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Abnormal Cryonics
Written with much help from and , in response to various themes here, and throughout Less Wrong; but a casual mention here1 inspired me to finally write this post. (Note: The first, second, and third footnotes of this post are abnormally important.)
It seems to have become a trend on Less Wrong for people to include belief in the rationality of signing up for cryonics as an obviously correct position2 to take, much the same as thinking the theories of continental drift or anthropogenic global warming are almost certainly correct. I find this mildly disturbing on two counts. First, it really isn't all that obvious that signing up for cryonics is the best use of one's time and money. And second, regardless of whether cryonics turns out to have been the best choice all along, ostracizing those who do not find signing up for cryonics obvious is not at all helpful for people struggling to become more rational. Below I try to provide some decent arguments against signing up for cryonics — not with the aim of showing that signing up for cryonics is wrong, but simply to show that it is not obviously correct, and why it shouldn't be treated as such. (Please note that I am not arguing against the feasibility of cryopreservation!)
Signing up for cryonics is not obviously correct, and especially cannot obviously be expected to have been correct upon due reflection (even if it was the best decision given the uncertainty at the time):
- and ontological confusion: quantum immortality, anthropic reasoning, measure across multiverses, UDTesque 'decision theoretic measure' or 'probability as preference', et cetera, are not well-understood enough to make claims about whether or not you should even care about the number of 'yous' that are living or dying, whatever 'you' think you are.3 This does not make cryonics a bad idea — it may be the correct decision under uncertainty — but it should lessen anyone's confidence that the balance of reasons ultimately weighs overwhelmingly in favor of cryonics.
- If people believe that a technological singularity is imminent, then they may believe that it will happen before they have a significant chance of dying: either everyone (including cryonauts) dies anyway when an unFriendly artificial intelligence goes FOOM, or a Friendly artificial intelligence is created and death is solved (or reflectively embraced as good, or some other unexpected outcome). This is more salient when considering the likelihood of large advances in biomedical and life extension technologies in the near future.
- A person might find that more good is done by donating money to organizations like SENS, FHI, or SIAI4 than by spending that money on pursuing a small chance of eternal life. Cryonics working is pretty dependent on e.g. an unFriendly artificial intelligence not going FOOM, or molecular nanotechnology not killing everyone. Many people may believe that a slightly higher chance of a positive singularity is more important than a significantly higher chance of personal immortality. Likewise, having their friends and family not be killed by an existential disaster such as rogue MNT, bioweaponry, et cetera, could very well be more important to them than a chance at eternal life. Acknowledging these varied preferences, and varied beliefs about one's ability to sacrifice only luxury spending to cryonics, leads to equally varied subjectively rational courses of action for a person to take.
- Some people may have loose boundaries around what they consider personal identity, or expect personal identity to be less important in the future. Such a person might not place very high value on ensuring that they, in a strong sense, exist in the far future, if they expect that people sufficiently like them to satisfy their relevant values will exist in any case. (Kaj Sotala reports being indifferent to cryonics due to personal identity considerations .) Furthermore, there exist people who have preferences against (or no preferences either for or against) living extremely far into the future for reasons other than considerations about personal identity. Such cases are rare, but I suspect less rare among the Less Wrong population than most, and their existence should be recognized. (Maybe people who think they don't care are usually wrong, and, if so, irrational in an , but not in the sense of simple epistemic or instrumental-given-fixed-values rationality that discussions of cryonics usually center on.)
- That said, the reverse is true: not getting signed up for cryonics is also not obviously correct. The most common objections (most of them about the infeasibility of cryopreservation) are simply wrong. Strong arguments are being ignored on both sides. The common enemy is certainty.
Calling non-cryonauts irrational is not productive nor conducive to fostering a good epistemic atmosphere:
- Whether it's correct or not, it seems unreasonable to claim that the decision to forgo cryonics in favor of donating (a greater expected amount) to etc. represents as obvious an error as, for instance, religion. The possibility of a third option here shouldn't be ignored.
- People will not take a fringe subject more seriously simply because you call them irrational for not seeing it as obvious (as opposed to belief in anthropogenic global warming where a sheer bandwagon effect is enough of a memetic pull). Being forced on the defensive makes one less likely to their own irrationalities, if irrationalities they are. (See also: A Suite of Pragmatic Considerations in Favor of Niceness)
- As mentioned in bullet four above, some people really wouldn't care if they died, even if it turned out MWI, spatially infinite universes, et cetera were wrong hypotheses and that they only had this one shot at existence. It's not helping things to call them irrational when they may already have low self-esteem and problems with being accepted among those who have very different values pertaining to the importance of continued subjective experience. Likewise, calling people irrational for having kids when they could not afford cryonics for them is extremely unlikely to do any good for anyone.
