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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.
Great idea! Looking forward to resuming work on digitizing cryonics signup. For people signing up with Cryonics Institute, I want to hear all the points of friction!
More details:
https://www.reddit.com/r/cryonics/comments/istrk7/streamlining_cryonics_signup/
Submitting my blog post on AI Alignment testing https://medium.com/@thelastalias/ai-alignment-testing-bf8f4b6bb261?source=linkShare-182b8243d384-1522555285
The linked quote from Ian Goodfellow:
Yes, I left OpenAI at the end of February and returned to Google Brain. I enjoyed my time at OpenAI and am proud of the work my OpenAI colleagues and I accomplished. I returned to Google Brain because as time went on I found that my research focus on adversarial examples and related technologies like differential privacy saw me collaborate predominantly with colleagues at Google.