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jhuffman comments on That Magical Click - Less Wrong
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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.