Debate over cryonics is only one of many opportunities for politics-like thinking to taint the epistemic waters of a rationalist community; it is a topic where it is easy to say 'we are right and you are wrong' where 'we' and 'you' are much too poorly defined to be used without disclaimers. If 'you' really means 'you people who don't understand reductionist thinking', or 'you people who haven't considered the impact of existential risk', then it is important to say so. If such an epistemic norm is not established I fear that the quality of discourse at Less Wrong will suffer for the lack of it.
One easily falls to the trap of thinking that disagreements with other people happen because the others are irrational in simple, obviously flawed ways. It's harder to avoid the fundamental attribution error and the typical mind fallacy, and admit that the others may have a non-insane reason for their disagreement.
1 I don't disagree with Roko's real point, that the prevailing attitude towards cryonics is decisive evidence that people are crazy and the world is mad. Given uncertainty about whether one's real values would endorse signing up for cryonics, it's not plausible that the staggering potential benefit would fail to recommend extremely careful reasoning about the subject, and investment of plenty of resources if such reasoning didn't come up with a confident no. Even if the decision not to sign up for cryonics were obviously correct upon even a moderate level of reflection, it would still constitute a serious failure of instrumental rationality to make that decision non-reflectively and independently of its correctness, as almost everyone does. I think that usually when someone brings up the obvious correctness of cryonics, they mostly just mean to make this observation, which is no less sound even if cryonics isn't obviously correct.
2 To those who would immediately respond that signing up for cryonics is obviously correct, either for you or for people generally, it seems you could mean two very different things: Do you believe that signing up for cryonics is the best course of action given your level of uncertainty? or, Do you believe that signing up for cryonics can obviously be expected to have been correct upon due reflection? (That is, would you expect a logically omniscient agent to sign up for cryonics in roughly your situation given your utility function?) One is a statement about your decision algorithm, another is a statement about your meta-level uncertainty. I am primarily (though not entirely) arguing against the epistemic correctness of making a strong statement such as the latter.
3 By raising this point as an objection to strong certainty in cryonics specifically, I am essentially bludgeoning a fly with a sledgehammer. With much generalization and effort this post could also have been written as 'Abnormal Everything'. Structural uncertainty is a potent force and the various effects it has on whether or not 'it all adds up to normality' would not fit in the margin of this post. However, Nick Tarleton and I have expressed interest in writing a pseudo-sequence on the subject. We're just not sure about how to format it, and it might or might not come to fruition. If so, this would be the first post in the 'sequence'.
4 Disclaimer and alert to potential bias: I'm an intern (not any sort of Fellow) at the Singularity Institute for (or 'against' or 'ambivalent about' if that is what, upon due reflection, is seen as the best stance) Artificial Intelligence.
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Comments (365)
I'm new here, but I think I've been lurking since the start of the (latest, anyway) cryonics debate.
I may have missed something, but I saw nobody claiming that signing up for cryonics was the obvious correct choice -- it was more people claiming that believing that cryonics is obviously the incorrect choice is irrational. And even that is perhaps too strong a claim -- I think the debate was more centred on the probability of cyronics working, rather than the utility of it.
At one point Eliezer was accusing literally people who don't sign their kids up for Cyronics of "child abuse".
"If you don't sign up your kids for cryonics then you are a lousy parent." - E.Y.
Yeah looks like I misremembered, but it's essentially the same thing for purposes of illustrating to the OP that some people apparently do think that cryonics is the obvious correct choice.
Literally?
Um, why would anyone vote this down? It's bad juju to put quote marks around things someone didn't actually say, especially when you disagree with the person you're mischaracterizing. Anyway, thanks for the correction, cupholder.
Oops, I knew I should have actually looked that up. The difference between "lousy parent" and "child abuse" is only a matter of degree though - Eliezer is still claiming that cryonics is obviously right, which was the point of contention.
It's a difference of degree which matters, especially since people are apt to remember insults and extreme statements.
If I didn't explicitly say so before: signing up for cryonics is the obvious correct choice.
I think cryonics is used as a rationality test because most people reason about it from within the mental category "weird far-future stuff". The arguments in the post seem like appropriate justifications for choices within that category. The rationality test is whether you can compensate for your anti-weirdness bias and realize that cryonics is actually a more logical fit for the mental category "health care".
I think cryonics is a great idea and should be part of health care. However, $50,000 is a lot of money to me and I'm reluctant to spend money on life insurance, which except in the case of cryonics is almost always a bad bet.
I would like my brain to be vitrified if I am dead, but I would prefer not to pay $50,000 for cryonics in the universes where I live forever, die to existential catastrophe, or where cryonics just doesn't work.
What if I specify in my (currently non-existent) cryonics optimized living will that up to $100,000 from my estate is to be used to pay for cryonics? It's not nearly as secure as a real cryonics contract, but it has the benefit of not costing $50,000.
