7 ms·

Why wouldn't you do this if you have the money? :-)

alisonkisk 6y ago
If your don't want to be frozen and want to do something useful with your money. If you care about preserving yourself, spread your genes or memes is a more effective way
- melling 6y ago
  In 500 years when we have the technology to revive him and he can live a few hundred additional years, wouldn’t his investment now be better? The understanding of aging, disease, and death is progressing slowly but a few centuries of research will likely make significant discoveries.
- kubanczyk 6y ago
  Spreading your memes for money is known as advertising. Not particularly cheap or effective. Didn't hear about anything similar for genes. These two are much better done by investing your own time and your own effort. Of the remaining important things that money can buy, I think cryogenics is a very decent gamble.
  - justinclift 6y ago
    > Didn't hear about anything similar for genes. Probably the most successful at this that I'm aware of (morality aside) are the IVF doctors who use their own sperm to impregnate women. Some with many biological children from this. Results from a quick online search: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertold_Wiesner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertold_Wiesner * https://edition.cnn.com/2019/02/14/europe/jan-karbaat-fertility-doctor-scli-intl/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2019/02/14/europe/jan-karbaat-fertil... Oh, this looks relevant too and suggests some other approaches. Harem's and/or being a king seem like winners for those so inclined: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_with_the_most_children#Fathers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_with_the_most_c...
rriepe 6y ago
Pascal's wager for the irreligious
- newsbinator 6y ago
  This sounds different than Pascal's wager because it's binary: you have nothing to lose, so preserve or don't preserve. Whereas in Pascal's wager you have to choose one religion, which by definition excludes other religions.
  - rriepe 6y ago
    Here you have to choose a single company to freeze your head. If you choose the right company you get an afterlife, so you might as well choose one, even if they all seem like total bullshit. It is exactly Pascal's wager.
    - wzdd 6y ago
      1. Choose the wrong religion or no religion and you may suffer a fate worse than simple nonexistence. Not so with cryopreservation. 2. Many religions logically exclude other religions, i.e. if they are correct then other religions are not. This is not the case with cryopreservation, where there is a nonzero chance that more than one company may successfully resurrect you. 3. Various monotheistic religions don't accept "I think it's total bullshit but I'm going to act as if I believe it anyway" as belief (opinions vary on what exactly is required), whereas cryopreservation companies are happy to take your money regardless of what you privately think.
      - rriepe 6y ago
        1. You're comparing death to death here but the correct comparison is room-temperature death to Hell. Dead-but-cryopreserved is the pre-afterlife state equivalent to death in traditional religions. 2. How do you revive the frozen heads from companies that couldn't pay their freezer bills three decades ago? You don't. Those heads picked the wrong company. Expecting a just god from some other religion to let you into the afterlife anyway is a common response to Pascal's wager. 3. Is the word you're looking for here "faith"? I don't think that word helps your argument. I will concede that there's probably no condition where the company unfreezes you and then kills you because you're not up to their standards. Well, unless they find those old bad reviews you left...
nolok 6y ago
Honestly I would be worried of it because of all the crazy distopia sci fi stuff one that always resonated to me as "I could see it happen" is those where bodies are donated / preserved by a private entity which ends up changing hands god knows how many time until you wake up in a nightmare later on. Playing SOMA might have ruined it for me...
- arghwhat 6y ago
  What has historically happened is just that the company goes bankrupt, the bodies defrost in random warehouses and is finally disposed of in less-than-respectable fashion. There is pretty much zero chance that a cryopreserved individual would be revived. They're frozen when dying or dead, the process itself causes significant damage (with every mitigation just trading in a different severe form of damage), and even if future technology could undo all that and somehow make this severely damaged body somewhat operational, why in the world would anyone bother? The person is forgotten, replaced, and has nothing in their name any more. There is no gain for those reviving them.
  - azangru 6y ago
    > why in the world would anyone bother Why do people want to resurrect the woolly mammoth? ;-)
    - arghwhat 6y ago
      Because it's extinct.
    - smolder 6y ago
      That's actually possible, because you're not resurrecting a specific, dead wooly mammoth, you're growing a new one. Natural reproductive processes are an effective way to create living things, unlike thawing corpses with what are almost certainly irrevocably damaged brains.
  - saberdancer 6y ago
    Would a dying person be able to set up a trust fund or a bank account/investment that would "live on" when they die. Issue I see here is that the law does not recognize "crypreservation" as continuation of life so all your assets are probably inherited. I'm sure cryo companies offer this type of safekeeping of money or investment.
minitoar 6y ago
Because I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.
