7 ms·

You Only Live Twice

35 points by bloch 18y ago

tdavis 18y ago
Not signing up for cryonics - what does that say? That you've lost hope in the future. That you've lost your will to live. That you've stopped believing that human life, and your own life, is something of value. No, it's because I value my life so much that I don't believe in cryonics. If it is your belief that it is possible to live N number of lives, your current life loses some of its meaning. Maybe you don't strive for so much, because there's probably more time later. Maybe you don't try as hard because if you fail, you might get a do-over. Maybe you don't shoot for the whole "regret nothing" thing with as much tenacity.
- izaidi 18y ago
  By that logic, would you rather die in 5 years than in 50?
  - tdavis 18y ago
    Uhhh.. neither? Measuring it changes the outcome. Knowing when I'm going to die is as bad as believing I won't.
    - asdflkj 18y ago
      You already know with high probability when you're gonna die. If anything, living indefinitely (or giving yourself a chance thereof) takes you farther from knowing when you're gonna die.
Retric 18y ago
I think cryonics is about as useful as all those old tombs in Egypt. We could probably clone some of those body's and reviving people from cryonics might be an interesting experiment for our decedents but in both cases much of that dead person will have been lost. And trading resources in this life so that some shadow of me might show up in the future is not worth much time. So yea it's the best hope we have now, like it was their best hope back then, but all they are talking about is imperfect copies.
jongalt 18y ago
Reasons why cryonics is dumb: - First off, there's a close to zero chance of a successful revival. Pretty much all of the major problems with thawing (like, let's rebuild your severely damaged brain) are pushed off onto future generations to solve. Not to mention curing whatever killed you in the first place. But let's pretend the future is magic, and this can work... - Who pays for this? And no, I'm not talking about the freezing. The article presumes we can just use life insurance to pay for cryonics (and not say, to support your presently alive loved ones). But who pays for your future miraculous revival? Even in the super advanced future, presumably a complex procedure like reconstructing a human brain won't exactly be a cheap one. Not to mention all the medical care you'd need for recovery (and don't forget about all those people who just froze their heads, they'll need whole new bodies!). Why exactly are the people of the future so eager to resurrect all these frozen corpses of people with no living family or friends to support them? Is the future such a utopia that not only have we solved overpopulation, but we're desperately looking to bring back long frozen bodies with severe medical problems? - The part that really strikes me as idealistic and naive about the article though, is the idea that death is "not part of the plan". And I thought we were being unrealistic about the future when they could rebuild your brain. So now everyone lives forever? That doesn't seem very sustainable. Not to mention the fact that it is the very finiteness of life that makes it valuable in the first place. Conclusion: The present is yours to do with what you like, and the future may or may not ever get here. Invest in today.
- newt0311 18y ago
  Lets see... Value of my life (at least to myself): infinity, Probability of revival: >0 Expected value = (probability of revival) * (value of my life) = infinity. So... low odds are not a good excuse to not go for cryonics. Next, who pays: The person being frozen. Its like a trust fund. Toss in a large one time sum and live off the interest. The interest on 120K at 4% annual compound interest (after inflation) is ~500 dollars/yr which should be enough to maintain what is basically a big freezer for a long time and note that that 4% is a very conservative figure and accumulating 120K is not a big deal for those in the upper middle class and above which is still a lot of people. What he means by "death is not part of the plan" is that at least they are trying to live longer, even if the chances of success are slim. Conclusion: Cryonics has the potential to be a valuable investment.
time_management 18y ago
I find it interesting that there's a not-small class of atheists who, believing they face the horror of annihilation, are driven to believe in things that are just as irrational as traditional religion-- mind uploading, cryonics, singularity, etc. I don't know if there's an existence after death, though I think there probably is one, and I consider myself lucky to believe this, for if I'm wrong, I'll never know. What's horrible about annihilation/nonexistence isn't any experience of it-- there is none, by definition-- but the rather hideous shadow the prospect, were it true, would cast over life.
- yters 18y ago
  Yeah, I don't get the "horror" of annihilation. If I won't care once I'm gone, why should I care now?
  - aaronblohowiak 18y ago
    Biology.
  - time_management 18y ago
    Because a human life is so incredibly short that decline and death are rapidly impending, and it's difficult not to think about them constantly. Perhaps I'm unusual, but I think about death-- my death, not just the abstraction-- several times per day. And I'm not a depressed or morbid person, so I think this is pretty normal. It would suck if the final act of existence were painful decline, followed by eternal oblivion. It could well be the case, but I'm glad that if it is, I'll never know about it.
    - yters 18y ago
      Well, that's just a matter of psychology then, not any kind of logical should. I think about death too, but it doesn't seem to bother me like it does others since I don't see a logical reason behind the dread. Sure, the psychological side still gets to me when I stare death in the face, but otherwise not so much. A logical should would be something like if I were to die I would spend an eternity in ceaseless boredom. That would be a reason to avoid death. Otherwise it is just a false anticipation, like jumping off a high rock when you know it is perfectly safe. I try to eliminate that from my life if I can, which is the rational course of action. I think this is the psychological basis of thrill seeking. If you look at your own decision making process, you'll see that this procedure is how you also shape your psychological reactions. Say you really dreaded a certain event, such as moving out of your parents house. Then, when the time came, you found you could handle yourself alright. With that knowledge in the back of your mind, you no longer dread similar situations as much. I'm just making this process explicit in how I think about life.
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yters 18y ago
