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Earendil comments on A survey of anti-cryonics writing - Less Wrong
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This is the best anti-cryonics argument I've heard so far. I largely agree with the replies about why it's wrong, but at least it's an argument rather than a gut "ewww..." or "blasphemy!" or "crazy talk!" reaction.
http://forums.unicornjelly.com/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=2090#p21074
Your reply really is excellent!
Still - and I've been noting this a lot - not to do with technical feasibility. A word I have finally been learning to spell what with writing it so much.
It may seem weird to be so focussed on this one thing what with all the other ways that cryonics can fail, but feasibility is what creates the seriousness barrier. As soon as you think that it stands a really good chance of working, you're over the line with us wacky people, and you're arguing about economics or whether the future wants us or suchlike with real skin in the game.
I'm surprised. I'd have though the biggest barrier to it being taken seriously is the comfort of normality barrier. That is most people are comfortable with the narrative of birth-life-death and anything that takes them outside that makes them uncomfortable and is ignored.
Yes, that's what motivates people to come to a negative conclusion, but I think it's the plausibility issue that allows them not to worry about the conclusions. Not many people say "if my heart stops, don't resuscitate me".
I don't think it is the coming back from the dead that makes people uncomfortable so much the world and technology that is supposed in the future to enable it. The eternal life from that point on also drastically changes the narrative.
Earendil wins so hard it makes my ears bleed.
Whoops, I just sent off a "you should join LW" message to Earendil on the board without noting that Earendil was the one who posted the link here!
+1 rationality point for reading comments without checking the author. -1 social point for the faux pas.
I find this to be a silly argument, as it assumes that not much will change about the methods of teaching, or of rejuvenation by the time that these people (who have been frozen) are re-constituted in one manner or another.
True, we would be antiquated and ignorant by the standards of the day, but just going into the process of freezing gives us a mind-set that shows us that we must be ready to abandon just about everything we know when and if we wake again. The Man from 1400 discussed in the article did not have that mindset and it was discussed as if his freezing had been an accident rather than an act of intention.
Plus, there is another reason to thaw the people out who have been frozen: Rule of Law. These people have all signed contracts based upon their conception that when and if we develop the technology to reanimate them, that we will do so. I have not examined a contract from Alcor or another cryonics program, so this may be an implicit assumption of the process.
If that is the Best anti-cryonics argument heard so far, then it is a lousy argument.
Edit: Also, if, when revived, the person is going to have an indefinitely long life, then any re-training would be trivial in terms of cost.
I sort of agree with the argument.
I don't know if they will or won't, but if they do, we'd be a burden and not an asset.
Is it such an outlandish scenario that given adequate and safe technology cryonics patients will be revived because of humanitarian and moral concerns? I see no reason why we'd switch to a burden-asset evaluation scheme of human beings when we have moved beyond that a long time ago (or more likely we never really adhered purely to it). As of now, there are rather few slaves around and we mostly refrain from killing retarded infants.
Human trafficking is a massive problem that goes mostly unreported in the media.
800,000 out of 7 billion people? That doesn't sound like very much at all.
Please provide a list of things you consider more damaging as far as number of people directly affected per year.
Wait, I'm sorry, was this supposed to be a complete list?
It was supposed to be a convincing list which definitively shows that 800,000 people being tortured and raped by other human beings is not very much, as you claimed.
Yes, aging is bad, good for that insight. I remain convinced that human trafficking is as bad as I perceive it to be; it's right up there with war-in-general and certain epidemic diseases.
Further, consider this from the point of view of a parent. It's OK for a 20-something young adult to decide to take this risk, but how can a parent take this risk for their child? I wouldn't have children if I didn't feel as though I had some control over whether they were well taken care of -- how could I send them to an unknown point in the future? Today, there are many people and organizations that exploit children. I'm supposed to glibly pretend that these problems will completely disappear just with future technology? That would be pretty irresponsible.
A lot of people make some argument along the lines of, 'if they revive us, it's because they value us." Yeah. And if they value children, without their mommies?
This just breaks my heart, because I can understand the fear. I wouldn't want to have children if I thought they'd be taken away from me. But if I already had them, I would want them alive first and foremost. Even if that meant they'd be taken away. Living far away > dying in my arms.
I can imagine my kids in bad situations, and in most of those situations I would want them to keep living. If I was dying during some kind of terrible revolution, I wouldn't kill my children to protect them from an unknown future. They're already alive, come what may.
Cryonics feels like a choice again, and for me this is a moral choice -- perhaps a deontological one. I am willing to hear a variety of moral solutions/arguments, I just think this is something that needs address.