This sounds like a great practical plan if you can pull it off, and, given your values, possibly an obviously correct course of action. However, it does not answer the question of whether being vitrified after death will be seen as correct upon reflection. The distinction here is important.
I'm not sure if cryonics organizations would support that option, as it would be easier for potential opponents to defeat. Also, it wouldn't protect you against accidental death, if I'm understanding correctly, only against an illness that incapacitated you.
Alcor recommends not funding out of your estate, because in the current legal system any living person with the slightest claim will take precedence over the decedent's wishes. Even if the money eventually goes to Alcor, it'll be after 8 months in probate court; and your grey matter's unlikely to be in very good condition for preservation at that point.
I know they don't recommend this, but I suspect a sufficiently good will and trust setup would have a significant probability of working, and the legal precedent set by that would be beneficial to other potential cryonauts.
This argument from confusion doesn't shift the decision either way, so it could as well be an argument for signing up, or against signing up; similarly for immediate suicide, or against that. On the net, this argument doesn't move, because there is no default to fall off to once you get more confused.
Correct: it is simply an argument against certainty in either direction. It is the certainty that I find worrisome, not the conclusion. Now that I look back, I think I failed to duly emphasize the symmetry of my arguments.
And which way is certainty? There is no baseline in beliefs, around the magical "50%". When a given belief diminishes, its opposite grows in strength. At which point are they in balance? Is the "normal" level of belief the same for everything? Russell's teapot? The sky is blue?
Here I show my ignorance. I thought that I was describing the flattening of a probability distribution for both the propositions 'I will reflectively endorse that signing up for cryonics was the best thing to do' and 'I will reflectively endorse that not signing up for cryonics was the best thing to do'. (This is very different from the binary distinction 'Signing up for cryonics is the current best course of action' and 'Not signing up for cryonics is the best current course of action'.) You seem to be saying that this is meaningless because I am not flattening the distributions relative to anything else, whereas I have the intuition that I should be flattening them towards the shape of some ignorance prior (I would like to point out that I am using technical terms I do not fully understand here: I am a mere novice in Bayesian probability theory (as distinct from Bayesianism)). I feel like you have made a valid point but that I am failing to see it.
This is a try at resolving my own confusion:
Suppose there is a fair coin that is going to flipped, and I have been told that it is biased towards heads, so I bet on heads. Suppose that I am then informed that it is in fact biased in a random direction: all of a sudden I should reconsider whether I think betting on heads is the best strategy. I might not decide to switch to tails (cost of switching, and anyway I had some evidence that heads was the direction of bias even if it later turned out to be less-than-totally-informative), but I will move the estimate of my success a lot closer to 50%.
I seem to be arguing that when there's a lot of uncertainty about the model I should assume any given P and not-P are equally likely, because this seems like the best ignorance prior for a binary event about which I have very little information. When one learns there is a lot of structural/metaphysical uncertainty around the universe, identity, et cetera, one should revise their probabilities of any given obviously relevant P/not-P pair towards 50% each, and note that they would not be too surprised by any result being true (as they're expecting anything of everything to happen).
So it looks like what's going on is you have estimates for U(cryonics) and U(not cryonics), and structural confusion increases the variance for both these utilities, and Vladimir is saying this doesn't change the estimate of U(cryonics) - U(not cryonics), and you're saying it increases P(U(not cryonics) > U(cryonics)) if your estimate of U(cryonics) starts out higher, and both of you are right?
That seems correct to me.
I'd say the argument from confusion argues more strongly against benefits that are more inferential steps away. E.g., maybe it supports eating ice cream over cryonics but not necessarily existential risk reduction over cryonics.
Harder, not harder, but which is actually right? This is not about signaling one's ability to do the harder thing.
The reasons you listed are not ones moving most people to not sign up for cryonics. Most people, as you mention at the beginning, simply don't take the possibility seriously enough to even consider it in detail.
I agree, but there exists a non-negligible amount of people that have not obviously illegitimate reasons for not being signed up: not most of the people in the world, and maybe not most of Less Wrong, but at least a sizable portion of Less Wrongers (and most of the people I interact with on a daily basis at SIAI). It seems that somewhere along the line people started to misinterpret Eliezer (or something) and group the reasonable and unreasonable non-cryonauts together.
Then state the scope of the claim explicitly in the post.
Bolded and italicized; thanks for the criticism, especially as this is my first post on Less Wrong.
Good point: mainstream cryonics would be a big step towards raising the sanity waterline, which may end up being a prerequisite to reducing various kinds of existential risk. However, I think that the causal relationship goes the other way, and that raising the sanity waterline comes first, and cryonics second: if you can get the average person across the inferential distance to seeing cryonics as reasonable, you can most likely get them across the inferential distance to seeing existential risk as really flippin' important. (I should take the advice of my own post here and note that I am sure there are really strong arguments against the idea that working to reduce existential risk is important, or at least against having much certainty that reducing existential risk will have been the correct thing to do upon reflection, at the very least on a personal level.) Nonetheless, I agree further analysis is necessary, though difficult.