That's a pretty hopeless point of view. Why not assume that in the future they'll harness the universe's full computational capabilities and emulate every single being that has ever lived? If cryonics is possible, the simulation scenario is just as possible, since it uses the exact same assumptions. Plus, it is a lot cheaper to believe in:)
- byrneseyeview 18y ago
  Why not assume that in the future they'll harness the universe's full computational capabilities and emulate every single being that has ever lived? Because if you assume it will happen, you have to assume that the mostly likely explanation for your existence is that it did happen.
  - yters 18y ago
    That's a bad reason to assume the opposite. If Eliezer's assumptions are valid, then the scenario I outline is just as valid. You can't have one without the other.
tocomment 18y ago
Does the idea of quantum immortality suggest that you would be revived? In that case I guess you're already living in a universe where you WILL freeze yourself (or in one where the singularity gets here soon.)
jodrellblank 18y ago
Reasons why cryonics is dumb: Life is suffering (Buddha, n B.C.) Death is void. Nothing > suffering. But there's a wall of pain/fear/effort/risk with suicide that keeps people inside life. Once you're dead, you're forced past the wall and it's a simple choice: more suffering or no suffering? Immortality by not dieing isn't quite the same option - avoiding old age suffering or going to old age suffering? Easy, being alive and rejuvenated wins.
patio11 18y ago
OK, so maybe I read too many fantasy and sci-fi novels, but I'm less interested in the problems of coming back from the dead. What really interests me is the related problem of how to kill someone securely. Take, for a prosaic example, vampires. Shooting a vampire will almost certainly NOT kill them -- sources differ but they might not die, might die but revive immediately, might die but revive the next night, etc. So how to kill a vampire definitively? I think, based on the union of all the vampire lore I've heard, you have to: * stake him * stuff his mouth with holy wafers * cut off his head * burn the body (both parts, presumably, but better to keep them separate) * bury the ashes on hallowed ground * ... at high noon * drop a nuclear bomb on top of the church THERE. One vampire, securely disposed of. I'm sorry if this digression into the fantastic was a waste of time for you. We now return you to your regularly scheduled intellectual discussion of cryogenics.
chris11 18y ago
I'm not convinced that medical science is so far behind determining life. Once a person is pronounced dead, I'm convinced they're brain dead. So it's useless to preserve someone when nearly all of their information on the state of their mind has been lost.
- aantix 18y ago
  http://www.newsweek.com/id/35045 http://www.newsweek.com/id/35045 "The patient couldn't be revived because the tissues of his brain and heart had suffered irreversible damage from lack of oxygen. This process was understood to begin after just four or five minutes. If the patient doesn't receive cardiopulmonary resuscitation within that time, and if his heart can't be restarted soon thereafter, he is unlikely to recover. That dogma went unquestioned until researchers actually looked at oxygen-starved heart cells under a microscope. What they saw amazed them, according to Dr. Lance Becker, an authority on emergency medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. "After one hour," he says, "we couldn't see evidence the cells had died. We thought we'd done something wrong." In fact, cells cut off from their blood supply died only hours later."
- mhartl 18y ago
  You're right to be skeptical, but I encourage you to investigate further, since this is a common but erroneous belief: that even a few minutes without oxygen causes irreparable brain damage. In fact, it's the autoimmune response upon revival that causes the damage to the brain, not the hypoxia. And cold prevents the damage; some types of brain surgery require zero blood pressure, and are performed at low temperature (potentially for hours) without harm to the brain.
  - chris11 18y ago
    I probably spoke to fast. I could see it being somewhat feasible if the cryonics facility was immediately informed that the patient was dying, and the patient was frozen within hours of clinical death. My main concern is the success of freezing a brain dead person. I also was mainly referring earlier to the loss of information in the brain, not the actual physical brain damage.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theoretical_death http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theoretical_death. So if the family refuses or delays to inform the organization, I'm skeptical about whether the information in the brain can be preserved. And there have been bitter legal battles fought over cryonics. http://www.depressedmetabolism.com/is-that-what-love-is-the-hostile-wife-phenomenon-in-cryonics/ http://www.depressedmetabolism.com/is-that-what-love-is-the-...
dexter 18y ago
"If you want to securely erase a hard drive, it's not as easy as writing it over with zeroes. Sure, an "erased" hard drive like this won't boot up your computer if you just plug it in again. But if the drive falls into the hands of a specialist with a scanning tunneling microscope, they can tell the difference between "this was a 0, overwritten by a 0" and "this was a 1, overwritten by a 0". There are programs advertised to "securely erase" hard drives using many overwrites of 0s, 1s, and random data. But if you want to keep the secret on your hard drive secure against all possible future technologies that might ever be developed, then cover it with thermite and set it on fire. It's the only way to be sure." There have been no cases of anyone ever restoring a zeroed hard drive. It's utter bullshit. Especially these days with our precision aligned platters and insane densities.
mattmaroon 18y ago
Maybe, I'm wrong, but I often get the impression that the person who writes this blog is in need of a good grief counselor, but may be too smart for most of them to help.
- Eliezer 18y ago
  My grief is not the problem. This world is the problem.
  - mattmaroon 18y ago
    If this world is the problem, you need to redefine the word problem.
    - MaysonL 18y ago
      No, you just need to change the bleeping world.
      - mattmaroon 18y ago
        Maybe. Maybe death isn't such a bad thing. We only dislike it due to our grief response, but outside of that it performs lots of useful functions. Also, I'm still highly skeptical cryonics will ever be reversible to the point where I can truly be brought back. My body may be reanimated, maybe, but without my memories, it's not much different than birthing a fully formed adult. I'm not opposed to cryonics in general, but the author said he thought it should be done by the state to everyone unidentified, which I find ludicrous.

35 points by bloch 18y ago

Not signing up for cryonics - what does that say? That you've lost hope in the future. That you've lost your will to live. That you've stopped believing that human life, and your own life, is something of value. No, it's because I value my life so much that I don't believe in cryonics. If it is your belief that it is possible to live N number of lives, your current life loses some of its meaning. Maybe you don't strive for so much, because there's probably more time later. Maybe you don't try as hard because if you fail, you might get a do-over. Maybe you don't shoot for the whole "regret nothing" thing with as much tenacity.

izaidi 18y ago
By that logic, would you rather die in 5 years than in 50?
- tdavis 18y ago
  Uhhh.. neither? Measuring it changes the outcome. Knowing when I'm going to die is as bad as believing I won't.
  - asdflkj 18y ago
    You already know with high probability when you're gonna die. If anything, living indefinitely (or giving yourself a chance thereof) takes you farther from knowing when you're gonna die.

Retric 18y ago

I think cryonics is about as useful as all those old tombs in Egypt. We could probably clone some of those body's and reviving people from cryonics might be an interesting experiment for our decedents but in both cases much of that dead person will have been lost. And trading resources in this life so that some shadow of me might show up in the future is not worth much time. So yea it's the best hope we have now, like it was their best hope back then, but all they are talking about is imperfect copies.

jongalt 18y ago

Reasons why cryonics is dumb: - First off, there's a close to zero chance of a successful revival. Pretty much all of the major problems with thawing (like, let's rebuild your severely damaged brain) are pushed off onto future generations to solve. Not to mention curing whatever killed you in the first place. But let's pretend the future is magic, and this can work... - Who pays for this? And no, I'm not talking about the freezing. The article presumes we can just use life insurance to pay for cryonics (and not say, to support your presently alive loved ones). But who pays for your future miraculous revival? Even in the super advanced future, presumably a complex procedure like reconstructing a human brain won't exactly be a cheap one. Not to mention all the medical care you'd need for recovery (and don't forget about all those people who just froze their heads, they'll need whole new bodies!). Why exactly are the people of the future so eager to resurrect all these frozen corpses of people with no living family or friends to support them? Is the future such a utopia that not only have we solved overpopulation, but we're desperately looking to bring back long frozen bodies with severe medical problems? - The part that really strikes me as idealistic and naive about the article though, is the idea that death is "not part of the plan". And I thought we were being unrealistic about the future when they could rebuild your brain. So now everyone lives forever? That doesn't seem very sustainable. Not to mention the fact that it is the very finiteness of life that makes it valuable in the first place. Conclusion: The present is yours to do with what you like, and the future may or may not ever get here. Invest in today.

newt0311 18y ago
Lets see... Value of my life (at least to myself): infinity, Probability of revival: >0 Expected value = (probability of revival) * (value of my life) = infinity. So... low odds are not a good excuse to not go for cryonics. Next, who pays: The person being frozen. Its like a trust fund. Toss in a large one time sum and live off the interest. The interest on 120K at 4% annual compound interest (after inflation) is ~500 dollars/yr which should be enough to maintain what is basically a big freezer for a long time and note that that 4% is a very conservative figure and accumulating 120K is not a big deal for those in the upper middle class and above which is still a lot of people. What he means by "death is not part of the plan" is that at least they are trying to live longer, even if the chances of success are slim. Conclusion: Cryonics has the potential to be a valuable investment.

time_management 18y ago

I find it interesting that there's a not-small class of atheists who, believing they face the horror of annihilation, are driven to believe in things that are just as irrational as traditional religion-- mind uploading, cryonics, singularity, etc. I don't know if there's an existence after death, though I think there probably is one, and I consider myself lucky to believe this, for if I'm wrong, I'll never know. What's horrible about annihilation/nonexistence isn't any experience of it-- there is none, by definition-- but the rather hideous shadow the prospect, were it true, would cast over life.

yters 18y ago
Yeah, I don't get the "horror" of annihilation. If I won't care once I'm gone, why should I care now?
- aaronblohowiak 18y ago
  Biology.
- time_management 18y ago
  Because a human life is so incredibly short that decline and death are rapidly impending, and it's difficult not to think about them constantly. Perhaps I'm unusual, but I think about death-- my death, not just the abstraction-- several times per day. And I'm not a depressed or morbid person, so I think this is pretty normal. It would suck if the final act of existence were painful decline, followed by eternal oblivion. It could well be the case, but I'm glad that if it is, I'll never know about it.
  - yters 18y ago
    Well, that's just a matter of psychology then, not any kind of logical should. I think about death too, but it doesn't seem to bother me like it does others since I don't see a logical reason behind the dread. Sure, the psychological side still gets to me when I stare death in the face, but otherwise not so much. A logical should would be something like if I were to die I would spend an eternity in ceaseless boredom. That would be a reason to avoid death. Otherwise it is just a false anticipation, like jumping off a high rock when you know it is perfectly safe. I try to eliminate that from my life if I can, which is the rational course of action. I think this is the psychological basis of thrill seeking. If you look at your own decision making process, you'll see that this procedure is how you also shape your psychological reactions. Say you really dreaded a certain event, such as moving out of your parents house. Then, when the time came, you found you could handle yourself alright. With that knowledge in the back of your mind, you no longer dread similar situations as much. I'm just making this process explicit in how I think about life.

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yters 18y ago

That's a pretty hopeless point of view. Why not assume that in the future they'll harness the universe's full computational capabilities and emulate every single being that has ever lived? If cryonics is possible, the simulation scenario is just as possible, since it uses the exact same assumptions. Plus, it is a lot cheaper to believe in:)

byrneseyeview 18y ago
Why not assume that in the future they'll harness the universe's full computational capabilities and emulate every single being that has ever lived? Because if you assume it will happen, you have to assume that the mostly likely explanation for your existence is that it did happen.
- yters 18y ago
  That's a bad reason to assume the opposite. If Eliezer's assumptions are valid, then the scenario I outline is just as valid. You can't have one without the other.

tocomment 18y ago

Does the idea of quantum immortality suggest that you would be revived? In that case I guess you're already living in a universe where you WILL freeze yourself (or in one where the singularity gets here soon.)

jodrellblank 18y ago

Reasons why cryonics is dumb: Life is suffering (Buddha, n B.C.) Death is void. Nothing > suffering. But there's a wall of pain/fear/effort/risk with suicide that keeps people inside life. Once you're dead, you're forced past the wall and it's a simple choice: more suffering or no suffering? Immortality by not dieing isn't quite the same option - avoiding old age suffering or going to old age suffering? Easy, being alive and rejuvenated wins.

patio11 18y ago

OK, so maybe I read too many fantasy and sci-fi novels, but I'm less interested in the problems of coming back from the dead. What really interests me is the related problem of how to kill someone securely. Take, for a prosaic example, vampires. Shooting a vampire will almost certainly NOT kill them -- sources differ but they might not die, might die but revive immediately, might die but revive the next night, etc. So how to kill a vampire definitively? I think, based on the union of all the vampire lore I've heard, you have to: * stake him * stuff his mouth with holy wafers * cut off his head * burn the body (both parts, presumably, but better to keep them separate) * bury the ashes on hallowed ground * ... at high noon * drop a nuclear bomb on top of the church THERE. One vampire, securely disposed of. I'm sorry if this digression into the fantastic was a waste of time for you. We now return you to your regularly scheduled intellectual discussion of cryogenics.

chris11 18y ago

I'm not convinced that medical science is so far behind determining life. Once a person is pronounced dead, I'm convinced they're brain dead. So it's useless to preserve someone when nearly all of their information on the state of their mind has been lost.

aantix 18y ago
http://www.newsweek.com/id/35045 http://www.newsweek.com/id/35045 "The patient couldn't be revived because the tissues of his brain and heart had suffered irreversible damage from lack of oxygen. This process was understood to begin after just four or five minutes. If the patient doesn't receive cardiopulmonary resuscitation within that time, and if his heart can't be restarted soon thereafter, he is unlikely to recover. That dogma went unquestioned until researchers actually looked at oxygen-starved heart cells under a microscope. What they saw amazed them, according to Dr. Lance Becker, an authority on emergency medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. "After one hour," he says, "we couldn't see evidence the cells had died. We thought we'd done something wrong." In fact, cells cut off from their blood supply died only hours later."
mhartl 18y ago
You're right to be skeptical, but I encourage you to investigate further, since this is a common but erroneous belief: that even a few minutes without oxygen causes irreparable brain damage. In fact, it's the autoimmune response upon revival that causes the damage to the brain, not the hypoxia. And cold prevents the damage; some types of brain surgery require zero blood pressure, and are performed at low temperature (potentially for hours) without harm to the brain.
- chris11 18y ago
  I probably spoke to fast. I could see it being somewhat feasible if the cryonics facility was immediately informed that the patient was dying, and the patient was frozen within hours of clinical death. My main concern is the success of freezing a brain dead person. I also was mainly referring earlier to the loss of information in the brain, not the actual physical brain damage.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theoretical_death http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theoretical_death. So if the family refuses or delays to inform the organization, I'm skeptical about whether the information in the brain can be preserved. And there have been bitter legal battles fought over cryonics. http://www.depressedmetabolism.com/is-that-what-love-is-the-hostile-wife-phenomenon-in-cryonics/ http://www.depressedmetabolism.com/is-that-what-love-is-the-...

dexter 18y ago

"If you want to securely erase a hard drive, it's not as easy as writing it over with zeroes. Sure, an "erased" hard drive like this won't boot up your computer if you just plug it in again. But if the drive falls into the hands of a specialist with a scanning tunneling microscope, they can tell the difference between "this was a 0, overwritten by a 0" and "this was a 1, overwritten by a 0". There are programs advertised to "securely erase" hard drives using many overwrites of 0s, 1s, and random data. But if you want to keep the secret on your hard drive secure against all possible future technologies that might ever be developed, then cover it with thermite and set it on fire. It's the only way to be sure." There have been no cases of anyone ever restoring a zeroed hard drive. It's utter bullshit. Especially these days with our precision aligned platters and insane densities.

mattmaroon 18y ago

Maybe, I'm wrong, but I often get the impression that the person who writes this blog is in need of a good grief counselor, but may be too smart for most of them to help.

Eliezer 18y ago
My grief is not the problem. This world is the problem.
- mattmaroon 18y ago
  If this world is the problem, you need to redefine the word problem.
  - MaysonL 18y ago
    No, you just need to change the bleeping world.
    - mattmaroon 18y ago
      Maybe. Maybe death isn't such a bad thing. We only dislike it due to our grief response, but outside of that it performs lots of useful functions. Also, I'm still highly skeptical cryonics will ever be reversible to the point where I can truly be brought back. My body may be reanimated, maybe, but without my memories, it's not much different than birthing a fully formed adult. I'm not opposed to cryonics in general, but the author said he thought it should be done by the state to everyone unidentified, which I find ludicrous.