I wrote in another comment,
By "cryonics feels like a choice again", do you mean it bears emotional similarity to choosing to have children in the first place, more than choosing to let them go on living, and therefore you wouldn't sign your children up to be revived under any circumstances you wouldn't have chosen to have them in the first place?
If so, I hope you will do everything you can to reverse that impression. Think of the frozen people as asleep, comatose, blinking, time-traveling - not dead. They will be revived not as infants, not as new people, not as ontologically unrelated snippets of personhood wearing secondhand names - they will wake up. If your children are frozen and revived, then afterwards, they will be alive. If your children are not frozen and revived, then absent really convenient timing, they will be dead.
You seem to be thinking as if a person dies, and then cryonics is a way that can maybe bring them back to life. It is more accurate to say that a person loses the capacity to to sustain their own life (and experience it), and cryonics is a way to keep them alive until potential future technology can restore their ability to sustain and experience their life.
Can we please focus on one argument against cryonics at a time? Isn't this shifting to a new counterargument whenever an old one is addressed just logical rudeness?
If you don't dispute anything I actually say about technical feasibility, please take this discussion elsewhere.
EDIT: Downvotes are useful information, but comments explaining them are even better - thanks!
I didn't down vote you but I do feel frustrated about the censure. First, I obviously don't think technological feasibility is anywhere near the right question. So I should just ignore this post. (But) secondly, other people are discussing other issues -- this whole thread is all about whether or not we'll get revived and why; it has nothing to do with technology. If I don't respond to this thread because it's off-topic, then I'm just missing an opportunity to further an agenda that is very important to me. I like to follow rules but I'm not likely to follow them sacrificially while others disregard them.
An important subtext of the current extended discussion, which in one sense can be seen as fallout from the "Normal Cryonics" article, is how to conduct a debate in a manner that is both epistemically and instrumentally rational.
One major issue, raised by the "Logical rudeness" post, is that ordinary conversation has a nasty tendency to go in circles revolving around each interlocutor's pet anxiety or trigger issue. No one is exempt: I tend to focus on the financial and logistical aspects, and that says something about me.
Rather than think of ciphergoth's intervention as "censure", please think of it as the unpleasant but necessary work of a volunteer facilitator, doing his best to keep the conversation on track.
This conversation touches on an issue that is deeply important to you, that much I understand. Perhaps your interests are better served by your drafting a separate post to lay out this issue as clearly as you can, a post in which you'd set out to apply the thinking tools you've learned from LW or that you wish to introduce to LW?
Your first point I think you answer yourself, is that fair? Your second is a good one, but I wonder what the right thing to do about it is. I did reply to the top-level ancestor comment of this one to say "this is off-topic"; are you saying that where discussion blossoms anyway, that railing against in-thread commenters is a mistake? Certainly where top-level comments have started talking about other arguments, I think that is logical rudeness, and you don't seem to disagree; is there anything to be done about it beyond the comment on the top-level comment?
EDIT to make clear: questions are not rhetorical.
Rain, I'm aware of human trafficking and other abuses, which is the reason I said "rather few" instead of "no". But compared to just a few hundred years ago slaves are as rare as hen's teeth.
And yet population nowadays is so much larger than in ancient times so there are claims the absolute number of slaves is currently higher than ever before
The number given in that article is 27 million slaves. Yet Wikipedia claims that 55 million people lived in the Roman Empire in AD 300-400. Were less than half of them slaves? (And that's ignoring the slaves in the rest of the world at the time.) The same page claims that in 1750, the world population was almost 800 million. Were 29 out of 30 people at the time really free? Surely slavery was more widespread among the hierarchical city cultures that left written records than among the "barbarians", but it's hard to imagine that the number has always been less than 27 million. During the Middle Ages, throughout all of Europe, the vast majority of the people were serfs, bound to their land, living and dying at the mercy of their lords.
If it's true that 249 out of every 250 people today is free, that sounds like a huge improvement over almost all of human history.
Moral standards in general can improve irregardless of the number of people involved. Besides, one could argue that having more slaves is outweighed by having much more non-slaves living good lives. In regard to cryonics: all else being equal I'd favor to be reanimated in a world with low slave to non-slave ratios if I preferred the probability of my becoming a slave to be as low as possible.
We don't kill many infants, but we do abort lots of fetuses, though. I don't see any obvious reason why we should give a frozen corpse more rights than a fetus. Everyone who is cryopreserved actually did die; reviving one is more like creating a new person than it is like providing medical care to an existing, living person.