- jamesdmiller 6y ago
  Cryonics (I'm signed up with Alcor) can reduce the measure of you being tortured. Assume a multiverse where some versions of you are going to be tortured for a long time. If you sign up for cryonics, if you get brought back most likely you won't get tortured and so this might reduce the percent of you across the multiverse that is not being tortured.
  - minitoar 6y ago
    I’m open to this, but I’m not following how getting brought back equates to less torture. Can you elaborate?
    - jamesdmiller 6y ago
      Let's say that across the multiverse all versions of you are going to collectively live for 1 billion years. Unfortunately, some versions of you will be tortured and let's assume that collectively you will be tortured for 10,000 years meaning that the measure your torture is 10,000 / 1 billion. But if you sign up for cryonics you most likely only get brought back in a world that has cured death and isn't evil. If many versions of you do sign up for cryonics say you live collectively for 2 billion years and are only tortured for 11,000 of these years so the measure of you being tortured is 11,000/ 2 billion.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - minitoar 6y ago
        Ah, it was the “probably a non-torturous society will bring you back, since they are more likely to be altruistic” assumption that I was missing. Of course, it only takes one entity to bring you back for an eternity of torture to ruin this logic, as is the case in IHNMAIMS.
zucker42 6y ago
You can spend the money on something that actually helps other people instead.
- timonoko 6y ago
  After the Final Countdown people will be delighted to find a warehouse full of cryo-preserved well-seasoned meat.
- neilsense 6y ago
  Yawn.
- xiphias2 6y ago
  Actually it helps other people: it's used for researching more efficient ways of cryopreservation, thereby making it more accessible.
  - zucker42 6y ago
    I believe the chance that anyone who is cryopreserved today will ever be revived is exceedingly small, so I look at the whole venture as futile and in the same way I might look at an overly expensive funeral. Personally, I would spend my money to enjoy my life more while I'm alive, or else to help others in some tangible way.
    - xiphias2 6y ago
      Actually it is important tech for living people as well. The technology De Greg Fahy is working on can be used to freeze and unfreeze organs. It may save your (living) life if you get an organ just at the right time.
  - mensetmanusman 6y ago
    The same money could be spent on increasing the rate of research in this area by 100-1000x if we could solve how to do this on mice first...
furyofantares 6y ago
You don't even need much money all at once, you can use life insurance.
tomrod 6y ago
https://bobiverse.fandom.com/wiki/We_Are_Legion_(We_Are_Bob)_Wiki https://bobiverse.fandom.com/wiki/We_Are_Legion_(We_Are_Bob)...
- cbozeman 6y ago
  God I love that series.
busyant 6y ago
> Why wouldn't you do this if you have the money? :-) I've had these fantasies, too and then I thought, "Why wouldn't you just leave a few cells and then have someone re-clone you?" The obvious answer is that your memories/experiences are wiped out and what I _really_ want is to continue on with my pre-existing memories/experiences. It would be more optimal if you could pickle your memories, clone yourself and then (at some appropriate time later in life) "re-implant" the memories into your clone. I think that's what people like Larry King are really hoping for. But then there's all sorts of problems with this (e.g., your loved ones will presumably be gone, so who's going to give a shit about your memories? etc. etc.). The prospect of death is frightening to most of us.
- prmph 6y ago
  But even if your were to be cloned and your memories re-implanted, that would not necessarily be your consciousness
  - hntrader 6y ago
    Agreed, but by that definition my consciousness in 15 years isn't me either, since most of the cells in my body will have been regenerated with different particles.
- hntrader 6y ago
  > what I _really_ want is to continue on with my pre-existing memories/experiences This reminds me of an interesting philosophical question. To state the obvious, even if the clone had an exact copy of your memories/experiences, that clone isn't you, you've died. If I had a teleportation machine that could "teleport" you to work by destroying you painlessly and instantly at the source location, and reconstruct you particle for particle at destination, how many would use it? I wouldn't, however irrational that may be, because "I" would be dead. This bias is pretty interesting since by that definition we all die multiple times, as the particles that constitute our body are literally interchanging with the environment over time. But we don't feel uncomfortable about that fact.
  - 6y ago
coldtea 6y ago
Because you believe in science, not sci-fi inspired scientism metaphysics, so you know it's 100% bogus... If, and when, a real method for immortality/life extension emerges, we can jump on it. Merely frozing a corpse with the idea of some bogus future ressurection technology (that will still retain memories etc) is wishful thinking. Not to mention those cryo-preserves will be shut down with narry a thought in the first case of crisis...
staticman2 6y ago
Because it won't work?
elmomle 6y ago
Because it's profoundly selfish--you _might_ buy yourself more life in some unspecified future, or the same money today could definitely save and/or improve many, many lives now.
ur-whale 6y ago
You should read Transmetropolitan [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmetropolitan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmetropolitan

If your don't want to be frozen and want to do something useful with your money. If you care about preserving yourself, spread your genes or memes is a more effective way

melling 6y ago
In 500 years when we have the technology to revive him and he can live a few hundred additional years, wouldn’t his investment now be better? The understanding of aging, disease, and death is progressing slowly but a few centuries of research will likely make significant discoveries.
kubanczyk 6y ago
Spreading your memes for money is known as advertising. Not particularly cheap or effective. Didn't hear about anything similar for genes. These two are much better done by investing your own time and your own effort. Of the remaining important things that money can buy, I think cryogenics is a very decent gamble.
- justinclift 6y ago
  > Didn't hear about anything similar for genes. Probably the most successful at this that I'm aware of (morality aside) are the IVF doctors who use their own sperm to impregnate women. Some with many biological children from this. Results from a quick online search: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertold_Wiesner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertold_Wiesner * https://edition.cnn.com/2019/02/14/europe/jan-karbaat-fertility-doctor-scli-intl/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2019/02/14/europe/jan-karbaat-fertil... Oh, this looks relevant too and suggests some other approaches. Harem's and/or being a king seem like winners for those so inclined: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_with_the_most_children#Fathers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_with_the_most_c...

rriepe 6y ago

Pascal's wager for the irreligious

newsbinator 6y ago
This sounds different than Pascal's wager because it's binary: you have nothing to lose, so preserve or don't preserve. Whereas in Pascal's wager you have to choose one religion, which by definition excludes other religions.
- rriepe 6y ago
  Here you have to choose a single company to freeze your head. If you choose the right company you get an afterlife, so you might as well choose one, even if they all seem like total bullshit. It is exactly Pascal's wager.
  - wzdd 6y ago
    1. Choose the wrong religion or no religion and you may suffer a fate worse than simple nonexistence. Not so with cryopreservation. 2. Many religions logically exclude other religions, i.e. if they are correct then other religions are not. This is not the case with cryopreservation, where there is a nonzero chance that more than one company may successfully resurrect you. 3. Various monotheistic religions don't accept "I think it's total bullshit but I'm going to act as if I believe it anyway" as belief (opinions vary on what exactly is required), whereas cryopreservation companies are happy to take your money regardless of what you privately think.
    - rriepe 6y ago
      1. You're comparing death to death here but the correct comparison is room-temperature death to Hell. Dead-but-cryopreserved is the pre-afterlife state equivalent to death in traditional religions. 2. How do you revive the frozen heads from companies that couldn't pay their freezer bills three decades ago? You don't. Those heads picked the wrong company. Expecting a just god from some other religion to let you into the afterlife anyway is a common response to Pascal's wager. 3. Is the word you're looking for here "faith"? I don't think that word helps your argument. I will concede that there's probably no condition where the company unfreezes you and then kills you because you're not up to their standards. Well, unless they find those old bad reviews you left...

nolok 6y ago

Honestly I would be worried of it because of all the crazy distopia sci fi stuff one that always resonated to me as "I could see it happen" is those where bodies are donated / preserved by a private entity which ends up changing hands god knows how many time until you wake up in a nightmare later on. Playing SOMA might have ruined it for me...

arghwhat 6y ago
What has historically happened is just that the company goes bankrupt, the bodies defrost in random warehouses and is finally disposed of in less-than-respectable fashion. There is pretty much zero chance that a cryopreserved individual would be revived. They're frozen when dying or dead, the process itself causes significant damage (with every mitigation just trading in a different severe form of damage), and even if future technology could undo all that and somehow make this severely damaged body somewhat operational, why in the world would anyone bother? The person is forgotten, replaced, and has nothing in their name any more. There is no gain for those reviving them.
- azangru 6y ago
  > why in the world would anyone bother Why do people want to resurrect the woolly mammoth? ;-)
  - arghwhat 6y ago
    Because it's extinct.
  - smolder 6y ago
    That's actually possible, because you're not resurrecting a specific, dead wooly mammoth, you're growing a new one. Natural reproductive processes are an effective way to create living things, unlike thawing corpses with what are almost certainly irrevocably damaged brains.
- saberdancer 6y ago
  Would a dying person be able to set up a trust fund or a bank account/investment that would "live on" when they die. Issue I see here is that the law does not recognize "crypreservation" as continuation of life so all your assets are probably inherited. I'm sure cryo companies offer this type of safekeeping of money or investment.

minitoar 6y ago

Because I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.

