8 ms·

Cryonics is one of those things that's hard to evaluate. On the face of it, it seems insane. You're essentially making a bet that someone will find something

by amalcon 11y ago

Cryonics is one of those things that's hard to evaluate. On the face of it, it seems insane. You're essentially making a bet that someone will find something useful to do with a frozen brain -- and that your estate will be able to afford the procedure -- before the company you've entrusted your brain to either makes a mistake or collapses. Given the near-total lack of progress on the former front (there's been considerable progress in the freezing part, but almost none in finding a useful thing to do with a frozen brain), the odds seem phenomenally bad. On the other hand, it does offer something to those who are still alive: the hope that your exstence could continue indefinitely, and that you might get to be with lost loved ones again. This is a valuable hope, so much so that it's built into most religions in some form or other. It's possible that the benefit of this hope makes the costs worth bearing. For now, I've left cryonics in my "not for me, but I won't try to discourage anyone else" bucket.

fizixer 11y ago
Surprisingly, the financial aspect of it is pretty manageable as explained by Max More (head of Alcor) [0]. Apparently if you have signed up for some kind of life-insurance, you simply pay your regular insurance fee, and direct them to give it to Alcor for your preservation if you die. Or if you wish to pay in total, I've heard it's ~$80K for head only. And ~$200K for whole body. Once I can afford any of the above options, cryonics would be my top "burial preference". (Think about it, in the US, it's a fraction of the amount you get to spend in the final year of your life. You could choose to waste a lot of money during age 79-80 on a losing battle, or you could call it quits at 79, for which right-to-die needs to be legal, and spend a fraction on cryonics. Suffice to say, I'm a big advocate of right-to-die as well). [0] (Warning: loud intro) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0xiX9mPB_s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0xiX9mPB_s
- amalcon 11y ago
  Just because that's what Alcor is asking for does not mean that they can actually deliver the service they promise for that amount. Frankly, I don't think any fixed amount is sufficient for a reasonable chance of a positive outcome. A lot can happen in a few hundred years. If you believe they are honest and competent (which I do), there are factors to consider entirely beyond their control. Even if we assume that there are still humans around to run Alcor, that energy prices haven't skyrocketed, that cryonics haven't been made illegal for some reason, and that some kind of war or natural or man-made disaster hasn't wiped out the facility, there's still a rather high chance that some future management of Alcor will be either dishonest or incompetent and ruin the whole thing. On a 200 year scale, I'd place the odds of that alone above 90%, even if I assume maximally effective present management. Again, this doesn't have any effect on the present benefits (hope, etc).
  - Apofis 11y ago
    It's going to suck being part of the first batches of people before Alcor really figured out how to freeze people properly.
blake8086 11y ago
It's not that insane when compared to the alternative.
- a8da6b0c91d 11y ago
  Yes it is. Sane people are comfortable with death. It takes a weird sort of narcissism to pursue cryonics. Dying in the jungle in pursuit of the fountain of youth or bathing in the blood of the young rightfully comes off as bonkers to healthy people.
  - scrollaway 11y ago
    > Sane people are comfortable with death. Check your arrogance levels, they're way off. Sane people are actually very much afraid of death. Anyone would have a much easier time proving that it is insanity not to be afraid of death, than the opposite. > It takes a weird sort of narcissism to pursue cryonics. It takes a much nastier sort of narcissism to be judgemental about how people decide their bodies will be handled after death. > Dying in the jungle in pursuit of the fountain of youth or bathing in the blood of the young rightfully comes off as bonkers to healthy people. Nobody is bathing in blood. If this is what you are actually reading in this topic, I recommend therapy.
    - kombucha2 11y ago
      The poster isn't saying anyone in cryonics is bathing in blood just merely saying that pursuit of cryonic preservation as a means to extend life are one in the same, which they are right now.
      - deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
      - Qwertious 11y ago
        Bathing in peoples blood is considered insane because to do so, you've historically needed to be A PSYCHOPATHIC MASS MURDERER. This breaks the analogy. A more neutral example would be someone who thoroughly investigates dietary health, and makes sure to eat a nutritious, healthy diet full of fresh vegetables and whatnot. Which is CLEARLY insane, /s.
tene 11y ago
Cryonics is pretty unlikely to succeed! I'm signed up for cryonics through Alcor, and I am not confident at all that there's much chance that I'll be revived post-vitrification. I do it because there's an infinitely greater chance of life after vitrification than there is of life after burial, or life after cremation. I see it as a low-percentage last-chance life support. It's early and underdeveloped and flawed in many ways, but it's still the best (only) game in town for when all other medical technology has failed.
- amalcon 11y ago
  This is precisely what I mean when I talk about hope. That value is real, and I don't discount it the way most cryonics non-supporters seem to.
- eli_gottlieb 11y ago
  >I do it because there's an infinitely greater chance of life after vitrification than there is of life after burial, or life after cremation. Except that there are other things you could do with the money, some of which could potentially even give you a much greater chance of not vitrifying in the first place.
  - loup-vaillant 11y ago
