Optimism versus cryonics

Anecdotal evidence: although sympathetic to the idea, I am not signed up, and have had two close brushes with death (that I know of).

Not in my case for the original plan. I decided to sign up for cryonic suspension some day at age 14 (1974), after reading Robert Ettinger's Man Into Superman (an underappreciated book, in my opinion). I followed through in 1990 with Alcor. This November 2 (coincidentally my 51st birthday) marks the 20th anniversary of my suspension membership.

I did have an health issue recently which has motivated me to get more involved in trying to untangle the cryonics clusterfuck (long story). I had a branch retinal vein occlusion in my right eye back in June (basically a stroke in that retina), which has caused some vision loss. Since then I've lost about 40 lbs. and I take Lisinopril to lower my blood pressure (116/80 this morning).

Datapoint: I didn't have such an experience before deciding to sign up.

I've had a fair number of relatives die. This is actually one reason I'm delaying on cryonics right now. I first got strongly interested in cryonics about 6 months ago. Then shortly after that, multiple relatives of fairly young ages died fairly suddenly. They weren't the first such deaths in my family by any means. And a family friend died at about the same time from cancer that he had had for a very long time. The initial reaction was that I should run off and sign up for cryonics right now. So I'm now delaying in part to make sure that I am making the decision more rationally and not just based on sudden recent events clouding my judgment. That and the whole thing with cryonics being fairly expensive for a grad student budget are the main causes of not signing up at this point.

It actually didn't occur to me to wear a helmet in a car.

For me this was sort of the dividing line between "I'm young, I'll live forever" and "Wait, shit, I won't, I really do need to do all those boring things like use hand sanitizer and look both ways before crossing the street and take my vitamins."

Is this a standard term? I've only seen it in Alastair Reynolds's writing.

As we move farther away it becomes harder to self-identify. I have some difficulty self-identifying with an upload but there's still a fair bit. I have a lot of trouble identifying with a beta copy. In fact, I imagine that an accurate beta version of me would spend a lot of time simply worrying about whether it is me. (Of course now putting that in writing means that out super friendly AI will likely only make a beta of me that does do that worrying is potentially counterproductive. There's a weird issue here where the more the beta is like me the more it will worry about this. So a beta that was just like me but didn't worry would certainly not be close enough in behavior for me to self-identify with it. So such worrying in a beta is evidence that I should make the self-identification with that beta.)

Hmm, that's a much tighter estimate. (The page is poorly written (and frankly comes across as condescending(telling people that "exp" is some mathematical operation is not helpful) and poorly formatted. This is not good when cryonics already triggers some peoples' crank warning detectors) The math seems correct. That gives a much better bound for when chemical reactions will be an issue. It seems strongly then that my initial estimate that chemical reactions prevent kiloyear preservation is pretty wrong.

Well, no. You can't put a body at liquid helium temperatures without massive damage (the whole vitrification trick doesn't work as well). And liquid helium is also much harder to get and work with than liquid nitrogen. Helium is in general much rarer. The radiation shielding also will only help with background radiation. It won't help much with radiation due to C-14 decay or due to potassium decay. Since both are in your body naturally there's not much to do about them.

Count yourself as having other-optimised ;-p

I should clarify that it was not his main point about shortfalls due to signups, but the peripheral point about cryonics being optimistic that I was replying to. I disagree with his main point to a limited degree, i.e. I consider it probable that Alcor is not going to go bankrupt, though I recognize the need to be alert to the possibility.

As he said, money has shown up in the past from wealthy donors who don't want it to fail. I'm not upset at the inequity there because the donors are purchasing social status, and I don't have a problem with paying slightly more (or, if I can afford it, a lot more) to help cover someone else's expenses. (I am more open to socialistic logic than most current cryonicists.)

You come off as assuming that the people in this thread are not aware of the personal identity debate. That doesn't really strike me as productive.

I know the debate exists, I just think the wrong side is winning (in this little corner of the Internet).

These discussions usually occur in an atmosphere where there is far more presumption than there is knowledge, regarding the relationship between the physical brain and elements of personhood like mind, consciousness, or identity.

The default attitude is that a neuron is just a sort of self-healing transistor, that the physical-computational reality in the brain that is relevant for the existence of a person is a set of trillions of physically distinct but causally connected elementary acts of information processing, that the person exists in or alongside these events in some vague way that is not completely specified or understood, and that so long as the cloud of information processing continues in a vaguely similar way, or so long as it is instantiated in a way with vaguely similar causality, the person will continue to exist or will exist again, thanks to the vague and not-understood principle of association that links physical computation and self.

