5 ms·

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, le

by 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.
- llimllib 18y ago
  > Value of my life (at least to myself): infinity, Really? Have any kids, a wife? Would you die for them? Would you gas people in order to survive? Is there any cause you would fight to the death for, other than pure survival?
  - ericb 18y ago
    Are you asking which infinity is larger?
    - llimllib 18y ago
      If you would give up your life, voluntarily, for any reason at all, then it stands to reason that you do not value it infinitely - you value the thing for which you gave it up more. I'm not sure if you're putting me on with your response.
      - sciolizer 18y ago
        A > B does not imply that B is finite. But ericb already said this.
        llimllib 18y ago
        I know about aleph, and I understand cardinalities. There's no way that you value your life infinitely, while you value, say, your opposition to holocausts uncountably infinitely. Do you or ericb truly believe that this is the case, or are you putting me on? Just because I know there are cardinalities of infinities doesn't mean that it makes sense to claim that the people use these values in their life calculations. It's very simple, for example, to use arguments from the amount of money a person will accept for a more dangerous job, as byrneseyeview pointed out, to show that people value their lives as a finite number. If people valued their lives infinitely, they would accept no additional money for any increased risk of anything, ever. Unless of course, people value money infinitely too, and they're doing some sort transfinite math in their heads. Which I think you'll agree is a bit surreal and total nonsense.
bprater 18y ago
And computers only need how much RAM? Come now. Let the future folk figure out how to deal with my head on a platter. I'm just happy that I can finally get the internet on my cell phone. Nobody says that future folk will raise the dead in 50 years or 100 years or 1000 years or 5000 years. If we haven't nuked the planet in 5000 years, don't you think it's possible that thawing a head might be as inexpensive as buying a cellphone? Heck, kids on the street might come into the cryro-units, pick out a head and have it unfrozen for $5 just to watch the expression on our faces. Cheap thrills. But hey, if it means I'm alive again, I'll give the kids an expression to remember. Just because we don't have the answers today, doesn't mean the answers won't arrive tomorrow. Your conclusion is correct, however. Live for today.
mhartl 18y ago
This is like religious people who independently re-derive fallacious arguments for the existence of God (or the necessity to believe in him), and then present them to skeptics as if they were incontrovertible---things like the First Mover argument, the argument from design, or Pascal's Wager. Any agnostic/atheist worth his salt has heard every one of those arguments ad nauseam, and has definitive rebuttals to counter them. And so it goes; your arguments are as old as cryonics. Here are the answers offered by the Alcor FAQ, in order: - http://www.alcor.org/FAQs/faq01.html#evidence http://www.alcor.org/FAQs/faq01.html#evidence - http://www.alcor.org/FAQs/faq05.html#met http://www.alcor.org/FAQs/faq05.html#met - http://www.alcor.org/FAQs/faq07.html#overpopulation http://www.alcor.org/FAQs/faq07.html#overpopulation To those interested in more detail, I recommend the Alcor FAQ (http://www.alcor.org/FAQs/ http://www.alcor.org/FAQs/), Chapter 9 of Engines of Creation (http://e-drexler.com/d/06/00/EOC/EOC_Chapter_9.html http://e-drexler.com/d/06/00/EOC/EOC_Chapter_9.html), and the World Transhumanist Association FAQ (http://www.transhumanism.org/resources/faq.html http://www.transhumanism.org/resources/faq.html; search for the question "What is cryonics? Isn’t the probability of success too small?"). N.B. I am one of the signatories of the "Scientists' Open Letter on Cryonics" (http://www.imminst.org/cryonics_letter/ http://www.imminst.org/cryonics_letter/) mentioned by Eliezer in the post.
jodrellblank 18y ago
Even in the super advanced future, presumably a complex procedure like reconstructing a human brain won't exactly be a cheap one. So wait another thousand years. You're undead, you wont notice. If it ever becomes possible, it will one day become cheap. Is the future such a utopia that [x,y,z] It might be. Why not stick around to find out? Why not help make it be such a place? The part that really strikes me as idealistic Oh no, someone being idealistic! Not to mention the fact that it is the very finiteness of life that makes it valuable in the first place. Well you'll probably die in the heat death of the universe or the big crunch, so whatever you do life is finite and therefore valuable. I disagree that its finiteness makes it valuable, however. Life isn't a market commodity where scarcity increases value, it's a personal one-off once-in-a-lifetime offer.
mechanical_fish 18y ago
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? For some inexplicable reason, I have thus far only read two issues of Warren Ellis' Transmetropolitan: Issue #1, which is available free on the web, and an issue that talks about this. Here's a description from Wikipedia, which I touched up a bit: In the comic book Transmetropolitan, Revivals are people whose head was preserved in cryogenic stasis, only to be revived years later by a government program and given a cloned body. They are overwhelmed by the dystopian future in which they have awoken and distraught by the complete loss of every one of their friends and loved ones, and they often break down; they are generally ignored by society and are left to fend for themselves. You should read this -- though probably not when you're feeling lonely -- because IMHO Ellis totally nails the likely emotional state of a person revived from cryonics. If you want to experience the thrill of being the only survivor of a tremendous holocaust that has claimed the life of every single person you've ever met, combined with the thrill of having your entire life experience rendered obsolete, get yourself cryogenically frozen and hope for revival. I, on the other hand, am either getting cremated or am donating my body to science.
- jamii 18y ago
  > You should read this Thats a good place to stop the sentence. Transmetropolitan is one of those things that everyone should try at least once.
- rsheridan6 18y ago
  That's really not much different than the situation a typical very old person lives in now. My grandmother is 95 and has found the world bewildering for decades now. She's a widow, and all of her formerly numerous friends are dead or senile. Her old neighborhood is gone, modern entertainment reflects attitudes that are alien to her, etc. She has descendants she sees sometimes, but some other people her age don't even have that. Yet we don't see them hurling themselves off of cliffs very often.
asdflkj 18y ago
The fact that it is the very finiteness of life that makes it valuable in the first place. Just because Steve Jobs said it doesn't mean it's a fact, you know.
shabda 18y ago
>> "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?" What if I am a cobol programmer, and they need me to fix the Year9999 bug?
- MaysonL 18y ago
  Not to speak of history grad students looking for a thesis subject.

