= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
byrnema comments on Abnormal Cryonics - 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 (365)
This comment is a more fleshed-out response to VladimirM’s comment.
Whether cryonics is the right choice depends on your values. There are suggestions that people who don’t think they value revival in the distant future are mislead about their real values. I think it might be the complete opposite: advocation of cryonics completely missing what it is that people value about their lives.
The reason for this mistake could be that cryonics is such a new idea that we are culturally a step or two behind in identifying what it is that we value about existence. So people think about cryonics a while and just conclude they don’t want to do it. (For example, the stories herein.) Why? We call this a ‘weirdness’ or ‘creep’ factor, but we haven’t identified the reason.
When someone values their life, what is it that they value? When we worry about dying, we worry about a variety of obligations unmet (values not optimized), and people we love abandoned. It seems to me that people are attached to a network of interactions (and value-responsibilities) in the immediate present. There is also an element of wanting more experience and more pleasure, and this may be what cryonics advocates are over-emphasizing. But after some reflection, how do you think most people would answer this question: when it comes to experiencing 5 minutes of pleasure, does it matter if it is you or someone else if neither of you remember it?
A lot of the desperation we feel when faced with death is probably a sense of responsibility for our immediate values. We are a bundle of volition that is directed towards shaping an immediate network of experience. I don't really care about anything 200 years from now, and enjoy the lack of responsibility I feel for the concerns I would have if I were revived then. As soon as I was revived, however, I know I would become a bundle of volition directed towards shaping that immediate network of experience.
Considering what we do value about life -- immediate connections, attachments and interactions, it makes much more sense to invest in figuring out technology to increase lifespan and prevent accidental death. Once the technology of cryonics is established, I think that there could be a healthy market for people undergoing cryonics in groups. (Not just signing up in groups, but choosing to be vitrified simultaneously in order to preserve a network of special importance to them.)
The 'we' population I was referring to was deliberately vague. I don't know how many people have values as described, or what fraction of people who have thought about cryonics and don't choose cryonics this would account for. My main point, all along, is that whether cryonics is the "correct" choice depends on your values.
Anti-cryonics "values" can sometimes be easily criticized as rationalizations or baseless religious objections. ('Death is natural', for example.) However, this doesn't mean that a person couldn't have true anti-cryonics values (even very similar-sounding ones).
Value-wise, I don't know even whether cryonics is the correct choice for much more than half or much less than half of all persons, but given all the variation in people, I'm pretty sure it's going to be the right choice for at least a handful and the wrong choice for at least a handful.
Roko:
This is another issue where, in my view, pro-cryonics people often make unwarranted assumptions. They imagine a future with a level of technology sufficient to revive frozen people, and assume that this will probably mean a great increase in per-capita wealth and comfort, like today's developed world compared to primitive societies, only even more splendid. Yet I see no grounds at all for such a conclusion.
What I find much more plausible are the Malthusian scenarios of the sort predicted by Robin Hanson. If technology becomes advanced enough to revive frozen brains in some way, it probably means that it will be also advanced enough to create and copy artificial intelligent minds and dexterous robots for a very cheap price. [Edit to avoid misunderstanding: the remainder of the comment is inspired by Hanson's vision, but based on my speculation, not a reflection of his views.]
This seems to imply a Malthusian world where selling labor commands only the most meager subsistence necessary to keep the cheapest artificial mind running, and biological humans are out-competed out of existence altogether. I'm not at all sure I'd like to wake up in such a world, even if rich -- and I also see some highly questionable assumptions in the plans of people who expect that they can simply leave a posthumous investment, let the interest accumulate while they're frozen, and be revived rich. Even if your investments remain safe and grow at an immense rate, which is itself questionable, the price of lifestyle that would be considered tolerable by today's human standards may well grow even more rapidly as the Malthusian scenario unfolds.
That's a risk for regular death, too, albeit a very unlikely one. This possibility seems like Pascal's wager with a minus sign.
