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MichaelGR comments on Normal Cryonics - Less Wrong
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Do you think that there might be a link between these two things?
Aubrey de Grey often talks about the "pro-death trance", and says that as long as people think that death from the diseases of aging is inevitable, they'll find ways to rationalize why "it's a good thing" or at least "not so bad".
Do you think that if Cryonics was widely available where you are and that it was affordable (a hundred Euros a year life insurance, f.ex.) that this would increase your interest in it?
I have pretty much the same view as Kaj, I'd get cryonics if it was cheap.
If I did I'd want to put a note that I'd be okay with people using my brain for science when they needed it to test scanning equipment and the like. For some reason I can associate better and feel more positive about imagining papers being published about my brain than being reincarnated in silicon (or carbon nanotubes).
Probably, yes.
I often have this thought, and then get a nasty sick feeling along the lines of 'what the hell kind of expected utility calculation am I doing that weighs a second shot at life against some amount of cash?' Argument rejected!
This has to be a rationality error. Given that it's far from guaranteed to work, there has to be an amount that cryonics could cost such that it wouldn't be worth signing up. I'm not saying that the real costs are that high, just that if you're making a rational decision such an amount will exist.
Sorry, should have given more context.
Given the sky-high utility I'd place on living, I wouldn't expect to see the numbers crunch down to a place where a non-huge sum of money is the difference between signing up and not.
So when someone says 'if it were half the price maybe I'd sign up' I'm always interested to know exactly what calculations they're performing, and exactly what it is that reduces the billions of utilons of living down to a marginal cash sum. The (tiny?) chance of cryonics working? Serious coincidence if those factors cancel comfortably. Just smacks of bottom-line to me.
Put it this way - imagine cryonics has been seriously, prohibitively expensive for many years after introduction. Say it still was today, for some reason, and then after much debate and hand-wringing about immortality for the uber-rich, tomorrow suddenly and very publicly dropped to current levels, I'd expect to see a huge upswing in signing up. Such is the human being!
I agree with all of this.