Your original point was that "getting cryo to go mainstream would be a strong win as far as existential risk reduction is concerned (because then the public at large would have a reason to care about the future) and as far as rationality is concerned", in which case your above comment is interesting, but tangential to what we were discussing previously. I agree that getting people to sign up for cryonics will almost assuredly get more people to sign up for cryonics (barring legal issues becoming more salient and thus potentially more restrictive as cryonics becomes more popular, or bad stories publicized whether true or false), but "because then the public at large would have a reason to care about the future" does not seem to be a strong reason to expect existential risk reduction as a result (one counterargument being the one raised by timtyler in this thread). You have to connect cryonics with existential risk reduction, and the key isn't futurism, but strong epistemic rationality. Sure, you could also get interest sparked via memetics, but I don't think the most cost-effective way to do so would be investment in cryonics as opposed to, say, billboards proclaiming 'Existential risks are even more bad than marijuana: talk to your kids.' Again, my intuitions are totally uncertain about this point, but it seems to me that the option a) 10 million dollars -> cryonics investment -> increased awareness in futurism -> increased awareness in existential risk reduction, is most likely inferior to option b) 10 million dollars -> any other memetic strategy -> increased awareness in existential risk reduction.
I think the correct question here is instead "Do you really value a very, very small chance at you having been signed up for cryonics leading to huge changes in your expected utility in some distant future across unfathomable multiverses more than an assured small amount of utility 30 minutes from now?" I do not think the answer is obvious, but I lean towards avoiding long-term commitments until I better understand the issues. Yes, a very very very tiny amount of me is dying everyday due to freak kitchen accidents, but that much of my measure is so seemingly negligible that I don't feel too horrible trading it off for more thinking time and half a Hershey's bar.
The reasons you gave for spending a dollar a day on cryonics seem perfectly reasonable and I have spent a considerable amount of time thinking about them. Nonetheless, I have yet to be convinced that I would want to sign up for cryonics as anything more than a credible signal of extreme rationality. From a purely intuitive standpoint this seems justified. I'm 18 years old and the singularity seems near. I have measure to burn.
Perhaps. I think a singularity is more likely to occur before I die (in most universes, anyway). With advancing life extension technology, good genes, and a disposition to be reasonably careful with my life, I plan on living pretty much indefinitely. I doubt cryonics has any effect at all on these universes for me personally. Beyond that, I do not have a strong sense of identity, and my preferences are not mostly about personal gain, and so universes where I do die do not seem horribly tragic, especially if I can write down a list of my values for future generations (or a future FAI) to consider and do with that they wish.
So basically... (far) less than a 1% chance of saving 'me', but even then, I don't have strong preferences for being saved. I think that the technologies are totally feasible and am less pessimistic than others that Alcor and CI will survive for the next few decades and do well. However, I think larger considerations like life extension technology, uFAI or FAI, MNT, bioweaponry, et cetera, simply render the cryopreservation / no cryopreservation question both difficult and insignificant for me personally. (Again, I'm 18, these arguments do not hold equally well for people who are older than me.)
Hm, thanks for making me really think about it, and not letting me slide by without doing calculation. It seems to me, given my preferences, about which I am not logically omniscient, and given my structural uncertainty around these issues, of which there is much, I think that my 50 percent confidence interval is between .00001%, 1 in 10 million, to .01%, 1 in ten thousand.
When I read this, two images popped unbidden into my mind: 1) you wanting to walk over the not-that-stable log over the stream with the jagged rocks in it and 2) you wanting to climb out on the ledge at Benton House to get the ball. I suppose one person's "reasonably careful" is another person's "needlessly risky."
Ha, good times. :) But being careful with one's life and being careful with one's limb are too very different things. I may be stupid, but I'm not stupid.
This comment inspired me to draft a post about how much quantum measure is lost doing various things, so that people can more easily see whether or not a certain activity (like driving to the store for food once a week instead of having it delivered) is 'worth it'.
I like this turn of phrase.
Most people already have a reason to care about the future - since it contains their relatives and descendants - and those are among the things that they say they care about.
If you are totally sterile - and have no living relatives - cryonics might seem like a reasonable way of perpetuating your essence - but for most others, there are more conventional options.
Levels of concern about the future vary between individuals - whereas interest rates are a property of society. Surely these things are not connected!
High interest rates do not reflect a lack of concern about the future. They just illustrate how much money your government is printing. Provided you don't invest in that currency, that matters rather little.