by jongalt 18y ago

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.

llimllib 18y ago
> Value of my life (at least to myself): infinity, Really? Have any kids, a wife? Would you die for them? Would you gas people in order to survive? Is there any cause you would fight to the death for, other than pure survival?
- ericb 18y ago
  Are you asking which infinity is larger?
  - llimllib 18y ago
    If you would give up your life, voluntarily, for any reason at all, then it stands to reason that you do not value it infinitely - you value the thing for which you gave it up more. I'm not sure if you're putting me on with your response.
    - sciolizer 18y ago
      A > B does not imply that B is finite. But ericb already said this.
      - llimllib 18y ago
        I know about aleph, and I understand cardinalities. There's no way that you value your life infinitely, while you value, say, your opposition to holocausts uncountably infinitely. Do you or ericb truly believe that this is the case, or are you putting me on? Just because I know there are cardinalities of infinities doesn't mean that it makes sense to claim that the people use these values in their life calculations. It's very simple, for example, to use arguments from the amount of money a person will accept for a more dangerous job, as byrneseyeview pointed out, to show that people value their lives as a finite number. If people valued their lives infinitely, they would accept no additional money for any increased risk of anything, ever. Unless of course, people value money infinitely too, and they're doing some sort transfinite math in their heads. Which I think you'll agree is a bit surreal and total nonsense.

bprater 18y ago

And computers only need how much RAM? Come now. Let the future folk figure out how to deal with my head on a platter. I'm just happy that I can finally get the internet on my cell phone. Nobody says that future folk will raise the dead in 50 years or 100 years or 1000 years or 5000 years. If we haven't nuked the planet in 5000 years, don't you think it's possible that thawing a head might be as inexpensive as buying a cellphone? Heck, kids on the street might come into the cryro-units, pick out a head and have it unfrozen for $5 just to watch the expression on our faces. Cheap thrills. But hey, if it means I'm alive again, I'll give the kids an expression to remember. Just because we don't have the answers today, doesn't mean the answers won't arrive tomorrow. Your conclusion is correct, however. Live for today.

mhartl 18y ago

This is like religious people who independently re-derive fallacious arguments for the existence of God (or the necessity to believe in him), and then present them to skeptics as if they were incontrovertible---things like the First Mover argument, the argument from design, or Pascal's Wager. Any agnostic/atheist worth his salt has heard every one of those arguments ad nauseam, and has definitive rebuttals to counter them. And so it goes; your arguments are as old as cryonics. Here are the answers offered by the Alcor FAQ, in order: - http://www.alcor.org/FAQs/faq01.html#evidence http://www.alcor.org/FAQs/faq01.html#evidence - http://www.alcor.org/FAQs/faq05.html#met http://www.alcor.org/FAQs/faq05.html#met - http://www.alcor.org/FAQs/faq07.html#overpopulation http://www.alcor.org/FAQs/faq07.html#overpopulation To those interested in more detail, I recommend the Alcor FAQ (http://www.alcor.org/FAQs/ http://www.alcor.org/FAQs/), Chapter 9 of Engines of Creation (http://e-drexler.com/d/06/00/EOC/EOC_Chapter_9.html http://e-drexler.com/d/06/00/EOC/EOC_Chapter_9.html), and the World Transhumanist Association FAQ (http://www.transhumanism.org/resources/faq.html http://www.transhumanism.org/resources/faq.html; search for the question "What is cryonics? Isn’t the probability of success too small?"). N.B. I am one of the signatories of the "Scientists' Open Letter on Cryonics" (http://www.imminst.org/cryonics_letter/ http://www.imminst.org/cryonics_letter/) mentioned by Eliezer in the post.

jodrellblank 18y ago

Even in the super advanced future, presumably a complex procedure like reconstructing a human brain won't exactly be a cheap one. So wait another thousand years. You're undead, you wont notice. If it ever becomes possible, it will one day become cheap. Is the future such a utopia that [x,y,z] It might be. Why not stick around to find out? Why not help make it be such a place? The part that really strikes me as idealistic Oh no, someone being idealistic! Not to mention the fact that it is the very finiteness of life that makes it valuable in the first place. Well you'll probably die in the heat death of the universe or the big crunch, so whatever you do life is finite and therefore valuable. I disagree that its finiteness makes it valuable, however. Life isn't a market commodity where scarcity increases value, it's a personal one-off once-in-a-lifetime offer.

mechanical_fish 18y ago

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? For some inexplicable reason, I have thus far only read two issues of Warren Ellis' Transmetropolitan: Issue #1, which is available free on the web, and an issue that talks about this. Here's a description from Wikipedia, which I touched up a bit: In the comic book Transmetropolitan, Revivals are people whose head was preserved in cryogenic stasis, only to be revived years later by a government program and given a cloned body. They are overwhelmed by the dystopian future in which they have awoken and distraught by the complete loss of every one of their friends and loved ones, and they often break down; they are generally ignored by society and are left to fend for themselves. You should read this -- though probably not when you're feeling lonely -- because IMHO Ellis totally nails the likely emotional state of a person revived from cryonics. If you want to experience the thrill of being the only survivor of a tremendous holocaust that has claimed the life of every single person you've ever met, combined with the thrill of having your entire life experience rendered obsolete, get yourself cryogenically frozen and hope for revival. I, on the other hand, am either getting cremated or am donating my body to science.

jamii 18y ago
> You should read this Thats a good place to stop the sentence. Transmetropolitan is one of those things that everyone should try at least once.
rsheridan6 18y ago
That's really not much different than the situation a typical very old person lives in now. My grandmother is 95 and has found the world bewildering for decades now. She's a widow, and all of her formerly numerous friends are dead or senile. Her old neighborhood is gone, modern entertainment reflects attitudes that are alien to her, etc. She has descendants she sees sometimes, but some other people her age don't even have that. Yet we don't see them hurling themselves off of cliffs very often.

asdflkj 18y ago

The fact that it is the very finiteness of life that makes it valuable in the first place. Just because Steve Jobs said it doesn't mean it's a fact, you know.

shabda 18y ago

>> "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?" What if I am a cobol programmer, and they need me to fix the Year9999 bug?

MaysonL 18y ago
Not to speak of history grad students looking for a thesis subject.