    Like, living long enough to benefit from other life-extension procedures? I'm not sure how a few hundred dollars a years are going to hasten those processes. (I'm assuming that losing this money wouldn't prevent someone to live a healthy life in the first place.) Now if you would divert all cryonics resources towards existential risk mitigations, AI or rejuvenation research, that would be a different story. But pretty soon we'd have to discuss how other resources are allocated right now, and next thing we know, we're talking politics. If you ask me, the world can probably finance cryonics for everyone and AI research and anti-ageing research and existential risk mitigation and many other things I didn't think of, while preserving and improving our standards of living at the same time. The (huge) problem is getting our act together.
    - 11y ago
ryandvm 11y ago
Cryonics is another version of Pascal's Wager. Logic and reason assures that it almost certainly is not going to work, but the value of the potential upside is effectively infinite to that individual, so it still may be a rational investment.
- loup-vaillant 11y ago
  The original wager is more extreme than that. Paradise is eternal Fun, while hell is eternal Not Cool. Cryonics, assuming you don't believe in the afterlife, only gives a hope of life in our world, instead of certain oblivion. Life does not have infinite value. People, including atheists, sometimes give their own life for some higher purpose (another life, freedom, a better standard of living for their village…). Of course, this would be different if you seek to escape Hell. (You might be religious, and guilty of some mortal sin.)
  - Apofis 11y ago
    I don't know about you, but to me my life has infinite value, I only have one after all.
    - loup-vaillant 11y ago
      How often do you commute your way to work? Driving has its risks. Now weight this risk against your salary. A cynical calculation may find that your own acts value your life at a few million dollars, maybe even a few dozen millions.
      - geofft 11y ago
        "Life" is more than the biological definition. There are things I could do to my life that would make it no longer worth living (and, on the way there, no longer of infinite value), and living in pathological fear of death is basically the broadest category of those things.
- a8da6b0c91d 11y ago
analog31 11y ago
... before the company you've entrusted your brain to either makes a mistake or collapses. A vastly more likely scenario is that the company is a scam in the first place, and has no particular interest in preserving your brain, given the complete lack of any possible accountability mechanism.
- edanm 11y ago
  That's a little pessimistic, and doesn't sound right to me. There aren't that many companies in cryonics, but they've been around for a long time (30 years I think?). And there are things you can do to verify - e.g. visit their preservation rooms, etc. And people have done this.
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    The pessimists are hard to tell from the realists in this particular case.
  - dennisgorelik 11y ago
    What exactly would you be able to verify? That some dead brains are frozen at the moment?
    - edanm 11y ago
      Well, yes. That would invalidate the whole idea of "they're not even interested in actually preserving anyone". You could verify other things too, but unfortunately, considering it's cryonics, there's not much you can verify except for the authenticity of the effort (e.g. you can't verify effectiveness of the effort since no one really knows).
      - dennisgorelik 11y ago
        If I run a scientific scam, keeping dead brains frozen for the show is an obvious thing to do. It would be like a relic[1]. I'd add some testaments to it with untestable claims. You know, the usual. The main difference between Cryonics and more established religions is that Cryonics is an unproven sect. Major religions survived and polished their traditions for hundreds or thousands of years. Cryonics movement is younger than Scientology[2] --- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relic [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology
336f5 11y ago
> that your estate will be able to afford the procedure -- before the company you've entrusted your brain to either makes a mistake or collapses You've misunderstood the business structure of modern cryonics. A cryonics org like ALCOR is actually two organizations: one is a commercial organization which charges for storage and for the messy business of cryopreservation, and the second is a nonprofit trust which 'owns' the vitrified brains, pays the rent, conservatively invests the rest, and which will pay for the revival procedures if/when such are invented. When the commercial organization collapses, the nonprofit will simply have to have the dewars transferred somewhere else (it takes something like weeks for those things to boil down to a dangerous level; LN2 dewars are really cool!); and I believe there have already been transferrals of cryopatients in the past. When you die, your life insurance is paying much of that out into the trust fund. There's not much question of 'whether your estate will be able to afford the procedure', since that's what the trust is for. It's not your estate's business at all.
- hugh4 11y ago
  The nonprofit can also collapse, though. Is it likely to happen? Honestly I have a very hard time imagining the probabilities. Financial collapse versus deliberate destruction versus horrible accident versus actually getting revived? They all seem unlikely, but once your brain is in deep freeze, its fate is one of those.
  - 336f5 11y ago
    > Is it likely to happen? It's hard to estimate, but nonprofits in the West have OK long-term track records and the cryonics double-organization model has worked well since it was created in the aftermath of Chatsworth (which demonstrated why the commercial side must be separated). Arguably, it only needs to work for another century, and it's not like it's that hard to keep some funds conservatively invested, pay rent regularly, and react once every few decades to a problem.
    - hugh4 11y ago
      I guess there's a fifth possibility: that people in the future learn enough about brain function to figure out that it's literally impossible to reboot a dead brain. I'm no neurologist but wouldn't be surprised if there's information in the brain which is encoded in ways other than which neuron is connected to which. Like, firing patterns.
loup-vaillant 11y ago
