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It's fascinating, and personally a bit disturbing, to read about his death as an announcement of cryopreservation ("being cryopreserved now") instead of the sad

It's fascinating, and personally a bit disturbing, to read about his death as an announcement of cryopreservation ("being cryopreserved now") instead of the sad news it is anyway ("died today"). Also the discussion here revolves around he coming back, not he leaving. Maybe it impresses me because he seemed so hopeful to be able to choose life in his post back then when he was diagnosed: "I may even still be able to write code, and my dream is to contribute to open source software projects even from within an immobile body. That will be a life very much worth living." http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ab/dying_outside/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ab/dying_outside/ I guess one can argue it is a good thing about cryonics, less mourning, more hope. Anyway, I'd like to write down a regular epitaph: Hal Finney (May 4, 1956 – August 28, 2014), second PGP developer after Zimmerman, first Bitcoin recipient, cypherpunk who wrote code.

pron 12y ago
> I guess one can argue it is a good thing about cryonics, less mourning, more hope. Not more so than in some other religions with their own versions of an afterlife. It all depends on your faith.
- Retric 12y ago
  I find it interesting that cryonics and the singularity are both 'modern' religions with that are vary similar in tone to many past religions. They both seems reasonable on the surface, but don't really work if you dig down into the details. Much like all that new age QM BS uses a few of the right words without much substance.
  - pron 12y ago
    Interesting -- yes; surprising -- not at all. After all, religions (whether true or not (there's only one true religion but I'm not going to tell you what it is)) serve the same deep human psychological needs. What I find curious about most versions of an afterlife is this: they all describe life without death, and some (including singularity) describe a pure spiritual (non-corporal) existence. Each of these things on its own -- let alone together -- makes that existence in the afterlife distinctly non human. Whatever we're reborn as, it's no longer human, but somehow it's not only us, but us as we'd want to exist. Note how religions that believe in reincarnation are different in that respect: they promise a constant re-birth but always in (at least hopefully) human form.
  - bellerocky 12y ago
    > but don't really work if you dig down into the details. Don't really work? There is no evidence that you can be brought back from cryopreservation, but assuming that it might one day be possible doesn't require throwing out all the known physical laws of the universe so it's hardly a religion. Cryopreservation is not based on faith, it's based on a little bit of optimism. It's not a religion. Edit: qualified on the amount of optimism required
    - ewoodrich 12y ago
      > Cryopreservation is not based on faith, it's based on optimism. So is religion, when you get down to it. But the optimism comes from belief in an unknowable deity rather than in future science.
      - TeMPOraL 12y ago
        There's a difference between a "belief in an unknowable deity" and extrapolating current scientifical problems and believing in technologies that are known to work. Molecular nanotech, which seems to be the holy grail for restoring cryopreserved patients, is something that is known to work (it's called "life"), and the only missing link is that we don't have much control over it yet. Unless you assume life is magic and information theory doesn't work with brains, there's a solid case for cryopreservation.
        ewoodrich 12y ago
        I accept that there is evidence that cryonics may become viable for human subjects in the future. My point is merely that freezing one's own body despite a lack of any evidence that present methods would allow revival of a human in the future requires optimism that is not incomparable with religion.
        TeMPOraL 12y ago
        It's a bet against future technology. How it differs from religion is that a/ we know that required technology is possible, b/ we are pretty confident that current cryopreservation methods are good enough for the required technology to be able to reverse the process, and c/ we make a bet that humanity will reach the point a/. Note that we are sure it can be done, we only don't know if it will be.
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    I think it's exactly the other way around. Cryonics/singularity is only similar to religion on the surface, but if you dig down into the details, you realize that there's no element of faith, only reasonable extrapolation of technological trends and a hedge against progress. I'd say that quite a lot of opposition to those ideas is religion-based. I.e. if you can't believe that a cryopreserved person can be revived in principle, then you must either disagree with modern infomation theory or believe in vitalism.
    - pron 12y ago
      > you realize that there's no element of faith, only reasonable extrapolation of technological trends and a hedge against progress. Religions are based on similar premises (given what humans knew about life at the time of their founding), and your argument is, in fact, known as Pascal's Wager[1]. Those arguing against faith will claim that the money spent is very certain and a very unreasonable bet. Others, like me, see some immediate, earthly benefits in religion, be it cryonics, singularity or another religion, and consider the money well spent. > if you can't believe that a cryopreserved person can be revived in principle... Thing is, you can't deny god's existence in principle, nor even disprove Christianity, and since Christianity seems to be in opposition to cryonics (hmm, actually, it might not be) then you're in serious trouble whether you agree with modern information theory or not (physics, and maybe even mathematics, might not hold in christian hell). Personally, I think human beings, as a product of our evolution, are so ill adapted even to our semi-primitive civilization and its own repressive discontents, that I cannot possibly see us living our immortal coils. BTW, are cryonics and singularity part of the same mythology? I mean, is there perhaps a book painting a clear (or, better yet - vague) picture of how this all would work out? [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal's_Wager http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal's_Wager
