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CronoDAS comments on Abnormal Cryonics - Less Wrong
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Reason #6 not to sign up: Cryonics is not compatible with organ donation. If you get frozen, you can't be an organ donor.
There was a short discussion previously about how cryonics is most useful in cases of degenerative diseases, whereas organ donation is most successful in cases of quick deaths such as due to car accidents; which is to say that cryonics and organ donation are not necessarily mutually exclusive preparations because they may emerge from mutually exclusive deaths.
Though maybe not, which is why I had asked about organ donation in the first place.
Is that true in general, or only for organizations that insist on full-body cryo?
AFACT (from reading a few cryonics websites), it seems to be true in general, but the circumstances under which your brain can be successfully cryopreserved tend to be ones that make you not suitable for being an organ donor anyway.
Could you elaborate on that? Is cryonic suspension inherently incompatible with organ donation, even when you are going with the neuro option or does the incompatibility stem from current obscurity of cryonics? I imagine that organ harvesting could be combined with early stages of cryonic suspension if the latter was more widely practiced.
The cause of death of people suitable to be organ donors is usually head trauma.
Alternatively, that's a good reason not to sign up for organ donation. Organ donation won't increase my well-being or happiness any, while cryonics might.
In addition, there's the problem that being an organ donor creates perverse incentives for your death.
You get no happiness knowing there is a decent chance your death could save the lives of others?
Would you turn down a donated organ if you needed one?
It's a nice thought, I guess, but I'd rather not die in the first place. And any happiness I might get from that is balanced out by the risks of organ donation: cryonic preservation becomes slightly less likely, and my death becomes slightly more likely (perverse incentives). If people benefit from my death, they have less of an incentive to make sure I don't die.
No. But I'd vote to make post-death organ donation illegal, and I'd encourage people not to donate their organs after they die. (I don't see a problem with donating a kidney while you're still alive.)
Well I understand that you will be so much more happy if you avoid death for the foreseeable future that cryonics outweighs organ donation. I'm just saying that the happiness from organ donation can't be zero.
The incentives seem to me so tiny as to be a laughable concern. I presume you're talking about doctors not treating you as effectively because they want your organs? Do you have this argument further developed elsewhere? It seems to me a doctor's aversion to letting someone die, fear of malpractice lawsuits and ethics boards are more than sufficient to counter whatever benefit they would get from your organs (which would be what precisely?). Like I would be more worried about the doctors not liking me or thinking I was weird because I wanted to be frozen and not working as hard to save me because of that. (ETA: If you're right there should be studies saying as much.)
It seems to me legislation to punish defectors in this cooperative action problem would make sense. Organ donors should go to the top of the implant lists if they don't already. Am I right that appealing to your sense of justice regarding your defection would be a waste of time?
If your arguments are right I can see how it would be a bad individual choice to be a organ donor (at least if you were signed up for cryonics). But those arguments don't at all entail that banning post-death organ donation would be the best public policy, especially since very few people will sign up for cryonics in the near future. Do you think that the perverse incentives lead to more deaths than the organs save?
And from a public interest perspective an organ donor is more valuable than a frozen head. It might be in the public interest to have some representatives from our generation in the future but there is a huge economic cost to losing 20 years of work from an experienced and trained employee-- a cost which is mediated little by the economic value of a revived cryonics patient who would likely have no marketable skills for his time period. So the social benefit to people signing up for cryonics diminishes rapidly.