> You're essentially making a bet that someone will find something useful to do with a frozen brain Something is deeply wrong with this way of thinking: it doesn't value human life at all. Here's another version. Someone comes to you seeking for help. He's dying. He could be saved by some recently devised miraculous medical procedure, which would return him to full health. The catch is, that procedure is relatively expensive (let's say a few weeks worth of your own salary). Question: would you let him die? Put it this way, of course not. But we tend to forget that cryopreservation, if it works, is exactly the same. See, a preserved person, provided she can actually be reconstructed back to life, is not actually dead. She's mostly dead. There's a difference. Think of it as a very deep coma. So, if we ever devise a proper reconstruction procedure, we have two choices: (i) pay for the procedure and heal that patient at last; or (ii) don't pay and let the patient drift into utter annihilation. Heal or don't heal. It's that simple. --- Now maybe you assume a frozen brain is not a living person. Maybe you're right. Maybe the preservation wasn't good enough on this particular brain. Maybe the preservation procedure was flawed to begin with. Maybe the brain doesn't hold enough information about a person to begin with. Maybe we won't find the technological means to actually get the brain back to its old state —even if it's theoretically possible. Maybe we won't be able to fix whatever caused the brainwaves to go flat in the first place —if that's fixable even in theory, see Alzheimer. I'm sure I've forgotten lots of ways this could go horribly wrong. Anyway, if any of this is true, that frozen brain can't be recovered, does count as dead, and you'd be right to call it a "frozen brain" instead of a "patient". The thing is, to the best of our current knowledge, the odds are not nil. They're not good, but they're not nil. There is a chance that the brain is actually alive —I mean, in some real deep coma. I'm not talking about some abstract hope here, but some actual probabilities of the kind you have for experimental drugs on cancer patients. Slim, but real. And of course, if we somehow come up with an actual reconstruction procedure, if we somehow can examine the brain and be assured that yes, a return to full health is not only possible, but highly probable, then we'll know that brain was alive all along. That it was a living person in dire need of healing. Surely the people of the future would be willing to pay for such healing? If not strangers, maybe (distant) relatives? Some philanthropist? The transhumanist community? Government or mutual funds? Today, people pay good money to give Kim a very slim hope of living again. In what kind of bleak world would no one be willing to pay for a probable return to full health?
ck2 11y ago
Now factor in the sheer population of the earth by the time science reaches such an implausible point and realize how little one life matters to anyone living or remotely "in charge".
WalterBright 11y ago
Isn't it still the Star Trek Transporter problem? The future may be able to revive a copy of you, that thinks it is you, but you'd still be dead.
- loup-vaillant 11y ago
  Oh, that one's easy. At the state of current science, we're pretty much sure that the Star Trek transporter doesn't kill the traveller. The "copy" is the original, in fact. Basically, this is because we're kinda made of particles, and the origin of the quarks you're made up of doesn't matter. As in, current physics don't even have a notion of the identity of a particle. The part where it gets weird is, if you don't destroy the "original", you end up with two originals. More (much more) details here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/r9/quantum_mechanics_and_personal_identity/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/r9/quantum_mechanics_and_personal_id...
  - WalterBright 11y ago
    > pretty much sure Are you willing to risk your life on "pretty much sure" ? Especially when there's no experiment you can devise to test it?
    - WalterBright 11y ago
      You downvoters have my blessing to go use it. Not me!
    - AgentME 11y ago
      If there's no conceivable experiment to test whether it's just a copy, then it seems like the copy isn't any different than the original.
    - loup-vaillant 11y ago
      I'm not talking about interpretation of quantum mechanics here. Just standard physics, of the kind we can test for —did test for. If the Star Trek transporter is shown to work (it has transported healthy monkeys so far, and did nothing weird with flies), I would totally step on it. I would feel uneasy of course, but no more so than if I stepped into a rocket.
Apofis 11y ago
For me, the only reason cryonics appeals to me is that I really really want to see the kinds of things humanity will come up 100 years down the line, 1000 years down the line... it's unimaginable but I really want to see our future and experience it. Hopefully by the time I'm in my 50's, cryogenics will be far more advanced and it will be a feasible alternative to simply disappearing.
developer1 11y ago
Yes, because the fear of death totally makes the decision to have faith in sci-fi a rational thought. I sincerely hope our species never solves the puzzle of immortal life or even prolonging a life past a natural existence. The mere thought disgusts me. Please, hell no.
caycep 11y ago
to be honest, from a histology, pathology point of view, it's pretty doubtful anyone frozen today would be restored to anywhere near working consciousness, no matter how many rat brain glycerol SEM slice pictures the company trots out. The second law of thermodynamics is pretty rough on neural tissue.
saalweachter 11y ago
> ... and that your estate will be able to afford the procedure ... The concerns about your frozen remains spoiling before anything happens is valid, but I personally suspect that unfreezing will play out like Social Security, but in reverse order. If we're unfrozen, it will be paid for (or prompted, in whatever post-scarcity Star Trek economy exists in the future) by our children and grandchildren, who will be unfrozen by their children and grandchildren, or childhood friend who misses them, or former coworker, and so on down the line. There's probably no practical or economic reason for future people to unfreeze corpsicles, but there are sentimental ones. So I'm not so much worried about estates needing to pay for unfreezing or some future banks needing COBOL programmers.

