Disagree that we should discuss what people values should be in this post or anywhere on Less Wrong. This is a place about rationality right? NOT MORALIZING.

I'm not willing for this be a place where we discuss what moral judgments are appropriate or not.

Killing a zygote is as morally charged as killing a random bacterium.

RIDICULOUS. It's not that I disagree -- but there is a difference between facts and moral values that is completely blurred here.

Your first point I think you answer yourself, is that fair? Your second is a good one, but I wonder what the right thing to do about it is. I did reply to the top-level ancestor comment of this one to say "this is off-topic"; are you saying that where discussion blossoms anyway, that railing against in-thread commenters is a mistake? Certainly where top-level comments have started talking about other arguments, I think that is logical rudeness, and you don't seem to disagree; is there anything to be done about it beyond the comment on the top-level comment?

I didn't down vote you but I do feel frustrated about the censure. First, I obviously don't think technological feasibility is anywhere near the right question. So I should just ignore this post. (But) secondly, other people are discussing other issues -- this whole thread is all about whether or not we'll get revived and why; it has nothing to do with technology. If I don't respond to this thread because it's off-topic, then I'm just missing an opportunity to further an agenda that is very important to me. I like to follow rules but I'm not likely to follow them sacrificially while others disregard them.

Everyone who is cryopreserved actually did die; reviving one is more like creating a new person than it is like providing medical care to an existing, living person.

At Alcor and CI there is much written about the definitions of death; their preferred version (mine too) is information theoretical death. To be precise, legal death is the moment the doctors decide to stop caring for the patient, mostly because they estimate the chance of successful resuscitation too low. On the other hand, information theoretical death is the point beyond which no technology can restore a mind. This definition is a bit more precise as it being vague requires us to consider the possibility of reversing entropy.

The subjective experience of waking up from cryonic suspension could range from identical to waking up from sleep to having suffered a serious and pervasive brain trauma, depending on the circumstances of suspension and reanimation. I wouldn't automatically categorize reanimated people as newly created persons as I wouldn't do so in the case of sleeping people or victims of brain injury. They are new persons to the extent the continuity between their pre- and post- suspension selves is lost, and I think the same applies to brain injury victims.

We don't kill many infants, but we do abort lots of fetuses, though.

Aborting a fetus may or may not be fully moral depending on how developed the fetus is. Killing a zygote is as morally charged as killing a random bacterium. Otherwise, causing suffering to fetuses by abortion is a sure a possibility, albeit one that can be reduced by regulations informed by a detailed knowledge of neurosciences.

However, I think the strongest reason why likening cryonics patients to fetuses is ridiculous is that cryonics patients (can) have a huge pile of accumulated life experiences and memories.

Disagree that you should be scared rather than curious. Such scenarios are not well worked out.

The abstract I linked to does mention LN2. Though I'm not sure how much difference various sub-freezing temperatures make, if our concern is how well the current protocols of cryonics can protect the brain against freezing damage.

I Googled for articles concerning nematodes because they're the standard "simplest organism with a nervous system", and this was among the first hits, filtering to exclude all publications by cryonicists.

What would be the next "higher" organism someone might have tried that on, that also has a nervous system?

And yet population nowadays is so much larger than in ancient times so there are claims the absolute number of slaves is currently higher than ever before

Rain, I'm aware of human trafficking and other abuses, which is the reason I said "rather few" instead of "no". But compared to just a few hundred years ago slaves are as rare as hen's teeth.

So when you write that you need interaction with real people, you were thinking of (i) or (ii)? I think (ii) or (iii), but only not (ii) if there is any objective coherent difference.

ii is a problem, iii fits my values but may violate other sentients' rights, and as for iv, I see no difference between the concepts of "computer program" and "universe" except that a computer program has an output.

I can imagine my kids in bad situations, and in most of those situations I would want them to keep living. If I was dying during some kind of terrible revolution, I wouldn't kill my children to protect them from an unknown future. They're already alive, come what may.

Cryonics feels like a choice again, and for me this is a moral choice -- perhaps a deontological one. I am willing to hear a variety of moral solutions/arguments, I just think this is something that needs address.

I wrote in another comment,

I depend upon society to help me explore what the ethical issues are so that I can make up my own mind in an informed way. I’m not an ethicist or a pastor, I’ve specialized in a different area.

It seems to me that the future goes one of two ways: virtually complete disaster (uFAI, other technology disaster, complete loss of humane values) or a fairly strong win for human values with massive easing of material constraints - superabundance.

In the latter group of scenarios, the cost of reanimating someone by scanning and building a new fleshy body for them would be close to nothing, and the market for sentimentally special objects (such as people from before the positive singularity) would be huge.

The scenarios that scare me are those where a friendly AI is built that reasons timelessly that it would have wanted to precommit to placing massive threats/rewards on anyone who knew about the singularity risk problem, and that unfortunately you (or I) in particular performed below some set standard of risk mitigation, and the FAI is going to put us in a horrific torture simulation forever. The argument against this is that rewards motivate better than punishments.

I don't think it is the coming back from the dead that makes people uncomfortable so much the world and technology that is supposed in the future to enable it. The eternal life from that point on also drastically changes the narrative.

This just breaks my heart, because I can understand the fear. I wouldn't want to have children if I thought they'd be taken away from me. But if I already had them, I would want them alive first and foremost. Even if that meant they'd be taken away. Living far away > dying in my arms.

