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Normal Cryonics
I recently attended a small gathering whose purpose was to let young people signed up for cryonics meet older people signed up for cryonics - a matter of some concern to the old guard, for obvious reasons.
The young cryonicists' travel was subsidized. I suspect this led to a greatly different selection filter than usually prevails at conferences of what Robin Hanson would call "contrarians". At an ordinary conference of transhumanists - or libertarians, or atheists - you get activists who want to meet their own kind, strongly enough to pay conference fees and travel expenses. This conference was just young people who took the action of signing up for cryonics, and who were willing to spend a couple of paid days in Florida meeting older cryonicists.
The gathering was 34% female, around half of whom were single, and a few kids. This may sound normal enough, unless you've been to a lot of contrarian-cluster conferences, in which case you just spit coffee all over your computer screen and shouted "WHAT?" I did sometimes hear "my husband persuaded me to sign up", but no more frequently than "I pursuaded my husband to sign up". Around 25% of the people present were from the computer world, 25% from science, and 15% were doing something in music or entertainment - with possible overlap, since I'm working from a show of hands.
I was expecting there to be some nutcases in that room, people who'd signed up for cryonics for just the same reason they subscribed to homeopathy or astrology, i.e., that it sounded cool. None of the younger cryonicists showed any sign of it. There were a couple of older cryonicists who'd gone strange, but none of the young ones that I saw. Only three hands went up that did not identify as atheist/agnostic, and I think those also might have all been old cryonicists. (This is surprising enough to be worth explaining, considering the base rate of insanity versus sanity. Maybe if you're into woo, there is so much more woo that is better optimized for being woo, that no one into woo would give cryonics a second glance.)
The part about actually signing up may also be key - that's probably a ten-to-one or worse filter among people who "get" cryonics. (I put to Bill Faloon of the old guard that probably twice as many people had died while planning to sign up for cryonics eventually, than had actually been suspended; and he said "Way more than that.") Actually signing up is an intense filter for Conscientiousness, since it's mildly tedious (requires multiple copies of papers signed and notarized with witnesses) and there's no peer pressure.
For whatever reason, those young cryonicists seemed really normal - except for one thing, which I'll get to tomorrow. Except for that, then, they seemed like very ordinary people: the couples and the singles, the husbands and the wives and the kids, scientists and programmers and sound studio technicians.
At some future point I ought to post on the notion of belief hysteresis, where you get locked into whatever belief hits you first. So it had previously occurred to me (though I didn't write the post) to argue for cryonics via a conformity reversal test:
If you found yourself in a world where everyone was signed up for cryonics as a matter of routine - including everyone who works at your office - you wouldn't be the first lonely dissenter to earn the incredulous stares of your coworkers by unchecking the box that kept you signed up for cryonics, in exchange for an extra $300 per year.
(Actually it would probably be a lot cheaper, more like $30/year or a free government program, with that economy of scale; but we should ignore that for purposes of the reversal test.)
The point being that if cryonics were taken for granted, it would go on being taken for granted; it is only the state of non-cryonics that is unstable, subject to being disrupted by rational argument.
And this cryonics meetup was that world. It was the world of the ordinary scientists and programmers and sound studio technicians who had signed up for cryonics as a matter of simple common sense.
It tears my heart out.
Those young cryonicists weren't heroes. Most of the older cryonicists were heroes, and of course there were a couple of other heroes among us young folk, like a former employee of Methuselah who'd left to try to put together a startup/nonprofit around a bright idea he'd had for curing cancer (note: even I think this is an acceptable excuse). But most of the younger cryonicists weren't there to fight a desperate battle against Death, they were people who'd signed up for cryonics because it was the obvious thing to do.
And it tears my heart out, because I am a hero and this was like seeing a ray of sunlight from a normal world, some alternate Everett branch of humanity where things really were normal instead of crazy all the goddamned time, a world that was everything this world could be and isn't.
Then there were the children, some of whom had been signed up for cryonics since the day they were born.
It tears my heart out. I'm having trouble remembering to breathe as I write this. My own little brother isn't breathing and never will again.
You know what? I'm going to come out and say it. I've been unsure about saying it, but after attending this event, and talking to the perfectly ordinary parents who signed their kids up for cryonics like the goddamn sane people do, I'm going to come out and say it: If you don't sign up your kids for cryonics then you are a lousy parent.
If you aren't choosing between textbooks and food, then you can afford to sign up your kids for cryonics. I don't know if it's more important than a home without lead paint, or omega-3 fish oil supplements while their brains are maturing, but it's certainly more important than you going to the movies or eating at nice restaurants. That's part of the bargain you signed up for when you became a parent. If you can afford kids at all, you can afford to sign up your kids for cryonics, and if you don't, you are a lousy parent. I'm just back from an event where the normal parents signed their normal kids up for cryonics, and that is the way things are supposed to be and should be, and whatever excuses you're using or thinking of right now, I don't believe in them any more, you're just a lousy parent.
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Comments (930)
I thought this was rather tasteful media coverage: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/8691489/Robert-Ettinger-the-father-of-cryonics-is-gone-for-now.html
Very positive too. Hard to ask for more favorable coverage than that.
Maybe too favorable, given that the author does not question the time frame of only decades until revival.
Since learning, from Less Wrong, of Alcor and vitrification tech and such, I seriously considered cryonics for the first time in my life and really it was obvious. However slim, it is an actual chance to live beyond the meager handful of decades we get naturally, an actual chance to not die, and in the world as it is today, the only option. Even if the chance of it actually working as advertised (waking up after however long with a brand new perfectly healthy youthful nanotechnologically-grown immortal body) is vanishingly tiny, it is still the optimal action in today's world, is it not?
I should mention that (despite my efforts to hack it out of myself) I have a powerful neurotic phobia of medication, mind-altering substances, surgeries, and basically anything past or current technology can do to a human body that leaves traces, however beneficial. The idea of my still-active brain being pumped full of cryoprotectant upon my heart's last beat is more subjectively disturbing to me than eating flesh cut from my own body.
And I fully intend to sign up anyway.
(I'm currently living on a fixed income that has me occasionally going hungry in order to keep myself in air conditioning and internet, or I would have signed up already.)
The thing is, I want to convince my dad to sign himself up as well, and I think punctuating with this article, if presented in the proper context, could go a long way towards convincing him to sign us up all at once if I can just get passed his excessive skepticism. I'm not at all confident in my ability to sell him on it, though, so are there any good arguments to use when your primary obstacle is the other person's deep-seated irrational pride in their own skepticism? He could easily afford it, and he already lives in Arizona. I know he would totally go for it if I could just find a way to get passed his initial dismissal of it (a decade ago) as false hope for gullible cowards. I think he's been numbing himself to his mortality, and accepting the existence of a genuine hope against death would be difficult because it dispels the numbness. (This might even be why the majority of otherwise-sane people dismiss cryonics out of hand now that I think of it: for some, accepting a tenuous hope is more painful than having no hope at all.)
I'd appreciate any good advice on how to present my case to him, if anyone has any insights.
Am I the only one who thinks it is far more likely that the institution will fail than that the technology is never developed or is never applied?
Corporations, nation-states - few things have lasted hundreds of years with their cores intact. Laws change, market prices of commodities change, wars happen. The United States is not immune.
Concur. I am moderately confident that cryonics will eventually be a viable technology, assuming normal conditions-- but I am very much not confident that Alcor and the like will live to see that day.
Maybe we can vitrify them?
I wish you the best of luck in signing up, and persuading your dad to. I think that the technical plausibility of cryonics (not "cyronics" btw) is much higher than you seem to imply here, incidentally - I'd put it over 50%.