by amalcon 11y ago

fizixer 11y ago

Surprisingly, the financial aspect of it is pretty manageable as explained by Max More (head of Alcor) [0]. Apparently if you have signed up for some kind of life-insurance, you simply pay your regular insurance fee, and direct them to give it to Alcor for your preservation if you die. Or if you wish to pay in total, I've heard it's ~$80K for head only. And ~$200K for whole body. Once I can afford any of the above options, cryonics would be my top "burial preference". (Think about it, in the US, it's a fraction of the amount you get to spend in the final year of your life. You could choose to waste a lot of money during age 79-80 on a losing battle, or you could call it quits at 79, for which right-to-die needs to be legal, and spend a fraction on cryonics. Suffice to say, I'm a big advocate of right-to-die as well). [0] (Warning: loud intro) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0xiX9mPB_s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0xiX9mPB_s

amalcon 11y ago
Just because that's what Alcor is asking for does not mean that they can actually deliver the service they promise for that amount. Frankly, I don't think any fixed amount is sufficient for a reasonable chance of a positive outcome. A lot can happen in a few hundred years. If you believe they are honest and competent (which I do), there are factors to consider entirely beyond their control. Even if we assume that there are still humans around to run Alcor, that energy prices haven't skyrocketed, that cryonics haven't been made illegal for some reason, and that some kind of war or natural or man-made disaster hasn't wiped out the facility, there's still a rather high chance that some future management of Alcor will be either dishonest or incompetent and ruin the whole thing. On a 200 year scale, I'd place the odds of that alone above 90%, even if I assume maximally effective present management. Again, this doesn't have any effect on the present benefits (hope, etc).
- Apofis 11y ago
  It's going to suck being part of the first batches of people before Alcor really figured out how to freeze people properly.