I agree that cryonics would make people care about the future more. Though IMO most of the problems with lack of planning are more to do with the shortcomings of modern political systems than they are to do with voters not caring about the future.
The problem with cryonics is the cost. You might care more, but you can influence less - because you no longer have the cryonics money. If you can't think of any more worthwhile things to spend your money on, go for it.
Real interest rates should be fairly constant (nominal interest rates will of course change with inflation), and reflect the price the marginal saver needs to postpone consumption, and the highest price the marginal borrower will pay to bring his forward. If everyone had very low discount rates, you wouldn't need to offer savers so much, and borrowers would consider the costs more prohibitive, so rates would fall.
Perhaps decide to use gold, then. Your society's interest rate then becomes irrelevant to you - and you are free to care about the future as much - or as little - as you like.
Interest rates just do not reflect people's level of concern about the future. Your money might be worth a lot less in 50 years - but the same is not necessarily true of your investments. So - despite all the discussion of interest rates - the topic is an irrelevant digression, apparently introduced through fallacious reasoning.
They're nothing of the kind. See this. Inflation-adjusted as-risk-free-as-it-gets rates vary between 0.2%/year to 3.4%/year.
This isn't about discount rates, it's about supply and demand of investment money, and financial sector essentially erases any connection with people's discount rates.
Point taken; I concede the point. Evidently saving/borrowing rates are sticky, or low enough to be not relevant.
This is plain wrong. Most of these rates is inflation premium (premium for inflation you need to pay is higher than actual inflation because you also bear entire risk if inflation gets higher than predicted, and it cannot really get lower than predicted - it's not normally distributed).
Inflation-adjusted US treasury bonds have rates like 1.68% a year over last 12 years., and never really got much higher than 3%.
For most interest rates like the UK ones you quote there's non-negligible currency exchange risk and default risk in addition to all that.
taw:
Not to mention that even these figures are suspect. There is no single obvious or objectively correct way to calculate the numbers for inflation-adjustment, and the methods actually used are by no means clear, transparent, and free from political pressures. Ultimately, over a longer period of time, these numbers have little to no coherent meaning in any case.
It seems low but it's correct. Risk-free interests rate are very very low.
Individual stocks carry very high risk, so this is nowhere near correct calculation.
And even if you want to invest in S&P index - notice the date - 2007. This is a typical survivorship bias article from that time. In many countries stock markets crashed hard, and failed to rise for decades. Not just tiny countries, huge economies like Japan too. And by 2010 the same is true about United States too (and it would be ever worse if it wasn't for de facto massive taxpayers subsidies)
Here's Wikipedia:
This wasn't true back in 2007.
This is all survivorship bias and nothing more, many other stock exchanges crashed completely or had much lower returns like Japanese.
And I should add that markets are wickedly anti-inductive. With all the people being prodded into the stock market by tax policies and "finance gurus" ... yeah, the risk is being underpriced.
Also, there needs to be a big shift, probably involving a crisis, before risk-free rates actually make up for taxation, inflation, and sovereign risk. After that happens, I'll be confident the return on capital will be reasonable again.
Not signing up for cryonics is a rationality error on my part. What stops me is an irrational impulse I can't defeat: I seem to subsonsciously value "being normal" more than winning in this particular game. It is similar to byrnema's situation with religion a while ago. That said, I don't think any of the enumerated arguments against cryonics actually work. All such posts feel like they're writing the bottom line in advance.
Quite embarrassingly, my immediate reaction was 'What? Trying to be normal? That doesn't make sense. Europeans can't be normal anyway.' I am entirely unsure as to what cognitive process managed to create that gem of an observation.
I'm a Russian living in Moscow, so I hardly count as a European. But as perceptions of normality go, the most "normal" people in the world to me are those from the poor parts of Europe and the rich parts of the 3rd world, followed by richer Europeans (internal nickname "aliens"), followed by Americans (internal nickname "robots"). So if the scale works both ways, I'd probably look even weirder to you than the average European.
What is your impression of the 'weirdness' of the Japanese culture? 'Cuz it's pretty high up there for me.
I'm not judging culture, I'm judging people. Don't personally know anyone from Japan. Know some Filipinos and they seemed very "normal" and understandable to me, moreso than Americans.
I wanted to visit Russia and Ukraine anyway, but this conversation has made me update in favor of the importance of doing so. I've never come into contact with an alien before. I've heard, however, that ex-Soviets tend to have a more live-and-let-live style of interacting with people who look touristy than, for example, Brazil or Greece, so perhaps it will take an extra effort on my part to discover if there really is a tangible aspect of alienness.
I would love to hear more about how you see the behavior of Americans, and why you see us as "robots"!
I feel that Americans are more "professional": they can perform a more complete context-switch into the job they have to do and the rules they have to follow. In contrast, a Russian at work is usually the same slacker self as the Russian at home, or sometimes the same unbalanced work-obsessed self.
