp blade, throw it away, and then run. But even with your best efforts, you will probably die. Do you fight?

Fred was the best supporter I had at work. He was in his 70s, and about to retire. I invited him to lunch to try to convince him to sign up for cryonics. He was a perfect candidate. He had lots of money, was (I think) an atheist, had a strong belief in the power of technology to improve society, had teenage children, and most importantly he loved life and had plans to travel the world after he retired. About ten seconds after I started my cryonics pitch I knew I had lost him, and he would be just politely humoring me. I had about as much chance of getting him to join Alcor as of convincing him to donate $50,000 to a cult of Cthulhu. Fred died of pancreas cancer shortly after retiring.

Cryonics organizations themselves have neglected the obligation to generate and update current expository literature. I see the urgent need for a "Cryonics for Dummies" book which incorporates the experience base of real, existing cryonics organizations over the last 50 years and explains what the bearing of current neuroscience, cryobiology, gerontology and biotechnology have on what cryonicists want to do.

The cryonics movement needs more people with clinical medical backgrounds involved, but then it also needs people with practical business experience.

I will give you a business intelligence test. Look at just the home page of the website for this startup cryonics organization in Oregon, and tell me one obvious thing that it lacks - just on the home page:

http://oregoncryo.com/

"Many Are Cold But Few Are Frozen"

;)

As we talk about sales pitch here, just one question: how can we distinguish between genuine cryonics research and quackery?

Don't forget that wishful thinking is deeply ingrained into human psychology, and it seems that many people on this site are ready to throw money at any organization who claims to work on cryonics.

Given that we don't have any evidence of cryonics working (as far as I know, no successful revival has been ever done), it is only hoped that it might work some day in the future. This can also attract scammers.

So far, cryonics looks like a great SF idea. One of those things that should be possible in theory, but may not be possible in practice. If you get frozen now, what I think will happen is that they'll do it wrong, and the people who thaw you will do it wrong, too. And those people will learn about what to avoid next time they thaw someone, and what the people who froze you should have done differently.

That's great, because it'll help people they freeze in 2215 to maybe have a real chance of being revived, so I'd be prepared to volunteer for it (but not pay a lot of money for it). But what if they succeed partially, and I don't just die (for real, this time) but end up a 'vegetable'? No, thanks, I'm not as altruistic as all that.

Agreed; in fact, I think that we need a better "cryonics sales pitch" everything. Note that I may have used a more critical and more cynical tone than I meant to in writing these quick thoughts:

• Neither CI nor Alcor's logos are particularly memorable, and neither organization has a mascot. Why not include a cute cartoonized polar bear on Alcor's website?
• CI's home page is well done. Alcor's is decent. The pictures on the home pages of both sites could be improved-- instead of using pictures of a room full of freezing/storage tanks on the home page, use a picture of your new smiling, cartoonized polar bear mascot taking a cold bath in a bisected storage tank. The polar bear could be depicted in a reclined position, as one might recline in a hot tub if feeling especially relaxed.
• On Alcor's home page, the pictures of Alcor members recommending Alcor's service could be replaced with pictures of smiling doctors and scientists (either old ones with grey beards, or young ones who are conventionally attractive) wearing lab coats on top of business professional attire, and recommending Alcor's services. Bonus points if the scientists are actually signed up for cryonics.
• Could a prominent biologist or science-related public figure be paid to do a TED talk on cryonics?
• I remember that Eliezer one mentioned that sending people cryonics pendants when they were just beginning to sign up, rather than after they were completely signed up, might help motivate people to finish the process of signing up for cryonics.

Gregory Benford, Ph.D., the physicist and science fiction writer, talks about cryonics in a new video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoGMYjYSCG8

Seeing as how you're potentially willing to put money toward this, have you considering running a contest?

Ah, I also wish there were some posts about the practical parts of signing up. An overview of options, like Alcor or CI, standby service, life insurance costs, whether to consider relocation to Phoenix or whatnot, whether to get one of those bracelet things or something, and for god's sake let the guide not be so US-centric.

Though possibly this masterpost-thing exists and I haven't heard of it, or my unusual distaste for not having every detail planned out beforehand is biasing me.

Focus on the goal more than the means:

I want to stay alive in good shape.

Life allows for experiences.

Experiences can lead to skills.

Accumulate enough skills, and you can become a futuristic badass like something out of science fiction, kind of like the character Rutger Hauer plays in Blade Runner, but really old and "ultramature," as Max More says, if you do it right: "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. . . "

And then, some day, young people - I don't mean ones in their teens and twenties, but ones only a few centuries old after the transition to superlongevity - will learn of your reputation, and they will come up to you deferentially to ask, "You knew people who have DIED?! And no one could revive them? We don't understand that experience. Could you please tell us about it?"

Obviously related: D.J. MacLennan's new book, Frozen to Life:

https://www.singularityweblog.com/cryonics-a-glass-state-time-travel/

Cryonics: A Glass-state Time Travel

by D.J. MacLennan on August 6, 2015 0 Comments

Frozen to Life

What if we gave people a way to escape absolute death at the end of their biologically-allotted lifespans? Wouldn’t many of them jump at it? Of course, and they do, and have been for some time now. Religionists believe that the metaverse (or whatever they wish to call the whole macro-everything, including all the ‘spiritual’ bits) is neatly ordered to deliver them into immortality, just in time. There’s no mechanism for this. It just happens.

That’s an amazing technology – no mechanism, no physical processes, no messy cause and effect to worry about. Religionists, however, don’t consider this a technology. It’s beyond technology and little human tinkerings like that. Something else does the miraculous transmutation from decay-prone physical stuff to eternal ethereal stuff – something evidently a lot smarter than we are.

The religionist route is an unfounded one, to say the very least.

So, what might work if you want to avoid absolute death? First, you need to accept your existence as a host of atoms in particular configurations. Second, you need to think about ways to arrest biological decay, which is just the chemical reactions that happen when the specific set of constraints we call life no longer apply. As Brian Wowk discusses in his essay Medical Time Travel, the Arrhenius equation shows us that chemical reactions stop when temperature drops low enough (-196 °C, just below the boiling point of nitrogen, will suffice for our purposes). Done correctly, with the right concentration of antifreeze-type cryoprotectants, your ‘dead’ brain and its surrounding tissues will undergo ‘glass-state’ vitrification after suspension in liquid nitrogen. Third, armed with this information, you need to act. It’s unlikely that anybody else is going to set up the circumstances for your eventual glass-state transition, so it’s down to you.

In information-theoretic terms, immortality is already possible. It just isn’t much fun, because you can’t be conscious of anything. Bad and extant, good and gone, you hang on the precipice tip of an unclosed infinity symbol. With your molecular interactions halted, nothing happens. Time yawns, and down its craw you silently fall. Nobody knows how to resurrect a person from this immortal abeyance. Some have theories, some even incipient skills and tools, but no one yet knows how to trigger the temporal gag reflex that will cough you out and close the sigil.

But think on it. Think on the potential. The glass-state time-traveler is indeterminate, undissipated, untruncated. Her death was not information-theoretic death. She is orders of magnitude less dead than the conventionally-erased many.

Skepticism about her possible revival amounts to this: because we cannot imagine how she might be revived, we cannot imagine how she might be revived. Might it take nanobots, substrate-independence tech, scanning neuromorphic arrays, advanced connectomic inference, molecular assemblers? Who knows? Perhaps all of these, perhaps none. No matter. She has the luxury of time. Only if abandoned and allowed to decay (or if our race extinguishes itself before the necessary technology arises) will her problem become terminally insurmountable.

This potential solution to the problem of absolute death defies established human conventions of death and corpse-disposal. It triggers ‘cognitive dissonance’ and repugnance reactions. Scientist Leon Kass finds ‘wisdom’ in the human repugnance response. On cryonics, I neither feel it nor find it wise. Post-mortem cryoprotective abeyance is a logical choice. Nevertheless, the heavy blinders of repugnance and convention still screen this from most. And we ‘cryonicists’ do it to ourselves; we are far from immune to the emotional and existential (for a few, even ‘spiritual’) turmoil our mortal decision may cause.

‘Cryonauts’ are simply mute, liminal dwellers on an unknown threshold. Not living, not dead; not formerly crazy – nor necessarily selfish, altruistic, or pioneering. Just – for the love of hope and reason – not irretrievably lost.

About the Author:

D.J. MacLennan

D.J. MacLennan is a futurist author who lives on the Isle of Skye, Scotland. He wrote two chapters of the recently-published cryonics anthology The Prospect of Immortality – Fifty Years Later. His new book Frozen to Life: A Personal Mortality Experiment is due for release at the end of August 2015.

Is there a foundation devoted to promotion of cryonics? If no, it would be probably very desirable to create such. Popularizing cryonics can save an incredible amout of existences and so, many people supporting cryonics would probably be willing to donate money to make some more organized promotion. Not to mention personal gains - the more popular cryonics would become, the lower the costs and better logistics.

If you are or know someone supporting cryonics and having experience/knowledge in non-profit organisations or professional promotion, please consider that.

It doesn't depend on the quality of the writing if someone is mourning over a death then it's a bad time to speak about how the death could have been prevented.

CronoDAS, I'm glad you brought up this issue. Sadly, I don't think there's good evidence that cryo, as practiced today, works. I think it is reasonable (but of course, not ideal) for people to dismiss things which are only theoretically possible but not practically possible.

If we had verifiably working cryo today, it might be easier to change people's minds.

How about arguments from analogy that are broadly evocative.

The underlying question seems to be:

To what extent should an agent's utility definition extend beyond their own person?

A ready example would be effective altruism - should an effective altruism care about bequesting their fortune after death, given that they are not around to process the outcome? Intuitively, subcultural conditioning would bring most people to say yes, but how about if I turned it around? For example, a suicidal woman may strongly advocate for a right to suicide. Would she be maximising her utility to publish a note to the effect of calling on potential like-minded suicidees to kill anti-suicide policy-makers/politicians before they kill themselves, in order to pressure them to change their stance and raise awareness for dying with dignity? The post-death value maximising approach should be consistent in both the EA and suicide example, I should think.

My argument against cyronics:

The probability of being successfully frozen and then being revived later on is dependent on the following

1)Being successfully frozen upon death (loved ones could interfere, lawyers could interfere, the manner of my death could interfere)

2)The company storing me keeps me in the same (or close to it) condition for however long it takes for revivification technologies to be discovered

3)The revivification technologies are capable of being discovered

4)There is a will to revivify me

These all combine to make the probability of success quite low.

The value of success is obviously high, but it's difficult to assess how high: just because they can revivify me doesn't mean my life will then end up being endless (at the very least, violent death might still lead to death in the future)

This is weighted by the costs. These are

1)The obvious financial ones

2)The social ones. I actually probably value this higher than 1. Explaining to my loved ones my decision, having to endure mockery and possibly quite strong reactions

The final point here is about risk aversion. While one could probably set up the utility calculation above to come up positive, I'm not sure that utility calculation is the correct way to determine whether to make such a risk. That is, if a probability of a one shot event is low enough, the expected value isn't a very useful indicator of my actual returns. That is, if a lottery has a positive gain, it still might not be worth me playing it if the odds are still very much against me making any money from it!

So how would you convince me?

1)Drop the costs, both social and financial. The former is obviously done by making cryonics more mainstream, the latter... well by making cryonics more mainstream, probably

2)Convince me that the probability of all 4 components is higher than I think it is. If the conjoined probability started hitting >5% then I might start thinking about it seriously.

As someone who has read a bit about cryonics and is not convinced, I'd be interested in a summary of the arguments for cryonics. However, I'm skeptical it would convince me to sign up.

God bless this post and God bless Aubrey de Grey.