blake8086 11y ago

It's not that insane when compared to the alternative.

a8da6b0c91d 11y ago
Yes it is. Sane people are comfortable with death. It takes a weird sort of narcissism to pursue cryonics. Dying in the jungle in pursuit of the fountain of youth or bathing in the blood of the young rightfully comes off as bonkers to healthy people.
- scrollaway 11y ago
  > Sane people are comfortable with death. Check your arrogance levels, they're way off. Sane people are actually very much afraid of death. Anyone would have a much easier time proving that it is insanity not to be afraid of death, than the opposite. > It takes a weird sort of narcissism to pursue cryonics. It takes a much nastier sort of narcissism to be judgemental about how people decide their bodies will be handled after death. > Dying in the jungle in pursuit of the fountain of youth or bathing in the blood of the young rightfully comes off as bonkers to healthy people. Nobody is bathing in blood. If this is what you are actually reading in this topic, I recommend therapy.
  - kombucha2 11y ago
    The poster isn't saying anyone in cryonics is bathing in blood just merely saying that pursuit of cryonic preservation as a means to extend life are one in the same, which they are right now.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - Qwertious 11y ago
      Bathing in peoples blood is considered insane because to do so, you've historically needed to be A PSYCHOPATHIC MASS MURDERER. This breaks the analogy. A more neutral example would be someone who thoroughly investigates dietary health, and makes sure to eat a nutritious, healthy diet full of fresh vegetables and whatnot. Which is CLEARLY insane, /s.

tene 11y ago

Cryonics is pretty unlikely to succeed! I'm signed up for cryonics through Alcor, and I am not confident at all that there's much chance that I'll be revived post-vitrification. I do it because there's an infinitely greater chance of life after vitrification than there is of life after burial, or life after cremation. I see it as a low-percentage last-chance life support. It's early and underdeveloped and flawed in many ways, but it's still the best (only) game in town for when all other medical technology has failed.

amalcon 11y ago
This is precisely what I mean when I talk about hope. That value is real, and I don't discount it the way most cryonics non-supporters seem to.
eli_gottlieb 11y ago
>I do it because there's an infinitely greater chance of life after vitrification than there is of life after burial, or life after cremation. Except that there are other things you could do with the money, some of which could potentially even give you a much greater chance of not vitrifying in the first place.
- loup-vaillant 11y ago
  Like, living long enough to benefit from other life-extension procedures? I'm not sure how a few hundred dollars a years are going to hasten those processes. (I'm assuming that losing this money wouldn't prevent someone to live a healthy life in the first place.) Now if you would divert all cryonics resources towards existential risk mitigations, AI or rejuvenation research, that would be a different story. But pretty soon we'd have to discuss how other resources are allocated right now, and next thing we know, we're talking politics. If you ask me, the world can probably finance cryonics for everyone and AI research and anti-ageing research and existential risk mitigation and many other things I didn't think of, while preserving and improving our standards of living at the same time. The (huge) problem is getting our act together.
  - 11y ago

ryandvm 11y ago

Cryonics is another version of Pascal's Wager. Logic and reason assures that it almost certainly is not going to work, but the value of the potential upside is effectively infinite to that individual, so it still may be a rational investment.

loup-vaillant 11y ago
The original wager is more extreme than that. Paradise is eternal Fun, while hell is eternal Not Cool. Cryonics, assuming you don't believe in the afterlife, only gives a hope of life in our world, instead of certain oblivion. Life does not have infinite value. People, including atheists, sometimes give their own life for some higher purpose (another life, freedom, a better standard of living for their village…). Of course, this would be different if you seek to escape Hell. (You might be religious, and guilty of some mortal sin.)
- Apofis 11y ago
  I don't know about you, but to me my life has infinite value, I only have one after all.
  - loup-vaillant 11y ago
    How often do you commute your way to work? Driving has its risks. Now weight this risk against your salary. A cynical calculation may find that your own acts value your life at a few million dollars, maybe even a few dozen millions.
    - geofft 11y ago
      "Life" is more than the biological definition. There are things I could do to my life that would make it no longer worth living (and, on the way there, no longer of infinite value), and living in pathological fear of death is basically the broadest category of those things.
a8da6b0c91d 11y ago

analog31 11y ago

... before the company you've entrusted your brain to either makes a mistake or collapses. A vastly more likely scenario is that the company is a scam in the first place, and has no particular interest in preserving your brain, given the complete lack of any possible accountability mechanism.