Probably my biggest concern with cryonics is that if I was to die at my age (25), it would probably be in a way where I would be highly unlikely to be preserved before a large amount of decay had already occurred. If there was a law in this country (Australia) mandating immediate cryopreservation of the head for those contracted, I'd be much more interested.
Agreed. On the other hand, in order to get laws into effect it may be necessary to first have sufficient numbers of people signed up for cryonics. In that sense, signing up for cryonics might not only save your life, it might spur changes that will allow others to be preserved better (faster), potentially saving more lives.
On a side note, speaking of "abnormal" and cryonics, apparently Britney Spears wants to sign up with Alcor: http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/entertainment/britney-spears-wants-to-be-frozen-after-death_100369339.html
I think this can be filed under "any publicity is good publicity".
I was thinking of filing this as an example of Reversed stupidity is not intelligence.
Is there any way that we could get Britney Spears interested in existential risk mitigation?
It's not obvious that this would be good: it could very well make existential risks research appear less credible to the relevant people (current or future scientists).
I'm surprised. Last time it was Paris Hilton and it turned out not to be true, but it looks like there's more detail this time.
This claims it's a false rumor.
That only cites a "source close to the singer" compared to the detail given by the original rumour. However given the small prior probability of this being true I guess it's probably still more likely to be false.
This post seems to focus too much on Singularity related issues as alternative arguments. Thus, one might think that if one assigns the Singularity a low probability one should definitely take cryonics. I'm going to therefore suggest a few arguments against cryonics that may be relevant:
First, there are other serious existential threats to humans. Many don't even arise from our technology. Large asteroids would be an obvious example. Gamma ray bursts and nearby stars going supernova are other risks. (Betelgeuse is a likely candidate for a nearby supernova making our lives unpleasant. If current estimates are correct there will be substantial radiation from Betelgeuse in that situation but not so much as to wipe out humanity. But we could be wrong.)
Second, one may see a high negative utility if one gets cryonics and one's friends and relatives do not. The abnormal after death result could substantially interfere with their grieving processes. Similarly, there's a direct opportunity cost to paying and preparing for cryonics.
The above argument about lost utility is normally responded to by claiming that the expected utility for cryonics is infinite. If this were actually the case, this would be a valid response.
This leads neatly to my third argument: The claim that my expected utility from cryonics is infinite fails. Even in the future, there will be some probability that I die at any given point. If that probability is never reduced below a certain fixed amount, then my expected life-span is still finite even if I assume cryonics succeeds. (Fun little exercise, suppose that my probability of dying is x on any given day. What is my expected number of days of life? Note that no matter how small x is, as long as x>0, you still get a finite number). Thus, even if one agrees that an infinite lifespan can give infinite utility, it doesn't follow that cryonics gives an expected value that is infinite. (Edit: What happens in a MWI situation is more complicated but similar arguments can be made as the fraction of universes where you exist declines at a geometric rate so the total sum of utility over all universes is still finite)
Fourth, it isn't even clear that one can meaningfully talk about infinite utility. For example, consider the situation where you are given two choices (probably given to you by Omega because that's the standard genie equivalent on LW). In one of them, you are guaranteed immortality with no costs. In the other you are guaranteed immortality but are first tortured for a thousand years. The expected utility for both is infinite, but I'm pretty sure that no one is indifferent to the two choices. This is closely connected to the fact that economists when using utility make an effort to show that their claims remain true under monotonic transformations of total utility. This cannot hold when one has infinite utility being bandied about (it isn't even clear that such transformations are meaningful in such contexts). So much of what we take for granted about utility breaks down.
And if the expected utility of cryonics is simply a very large yet finite positive quantity?
In that case, arguments that cryonics is intrinsically the better choice become much more dependent on specific estimates of utility and probability.
And so they should.
EDIT: Nick Tarleton makes a good point in reply to this comment, which I have moved to be footnote 2 in the text.
This distinction might warrant noting in the post, since it might not be clear that you're only criticizing one position, or that the distinction is really important to keep in mind.
Getting back down to earth, there has been renewed interest in medical circles in the potential of induced hibernation, for short-term suspended animation. The nice trustworthy doctors in lab coats, the ones who get interviews on TV, are all reassuringly behind this, so this will be smoothly brought into the mainstream, and Joe the Plumber can't wait to get "frozed-up" at the hospital so he can tell all his buddies about it.
Once induced hibernation becomes mainstream, cryonics can simply (and misleadingly, but successfully) be explained as "hibernation for a long time."
Hibernation will likely become a commonly used "last resort" for many many critical cases (instead of letting them die, you freeze 'em until you've gone over their chart another time, talked to some colleagues, called around to see if anyone has an extra kidney, or even just sleep on it, at least.) When your loved one is in the fridge, and you're being told that there's nothing left to do, we're going to have to thaw them and watch them die, your next question is going to be "Can we leave them in the fridge a bit longer?"