      - TeMPOraL 12y ago
        > BTW, are cryonics and singularity part of the same mythology? As far as I can tell, those are two completely separated, though not unrelated concepts. Cryopreservation is about a hope that we'll get advanced enough technology, whether or not singularity occurs before or after. Singularity is about progress of technology accelerating to the point we absolutely, positively can't keep up with it, so we can't predict how anything will look after singularity.
- ChuckMcM 12y ago
  Well Cryonics is one of the few where the afterlife is back here with the rest of us. There was an interesting story where these people were revived in the future but were basically welfare cases without any of the modern implants and conveniences and no money or credit to get them they were unemployable. Then there is Woody Allen's "Sleeper" :-)
  - pron 12y ago
    > Well Cryonics is one of the few where the afterlife is back here with the rest of us. I would argue that that's not the case. See my other comment here, contrasting cryonics with reincarnation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8239950 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8239950 > There was an interesting story where these people were revived in the future but were basically welfare cases... Some religions have two versions of the afterlife: there's heaven, and then there's hell...
  - jedberg 12y ago
    There's also a fun Star Trek TNG about the crew finding a spaceship with three cryogenically preserved people from the 1990s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Neutral_Zone_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Neutral_Zone_(Star_Trek:_Th...
  - rqebmm 12y ago
    you might be thinking of the Transmetropolitan issue "Another Cold Morning" http://www.comicvine.com/transmetropolitan-8-another-cold-morning/4000-44857/user-reviews/ http://www.comicvine.com/transmetropolitan-8-another-cold-mo...
    - ChuckMcM 12y ago
      Not that exact source but the same theme. Kind of sobering. A friend of mine is an Alcor member and totally ready to be frozen if he can't upload his mind into the Internet first.
- JulianMorrison 12y ago
  Cryonics is the opposite of religious faith in an afterlife, actually. It only makes sense with strict physicalism. If your self is neural state (structural and chemical but not electrical), and the state is preserved, then your life is on pause. That's almost a truism.
- drcode 12y ago
  I find it really annoying when people compare cryopreservation to religious belief in an afterlife. It's sort of like saying "Dieting is an eating disorder"- Yes, they share some superficial similarities (and some people may have both) but in any substantive way they are totally different things.
  - pron 12y ago
    I think they're superficially different, and continuing the eating disorder analogy, consider this anecdote. in the middle ages, monks and nuns used to torment themselves in many ways. While men used various inventive self-corporal-punishment techniques, women mostly employed one: starvation. It was their fight against their earthly body, which they tried to minimize as possible. So was that an eating disorder? Absolutely! It's just that today, instead of reducing your earthly body to become more spiritual, women (mostly) have other excuses for the same practice, namely modern standards of beauty. When a sociologist or anthropologist encounters something like that, the assumption is that a deep underlying human psychological need uses contemporary ideas and beliefs to find justification. When it was "known" that superhuman deities rule the world, the afterlife was their domain; now, when science rules, ideas from science fiction explain those (currently?) superhuman abilities and the after-life they bring. So the same deep cause is expressed using contemporary ideas. If you don't like the word religion, we can call it "a belief in the afterlife", although the same trend applies to other behaviors that have commonly been considered religious, so the correlation is far stronger than just a belief in the afterlife (there are also notions about "purity" that are now explained by pseudo/shoddy science).
brey 12y ago
It sounds from the language used ("he did not want his vital functions supported any further but should be allowed to cease functioning and promptly be cryopreserved") that he didn't regard this moment as death at all - merely pausing his life until a) ALS is curable and b) we have the technology to reawaken cryopreserved people. To him, all that was worth announcing here is the cryopreservation. Who's to say he's wrong?
- ewoodrich 12y ago
  Personally, I think cryonics is a pipe dream right now. But I completely respect and empathize with the wishes of Hal Finney to put hope into a future life, possibly without the burden of ALS that he was forced to deal with for a significant portion of his life. If he had the means to do it, and it gave him something while he was still alive, than I would say it was worth it to him.
  - bdamm 12y ago
    It seems strange to me to place him into "cold storage" after he was completely ravaged by ALS and had died. Wouldn't there be more hope for a recovery if he had been placed into a frozen state before his physical form had died? No doubt a dicey area of law but surely a treatment for ALS will be reached for those still living before we discover a treatment of ALS for those who are already terminal.
    - twostorytower 12y ago
      The hardest part of that equation still remains revival from the cryo-preserved state, not treating the ALS.
  - Widdershin 12y ago
    You're probably right, but I just thought about it from the point of view of someone dying from a (currently) incurable illness. On one hand, you can die, and that will probably be it for you. On the other hand, you can become cryogenically preserved. In that case, there are two outcomes I can see. One, you're never revived (which is functionally equivalent to death). The other, you awake (in what feels like an instant) in a world where you can continue living. That certainly makes it seem tempting for me.

pron 12y ago

> I guess one can argue it is a good thing about cryonics, less mourning, more hope. Not more so than in some other religions with their own versions of an afterlife. It all depends on your faith.