The view of the self which naturally arises subjectively is that it is real and that it persists in time. But because of the computational atomism present in the default attitude (described in the previous paragraph), and also because of MWI dogma and various thought-experiments involving computer programs, the dominant tendency is to say, the natural view is naive and wrong, there's no continuity, you are as much your copies and your duplicates elsewhere in the multiverse as you are this-you, and so on ad infinitum, in a large number of permutations on the theme that you aren't what you think you are or what you appear to be.

Another reason that people are willing to sacrifice the natural view wholesale has to do with attachment to the clarity that comes from mathematical, physical, and computational concepts. These concepts also have an empirical side to their attraction, in that science has validated their use to a certain degree. But I think there is also a love of the types of objective thought that we already know how to perform, a love of them for their own sake, even when they do not easily mesh with something we would otherwise consider a reality. An example would be the flow of time. If there were no mathematical physics which treats time as just another sort of space, we would say, of course time passes; it may be a little mysterious, a little hard to describe (see St Augustine), but of course it's real. But since we have geometric models of space-time which are most easily apprehended in a timeless or static fashion (as a single self-existent geometric object), the flow of time is relegated to consciousness, subjectivity, illusion, even denied outright.

The matter-of-fact belief in uploading (in the sense that a digital emulation of your brain will be conscious and will be you), in cryonics, and a few of the other less baroque permutations of identity, doesn't necessarily derive from this quasi-platonic absorption in abstract objectivity. It can also come from "thought-experiment common-sense", as in your scenario of a world where cryonics or uploading is already common. But the abstract attachment to certain modes of thought is a significant factor in this particular intellectual environment, and in discussions where there is an attempt to think about these matters from first principles. And apparently it needs to be pointed out that everything which is "subjective", and which presents a problem for the standard picture (by which I mean, the combination of computational atomism and physical ontology), is quickly discarded as unreal or is treated as a problem that will take care of itself somehow, even though the standard picture is incredibly vague regarding how identity, mind, or consciousness relates to the physical and biological description.

I lean in the other direction, because the standard picture is still very vague, and also because subjective appearances have evidential value. We have every reason to look for models of reality in which time is real, the self is real, and so on, rather than bravely biting the naturalistic bullet and asserting that all that stuff is somehow unreal or otherwise ontologically secondary. Last year I suggested here that the exact physical correlate of the self might be a specific, very large irreducible tensor factor in the quantum state of the brain. That wasn't a very popular idea. There's also the idea that the self is a little more mesoscopic than that, and should be identified with a dynamic "functional organization" glued together more by causality than by anything else. I think this idea is a little fuzzy, a little problematic, but it's still superior to the patternist theories according to which physical continuity in space and time has nothing to do with identity; and perhaps you can see that on this theory also, a destructive upload or a cryonic resurrectee isn't you - because you were the particular dynamical process which terminated when you died, and the upload and the cryo-copy are distinct processes, with a definite beginning in time which came long after the end of the earlier process on which they were modeled.

You ask how, in a world where cryonic suspension and mind uploading are commonplace, a person could arrive at the intuition that identity does not persist across these transformations. All it would take is the knowledge that a self is an entity of type X, and that in these transformations, one such entity is destroyed and another created. These questions won't remain unanswered forever, and I see no reason to think that the final answers will be friendly to or consistent with a lax attitude towards personal identity. To be is to be something, and inside appearances already tell us that each of us is one particular thing which persists in time. All that remains is to figure out what that thing is, from the perspective of natural science.

imagine growing up in a world where reviving people from something that very obviously halts all their bodily functions for a nontrivial duration, such as cryonics or uploading, is commonplace.

I go to sleep every night. It doesn't halt my bodily processes, but I become less intelligent then animals. People largely don't seem concerned with animals dying, so the logical conclusion is that someone reduced to such low intelligence is effectively already dead.

This isn't confidence in present-day criteria of clinical death, it's confidence that completely freezing your brain breaks whatever form of continuity is responsible for persistence of personhood through ordinary life changes. I'm not 100% sure about it, but that is a radically pulverizing transformation compared to just about anything that a brain can live through. Making a new brain in the image of the old brain and from the pieces of the old brain doesn't change that.

I identify with some forms of restoration but not others. If I cut off all my hair and then it grows back, I have been "restored" without having ever gone away. If I get vaporized now, and then a trillion years later I happen to live again as a Boltzmann brain, that's clearly a copy. There are many conceivable transformations between those two extremes, and as I said to Risto in my first reply, I believe I am something, and that consequently there is an objective fact as to whether a particular transformation just changes me, or whether it actually destroys me (though a substitute may later be created). I think cryonics (and uploading) fall into this latter category. It's not certain but it's likely.

My comment was an explanation for why so few are interested in cryonics.

Most humans are just not built to be interested in living for a long time. Such humans are not losing "the game" of living for as long as possible. They were not playing that game in the first place!