Hibernation will sell people on the idea that fridges save lives. It doesn't have to be much more rational than that.
If you're young, you might be better off pushing hard to help that tech go mainsteam faster. That will lead to mainstream cryo faster than promoting cryo, and once cryo is mainstream, you'll be able to sign up for cheaper, probably better cryo, and more importantly, one that is integrated into the medical system, where they might transition me from hibernation to cryo, without needing to make sure I'm clinically dead first.
I will gladly concede that, for myself, there is still an irrational set of beliefs keeping me from buying into cryo. The argument above may just be a justification I found t avoid biting the bullet. But maybe I've stumbled onto a good point?
I don't think you stumbled on any good point against cryonics, but the scenario you described sounds very reassuring. Do you have any links on current hibernation research?
Maybe it's a point against investing directly into cryonics as it exists today, and working more through the indirect approach that is most likely to lead to good cryonics sooner. I'm much much more interested in being preserved before I'm brain-dead.
I'm looking for specifics on human hibernation. Lots of sci-fi out there, but more and more hard science as well, especially in recent years. There's the genetic approach, and the hydrogen sulfide approach.
March 2010: Mark Roth at TED
...by the way, the comments threads on the TED website could use a few more rationalists... Lots of smart people there thinking with the wrong body parts.
May 2009: NIH awards a $2,227,500 grant
2006: Doctors chill, operate on, and revive a pig
Voted up for extensive linkage
An interesting comparison I mentioned previously: the cost to Alcor of preserving one human (full-body) is $150,000. The recent full annual budget of SIAI is on the order of (edit:) $500,000.
Cryonics Institute is a factor of 5 cheaper than that, the SIAI budget is larger than that, and SIAI cannot be funded through life insurance while cryonics can. And most people who read this aren't actually substantial SIAI donors.
You can't assign a life insurance policy to a non-profit organization?
Is the long-term viability of low-cost cryonics a known quantity? Is it noticeably similar to the viability of high-cost cryonics?
Did Michael Anissimov, Media Director for SIAI, when citing specific financial data available on Guidestar, lie about SIAI's budget in the linked blog post?
Do people who aren't donors not want to know potential cost ratios regarding the arguments specifically made by the top level post?
"You can't assign a life insurance policy to a non-profit organization?"
You can, but it probably won't pay out until relatively far into the future, and because of SIAI's high discount rate, money in the far future isn't worth much.
"Is the long-term viability of low-cost cryonics a known quantity? Is it noticeably similar to the viability of high-cost cryonics?"
Yes. The Cryonics Institute has been in operation since 1976 (35 years) and is very financially stable.
"Did Michael Anissimov, Media Director for SIAI, when citing specific financial data available on Guidestar, lie about SIAI's budget in the linked blog post?"
Probably not, he just wasn't being precise. SIAI's financial data for 2008 is available here (guidestar.org) for anyone who doesn't believe me.
Please provide evidence for this claim. I've heard contradictory statements to the effect that even $150,000 likely isn't enough for long term viability.
I'm curious how the statement, "our annual budget is in the $200,000/year range", may be considered "imprecise" rather than outright false when compared with data from the source he cited.
SIAI Total Expenses (IRS form 990, line 17):
I sent Anissimov an email asking him to clarify. He may have been netting out Summit expenses (matching cost of venue, speaker arrangements, etc against tickets to net things out). Also note that 2008 was followed by a turnover of all the SIAI staff except Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Michael Vassar then cut costs.
Hi all,
I was completely wrong on my budget estimate, I apologize. I wasn't including the Summit, and I was just estimating the cost on my understanding of salaries + misc. expenses. I should have checked Guidestar. My view of the budget also seems to have been slightly skewed because I frequently check the SIAI Paypal account, which many people use to donate, but I never see the incoming checks, which are rarer but sometimes make up a large portion of total donations. My underestimate of money in contributing to my underestimating monies out.
Again, I'm sorry, I was not lying, just a little confused and a few years out of date on my estimate. I will search over my blog to modify any incorrect numbers I can find.
Thank you for the correction.
That's a very good point. It seems there is some dispute about the numbers but the general point is that it would be a lot cheaper to fund SIAI which may save the world than to cryogenically freeze even a small fraction of the world's population.
The point about life insurance is moot. Life insurance companies make a profit so having SIAI as your beneficiary upon death wouldn't even make that much sense. If you just give whatever you'd be paying in life insurance premiums directly to SIAI, you're probably doing much more overall good than paying for a cryonics policy.