Retric 12y ago
I find it interesting that cryonics and the singularity are both 'modern' religions with that are vary similar in tone to many past religions. They both seems reasonable on the surface, but don't really work if you dig down into the details. Much like all that new age QM BS uses a few of the right words without much substance.
- pron 12y ago
  Interesting -- yes; surprising -- not at all. After all, religions (whether true or not (there's only one true religion but I'm not going to tell you what it is)) serve the same deep human psychological needs. What I find curious about most versions of an afterlife is this: they all describe life without death, and some (including singularity) describe a pure spiritual (non-corporal) existence. Each of these things on its own -- let alone together -- makes that existence in the afterlife distinctly non human. Whatever we're reborn as, it's no longer human, but somehow it's not only us, but us as we'd want to exist. Note how religions that believe in reincarnation are different in that respect: they promise a constant re-birth but always in (at least hopefully) human form.
- bellerocky 12y ago
  > but don't really work if you dig down into the details. Don't really work? There is no evidence that you can be brought back from cryopreservation, but assuming that it might one day be possible doesn't require throwing out all the known physical laws of the universe so it's hardly a religion. Cryopreservation is not based on faith, it's based on a little bit of optimism. It's not a religion. Edit: qualified on the amount of optimism required
  - ewoodrich 12y ago
    > Cryopreservation is not based on faith, it's based on optimism. So is religion, when you get down to it. But the optimism comes from belief in an unknowable deity rather than in future science.
    - TeMPOraL 12y ago
      There's a difference between a "belief in an unknowable deity" and extrapolating current scientifical problems and believing in technologies that are known to work. Molecular nanotech, which seems to be the holy grail for restoring cryopreserved patients, is something that is known to work (it's called "life"), and the only missing link is that we don't have much control over it yet. Unless you assume life is magic and information theory doesn't work with brains, there's a solid case for cryopreservation.
      - ewoodrich 12y ago
        I accept that there is evidence that cryonics may become viable for human subjects in the future. My point is merely that freezing one's own body despite a lack of any evidence that present methods would allow revival of a human in the future requires optimism that is not incomparable with religion.
        TeMPOraL 12y ago
        It's a bet against future technology. How it differs from religion is that a/ we know that required technology is possible, b/ we are pretty confident that current cryopreservation methods are good enough for the required technology to be able to reverse the process, and c/ we make a bet that humanity will reach the point a/. Note that we are sure it can be done, we only don't know if it will be.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  I think it's exactly the other way around. Cryonics/singularity is only similar to religion on the surface, but if you dig down into the details, you realize that there's no element of faith, only reasonable extrapolation of technological trends and a hedge against progress. I'd say that quite a lot of opposition to those ideas is religion-based. I.e. if you can't believe that a cryopreserved person can be revived in principle, then you must either disagree with modern infomation theory or believe in vitalism.
  - pron 12y ago
    > you realize that there's no element of faith, only reasonable extrapolation of technological trends and a hedge against progress. Religions are based on similar premises (given what humans knew about life at the time of their founding), and your argument is, in fact, known as Pascal's Wager[1]. Those arguing against faith will claim that the money spent is very certain and a very unreasonable bet. Others, like me, see some immediate, earthly benefits in religion, be it cryonics, singularity or another religion, and consider the money well spent. > if you can't believe that a cryopreserved person can be revived in principle... Thing is, you can't deny god's existence in principle, nor even disprove Christianity, and since Christianity seems to be in opposition to cryonics (hmm, actually, it might not be) then you're in serious trouble whether you agree with modern information theory or not (physics, and maybe even mathematics, might not hold in christian hell). Personally, I think human beings, as a product of our evolution, are so ill adapted even to our semi-primitive civilization and its own repressive discontents, that I cannot possibly see us living our immortal coils. BTW, are cryonics and singularity part of the same mythology? I mean, is there perhaps a book painting a clear (or, better yet - vague) picture of how this all would work out? [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal's_Wager http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal's_Wager
    - TeMPOraL 12y ago
      > BTW, are cryonics and singularity part of the same mythology? As far as I can tell, those are two completely separated, though not unrelated concepts. Cryopreservation is about a hope that we'll get advanced enough technology, whether or not singularity occurs before or after. Singularity is about progress of technology accelerating to the point we absolutely, positively can't keep up with it, so we can't predict how anything will look after singularity.
ChuckMcM 12y ago
Well Cryonics is one of the few where the afterlife is back here with the rest of us. There was an interesting story where these people were revived in the future but were basically welfare cases without any of the modern implants and conveniences and no money or credit to get them they were unemployable. Then there is Woody Allen's "Sleeper" :-)
- pron 12y ago
  > Well Cryonics is one of the few where the afterlife is back here with the rest of us. I would argue that that's not the case. See my other comment here, contrasting cryonics with reincarnation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8239950 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8239950 > There was an interesting story where these people were revived in the future but were basically welfare cases... Some religions have two versions of the afterlife: there's heaven, and then there's hell...
- jedberg 12y ago
  There's also a fun Star Trek TNG about the crew finding a spaceship with three cryogenically preserved people from the 1990s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Neutral_Zone_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Neutral_Zone_(Star_Trek:_Th...
- rqebmm 12y ago
  you might be thinking of the Transmetropolitan issue "Another Cold Morning" http://www.comicvine.com/transmetropolitan-8-another-cold-morning/4000-44857/user-reviews/ http://www.comicvine.com/transmetropolitan-8-another-cold-mo...
  - ChuckMcM 12y ago
    Not that exact source but the same theme. Kind of sobering. A friend of mine is an Alcor member and totally ready to be frozen if he can't upload his mind into the Internet first.
JulianMorrison 12y ago
Cryonics is the opposite of religious faith in an afterlife, actually. It only makes sense with strict physicalism. If your self is neural state (structural and chemical but not electrical), and the state is preserved, then your life is on pause. That's almost a truism.
drcode 12y ago
I find it really annoying when people compare cryopreservation to religious belief in an afterlife. It's sort of like saying "Dieting is an eating disorder"- Yes, they share some superficial similarities (and some people may have both) but in any substantive way they are totally different things.
- pron 12y ago
  I think they're superficially different, and continuing the eating disorder analogy, consider this anecdote. in the middle ages, monks and nuns used to torment themselves in many ways. While men used various inventive self-corporal-punishment techniques, women mostly employed one: starvation. It was their fight against their earthly body, which they tried to minimize as possible. So was that an eating disorder? Absolutely! It's just that today, instead of reducing your earthly body to become more spiritual, women (mostly) have other excuses for the same practice, namely modern standards of beauty. When a sociologist or anthropologist encounters something like that, the assumption is that a deep underlying human psychological need uses contemporary ideas and beliefs to find justification. When it was "known" that superhuman deities rule the world, the afterlife was their domain; now, when science rules, ideas from science fiction explain those (currently?) superhuman abilities and the after-life they bring. So the same deep cause is expressed using contemporary ideas. If you don't like the word religion, we can call it "a belief in the afterlife", although the same trend applies to other behaviors that have commonly been considered religious, so the correlation is far stronger than just a belief in the afterlife (there are also notions about "purity" that are now explained by pseudo/shoddy science).