Can we please focus on one argument against cryonics at a time? Isn't this shifting to a new counterargument whenever an old one is addressed just logical rudeness?

If you don't dispute anything I actually say about technical feasibility, please take this discussion elsewhere.

EDIT: Downvotes are useful information, but comments explaining them are even better - thanks!

Further, consider this from the point of view of a parent. It's OK for a 20-something young adult to decide to take this risk, but how can a parent take this risk for their child? I wouldn't have children if I didn't feel as though I had some control over whether they were well taken care of -- how could I send them to an unknown point in the future? Today, there are many people and organizations that exploit children. I'm supposed to glibly pretend that these problems will completely disappear just with future technology? That would be pretty irresponsible.

A lot of people make some argument along the lines of, 'if they revive us, it's because they value us." Yeah. And if they value children, without their mommies?

Yes, dissecting a conversation like that is the kind of thing I had in mind.

A further intent, and I agree with Eliezer here, is to capture and provisonally settle arguments as they occur, to avoid discussions that go around in circles. So it's not about just mapping one conversation, but also about being able to link further conversations back to that formal map.

By "provisionally settle" I mean something like agreeing that whether you should spend your money on cryonics is an expected utility trade-off. If you think there is an ethical issue such that even wanting cryonics to work is bad, or sinful or what have you, there's no point discussing the price. The discussion has a tree structure, as suggested in this thread by clockbackwards and Jennifer.

Possibly you don't need much more of a tool than a good outliner. Perhaps not even that: if you set out to write the "definitive" article on the best known arguments for and against cryonics, just setting out everything in one place, that could be enough. I very much like the "roadmap" format, as in the whole-brain emulation roadmap (pdf link).

The written word is hard to beat.

I do appreciate the work you've done on these Wiki pages, btw. Perhaps, as Vladimir Nesov commented somewhere, they won't go much further; but it's also good that they exist and collect in one place information that has taken some effort to gather.

The first 4 minutes of this is another good example. The guy on the left is Mike Darwin.

Very interesting! Again, not LN2 temperatures though.

The above might be true if I didn't know that Knox and Sollecito were convicted by an Italian court, but once I take that into account, it seems impossible to get to 0.9 probability of innocence that quickly. Unless I've seen nearly all of the evidence and arguments that the court has seen, I think there's a probability higher than 0.1 that the court knows something significant that I don't.

There was little to no change in the information content of True Justice and Friends of Amanda between Thursday, December 3, 2009 and Friday, December 4, 2009 (when the verdict was announced). If you believe that you would have arrived at a high probability of innocence on Thursday, then by conservation of expected evidence, you should have been very surprised to observe significant evidence of guilt on Friday. Since you appear to regard the conviction as significant evidence of guilt, this would imply that you have a low prior on a jury delivering a guilty verdict on the basis of the information available on those two sites.

To which I can only ask: Whence cometh this unwavering faith in the rationality of one's fellow humans?

I assume that a human being has a finite capacity for outrage. To feel that strongly about Knox and Sollecito implies that you cannot feel equally strongly about all other individuals who have suffered equally terrible fates. You say that the case increased your net concern about the madness of the world, but surely you must have already known that injustice like this (assuming you're right Knox and Sollecito) happens every day to many people all over the world? Is it just that the abstract knowledge didn't engage your emotions, like seeing these two specific individuals did?

If I understand you correctly, you appear to be arguing (or at least suggesting I consider an argument) for the following disjunction:

Either:

(1) I should devote more psychological energy to other victims of injustice to match my concern for Knox and Sollecito.

Or:

(2) I should devote less psychological energy to Knox and Sollecito in order not to unfairly privilege them more than other victims of injustice.

Now neither of these strikes me as plausible. (1) is simply impractical: LW readers would get tired if I did a post on every miscarriage of justice that has ever occurred, even if I were capable of doing so. But (2) can't be right either, because what happened to Knox and Sollecito is a legitimate outrage, and simply going about my business with indifference strikes me as highly unsatisfactory.

I see this as nothing more than a variant of the old argument against "ordinary" altruism: we really ought not to hold doors for little old ladies, since doing so consumes resources that could be put to better use fighting existential risk. But, as we know, human brains simply don't work that way. It's far more efficient to harness our natural feeling-circuitry to accomplish our goals than it is to (vainly) struggle to reprogram it.

So yes, there is a psychological difference between abstractly knowing that injustice exists and humans are irrational on the one hand, and actually seeing consequences of this happen to victims one finds particularly sympathetic on the other. But that emotional stimulation can be put to good use. That's why it's not quite right to say:

To feel that strongly about Knox and Sollecito implies that you cannot feel equally strongly about all other individuals who have suffered equally terrible fates.

I don't feel less strongly about the other individuals than I used to; rather, I feel more strongly than I did before. In my mind, Knox and Sollecito represent others in their situation; thinking specifically of them makes it easier to care about the problem of injustice in general. It's a mind-hack that happens to cater to the way my brain works. I suspect I'm not the only one on whom this kind of trick is effective.

(And it also helps Amanda and Raffaele themselves -- who deserve to be helped, just like the old ladies for whom we open doors.)

It's perfectly okay for a human rationalist to have natural human reactions; when those reactions are put to good use, it's an outright good thing.