I wasn't actually expressing an estimation of the plausibility of it working; merely that an uncertainty of death is preferable to a certainty of death.
I am applauding this article. You have moved me. I am A-2561 neuro and I'm proud to be a member of Alcor. I am 16 years old. I got into the field myself when I watched Dr. De Grey's documentary Do You Want To Live Forever. I am unbelievably lucky. The average American has a better chance of being an A-list celebrity than being a cryonicist. As Mike Perry said; Cryonicists are born, not made. When I watched it, something just clicked and I decided to devote my life to it. A lousy parent also doesn't get memberships for the pets of their children. Cupcake and Snugglemuffins have memberships because I begged my parents to get it for them. No child should see their dog rot in the ground followed by the 'Heaven' story that we've had shoved at us for thousands of years.
I'm reading the first sentence as being an implication of the fact that there are more celebrities than cryonicists, and the second one as meaning that how much one is exposed to information that may motivate one to be a cryonicist significant impacts the chance that they will be a cryonicist. Is this right, or am I missing something?
I interpreted the second one to mean the opposite: that exposure to information really doesn't help turn people into cryonicists (discussed in That Magical Click), All the rational arguments in the world really haven't persuaded that many people, while most of the ones who sign up just get it.
I want to downvote you for naming a pet "snugglemuffins", but that would probably be an abuse of the system. :-)
I'll raise an issue here, without taking a position on it myself right now. I'm not saying there is no answer (in fact, I can think of at least one), but I think one is needed.
If you sign up for cryonics, and it is going to work and give you a very long life in a posthuman future, given that such a long life would involve a huge number of observer moments, almost all of which will be far in the future, why are you experiencing such a rare (i.e. extraordinarily early) observer moment right now? In other words, why not apply the Doomsday argument's logic to a human life as an argument against the feasibility of cryonics?
Because that logic is flawed.
If I (the Furcas typing these words) lived in 3010, 'I' would have different memories and 'I' would be experiencing different things and thus I (the Furcas typing these words) would not exist. Thus there is no likelihood whatsoever that I (the Furcas typing these words) could have existed in 3010*.
There may be something left of me in 3010, just as there is something left of the boy I 'was' in 1990 today, but it won't be me: The memories will be different and the observations will be different, therefore the experience will be different. Asking why I don't exist in 3010 is asking why experience X is not experience Y. X is not Y because X does not equal Y. It's as simple as that.
*Except, of course, if I were put in a simulation that very closely replicates the environment that I (believe I) experience in 2010.
I've written a 2000 word blog article on my efforts to find the best anti-cryonics writing I can:
A survey of anti-cryonics writing
Edit: now a top level article
An excellent post.
I have one issue, though. It may be poor form to alter your opening paragraph at this stage, Paul, but I'd appreciate it if you did. While it makes a very good 'hook' for those of us inclined to take cryonics seriously, it means that posting a link for other friends (as I'd otherwise do) will have the opposite effect than it should. (I am fairly sure that a person inclined to be suspicious of cryonics would read the first few lines only, departing in the knowledge that their suspicions were confirmed.)
An introduction that is at first glance equivocal would be a great improvement over one that is at first glance committed to the anti-cryonics viewpoint, for that reason.
Thanks!
I am inclined to agree, but I can't work out how. I found it pretty difficult to get started writing that, and that way seemed to work. If you can give me any more specific ideas on how best to fix it, I might well try. Have saved first version in version control!
The Feynman anecdote actually seems to me like the best place to begin, both for literary interest and for a clearer introduction. If you started there, you could take the rest of that paragraph almost unchanged (inserting the parenthetical definition of cryonics from your current first paragraph) before introducing the skeptics' links and continuing as before?
Just had a go, but I can't quite make it work; the skeptic's links seem hard to introduce.
Suggested edits:
This way your hook is neutral enough to draw everyone in.
ETA: I would be careful with the £25/mo quote, until and unless you get a quote from Rudi Hoffman or elsewhere. At least mention that the pricing is one of those logistical issues you've promised to cover in further posts.
Suggested edit:
I did something like this in the end.
Agreed.
Top-level post it
Me too. This is not just about cryonics. It is not remotely just about cryonics. It is about the general quality of published argument that you can expect to find against a true contrarian idea, as opposed to a false contrarian idea.
I now want to go and look for the pre-chemistry arguments against alchemy.
I don't think that cryonics is inherently wrong, but equally I don't think we have a theory or language of identity and mind sufficiently advanced to refute it.
You know, I did a lot of reading about alchemy when I was younger, and when I try to think back to contemporary criticisms (and there was a lot, alchemy was very disreputable), they all seem to boil down to 1) no alchemists have yet succeeded despite lavish funding, and they are all either failures or outright conmen like Casanova; and 2) alchemical immortality is overreaching and against God.
#1 is pretty convincing but not directly applicable (cryonics since the 1970s has met its self-defined goal of keeping patients cold); #2 strikes me as false, but I also regard the similar anti-cryonics arguments as false.
I've posted a link to my blog at the moment; do you think it's better that the entire article be included here?
yep
Done.
Bah. Any FAI worthy of the name will reconstruct a plausible approximation of me from my notebooks and blog comments.
I’ve mentioned already in comments to this post that parents don’t have access to cryonics. I would like to describe in more detail what I mean by ‘access’. I think that childless adults often don’t realize the extent to which parents depend upon embedded social structures, though I’m sure they’ve noticed things like children’s menus, stroller parking stations and priority airplane seating. (One of my worst experiences as a parent was spending 14 hours with an 11 month old in Chicago-O’Hare ...)
Access certainly includes affordability. $300 per year is what it might minimally cost for one person. If it scales linearly and you have 3 kids, that would be $1,500 per year to cover the whole family. Consider that many families are struggling to cover health insurance or save for college tuition, and have already relinquished all but very occasional movies and dinners out.
Also, access includes general societal acceptance and a certain level of background participation.
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.
If there is a certain level of background participation, I can possibly count on any number of aunts and uncles and grandparents and godparents to sign up, in the case that my husband and I can’t be preserved at all or resuscitated as early as our child. (For example, my child might die of leukemia that they have a cure for in 100 years, but my husband might die of a cancer they don’t have a cure for for 150 years, and I might die of brain degeneration that makes it impossible to ever revive me.)
Placing a child in cryonics may ostracize a grieving parent from important components of community support. Without informed consideration of the issues and a collection of common experiences, society won’t know how to help the parents of a cryonically preserved child grieve. Even if you believe the child has a good chance of being revived, the parent still needs to come to terms with the terrible pain of not being able to care for their child every day anymore. When they’re reunited, the parent may have only a vague memory of their child. So an example of societal cryonics infrastructure would be the option of freezing a healthy parent with their child, if they choose to.
Access also includes the same elements that are of concern to childless adults – proximity to a large airport, access to hospitals that know about cryonics and that are willing to comply with initial steps, access to an ambulance that comes prepared with a big vat of ice.
Can you imagine a grieving parent, at the sight of the wreck, trying to arrange for someone to go to a grocery store and buy a bucket and 12 bags of ice?
One last remark about “access”. What happens once cryonics is more commonplace? Perhaps 1% of the population is signing up for cryonics and societal norms shift over a couple years. Certainly this number would rise to well above 75%. Could cryonics companies keep up with the 7000 people that die per day in the U.S, 2.5 million per year? How many billions of people will be cryo-preserved before revival is possible? Perhaps these are trivial issues, I don’t know, but they are nevertheless relevant to whether there is any real access to the 150 million parents in the US.
Eventually it might be easy, painless, and cheap for parents to save their children's lives. The more people sign up for cryonics, the closer we get to that world.
Meanwhile, though, we don't live in that world, and for now, only parents who actually care about their children's lives will bother.
See also: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/08/pick-one-sick-kids-or-look-poor.html
I've lived with families in third and second world countries, as a guest, and have my own and different ideas about this story. For example, depending upon some economic and cultural variables, it could be more likely that they don't fully trust Western solutions and didn't want to appear uppity or as though they were rejecting their native societal support structure, which they depend upon. Still, I wouldn't assert that anything is the case without actually talking to a Bolivian family. Doesn't it matter what they think of their experience?
Likewise, by insisting that it's a cut-and-dry, settled issue, you missed an opportunity at your conference to ask the couple with the kids how they overcame their initial qualms, if any, and what advice they would give to other parents thinking about cryonics. I think that I would have gotten along with this couple and after speaking together for a few minutes, neither one of us would have walked away thinking that the other set of parents were 'bad parents'.
Here's an audio interview from 5 days ago with Ben Best, the president of the Cryonics Institute:
http://itsrainmakingtime.com/2010/cryonics/
I'm trying to avoid confirmation bias on this one, and I'm asking everywhere I can for links to the best anti-cryonics writing online. Thanks!
Here's a simple metric to demonstrate why alternatives to cryonics could be preferred:
Suppose we calculate the overall value of living as the quantity of life multiplied by the quality of life. For lack of a better metric, we can rate our quality of life from 1 to 100. Thus one really good year (quality = 100) is equal to 100 really bad years (ql = 1). If you think quality of life is more important, you can use a larger metric, like 1 to 1000. But for our purposes, let's use a scale to 100.
Some transhumanists have calculated that your life expectancy without aging is about 1300 years (because there's still an annual probability that you will die from an accident, homicide, etc.). Conservatively, let's assume that if cryonics and revivification are successful, you can expect to live for another 1000 years. Also, knowing nothing else about the future, your quality of life will be ~50. Thus your total life-index points gained is 50,000. But suppose that the probability that cryonics/revivification will be successful is 1 in 10,000, or .0001. Thus the expected utility points gained is .0001 * 50,000 = 50.
It will cost your $300/year for the rest of your life to gain those expected 50 points. But suppose you could spend that $300 a year on something that is 80% likely to increase your quality of life by 5 points a year (only 5%) for the rest of your life (let's say another 50 years). There are all kinds of things that could do that: vacations, games, lovers, whatever. That's .80 * 5 * 50 = 200 expected utility points.
You're better off spending your money on things that are highly likely to increase your quality of life here and now, then on things that are highly unlikely or unknown to increase your quantity and quality of life in the future.
I think this hugely underestimates both the probability and utility of reanimation. If I am revived, I expect to live for billions of years, and to eventually know a quality of life that would be off the end of any scale we can imagine.
I can't argue that cryonics would strike me as an excellent deal if I believed that, but that seems wildly optimistic.
This seems an odd response. I'd understand a response that said "why on Earth do you anticipate that?" or one that said "I think I know why you anticipate that, here are some arguments against...". But "wildly optimistic" seems to me to make the mistake of offering "a literary criticism, not a scientific one" - as if we knew more about how optimistic a future to expect than what sort of future to expect. These must come the other way around - we must first think about what we anticipate, and our level of optimism must flow from that.
Sure, I'm talking about heuristics. Don't think that's a mistake, though, in an instance with so many unknowns. I agree that my comment above is not a counter-argument, per se, just explaining why your statement goes over my head.
Since you prefer specificity: Why on Earth do you anticipate that?
Not always - minds with the right preference produce surprising outcomes that couldn't be anticipated, of more or less anticipated good quality. (Expected Creative Surprises)
But that property is not limited to outcomes of good quality, correct?
Agreed - but that caveat doesn't apply in this instance, does it?
It does apply, the argument you attacked is wrong for a different reason. Amusingly, I see your original comment, and the follow-up arguments for incorrectness of the previous arguments as all wrong (under assumptions not widely accepted though). Let's break it up:
(1) "If I am revived, I expect to live for billions of years"
(2) "That seems wildly optimistic"
(3) "We must first think about what we anticipate, and our level of optimism must flow from that"
(3) is wrong because the general pattern of reasoning from how good the postulated outcome is to its plausibility is valid. (2) is wrong because it's not in fact too optimistic, quite the opposite. And (1) is wrong because it's not optimistic enough. If your concepts haven't broken down when the world is optimized for a magical concept of preference, it's not optimized strongly enough. "Revival" and "quality of life" are status quo natural categories which are unlikely to survive strong optimization according to the whole of human preference in a recognizable form.
Do you think that if someone frozen in the near future is revived, that's likely to happen after a friendly-AI singularity has occurred? If so, what's your reasoning for that assumption?
The best alternative to cryonics is to never need it -- to live long enough to be able to keep living longer, as new ways of living longer are developed. Cryonics is only an emergency lifeboat into the future. If you need the lifeboat you take it, but only when the ship is doomed.
Or as Ralph Merkle put it, "cryonic suspension is the second-worst thing that can happen to you".
To put this in perspective, $300/year is the cost of my ACM subscription. That's a rounding error as far as increasing my quality of life is concerned, way below 5%.
For about a billion people in the world, $300 a year (or $500, as it sounds the numbers probably really are) would double their income, very probably increasing their quality of life dramatically. I'd rather give my money to them.
See also my (ill-received) post Against Cryonics & For Cost-Effective Charity.
Welcome to LessWrong!
While it's not relevant to Mornedil's point (about his own quality of life), this was my major objection to cryonics for a while as well. There are a couple of problems with it: Most people don't currently donate all their disposable income to charity. If you do, then a cryonics subscription would actually trade off with charitable donations; if you're like most people, it probably trades off with eating out, seeing movies and saving for retirement.
As MixedNuts points out below, most people don't hesitate to spend that much on accepted medical treatments that could save their lives; another, related point is that people on cryonics may not feel the need to spend millions on costly end-of-life treatments that will only extend their lives by a few months. A disproportionate high portion of medical costs come from the last year of life.
Thirdly, if you estimate the money spent on cryonics could save 20 lives in a third world country, you are choosing between extending 20 lives for a few decades and (possibly) extending one life for millions of years. Which side of that tradeoff you prefer depends a lot on your view of immortality.
Finally, ask yourself "If I was offered cryonics for free, would I sign up?" If not, this isn't your true rejection.
I do. I give away all my earnings and my husband gives about 20% of his, so we live on a much smaller budget than most people we know.
This would be good. But it would be good if people laid off the end-of-life spending even without cryonics.
Maybe. I only heard of the idea a week ago - still thinking.
Do you know about Giving What We Can? You may be interested in getting to know people in that community. Basically, it's a group of people that pledges to give 10% of their earnings to the most effective charities in the developing world. Feel free to PM me or reply if you want to know more.
I'm familiar with it. Thanks for checking!
While we live on a much smaller budget than many people, we still have disposable income that we could choose to spend on cryonics instead of other things. If cryonics cost $500/year you would still have $28/week in discretionary money after the cryonics spending. Whether this makes sense depends on whether you think that you would get more happiness out of cryonics or that $10/week. As for me, I need to read more about cryonics.
(Some background: As she wrote, julia is very unwilling to spend money on herself that could instead be going to helping other people. Because this leads to making yourself miserable, I decided to put $38/week into an account as a conditional gift, where the condition is that it can be spent on herself (or on gifts for people she knows personally) but not given away. So cryonics would not in our case actually mean less money given to charity.)
You have my great respect for this, and if you moreover endorse
and you've got some sort of numerical lives-saved estimate on the charities you're donating to, then I will accept "Cryonics is not altruistically maximizing" from you and your husband - and only from you two.
Unless you have kids, in which case you should sign them up.
The metric I care more about is more like quality-adjusted life years than lives saved. We've been giving to Oxfam because they seem to be doing good work on changing systems (e.g. agricultural policy) that keep people in miserable situations addition to more micro, and thus measurable, stuff (e.g. mosquito nets). The lack of measurement does bother us, and our last donation was to their evaluation and monitoring department. I do understand that restricted donations aren't really restricted, but Oxfam indicated having donors give specifically to something as unpopular as evaluation does increase their willingness to increase its budget.
We may go with a more GiveWell-y choice next year.
Only if I believe my (currently non-existing) children's lives are more valuable than other lives. Otherwise, I should fund a cryonics scholarship for someone who definitely wants it. Assuming I even think cryonics is a good use of money, which I'm currently not sure about.
The ethics of allocating lots of resources to our own children instead of other people's, and of making our own vs. adopting, is another thing I'm not sure about. If there are writings on LW about this topic, I haven't found them.
In light of the sustainability concerns that Carl Shulman raises in paragraphs 2, 3 and 4 here; I'm not sure that it's advisable to base the (major) life choice of having or adopting children on ethical considerations.
That being said, if one is looking at the situation bloodlessly and without regard for personal satisfaction & sustainability, I'm reasonably sure that having or adopting children does not count as effective philanthropy. There are two relevant points here:
(a) If one is committed to global welfare, the expected commitment to global welfare of one's (biological or adopted) children is lower than that of one's own commitment. On a biological level there's regression to the mean and at the environmental level though one's values does influence those of one's children, there's also a general tendency for children to rebel against their parents.
(b) The philanthropic opportunity cost of having or adopting children is (in my opinion) so large as to eclipse the added value of a life in the developed world. The financial cost alone has been estimated as a quarter million dollars per child.
And even if one considers the quality of life in the developed world to be so large so that one extra person living in the developed world is more important than hundreds of people in the developing world, to the extent that there are good existential risk reduction charities the calculation still comes out against having children (if the human race thrives in the future then our descendants will have much higher quality of life than people in the contemporary developed world).
Irrelevant. My observation was adressed to an argument that those $300 would improve my own QoL.
"Hi, you have cancer. Want an experimental treatment? It works with >5% probability and costs $500/year." "No thanks, I'll die and give the money to charity."
Strangely enough, I don't hear that nearly as often as the one against cryonics. And it's even worse, because signing up for cryonics means more people will be able to (economies of scale, looks less weird, more people hear of it).
Not to mention that most charities suck. But VillageReach does qualify.
I don't think the 1 to 100 scale works; the scale should allow for negative numbers to accommodate some of the concepts that have been mentioned.For example, would you rather die at 50 years old, or live another decade while being constantly and pointlessly tortured, and then die?
It seems reasonable to assume that selection bias will work in our favor when considering the nature of the world in cases where the revival will work. This is debatable, but the debate shouldn't just be ignored.
Even assuming that your math is right, I'm having a hard time thinking of something that I could spend $300/year on that would give me a quality-of-life increase equivalent to 5% of the difference between the worse possible case (being tortured for a year) and the best possible case (being massively independently wealthy, having an awesome social life and plenty of interesting things to do with my time). I'd rate a week's vacation as less than 0.5% of the difference between those two, for example, and you can barely get plane tickets to somewhere interesting for $300.
Edit: Flubbed the math. Point still stands, but not as strongly as I originally thought.
For a single individual the cost is much more than $300. Alcor's website says membership is $478 annually, plus another $120 a year if you elect the stand-by option. Also you need $150K worth of life insurance, which will add a bit more.
Peanuts! You say...
I really don't see the point of signing up now, because I really don't see how you can avoid losing all the information in your mind to autolysis unless you get a standby or at least a very quick (within an hour or two) vitrification. That means I have to be in the right place, at the right time when I die and I simply don't think thats likely now - when any death I experience would almost certainly be sudden and it would be hours and hours before I'm vitrified.
I mean, if I get a disease and have some warning then sure I'll consider a move to Phoenix and pay them their $20k surcharge (about a lifetime's worth of dues anyway) and pay for the procedure in cash up-front. There is no reason for me to put money into dues now when the net present value of those payments exceeds the surcharge they charge if you are a "last minute" patient.
I understand this isn't an option if you don't have at least that much liquidity but since I happen to do so then it makes sense to me to keep it all (and future payments) under my control.
Hopefully that decision is a long time from now and I'll be more optimistic about the whole business at that time. I'll also have better picture of my overall financial outlook and whether I'd rather spend that money on my children's future than my doubtful one.
jhuffman's point made me think of the following devil's advocacy: If someone is very confident of cryonics, say more than 99% confident, then they should have themselves preserved before death. They should really have themselves preserved immediately - otherwise there is a higher risk that they will die in a way that causes the destruction of their mind, than there is that cryonics will fail. The amount that they will be willing to pay would also be irrelevant - they won't need the money until after they are preserved. I appreciate that there are probably laws against preserving healthy adults, so this is strictly a thought experiment.
As people get older their risk of death or brain damage increases. This means that as someone gets older the confidence level at which they should seek early preservation will decrease. Also as someone gets older their expected "natural" survival time decreases, by definition. This means the payoff for not seeking early preservation is reducing all the time. This seems to bring some force to the argument - if there is a 10% probability that cryonics will succeed, then I really can't see why anyone would let themselves get within 6 years of likely death - they are putting a second lifetime at risk for 6 years of less and less healthy life.
Finally the confidence level relates to cost. If people can be shown to have a low level of confidence in cryonics, then their willingness to pay money should be lower. The figures I've seen quoted require a sum of $150,000. (Whether this is paid in life insurance or not is irrelevant - you must pay for it in the premium since, if you're going to keep the insurance until you die, the probability of the insurer paying out is 100%). If the probability of Cryonics working is 10%, then the average cost for a successful re-animation is $1.5 million. This is a pretty conservative cost I think - doubtless for some who read this blog it is small change. Not for me sadly though :)
I don't think anyone is that confident...at least I hope that they are not. Even if cryonics itself works there are so many other reasons revival would never happen; I outlined them near the bottom of the thread related to my original reply to this post already so I won't do so again. Suffice it to say, even if you had 100% confidence in both cryonics and future revival technology, you cannot have nearly 100% confidence in actually being revived.
But if you are young and healthy and want to be preserved intact you can probably figure out how to do it; but it is risky and you need to take precautions which I don't know the least thing about... The last thing you want is to end up under a scalpel on a medical examiner's table, which is what often happens to people who die suddenly or violently.
It's information, it doesn't need to be found in the same form that is necessary for normal brain's function. If there is something else correlated with the info in question, or some kind of residue from which it's possible to infer what was there before, it's enough. Also, concepts in the brain seem to be coded holographically, so even a bullet in the brain may be recoverable from.
(For the same reason, importance of vitrification seems overemphasised. I can't imagine information getting lost because of freezing damage. Of course, brain becomes broken, but info doesn't magically disappear because of that.)
That's a pretty big if. The self-destruction and consumption of neural cells is certainly going to leave a residue, but this would be like trying to figure out what sort of information was carved into an apple slice before I ate it, digested it and excreted the remains.
I am fairly sure, though I haven't been able to refind a link, that there's some solid evidence that autolysis isn't nearly that quick or severe.
We can watch neural cells dying underneath a microscope. The destruction looks pretty complete. Structure is dissolved in what are essentially digestive enzymes.
If you read Alcor's FAQ for Scientists, you'll notice that they are the most careful to point out that there is considerable doubt about the possibility to ever revive anyone whose gone several hours without vitrification. Maybe this is because they want more "stand-by" revenue. Maybe its because they know they know there is no basis for speculation; by our current understanding of things its a serious problem. There are those who hope it is not a fatal problem. There are those who hope there is a heaven, too.
Please write up these objections into a blog post or article somewhere. From the searches I've been doing, you only have to clear a very low bar to write the most clearly argued and well informed criticism of cryonics in the world.
What has to be done ASAP is not vitrification it is cooling. Just dropping the body in a bath of icewater will prevent that kind of damage for days; and Suspended Animation or Alcor - either of which will be waiting right next to your bedside as fast as they can fly - have much more effective ways of cooling than a bath of icewater, and they're working on better ways yet. They also use a portable thumper to perform CPR while cooling (their special waterproof version has been patented by cryo orgs for marketing for other medical uses), just to make sure your blood stays oxygenated while you're in the metabolic danger zone, and I believe they pump you full of other protectants as well (using interosseous access, which is much faster than intravenous).
Local cryonics groups in faraway lands may not have thumpers and complicated blood medications and interosseous access, but they can at least dump you in a bathtub of ice water and perform CPR for a few minutes.
Also, with a bit more life insurance you can get the air ambulance option at Suspended Animation.
You are right - what I should be saying is not that I'm concerned about the likelihood of hours without vitrification but that I am concerned about hours of autolysis occurring.
Yes, well, I think it's safe to say that quite a few cryonics patients and orgs are concerned about that. There are complex technologies to prevent it, but also a simple one, widely available if you have any local cryonics group. It's called crushed ice, and a lot of stores will sell it to you.
Most cryonics literature concentrates on the possibility of direct bodily reanimation, not scanning and WBE.
And yet even vitrified brains still fracture during freezing, and even pre-vitrification bodies are stored. What happens in modern practice to bodies that were impossible to vitrify, or that weren't frozen for "too long" (e.g. because of autopsy)? Are they thrown away? (I believe they are.) I'm a little worried about these scenarios (and consistency of decision-making that goes into them).
Lots of non-vitrified bodies are stored. I don't think any are discarded because they were impossible to vitrify, but some are discarded because they weren't frozen for too long, and Alcor note that this is controversial: see Neural Archaeology and Ethics of Non-ideal Cryonics Cases.
I'm expecting to have to wait a long subjective time before I get to meet James Bedford, put it that way!
(Updated to add "Ethics..." link)
Thanks for the links! From the first one:
From the second link:
Sure, but if I was Alcor or CI, I'd be wary of being seen to be over-eager to preserve (and so get the money).
The best solution is probably to ask when you sign up.
Your final paragraph is a very limited list of the ways parents can spend money on their children. For example, what if the choice is between spending more money on your current kids (like by signing them up for cryonics), and having more kids? By giving kid 1 immortality, you snuff out kid 2's chance at life. There are more life or not-life tradeoffs going on here than merely cryonics.
Anyway, there are a bunch of things mixed up in your (understandably) emotional paragraph. Like: what do parents owe their children? And: is cryonics a cost-effective benefit? Both of these links seem somewhat suspect to me.
I'm still a few million in net worth away from thinking cryonics is worth the cost.
The tradeoff between kid 1 and kid 2 doesn't exist, because kid 2 doesn't exist. There is no kid 2 to whom to give life, any more than there is a kid 2 to whom to give a popsickle. To do good or ill by kid 2, kid 2 has first to exist; bringing kid 2 into existence is not a good for kid 2, nor is denying kid 2 existence a wrong, because kid 2 has no prior existence to grant hir good or ill. You can't harm an hypothesis.
Maybe there are better examples out there, but this isn't very convincing to me.
The limiting factor on the number of kids that people have very rarely seems to be money, despite what some people will say. Actions speak louder than words, and the poor have more kids than the rich.
And if cryonics is a problem because it makes people have fewer kids (which remains to be seen), it's pretty low on the list of things that produce that effect (f.ex. cheap birth control, careers, and the desire for a social life have certainly "snuffed out" many more potential kids than cryonics ever did (if any)).
How do you figure that?
Are you aware that cryonics paid for via life insurance usually costs a few hundreds a year for someone your age, and probably less for a young child? You've probably played bigger poker hands than that. If money's a limiting factor, it should be easy to trim that amount from the fat somewhere else in the budget.
I'm still so baffled by this post.
Eliezer, do you like human beings? As they are, or do you want to change them?
Please: recognize the motive in asking this question, and give me a square answer.
http://books.google.com/books?id=MK0-GY5Ak7MC&pg=PA88&lpg=PA88&dq=%22sock+full+of%22+%22ozy+and+millie%22&source=bl&ots=f0DznsbBEK&sig=oXYyvFEDclrOajLIz7kdKI6oC0k&hl=en&ei=GGNaS-exFISksgPps6zMBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CAcQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=&f=false
Second comic from the top.
Backup link: http://dergeis.livejournal.com/319819.html
Original link: http://www.ozyandmillie.org/d/20030324.html
(In other words: "I love humanity. It's people I can't stand." - Linus van Pelt)?
I'm rather the opposite. My feelings can best be summed up by a Pirates of Penzance quote rather than a webcomic:
Or Mrs. Banks in Mary Poppins: "Though we adore men individually, we agree that as a group they're rather stupid."
What does that mean in practical terms?
I adore many individual humans, and considering even complete strangers one at a time, I can offer the benefit of the doubt to a considerable degree. I abhor us as a species, and when large groups of humans do stupid or evil things, my benefit-of-doubt mechanisms stop working and I fall back on "we suck".
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it." - Agent K, Men in Black
There's no question that Eliezer wants humans to change. But he wants them to change in accordance with a coherent extrapolation of their values as they are now.
I have found this article which is about the same event (they even mention Eliezer as "an authority in the field of artificial intelligence"):
http://www.immortalhumans.com/what-type-of-personality-thinks-immortality-is-possible/
'twarn't me
If I understand that contraction properly, are you saying you were instead the "science fiction scribe" they mention?
I was not at that conference. It is a different conference.
Okay, I got it wrong the first time. But this one is about the conference you attended (and the author mentions you by name):
http://www.depressedmetabolism.com/2010/01/15/teens-twenties-cryonicist-event-2010/
Ah, well. What are the odds? I didn't even think to double check the name of the conference in your post since it so obviously seemed to be the same one.
I guess there's a lesson in there...
I do not believe I'll be singing up for cryonics. Not because I think it's too expensive, or impossible to be reanimated. The reason I won't be signing up is because I have no interest in living forever.
Can you be more precise about the age at which you wish to die?
edit: I'd like to live to maybe 150~200. I don't find that impossible with current medical/technological advances. The leading causes of death in old age tend to be as a result of organ failure and disease. I imagine that in the near future if any of my organs fail, I'll be able to have them replaced via prosthesis, or cloned organs.
And once 120, you'd like to die, even if you find you're in better health at 120 than you are now?
I guess it depends on how well I'm able to sustain my own existence. If at age 120(150~200) I'm unable to feed, or financially support myself. Then yes, I'd like to die. If I'm at the high point of my life, successful(this is relative, assume my evaluation of success is the same as yours), healthy, and have enough activities to keep me entertained, then I'd like to continue living.
So at what point would you like to die no matter how well you're doing?
If I am lucky enough to be eternally financially secure and healthy, then I'd like to live to the life expectancy of everyone else. this is taking into account cryonics. If it becomes ubiquitous to live very long, via any means, then I'd like to live just as long. If in 2010, the average adult male lived to be 30 years old, I wouldn't want to live to be 200.
This is really interesting. Do you have a dispreference for uniqueness in other things, too? Do you think that societies are optimized for the average lifespans of their inhabitants and wouldn't be able to deal with a longer-lived outlying specimen? You specified "male" - if males lived 30 years and females got to be a thousand, would you still want to live to be only 30?
I personally just think that everyone should be given the same chance to live a long and happy life. I don't think anyone should be "privileged" enough to live longer than anyone else, simply because they have the financial means to do so.
I do think societies are optimized for their average inhabitant lifespan. If a group of "super humans" came about, I think that they'd be met with extreme opposition from other "normal" people. If you've ever read a history boook, or watched the news, then you're already aware of the numerous examples prejudice (that often lead to violence/genocide) for those who are different, be it ethnicity, creed, gender, or sexual preference.
Probably, I wouldn't want to go around being the "freakishly immortal" male, I imagine it'd reduce my chances of finding adequate mates, and/or fitting into society. As irrational as that sounds, I quite like being social/normal.
Should we give up antibiotics because some people can't afford them?
Well, if you were the freakishly immortal male, nobody would (probably) be able to tell until you were the far side of thirty; so while it might or might not help, it doesn't seem like it'd hurt, in the finding-mates department.
OK, but do you have an interest in living for say... 100 years ? 200 years? 1,000,000 years? All of these lifespans are significantly shorter than forever, yet longer than current lifespans.
My opinion has changed. I'd like to live as long as everyone else. No more, no less. If the average life expectancy of a healthy American male was 1,000 years, then I'd like to live to be the ripe old age of 1,000. I would not like to rely on cryonics to extend my life. I would however use cloned organs, full body prosthesis, or nanotechnology to extend my life.
My biggest concern with cryonics is whether my consciousness could be transferred to a new body. I'm still skeptical about how consciousness is formed exactly. I'm skeptical that if an exact (to the atomic scale) replica of my brain is created, that it might not be me. I'm not willing to bet money that could go toward my (future) child's college expenses, a house, or emergency medical expenses. I'd also note that I am currently trying to decide between textbooks, food, and rent. Perhaps if I were more financially secure my opinion would be different.
If consciousness is proven to be concrete, and/or easily transferable then I'll sign up for cryonics. Until then I'll live my current life to the fullest, by wasting my money on tangible, menial activities like watching movies, and playing laser tag with my brother.
It sounds like you are worried about philosophical zombies.
The key point of the linked article is that an atom for atom replica of your brain would direct its body to talk about its consious experiences for the same reason you talk about your consious experiences, so it would be an astounding coincidence if your reports of consiousness corresponded with your experience if that consious experience was not part of the causal physics governing the atoms.
I don't understand. Are you saying that if an exactly replica of my brain was created, then it wouldn't be me? If that's the case, then why sign up for cryonics?
No, I am saying the opposite, that the exact replica of your brain would be you, complete with your consiousness.
Well, even if you were preserved, you still wouldn't live "forever". You could still die in an accident in some way that wouldn't allow you to be dethawed. You could still die from an illness that hasn't been cured yet. And you wouldn't survive the heat death of the universe.
But, why wouldn't you want to keep living? I hear this sentiment often and really don't understand it. I've always wanted to be immortal.
I phrased my original statement from the point of view of a person who lives in a world where people live to be 80. I'd like to live as long as everyone else lives, if cryonics, prosthesis, nanotechnology, or some unforeseen technology come across that allows people to live to be thousands of years old, then I'd like to live as long as them too. I'm afraid of being alone, and I wouldn't like to be the last person, or one of the last people alive.
I actually feel the same way. It's not going to stop me from signing up for cryo, though.
The feeling isn't rational; if anything, I'd describe it as instinctual, since it seems to be fairly free-floating and I don't remember having believed anything that seems likely to have spawned it. I try not to build on it, but it has acquired some cruft over the years. The main component is the feeling that anything over about 1,000 years' lifetime is just crazy talk - literally unthinkable in a way that my brain classifies as 'impossible' for no good reason. A recurring crufty rationalization of this is the idea that I wouldn't be able to handle 1,000 years' worth of cultural change. Another component of the issue is the feeling that I have that eventually I'll be 'done' - I'll run out of interesting things to do, or just not want to continue for whatever reason. For no apparent reason, my brain attaches the idea '200 years old' to this bit.
Of course, I also rather strongly suspect that if I live to be 1,000 (subjective) years old, I'll feel the same way, just with the numbers '10,000' and '2,000' where I have '1,000' and '200' now. Either way, it seems like living that long and finding out is a good solution to this problem.
You've already handled ~50,000 years of cultural change.
I was counting cultural change since I was born, though perhaps it'd make more sense to count cultural change since I started participating in the world - no more than 30 years' worth, by either count.
How are you counting it, and why?
You've gone from no culture at all (which I somewhat arbitrarily placed as the equivalent of 50kyrs ago) to the present in only as many years as you are old. A mere 1,000 more years of change, experienced in real time, should be easy in comparison.
Think back to whenever your earliest memories are, and the person you were then. Think of that magnitude of change as being just the beginning.
I already had a reasonably good grasp of some parts of our culture as far back as I remember. I'm also already having trouble really keeping up with the world as it is now - I have trouble remembering that cell phones and laptops are commonplace, for example.
My model of how comprehension of culture works is based on the Critical Period Hypothesis - I suspect that we get one burst of really good ability to pick that kind of concept up, and then have a much lower ability for the rest of our lives.
It does occur to me that the kind of advanced science that would be able to reverse cryo preservation might well be able to recreate that kind of ability, though, now that I've thought enough about it to spell it out.
I'd put a much higher probability on that kind of 'advanced science' than on cryonics working, FWIW. The key ingredients like BDNF are already loosely known, and we already know a lot of drugs (like piracetam) that have effects on BDNF.
OK, here's a rationality test.
To test in some measure if your assumptions and hypothesis about cryonics are calibrated, how many people do you estimate were cryono-preserved at Alcor in 2009? (Don't look! And don't answer if you already know or knew for 2008 or another recent year.)
Later edit: The number of people who signed up for cryonics in 2009 is available as well if you want to estimate that too.
If you want, provide your estimate and something about your calculation.
Normal distribution, truncated at zero ... mean 10, standard deviation 50.
And that's ten and fifty I mean, not one hundred or five.
Edit: Justification is a sense that there are less than 1e4 people on ice so far, suspected to be based on flipping past such a statistic on a webpage without consciously reading. Expect number of people signed up is between twice and thirty times number stored.
Edit mk. 2: Or between zero and twenty, whichever is greater.
Edit mk. 3: I have now checked my numbers. ...Interesting.
Can anyone post a comparison of the services, (and other pros and cons) between Alcor and CI?
What are the arguments for either? Paying something like 2X price for a similar looking service implies that there should be a difference in the quality of service, perhaps the quality of the cryopreservation procedure. Maybe the most important one is the financial health of the company: the probability that they manage to exist long enough.
There's some information here.
Alcor takes care of standby (they'll send a team to camp out at your deathbed) and transportation. CI requires contracting with Suspended Animation for that level of care. Alcor invests more money per patient to fund liquid nitrogen and other maintenance expenses. ($25,000 for neuros and $65,000 for whole body)
On the other hand, CI keeps a relatively low profile while Alcor doesn't.
Thanks for the effort!
Of course I came to the above link and also to CI's comparison page, still it would be nice to see some independent review of both companies. Especially on the financial prospects.
The information on trust is interesting. Does it mean that Alcor patients have a safer future in case the operation of Alcor is endangered?
What I found strange is that Alcor advertises itself as the only company using "perfusion technology" whatever it means as opposed to CI, whereas CI also insists on using the "best techniques currently available" and cites the same paper as Alcor. It is definitely unclear. The only clear dinstinction seems to be that Alcor uses full body vitrification if a premium is payed. Still, the price difference between 88K and 35K are staggering, even if the transportation/suspension costs are taken into account.
It is fairly irrational, but the reason I haven't signed up is because it seems in order to get insurance, you normally need to have a blood test. Basically, I have this phobia when it comes to those; I recognize it is stupid, but I can't seem to get over it (maybe if I could have it done while knocked out, but it seems unlikely the people taking the blood would go for that). I’ve heard you can get term insurance without a medical test in the amounts required for cryonics (I think the premiums would probably cost me a few hundred dollars more per year; I’m 25 and in the US, so my risk of dying in the next 25 years should be low enough to not merit too large of an increase). Does anyone know if there are carriers that would do this?
What would you do if it were medically necessary for you to get a blood test for some other reason (or what have you done in the past)?
I've had one done in the past when I was younger, and that probably made my phobia a bit worse. I believe they had to hold my arm down and and basically force it. I'd like to think if I needed it for some other medical reason, I would be able to do so without a similar incident; but realistically, I figure that won't be the case.
Have you tried desensitization? Could you prick yourself with a med-lance? Even though you could feel weird doing it at home by yourself, you might feel more in control if it's just you doing it. Then being analytical and curious about your response might make it go away.
Although you suggestion did sound strange initially, desensitization might be a good way to get over it. I’ll have to considering trying that as an option.
Are they going to keep having this conference? $300 a year seems like an outright bargain if I get a free trip to Florida every year out of it.
Curiously -- not indignantly -- how should I interpret your statement that all but a handful of parents are "lousy"? Does this mean that your values are different from theirs? This might be what is usually meant when someone says someone is "lousy".
Your explicit argument seems to be that they're selfish if they're purchasing fleeting entertainment when they could invest that money in cryonics for their children. However, if they don't buy cryonics for themselves, either, it seems like cryonics is something they don't value, not that they're too selfish to buy it for their children.
Eliezer is criticizing parents who in principle think that cryonics is a good thing, but don't get it for their children, whether or not they get it for themselves.
My guess is that such parents are much more common than parents who buy it for themselves but not for their children, just because "thinking that cryonics is good in principle" is much more common than actually buying it for yourself.
Exactly. If a parent doesn't think cryonics makes sense, then they wouldn't get it for their kids anyways. Eliezer's statement can only criticize parents who get cryonics for themselves but not their children. This is a small group, and I assume it is not the one he was targeting.
Wow, the opposition I'm getting in my blog for suggesting this! (No link, because I want to avoid a pile-on). Still, two friends say they're also considering it. Will push :-)
Eliezer--don't know how many people reading this had the same response I did, but you tore my heart out.
As Nick Bostrom Ph.D. Director of the Oxford Future of Humanity institute, Co-founder of the World Transhumanist Association said about my book "21st Century Kids" "Childhood should be fun and so should the future. Read this to your children, and next you know they'll demand a cryonics contract for Christmas."
You know, I do what I can to educate others to the fact that cryonics is possible, and thus there is the common sense obligation to try. For me it is a noble endeavor that humans are attempting, I'm proud to help that effort. If you do a search on "teaching kids cryonics" you'll get: http://www.depressedmetabolism.com/2008/07/04/teaching-children-about-cryonics/ from a few years ago. I still do classes when I can, I've been talking to my children's friends and parents here in the UK after moving from Austin this past summer. The reception I get over here from parents and kids is generally the same as what I heard in the States--people express interest, but never really go through the effort of signing up.
I will be writing more, in the mean time I love hearing from fans of http://www.amazon.com/21st-Century-Kids-Shannon-Vyff/dp/1886057001 It was a thrill to get pictures and feedback from kids who got the book this Christmas and loved it!
Thank you for writing about the Teens & Twenties conference Eliezer, I sincerely look forward to further analysis from you. I'll be attending with my teens in the future, my 13 year old daughter actually had wanted to go this year but we were not able to work it in. She'll be more mature, and my son will be a teen by the time the next event occurs. It is great to have the heroes who have devoted their lives to cryoncis, meet the "normal folk" who sign up--and for the kids to make friends with other cryonicists.
I'm sorry about your brother Eliezier, your writing tore my heart out. I agree that parents should sign their kids up, my own were raised with it and plan on "talking their spouse" into doing it (that will be interesting ;-) ). I've seen other older cryonicists who have raised their kids with cryonics, and the kids kept up the arrangements. I've also seen it go the other way. We need more books written for kids :-)
Thanks for all you do.
January 21, 2010
Eliezer Yudkowsky writes (in Normal Cryonics):
Comment: there’s that, but if that was all it was, it wouldn’t be harder than doing your own income taxes by hand. A lot more people manage that, than do atheists who can afford it manage to sign up for cryonics.
So what’s the problem? A major one is what I might term the “creep factor.” Even if you have no fears of being alone in the future, or being experimented upon by denizens of the future, there’s still the problem that you have to think about your own physical mortality in a very concrete way. A way which requires choices, for hours and perhaps even days.
And they aren’t comforting choices, either, such as planning your own funeral. The conventional funeral is an event where you can imagine yourself in a comfortable nice casket, surrounded by people either eulogizing you, or kicking themselves because they weren’t nicer to you while you were alive. These thoughts may comfort those contemplating suicide, but they don’t comfort cryonicists.
No, you won’t be in any slumber-chamber. Instead they’ll cut your head off and it will push up bubbles, not daisies. At the very least they’ll fill your vessels with cold dehydrating solution and you’ll end up upside down and naked at 321 F. below zero, like some shriveled up old vampire.
Will you feel any of this? No. Is it any more gruesome than the alternatives of skeletonizing in a flame, or by slow decay? No. But the average person manages to mostly avoid thinking of the alternatives, and the funeral industry helps them do it. But there’s no avoiding thinking hard about this nitty-gritty physical death stuff, when you sign up for cryonics.
There’s even some primal primate fear involved, something like the fear of snakes. Except that cryonics taps into fears about being alone and alienated in the future, along with primal fears of decapitation (monkeys hate seeing monkey parts, particularly monkey heads). My illustration of the power of these memes is Washington Irving’s short stories: out of the very many he wrote, only two are now remembered, and yet, at the same time, remarkably almost everyone knows those two. They are Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. There’s a reason for this.
The psychological factors can surprise the most dyed-in-the-wool atheists who have experience with death. I myself came to cryonics as a physician, already having spent most of a year dissecting corpses, and later seeing much real-time dying. It didn’t completely fix the problem of my own physical mortality. When I came to actually signing up for cryonics, already having been convinced of it for some time, I felt significant psychological resistance, even so. There’s a difference between what you know intellectually and what your gut tells you. Cryonics is like skydiving in that regard.
At this point, it’s worth repeating two of my favorite cryonics stories (the intellectual world is composed of stories, as somebody said, in the same way the physical world is composed of atoms).
Story #1 involves the winner of the Omni magazine essay contest of Why I Want To Be Cryonically Suspended. The prize: a free sign-up to Alcor, no money needed. The young man who won with the best essay about why he wanted to do it, was duly offered the prize he’d eloquently convinced himself, and everyone else, that he wanted. And when it came down to doing it, he couldn’t make himself do it. Interesting.
Story #2 is about Frederik Pohl, atheist S.F. writer of a lot of good tales, including one of the better cryonics stories, The Age of the Pussyfoot. Thirty years ago Pohl was approached by a cryonics organization about signing up, on the basis of his novel and known beliefs. He gave the usual counter argument about the chance not being worth the expense. The return was an offer to cryopreserve him free, for the publicity. He was taken aback, and said he’d have to think about it. Later, after much prodding, he produced what he admitted (and hadn’t realized before) was the real reason: he couldn’t get past the creep factor. Pohl is still alive as of this writing (he’s 90), but he’ll eventually die and won’t be cryopreserved, even though his intellect tells him (and has long told him) that he should.
So, in summary, I’m happy that Eliezer spent some time in Florida socializing with happy yuppies who had already made it past the barrier to signing up for cryonics. But for those out in the world who haven’t actually done that yet--- signed and notarized--- there is one more test of mettle for the Hero, which even they may not realize yet awaits them. This is a test of the power of will over emotion, and it’s not for the faint of spirit. In some ways it’s like the scene from the Book of the Dead where the dead person’s heart is weighed, except that this is where the would-be cryonicist finds that his or her courage is being weighed. It’s like doing the long tax return while signing yourself up for organ donation or medical school dissection, or the like.
I wish them luck. I wonder if anybody asked people at the conference what their own experiences had been, in getting past the tests of the underworld, or the under-MIND, to gain that strange chance to be your own Osiris.
Steve Harris, M.D. Alcor member since 1987
This is an awesome comment. I plan to sign up for cryonics when I can, and I'm really hoping I have the guts to go through with it for myself and any children I may someday have. I hope it really is comparable to signing up to be an organ donor, because I did that without a second thought. On the other hand, that was just one of many boxes on the driver's license paperwork.
I live in the UK, and when I was self-employed I had an accountant do my taxes. I'm looking into signing up, and it looks to be much, much harder than that; not an "oh, must get around to it" thing but a long and continuing period of investigation to even find out what I need to sort out. This bar currently seems very, very high to me; if it were as simple as getting a mortgage I'd probably already be signed up.
Rudi Hoffman has sent word back.
The quote I was given for whole-life (constant coverage, constant premiums, no time limit) is $1900 per year (I'm 40, male and healhty), for a payout of $200K.
The more problematic news is that the life insurance company may start requiring a US Social Security number.
Wow, that's a lot. Thanks!
Yes. The major conclusion here is - if you are going to sign up, sign up early.
I'm baffled that this is the stumbling block for so many people. I can understand being worried about the cost/uncertainty trade-off, but I really don't understand why it's any less troublesome than buying life insurance, planning a funeral, picking a cemetery plot, writing a will, or planning for cremation. People make choices that involve contemplating their death all the time, and people make choices about unpleasant-sounding medical treatments all the time.
Well, maybe more people would sign up if Alcor's process didn't involve as much thinking about the alternatives? I had thought that the process was just signing papers and arranging life insurance. But if Alcor's process is turning people away, maybe that needs to change.
Maybe I'm just deluding myself: I'm not in a financial position to sign up yet, and I plan on signing up when I am. But I can't see the "creep factor" being an issue for me at all. I have no idea what that would feel like.
Speaking as someone who tried getting a concrete price estimate, the process can stand to be much improved. I had/will have to (if I follow through):
Get a pile of PDFs in return along with finding out that I still have to...
Decide between different cryo organizations. 6 a) Find out info about the organizations' recurring fees. 6 b) Do research into each organization
At any time between steps 1 and 16, the process can fall completely apart.
This is the exact sentence that crossed my mind upon reading the original comment.
I often find that my reactions and feelings are completely different from other people's, though.
For what it's worth, I've heard people initially had many of the same hangups about life insurance, saying that they didn't want to gamble on death. The way that salespeople got around that was by emphasizing that the contracts would protect the family in event of the breadwinner's death, and thus making it less of a selfish thing.
I wonder if cryo needs a similar marketing parallel. "Don't you want to see your parents again?"
Steve I didn't know that story about Frederik Pohl-thank you for posting it, fascinating. Also, they weren't all yuppies at the FL teens & twenties cryonicist conference, there were representatives from all sorts of backgrounds/classes. Personally my motivation in signing up for cryonics is that I think the amount of knowledge that we have to learn about the Universe pales in comparison to my short natural lifespan, that keeps me in awe-as I currently learn all that I can, and all the new things I realize I don't know. That said, I'm perfectly happy with my own life, with my family, friends and community work and if I get more time, an "extreme lifespan" to see what is out there in the billions of light years of space, if I get more time to help end inequality if it still exists--or to move on to other goals, then so be it-I got lucky that cryonics worked ;-)
You're doing your argument an injustice by not linking to (or expounding on) a great reason why cryonics should work. In case you already have, well then, please could you just cite your prior work.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/wq/you_only_live_twice/
It seems obvious to me that if cryonics companies wanted more people to sign up, all they'd need to do is advertise a little. An ad compaign quelling top 10 parent fears would probably start causing people to sign up in droves. However, they remain quite quiet so I do assume that there's some kind techno-elitist thing going on ... they don't want everyone signing up.
Doesn't, um, thinking about that for like 30 seconds tell you how unlikely it is?
Not advertising is a clear signal. If any company wants the masses, they advertise to the masses. If Proctor & Gamble comes out with a great new detergent, they're not going to wait for people to do the research and find out about them.
The more I think about it the more likely it seems... So: finding out about them is the first barrier to entry.
A clear signal that cryonics companies don't have an advertising budget?
Do you know why cryonics is not more heavily advertised? Thinking about it for 30 seconds gives me some hypotheses but I'm too socially distant to make a reliable guess.
I like the mockery explanation. Cryonics is as about as socially acceptable as furry fandom; if furries scraped up a few millions for some TV spots, do you think they would get more or less members in the long run? There is such a thing as bad publicity.
And existing cryonics members might be exasperated - money used for advertising is money not used for research or long-term sustainability (I hear Alcor runs at a loss).
I'm pretty sure that at the root, most furries are furries because of anthropomorphized animal cartoon shows. I think a well designed commercial could push a lot of people over the edge.
Thanks, now I have an entertaining conspiracy theory about Avatar.
This is a myth. Techno-filia is very much part of our culture. Science fiction dominates our movies. People would scramble to sign up for cryonics if the infrastructure was there and they were certain it wasn't a scam. But that's a big IF. And that's the IF -- this idea of parents not choosing cryonics because they're lousy parents is a huge MYTH invented right on the spot. Parents don't have access to cryonics.
(If a cryonics company is reading this: I do suggest an ad campaign. I think the image you project should be 'safe household product': something completely established and solid that people can sign up for and sign out of easily -- just a basic, mundane service. No complications and lots of options. People aren't signing they're life away, they're buying a service. And it's just suspension till a later date -- I'd stay well clear of any utopian pseudo-religious stuff.)
I think byrnema has a point. I don't think most people are even aware that cryonics isn't sci-fi anymore.
The way people say "it's science fiction" as if it tells you anything at all about the plausibility of what's under discussion drives me crazy. Doctor Who and communications satellites are both science fiction.
Anecdote: I read sci-fi as a kid, learned of the concept of cryonics, thought it was a good idea if it worked... and then it never occurred to me to research whether it was a real technology. Surely I would have heard of it if it was?
Then years later I ran into a mention on OvercomingBias and signed up pretty much immediately.
AFAICT your statement is simply false.
I won't try to judge the original statement, but I do think that people believing cryonics to be a scam is a serious problem -- much more serious than I would have believed. I have talked to some friends (very bright friends with computer science backgrounds, in the process of getting college degrees) about the idea, and a shockingly large number of them seemed quite certain that Alcor was a scam. I managed to dissuade maybe one of those, but in the process I think I convinced at least one more that I was a sucker.
Reasoning by perceptual recognition. Cryonics seems weird and involves money, therefore it's perceptually recognized as a scam. The fact that it would be immensely labor-intensive to develop the suspension tech, isn't marketed well or at all really, and would have a very poor payoff on invested labor as scams go, will have little impact on this. The lightning-fast perceptual system hath spoken.
I'm surprised that you say your friends are computer programmers. Programmers need to be capable of abstract thought.