jamesdmiller 6y ago
Cryonics (I'm signed up with Alcor) can reduce the measure of you being tortured. Assume a multiverse where some versions of you are going to be tortured for a long time. If you sign up for cryonics, if you get brought back most likely you won't get tortured and so this might reduce the percent of you across the multiverse that is not being tortured.
- minitoar 6y ago
  I’m open to this, but I’m not following how getting brought back equates to less torture. Can you elaborate?
  - jamesdmiller 6y ago
    Let's say that across the multiverse all versions of you are going to collectively live for 1 billion years. Unfortunately, some versions of you will be tortured and let's assume that collectively you will be tortured for 10,000 years meaning that the measure your torture is 10,000 / 1 billion. But if you sign up for cryonics you most likely only get brought back in a world that has cured death and isn't evil. If many versions of you do sign up for cryonics say you live collectively for 2 billion years and are only tortured for 11,000 of these years so the measure of you being tortured is 11,000/ 2 billion.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - minitoar 6y ago
      Ah, it was the “probably a non-torturous society will bring you back, since they are more likely to be altruistic” assumption that I was missing. Of course, it only takes one entity to bring you back for an eternity of torture to ruin this logic, as is the case in IHNMAIMS.

zucker42 6y ago

You can spend the money on something that actually helps other people instead.

timonoko 6y ago
After the Final Countdown people will be delighted to find a warehouse full of cryo-preserved well-seasoned meat.
neilsense 6y ago
Yawn.
xiphias2 6y ago
Actually it helps other people: it's used for researching more efficient ways of cryopreservation, thereby making it more accessible.
- zucker42 6y ago
  I believe the chance that anyone who is cryopreserved today will ever be revived is exceedingly small, so I look at the whole venture as futile and in the same way I might look at an overly expensive funeral. Personally, I would spend my money to enjoy my life more while I'm alive, or else to help others in some tangible way.
  - xiphias2 6y ago
    Actually it is important tech for living people as well. The technology De Greg Fahy is working on can be used to freeze and unfreeze organs. It may save your (living) life if you get an organ just at the right time.
- mensetmanusman 6y ago
  The same money could be spent on increasing the rate of research in this area by 100-1000x if we could solve how to do this on mice first...

furyofantares 6y ago

You don't even need much money all at once, you can use life insurance.

tomrod 6y ago

https://bobiverse.fandom.com/wiki/We_Are_Legion_(We_Are_Bob)_Wiki https://bobiverse.fandom.com/wiki/We_Are_Legion_(We_Are_Bob)...

cbozeman 6y ago
God I love that series.

busyant 6y ago

> Why wouldn't you do this if you have the money? :-) I've had these fantasies, too and then I thought, "Why wouldn't you just leave a few cells and then have someone re-clone you?" The obvious answer is that your memories/experiences are wiped out and what I _really_ want is to continue on with my pre-existing memories/experiences. It would be more optimal if you could pickle your memories, clone yourself and then (at some appropriate time later in life) "re-implant" the memories into your clone. I think that's what people like Larry King are really hoping for. But then there's all sorts of problems with this (e.g., your loved ones will presumably be gone, so who's going to give a shit about your memories? etc. etc.). The prospect of death is frightening to most of us.

prmph 6y ago
But even if your were to be cloned and your memories re-implanted, that would not necessarily be your consciousness
- hntrader 6y ago
  Agreed, but by that definition my consciousness in 15 years isn't me either, since most of the cells in my body will have been regenerated with different particles.
hntrader 6y ago
> what I _really_ want is to continue on with my pre-existing memories/experiences This reminds me of an interesting philosophical question. To state the obvious, even if the clone had an exact copy of your memories/experiences, that clone isn't you, you've died. If I had a teleportation machine that could "teleport" you to work by destroying you painlessly and instantly at the source location, and reconstruct you particle for particle at destination, how many would use it? I wouldn't, however irrational that may be, because "I" would be dead. This bias is pretty interesting since by that definition we all die multiple times, as the particles that constitute our body are literally interchanging with the environment over time. But we don't feel uncomfortable about that fact.
- 6y ago

coldtea 6y ago

Because you believe in science, not sci-fi inspired scientism metaphysics, so you know it's 100% bogus... If, and when, a real method for immortality/life extension emerges, we can jump on it. Merely frozing a corpse with the idea of some bogus future ressurection technology (that will still retain memories etc) is wishful thinking. Not to mention those cryo-preserves will be shut down with narry a thought in the first case of crisis...

staticman2 6y ago

Because it won't work?

elmomle 6y ago

Because it's profoundly selfish--you _might_ buy yourself more life in some unspecified future, or the same money today could definitely save and/or improve many, many lives now.

ur-whale 6y ago

You should read Transmetropolitan [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmetropolitan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmetropolitan