= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
jhuffman comments on That Magical Click - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (400)
Cryonics does not prevent you from dying. Humans are afraid of dying. Cryonics does not address the problem (fear of death). It instead offers a possible second life.
I'm afraid of dying, because I know that when I am dying I will be very afraid. So I'm afraid of being afraid. Cryonics would offer very little to me right now in terms of alleviating this fear. Sure it might work; but I won't know that it will while I'm dying, and so my fear while dying will not be mitigated.
You might say hey wait jhuff- isn't actually being dead, and not have a chance at a second life a problem (or at least a missed opportunity)? Well I don't see how it is once I'm dead. Heck the expression "I'm dead" doesn't even make sense - there is no consciousness or awareness of being dead - if I really wanted to be a pedant I'd argue there is no ego that is dead; only egos that have died.
So anyway until I have died the overwhelming problem with death is my fear of it. After I have died, I don't exist. So certainly no problems there for me (I can't have problems if I don't exist). Cryonics doesn't seem to offer me much utility value.
Thought:
Is there a significant difference between the process of being suspended and revived, and the process of going to sleep and waking up?
When I go to sleep I expect to wake up.
When I die, even if I had a cryogenic stand-by all ready to go, I would not expect to be revived. So dying would be a lot more emotionally painful than going to sleep.
In the future, if cryonic suspension and revival is an ordinary fact of life (for space travel or whatever) then I think there would be not much difference. The main emotional difference would be that you know you are going to be "away" for a long time. You may know people will miss you etc. Just like if you were taking a long trip with no communications.
So different from sleep/wake but not different from other ordinary human experiences.
I agree, cryonics is failing to "click" with me for largely the same reason - that the estimate of me benefitting from cryonics is not 95%, but more like 5%. If the likelihood of my revival and resumption of awareness is only 5%, then it doesn't much alleviate the emotional trauma of death.
Plus, I can imagine the possibility of a harmful revival, where the mind is cloned and resumes awareness, only to become a lab experiment that gets reused tens of thousands of times.
Think of it as insurance, in the literal sense. When you buy e.g. insurance for your house against fire, there is only something like 0.2% chance or less that you'll benefit from the fact that you've bought insurance (you only benefit if fire happens), and 99.8% chance that you'll only lose money by paying for insurance, which is by the way not a trivial sum.
The analogy is not intuitively very salient on first sight, because "fire" may connote with "death", while actually the analogy likens "fire" to successful revival, and death is just a fact of the scenery. A cryonics contract ensures you against the risk of successful revival. If it turns out that you can be successfully revived, then you get the premium of open-ended future.
It also "insures" against the risk of a horrific revival. Plus, in order for the insurance to work, the premium would be very high right now for me to pay:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/1mh/that_magical_click/1iam
Well if I'm banking on MW QM don't I already enjoy subjective quantum immortality, regardless of cryonics?
Interesting arguments. Thank you.
To bad about all those people who lived before cryo. I guess they all have at least a few world paths where they are in...hell?
I think that, like Schrodinger's Cat was originally posited as a thought experiment to show that there is something wrong with the Copenhagen interpretation of a wave collapse; Quantum Immortality was originally posited as a thought experiment to suggest that there is something intuitively wrong with the many worlds interpretation of QM. I know MW is very popular here, but personally I don't find any interpretation of QM to be meaningful. The only thing we know is that the standard model makes accurate predictions. But that is another debate.
5% is how many times better than 0% ?
But this invites Pascal's Wager/Pascal's Mugging type arguments. It's not enough to argue that it's more than zero - it has to be enough to be worth the investment.
The real flaw in Pascal's Wager isn't that the probability of getting the desired payoff is extremely low, it's that the probability of getting the payoff by holding any one belief from a set of different beliefs is the same. For example, the probability of being rewarded for being an atheist by a God who loves epistemic rationalism is at least as big as the probability of being rewarded by Yahweh for being a Christian.
The probability of cryonics getting us the payoff, however, is a lot bigger than the probability that not signing up for cryonics will get us the payoff, so it's not a Pascal's Wager type argument to point out that cryonics is worth it even if the probability of it working is very small.
Rather than pick a particular paranoid scenario, I'd just suggest you further reduce your +EV by some percentage to indicate revival into a future life you do not want to be living in. If you are lucky you'll have the chance to stop before the nanobots repair that particular "defect" in your mind.
See VijayKrishnan's comment for a much better writeup of the point I wanted to get across.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/1mh/that_magical_click/1hl8
The issue is that my positive expected value for cryo starts out as marginal. Once I account for the possible horrific outcomes, I'm not sure whether the resulting balance is positive at all. And if it is, I'm not sure it's worth the drastic changes I would have to make right now for cryo to be viable. In order for cryo to make sense for me right now, I'd have to move from the Caribbean to somewhere nearer to Alcor where they can get my body in case I die. I'd then also have to move my company, start paying corporate and personal income taxes...
The current +EV from cryo seems minor enough to me to not warrant these changes, but I would sign up if it didn't involve making a major compromise, and especially if I knew that the risk of a horrific outcome is nonexistent.
When I die, I plan on being on enough morphine that it doesn't cause me emotional pain to embrace my own probability estimates, which should be biased a lot higher in favor of resurrection by all of that morphine or kratom.
For me, the overwhelming problem with death is that I don't get to exist anymore.
If you're going to be afraid of dying whether or not you've signed up for cryonics, then your decision not to sign up cannot depend on your anticipation of being afraid, as that is invariant across the two scenarios.
I don't really understand that statement. Your problem - here and now - is that after you die you don't exist anymore?
I can't tell you what your problems or fears are but is it possible the real problem here and now is that you are afraid of not existing after your death?
edit to follow-up this remark:
So then Cryonics is just a solution looking for a problem. I don't have a problem it can solve.
Fear of not existing after death is not just some silly uncomfortable emotion to be calmed. Rather it reveals a disconnect between one's preference and expectations about the actual state of reality.
The real problem is not existing after death. Fear is a way of representing that.
I never said it was silly, I hope it didn't come across that way. And I am not at all suggesting that we shouldn't prefer life, and shouldn't take all reasonable steps to continue living as long as living is worthwhile.
I value my continued existence; I'm surprised that this is at all confusing.
Is penicillin also a solution looking for a problem? How about looking both ways before you cross the street? Do you really place no value on the longer life you would have the possibility of living if you signed up? If so, why does the same consideration not also extend to the common death-preventing steps (ETA: limit that to sudden death, the kind where you experience no opportunity to feel fear) you presumably currently take?
Of course not, penicillin prevents death. So does watching both ways before I cross the street. Cryonics does not prevent death.
Well, I could try and calculate the utility based on my guess at the odds of it working, but I estimate that the utility of the time invested in doing that would exceed the marginal utility I'd find when finished. So I'm not going to look into it, for the same reason that I don't read all the email messages I get from potential business partners in Nigeria. Surely there must be a chance that one of those is real, but I consider that chance to be so vanishingly small that its -EV for me to read the emails.
Funny that your expected value from posting this comment was higher than researching cryonics.
Funny, I had the same thought. But I actually I got value from the responses I've gotten in this thread, even if you haven't.
Fair enough; I can't deny that your conclusion follows from the premise "Cryonics has so small a probability of succeeding that it doesn't even justify looking into the topic." I will note that this is a shift from "Cryonics is a solution in search of a problem" to "Cryonics is not a solution."
ETA: No, I take that last remark back. But my original comment about your true objection being about something other than your fear of death was correct.
Really my original point was and still is that cryonics doesn't prevent dying or death. My particular problem with death is a fear of dying. I truly have gotten over the fact that one day I will not exist. So I guess I was projecting this onto others, and probably that isn't valid.
Yes there is another question, which I didn't originally speak to, about the analysis of the marginal utility value of a possibly pro-longed life, but that isn't really something that interests me.
Even if we became much more confident in cryonics, such as some major technological breakthroughs - I would update based on the fact that knowing cryonics is likely to work would be a comfort to me as I was dying. So I'd go sign up, but not just because I want the pro-longed life but because I'd now view dying more like "going to sleep" and the fear of it would be significantly reduced. So even if I were never revived, I would have gotten value from cryonics if I considered it viable at the time I was dying.
Okay, fair enough. But asserting that cryonics won't work without detailed prior knowledge of its infeasibility and without even being willing to investigate it puts you in a terrible epistemic position. You still haven't argued for your ostensible point.
(I wrote another reply, but then deleted it as it was premised on a falsehood.)
My ostensible point again: cryonics doesn't prevent dying. I really need to present an argument for this?
Or I need to present an argument for my point that I'm only afraid of dying, and not of being dead?
Well here it is: I can die. I can't be dead - because at that point there is no I. So while right now I can fear the void, it won't be a problem once I am dead. Note that insertion of cryonics does not change any of these facts. I'll still be afraid of dying, I'll still die, I will no longer exist. Whether I'm in a frozen can or my ashes are scattered in the ocean there will be an identical amount of neural computation. So I won't exist and I won't have any problems, either way.
I'm pretty sure your terminology is causing a lot of needless confusion here. I think people are reading "cryonics doesn't prevent dying" as "cryonics does not prevent death", which is the usual way of speaking. If someone says, "Sam's dying; do something!" they don't so much want you to stop Sam from feeling like he's dying, but rather they want you to make it so that Sam does not die.
However, you seem to be talking about death in the following, and people's replies might be better directed towards this:
Yes. I think the standard counterargument is linked to on the wiki; 'death' is a moving target, and it seems like "information-theoretic death" is a good candidate for what "death" will mean when the technology settles out.
(Original poster thinks of himself as a persistent billiard ball of identity, when neural processing stops, the billiard ball winks out of existence. This winking-out is death. If anyone wants to explain the ontological falsity of the billiard-balls theory to the original poster at less length than working all the way up to here, they can go ahead and try.)
I don't know why you'd assume I've done no research on it or have no knowledge of its feasibility. What I'm unwilling at this point to do, is try and estimate the marginal utility of the proposition in any serious or sophisticated way.
And I don't know where I said it won't work. That would be ridiculous to say that. Given our continued existence and advancement as a civilization it almost certainly it will work someday for someone.
We present we have substantial technical challenges related to preserving people in a state such that they can be revived. I also know there is debate on what may be possible in the even further future in terms of repairing brain cells that were destroyed through apoptosis or necrosis.
I also know there are a number of risks or barriers to revivals even after the technology challenges are resolved, and these risks (particularly the economic and political risks) increase the longer it takes the revival and medical technology to catch up. No one can predict the odds that any given person now would ever be revived, but there are many reasons to be pessimistic about those chances.
It's because we're using certain words in different ways, and according to my usage of them, what you said somewhat weakly implied that you hadn't.
You did say "Cryonics does not prevent you from dying." If cryonics works, then I don't consider the life events that follow resuscitation to be a second life that occured after death, as opposed to a single life with a long inanimate period somewhere in the middle -- to me, that just looks like a distinction without a difference. This is an example of the ongoing semantic clash.
Anyway, it now seems to me that you've practiced some form of Dark Side Epistemology on yourself, in that the fact that after you're dead you have no preferences seems to be critical to your reasoning. I'm all for removing time inconsistency of preferences, but I think that's going a bit far.
It seems that CronoDAS had a far better grasp than me of what you were actually claiming; the linked query is far more apposite than I originally appreciated, and I'd be very interested in your reply to his question. I'll even accentuate it: does the fact that if you were in a stable coma* you would have no preferences excuse your doctor from rescuing you from that coma if they can?
* Let us stipulate that you have no awareness of your state.