edanm 11y ago
That's a little pessimistic, and doesn't sound right to me. There aren't that many companies in cryonics, but they've been around for a long time (30 years I think?). And there are things you can do to verify - e.g. visit their preservation rooms, etc. And people have done this.
- jacquesm 11y ago
  The pessimists are hard to tell from the realists in this particular case.
- dennisgorelik 11y ago
  What exactly would you be able to verify? That some dead brains are frozen at the moment?
  - edanm 11y ago
    Well, yes. That would invalidate the whole idea of "they're not even interested in actually preserving anyone". You could verify other things too, but unfortunately, considering it's cryonics, there's not much you can verify except for the authenticity of the effort (e.g. you can't verify effectiveness of the effort since no one really knows).
    - dennisgorelik 11y ago
      If I run a scientific scam, keeping dead brains frozen for the show is an obvious thing to do. It would be like a relic[1]. I'd add some testaments to it with untestable claims. You know, the usual. The main difference between Cryonics and more established religions is that Cryonics is an unproven sect. Major religions survived and polished their traditions for hundreds or thousands of years. Cryonics movement is younger than Scientology[2] --- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relic [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology

336f5 11y ago

> that your estate will be able to afford the procedure -- before the company you've entrusted your brain to either makes a mistake or collapses You've misunderstood the business structure of modern cryonics. A cryonics org like ALCOR is actually two organizations: one is a commercial organization which charges for storage and for the messy business of cryopreservation, and the second is a nonprofit trust which 'owns' the vitrified brains, pays the rent, conservatively invests the rest, and which will pay for the revival procedures if/when such are invented. When the commercial organization collapses, the nonprofit will simply have to have the dewars transferred somewhere else (it takes something like weeks for those things to boil down to a dangerous level; LN2 dewars are really cool!); and I believe there have already been transferrals of cryopatients in the past. When you die, your life insurance is paying much of that out into the trust fund. There's not much question of 'whether your estate will be able to afford the procedure', since that's what the trust is for. It's not your estate's business at all.

hugh4 11y ago
The nonprofit can also collapse, though. Is it likely to happen? Honestly I have a very hard time imagining the probabilities. Financial collapse versus deliberate destruction versus horrible accident versus actually getting revived? They all seem unlikely, but once your brain is in deep freeze, its fate is one of those.
- 336f5 11y ago
  > Is it likely to happen? It's hard to estimate, but nonprofits in the West have OK long-term track records and the cryonics double-organization model has worked well since it was created in the aftermath of Chatsworth (which demonstrated why the commercial side must be separated). Arguably, it only needs to work for another century, and it's not like it's that hard to keep some funds conservatively invested, pay rent regularly, and react once every few decades to a problem.
  - hugh4 11y ago
    I guess there's a fifth possibility: that people in the future learn enough about brain function to figure out that it's literally impossible to reboot a dead brain. I'm no neurologist but wouldn't be surprised if there's information in the brain which is encoded in ways other than which neuron is connected to which. Like, firing patterns.