That said, I am nowhere near certain that bad future awaits us, nor that the above mentioned Malthusian scenario is inevitable. However, it does seem to me as the most plausible course of affairs given a cheap technology for making and copying minds, and it seems reasonable to expect that such technology would follow from more or less the same breakthroughs that would be necessary to revive people from cryonics.
That is true -- my comment was worded badly and open to misreading on this point. What I meant is that I agree with Hanson that ems likely imply a Malthusian scenario, but I'm skeptical of the feasibility of the investment strategy, unless it involves ditching the biological body altogether and identifying yourself with a future em, in which case you (or "you"?) might feasibly end up as a wealthy em. (From Hanson's writing I've seen, it isn't clear to me if he automatically assumes the latter, or if he actually believes that biological survival might be an option for prudent investors.)
The reason is that in a Malthusian world of cheap AIs, it seems to me that the prices of resources necessary to keep biological humans alive would far outrun any returns on investments, no matter how extraordinary they might be. Moreover, I'm also skeptical if humans could realistically expect their property rights to be respected in a Malthusian world populated by countless numbers of far more intelligent entities.
Roko:
This is a fallacious step. The fact that risk-free return on investment over a certain period is X% above inflation does not mean that you can pick any arbitrary thing and expect that if you can afford a quantity Y of it today, you'll be able to afford (1+X/100)Y of it after that period. It merely means that if you're wealthy enough today to afford a particular well-defined basket of goods -- whose contents are selected by convention as a necessary part of defining inflation, and may correspond to your personal needs and wants completely, partly, or not at all -- then investing your present wealth will get you the power to purchase a similar basket (1+X/100) times larger after that period. [*] When it comes to any particular good, the ratio can be in any direction -- even assuming a perfect laissez-faire market, let alone all sorts of market-distorting things that may happen.
Therefore, if you have peculiar needs and wants that don't correspond very well to the standard basket used to define the price index, then the inflation and growth numbers calculated using this basket are meaningless for all your practical purposes. Trouble is, in an economy populated primarily by ems, biological humans will be such outliers. It's enough that one factor critical for human survival gets bid up exorbitantly and it's adios amigos. I can easily think of more than one candidate.
From the perspective of an em barely scraping a virtual or robotic existence, a surviving human wealthy enough to keep their biological body alive would seem as if, from our perspective, a whole rich continent's worth of land, capital, and resources was owned by a being whose mind is so limited and slow that it takes a year to do one second's worth of human thinking, while we toil 24/7, barely able to make ends meet. I don't know with how much confidence we should expect that property rights would be stable in such a situation.
[*] - To be precise, the contents of the basket will also change during that period if it's of any significant length. This however gets us into the nebulous realm of Fisher's chain indexes and similar numerological tricks on which the dubious edifice of macroeconomic statistics rests to a large degree.
I don't think it's a matter of whether you value your life but why. We don't value life unconditionally (say, just a metabolism, or just having consciousness -- both would be considered useless).
I wouldn't expect anyone to choose to die, no, but I would predict some people would be depressed if everyone they cared about died and would not be too concerned about whether they lived or not. [I'll add that the truth of this depends upon personality and generational age.]
Regarding the medieval peasant, I would expect her to accept the offer but I don't think she would be irrational for refusing. In fact, if she refused, I would just decide she was a very incurious person and she couldn't think of anything special to bring to the future (like her religion or a type of music she felt passionate about.) But I don't think lacking curiosity or any goals for the far impersonal future is having low self-esteem. [Later, I'm adding that if she decided not to take the offer, I would fear she was doing so due to a transient lack of goals. I would rather she had made her decision when all was well.]
(If it was free, I definitely would take the offer and feel like I had a great bargain. I wonder if I can estimate how much I would pay for a cryopreservation that was certain to work? I think $10 to $50 thousand, in the case of no one I knew coming with me, but it's difficult to estimate.)