At Alcor and CI there is much written about the definitions of death; their preferred version (mine too) is information-theoretic death. To be precise, legal death is the moment the doctors decide to stop caring for the patient, mostly because they estimate the chance of successful resuscitation too low. On the other hand, information-theoretic death is the point beyond which no technology can restore a mind. This definition is a bit more precise as it being vague requires us to consider the possibility of reversing entropy (EDIT: in other words, the finality of legal death is pretty questionable, but we can only argue against the finality of information-theoretic death if there is a way to reverse entropy).
The subjective experience of waking up from cryonic suspension could range from identical to waking up from sleep to having suffered a serious and pervasive brain trauma, depending on the circumstances of suspension and reanimation. I wouldn't automatically categorize reanimated people as newly created persons as I wouldn't do so in the case of sleeping people or victims of brain injury. They are new persons to the extent the continuity between their pre- and post- suspension selves is lost, and I think the same applies to brain injury victims.
Aborting a fetus may or may not be fully moral depending on how developed the fetus is. Killing a zygote is as morally charged as killing a random bacterium. Otherwise, causing suffering to fetuses by abortion is sure a possibility, albeit one that can be reduced by regulations informed by a detailed knowledge of neurosciences.
However, I think the strongest reason why likening cryonics patients to fetuses is ridiculous is that cryonics patients (can) have a huge pile of accumulated life experiences, memories and a unique and rich personality.
That doesn't sound quite right, can you be a little more precise? If cryonics depended on breaking the Second Law I would have no time for it.
I meant that information theoretic-death is a point beyond which restoring a person requires reversing entropy. Thus we can only argue against the finality of this kind of death if there is a way to reverse entropy (which seems not to be the case). I admit my sentence there was too opaque.
Reversing entropy is insufficient. You have to interact with a past that no longer has any traces in the present. It's not enough to have a way to turn steam into ice cubes. You need a time camera.
I think the definition is clearer if you avoid reference to entropy, but I get what you're getting at now. Thanks!
[I'm deleting this comment soon. No reason to pick another fight. Maybe I'll take Morendil's advice and write a post about how much I disagree with people assuming moral positions for anyone but themselves and where I see that heading. I don't have time at the moment.]
I urge you to err strongly on the side of not deleting comments. If I post something I later regret, I just edit them to say "oops!" For one thing, it's easy to overreact and underestimate their quality.
OK.* I was mainly just trying to prevent another big long sidetrack. Since thomblake already replied, it needs to stay anyway.
*From now on, I'll just edit with an 'oops'.
We have had numerous top-level posts regarding ethics and meta-ethics; what one should do seems intimately related to rationality. This is already a place where we discuss what moral judgements are correct, and has been since its inception. Example
If I can create a new person from a frozen corpse, I can probably also create a new person by duplicating a living person. Why would the corpse have precedence on any moral grounds? Either way a new person is created; and duplication results in a person better adjusted to their era and so happier.
Given limited resources, persons will be created by the highest bidders. Many living persons will have a strong interest in self-duplication. Historical interests in reviving people would face economic competition. That's why I think they would switch to a burden/asset view.
It definitely depends on the what kind of future there'll be. Robin Hanson's Malthusian future of scarcity and effective reproduction is a place where your described things would be indeed commonplace. I personally wouldn't welcome an explosive wave of replication creating so much scarcity that there'd be an actual competition for resources for an number of additional people that is as small as the number of cryonics patients.
Besides, the corpse would have a great deal of precedence on moral grounds, because a death or failure of reanimation is a huge loss of value that already exists (knowledge, personality, memories, psychological complexity etc.), while duplication only enables the additional person to grow into a unique individual sometimes in the future.
Even if nearly all people were against replication - which is far from given - to prevent explosive replication you would need to either effectively limit everyone's access to basic resources (so they couldn't replicate) or to execute, exile or severely limit the rights of illegally created replicas (including allowing them to die of hunger or equivalent resource starvation).
Short of a sysop scenario, I don't see how this could be accomplished. Of course my inability to see it isn't proof of anything much, but just hoping it will happen without describing how to make it happen is pretty flimsy. That's why I regard resource scarcity as a primary feature of any future until proven otherwise.
"Loss of value" - value to whom? Not value to the frozen person, because they don't exist until revived. Do you think the general public has a moral obligation to increase the diversity of the set of persons in existence? If so, then instead of reviving or duplicating people or even breeding the old fashioned way, they would spend their time artificially engineering new and radically different life forms. Is that what you have in mind?