loup-vaillant 11y ago

> You're essentially making a bet that someone will find something useful to do with a frozen brain Something is deeply wrong with this way of thinking: it doesn't value human life at all. Here's another version. Someone comes to you seeking for help. He's dying. He could be saved by some recently devised miraculous medical procedure, which would return him to full health. The catch is, that procedure is relatively expensive (let's say a few weeks worth of your own salary). Question: would you let him die? Put it this way, of course not. But we tend to forget that cryopreservation, if it works, is exactly the same. See, a preserved person, provided she can actually be reconstructed back to life, is not actually dead. She's mostly dead. There's a difference. Think of it as a very deep coma. So, if we ever devise a proper reconstruction procedure, we have two choices: (i) pay for the procedure and heal that patient at last; or (ii) don't pay and let the patient drift into utter annihilation. Heal or don't heal. It's that simple. --- Now maybe you assume a frozen brain is not a living person. Maybe you're right. Maybe the preservation wasn't good enough on this particular brain. Maybe the preservation procedure was flawed to begin with. Maybe the brain doesn't hold enough information about a person to begin with. Maybe we won't find the technological means to actually get the brain back to its old state —even if it's theoretically possible. Maybe we won't be able to fix whatever caused the brainwaves to go flat in the first place —if that's fixable even in theory, see Alzheimer. I'm sure I've forgotten lots of ways this could go horribly wrong. Anyway, if any of this is true, that frozen brain can't be recovered, does count as dead, and you'd be right to call it a "frozen brain" instead of a "patient". The thing is, to the best of our current knowledge, the odds are not nil. They're not good, but they're not nil. There is a chance that the brain is actually alive —I mean, in some real deep coma. I'm not talking about some abstract hope here, but some actual probabilities of the kind you have for experimental drugs on cancer patients. Slim, but real. And of course, if we somehow come up with an actual reconstruction procedure, if we somehow can examine the brain and be assured that yes, a return to full health is not only possible, but highly probable, then we'll know that brain was alive all along. That it was a living person in dire need of healing. Surely the people of the future would be willing to pay for such healing? If not strangers, maybe (distant) relatives? Some philanthropist? The transhumanist community? Government or mutual funds? Today, people pay good money to give Kim a very slim hope of living again. In what kind of bleak world would no one be willing to pay for a probable return to full health?

ck2 11y ago

Now factor in the sheer population of the earth by the time science reaches such an implausible point and realize how little one life matters to anyone living or remotely "in charge".

WalterBright 11y ago

Isn't it still the Star Trek Transporter problem? The future may be able to revive a copy of you, that thinks it is you, but you'd still be dead.

loup-vaillant 11y ago
Oh, that one's easy. At the state of current science, we're pretty much sure that the Star Trek transporter doesn't kill the traveller. The "copy" is the original, in fact. Basically, this is because we're kinda made of particles, and the origin of the quarks you're made up of doesn't matter. As in, current physics don't even have a notion of the identity of a particle. The part where it gets weird is, if you don't destroy the "original", you end up with two originals. More (much more) details here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/r9/quantum_mechanics_and_personal_identity/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/r9/quantum_mechanics_and_personal_id...
- WalterBright 11y ago
  > pretty much sure Are you willing to risk your life on "pretty much sure" ? Especially when there's no experiment you can devise to test it?
  - WalterBright 11y ago
    You downvoters have my blessing to go use it. Not me!
  - AgentME 11y ago
    If there's no conceivable experiment to test whether it's just a copy, then it seems like the copy isn't any different than the original.
  - loup-vaillant 11y ago
    I'm not talking about interpretation of quantum mechanics here. Just standard physics, of the kind we can test for —did test for. If the Star Trek transporter is shown to work (it has transported healthy monkeys so far, and did nothing weird with flies), I would totally step on it. I would feel uneasy of course, but no more so than if I stepped into a rocket.

Apofis 11y ago

For me, the only reason cryonics appeals to me is that I really really want to see the kinds of things humanity will come up 100 years down the line, 1000 years down the line... it's unimaginable but I really want to see our future and experience it. Hopefully by the time I'm in my 50's, cryogenics will be far more advanced and it will be a feasible alternative to simply disappearing.

developer1 11y ago

Yes, because the fear of death totally makes the decision to have faith in sci-fi a rational thought. I sincerely hope our species never solves the puzzle of immortal life or even prolonging a life past a natural existence. The mere thought disgusts me. Please, hell no.

caycep 11y ago

to be honest, from a histology, pathology point of view, it's pretty doubtful anyone frozen today would be restored to anywhere near working consciousness, no matter how many rat brain glycerol SEM slice pictures the company trots out. The second law of thermodynamics is pretty rough on neural tissue.

saalweachter 11y ago

> ... and that your estate will be able to afford the procedure ... The concerns about your frozen remains spoiling before anything happens is valid, but I personally suspect that unfreezing will play out like Social Security, but in reverse order. If we're unfrozen, it will be paid for (or prompted, in whatever post-scarcity Star Trek economy exists in the future) by our children and grandchildren, who will be unfrozen by their children and grandchildren, or childhood friend who misses them, or former coworker, and so on down the line. There's probably no practical or economic reason for future people to unfreeze corpsicles, but there are sentimental ones. So I'm not so much worried about estates needing to pay for unfreezing or some future banks needing COBOL programmers.