brey 12y ago

It sounds from the language used ("he did not want his vital functions supported any further but should be allowed to cease functioning and promptly be cryopreserved") that he didn't regard this moment as death at all - merely pausing his life until a) ALS is curable and b) we have the technology to reawaken cryopreserved people. To him, all that was worth announcing here is the cryopreservation. Who's to say he's wrong?

ewoodrich 12y ago
Personally, I think cryonics is a pipe dream right now. But I completely respect and empathize with the wishes of Hal Finney to put hope into a future life, possibly without the burden of ALS that he was forced to deal with for a significant portion of his life. If he had the means to do it, and it gave him something while he was still alive, than I would say it was worth it to him.
- bdamm 12y ago
  It seems strange to me to place him into "cold storage" after he was completely ravaged by ALS and had died. Wouldn't there be more hope for a recovery if he had been placed into a frozen state before his physical form had died? No doubt a dicey area of law but surely a treatment for ALS will be reached for those still living before we discover a treatment of ALS for those who are already terminal.
  - twostorytower 12y ago
    The hardest part of that equation still remains revival from the cryo-preserved state, not treating the ALS.
- Widdershin 12y ago
  You're probably right, but I just thought about it from the point of view of someone dying from a (currently) incurable illness. On one hand, you can die, and that will probably be it for you. On the other hand, you can become cryogenically preserved. In that case, there are two outcomes I can see. One, you're never revived (which is functionally equivalent to death). The other, you awake (in what feels like an instant) in a world where you can continue living. That certainly makes it seem tempting for me.