I agree with that; the other default future would be extinction. My problem is that I regard full-blown Hansonian future as equivalent to extinction because it similarly leads to the total loss of everything humans care about now, but note that this is a subject of heated dispute and I'm on Eliezer's and Nick Bostrom's side.
And anaesthetized people don't exist until resuscitated? There is no meaningful sense in which suspended people automatically cease to exist and then pop back to existence. The sense in which people cease to exist is rather a continuous function of the amount of lost information about people's brain states. Reanimation from suspension can have as much effect on the subject's psychology than waking from sleep, or as much as a severe brain injury, depending on the circumstances and the technologies involved. Legal death is a magical category in this case. Of course they exist.
Also, not wanting to die only requires you to not want to die while you're alive. We would agree that it's not moral to kill a lot of people on the basis that once they're nonexistent they won't care about the matter. To give a closer analogue, it's not right either to kill sleeping people because they at the moment cannot want to be not killed. Never reviving the suspended me simply equals killing me, with all the moral implications of an ordinary murder. And the fact the revival has some costs does not give it a special status. After all, keeping me alive has its own costs; I could be shot anytime so that more food is left for others.
Does the public has a moral obligation to refrain from killing people? I (personally) disapprove of murder, in general. I suspect that the general public has the same feelings - and yes, this is the primary element of what I have in mind about reanimation.
Aside from this consideration above, I (still) argue that reviving people is more valuable than duplication, for other people. There is stuff there in those frickin' brains you might find amusing, funny, interesting, useful or aesthetically pleasing. It's a waste to leave that utter amount of complexity and information that a human brain boasts frozen in ice, inactive and unreachable. The act of duplication, on the other hand, creates not a single bit of information that wasn't already available, it "just" doubles the total future capacity to think, learn, feel, interact and experience.
To turn back to the quote above, we definitely value individuality and diversity. But I just won't spend my life mindlessly increasing some amount of a specifically defined "diversity" because I'm not like a paperclip optimizator. Also, "Increase diversity" is not a well-formed moral sentence. The concept of diversity is extremely complex to begin with; diversity as it is valued by people is also a magical category with obfuscated boundaries.
That assumption creates some unpleasant conclusions. To make sure I understand you, please consider the following scenarios.
Suppose that our descendants acquire a deep understanding of human brain operation. They build a machine which can generate a brain-description to given parameters, as different from any existing human as normal humans are different from one another. Given a description, a living brain and body can be built and a person created.
Suppose we generate 10^10 different descriptions. Do we now have a moral duty to instantiate them all in real bodies, because once we have some information-theoretical descriptions of them, they are "existing persons"? Note that we haven't simulated them; we just computed the single-moment-in-time initial states of possible simulations.
Then, does reviving you once equal killing the potential second copy of you we could also have revived?
A better comparison would be: does the public have a moral obligation to support minimal living conditions for all already-existing people, and keep them from dying from hunger or disease? I think the answer is yet, but it is not absolute; it works so far because the burden happens to be economically easily bearable. It might also work for reviving people if very few people will ever be frozen, so that the total burden of reviving is small. If ever it came to a real economic tradeoff, reviving people wouldn't necessarily win.
Giving birth to children, the old-fashioned way, and so growing new people also creates interesting new brains. Why would reviving ancient people (who were not outstanding thinkers or personalities in their own time) be so rewarding?
The question about diversity referred to the moral situation. You think there's a moral obligation to revive people, and you justify doing that instead of duplicating people because the duplicates increase the diversity of society. Is there a factor for diversity in your purely moral calculation, or do you think that morally it doesn't matter what new person you create, and diversity is only a selfish reason to revive a more interesting person?
No, I agree with Roko. Some people would probably want us. It's just that we'd be consumption goods rather than capital goods.
Just like kids, really. Most 1st Worlders don't have kids because they are good little workers, they have them because they make them happy. The few dozen cryopreserved people would be a scarce commodity in a world with very few scarcities.
Obviously this would only happen in a nice post-singularity world, or a weird future in which advanced nanotech comes before AI.
Most futures that still have human values will reanimate all cryo patients, if scanning and WBE counts as reanimation.
Disagree that you should be scared rather than curious. Such scenarios are not well worked out.
Which argument?
The one in the link.
Basically, that the cost of reviving and taking care of large numbers of frozen people will exceed the value of those people to the future, so there won't be very many frozen people revived.
How do you work that out? We're talking about a future society that can revive a cryonics patient, how can you be so certain that cost would be an issue for them?