Another argument against cryonics is just that it's relatively unlikely to work (= lead to your happy revival) since it requires several things to go right. Robin's net present value calculation of the expected benefits of cryonic preservation isn't all that different from the cost of cryonics. With slightly different estimates for some of the numbers, it would be easy to end up with an expected benefit that's less than the cost.
Given his future predictions, maybe, but the future predictions of a lot of smart people (especially singularitarians) can lead to drastically different expected values which often give the proposition of signing up for cryonics a Pascalian flavor.
I don't know if this is a self-defense mechanism or actually related to the motives of those promoting cryonics in this group, but I've always taken the "you're crazy not to be signed up for cryonics" meme to be intentional overstatement. If the intent is to remind me that things I do may later turn out to be not just wrong, but extremely wrong, it works pretty well.
It's a good topic to explore agreement theory, as different declared-intended-rationalists have different conclusions, and can talk somewhat dispassionately about such disagreement.
I have trouble believing that anyone means it literally, that for most humans a failure to sign up for cryonics at the earliest opportunity is as wrong as believing there's a giant man in the sky who'll punish or reward you after you die.
I hadn't thought of this, but if so, it's dangerous rhetoric and just begging to be misunderstood.
I object to many of your points, though I express slight agreement with your main thesis (that cryonics is not rational all of the time).
"Weird stuff and ontological confusion: quantum immortality, anthropic reasoning, measure across multiverses, UDTesque 'decision theoretic measure' or 'probability as preference', et cetera, are not well-understood enough to make claims about whether or not you should even care about the number of 'yous' that are living or dying, whatever 'you' think you are."
This argument basically reduces to, once you remove the aura of philosophical sophistication, "we don't really know whether death is bad, so we should worry less about death". This seems to me absurd. For more, read eg. http://yudkowsky.net/other/yehuda .
"If people believe that a technological singularity is imminent, then they may believe that it will happen before they have a significant chance of dying:"
If you assume the median date for Singularity is 2050, Wolfram Alpha says I have a 13% chance of dying before then (cite: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=life+expectancy+18yo+male), and I'm only eighteen.
"A person might find that more good is done by donating money to organizations like SENS, FHI, or SIAI3 than by spending that money on pursuing a small chance of eternal life."
If you already donate more than 5% of your income or time to one of these organizations, I'll buy that. Otherwise (and this "otherwise" will apply to the vast majority of LW commenters), it's invalid. You can't say "alternative X would be better than Y, therefore we shouldn't do Y" if you're not actually doing X.
"Calling non-cryonauts irrational is not productive nor conducive to fostering a good epistemic atmosphere"
Why? Having a good epistemic atmosphere demands that there be some mechanism for letting people know if they are being irrational. You should be nice about it and not nasty, but if someone isn't signing up for cryonics for a stupid reason, maintaining a high intellectual standard requires that someone or something identify the reason as stupid.
"People will not take a fringe subject more seriously simply because you call them irrational for not seeing it as obvious "
This is true, but maintaining a good epistemic atmosphere and getting people to take what they see as a "fringe subject" seriously are two entirely separate and to some extent mutually exclusive goals. Maintaining high epistemic standards internally requires that you call people on it if you think they are being stupid. Becoming friends with a person who sees you as a kook requires not telling them about every time they're being stupid.
"Likewise, calling people irrational for having kids when they could not afford cryonics for them is extremely unlikely to do any good for anyone."
If people are having kids who they can't afford (cryonics is extremely cheap; someone who can't afford cryonics is unlikely to be able to afford even a moderately comfortable life), it probably is, in fact, a stupid decision. Whether we should tell them that it's a stupid decision is a separate question, but it probably is.
"One easily falls to the trap of thinking that disagreements with other people happen because the others are irrational in simple, obviously flawed ways."
99% of the world's population is disagreeing with us because they are irrational in simple, obviously flawed ways! This is certainly not always the case, but I can't see a credible argument for why it wouldn't be the case a large percentage of the time.
Death is bad. The question is whether being revived is good. I'm not sure whether or not I particularly care about the guy who gets unfrozen. I'm not sure how much more he matters to me than anyone else. Does he count as "me?" Is that a meaningful question?
I'm genuinely unsure about this. It's not a decisive factor (it only adds uncertainty), but to me it is a meaningful one.
No. It more accurately reduces to "we don't really know what the heck existence is, so we should worry even more about these fundamental questions and not presume their answers are inconsequential; taking precautions like signing up for cryonics may be a good idea, but we should not presume our philosophical conclusions will be correct upon reflection."
Alright, but I would argue that a date of 2050 is pretty damn late. I'm very much in the 'singularity is near' crowd among SIAI folk, with 2050 as an upper bound. I suspect there are many who would also assign a date much sooner than 2050, but perhaps this was simply typical mind fallacy on my part. At any rate, your 13% is my 5%, probably not the biggest consideration in the scheme of things; but your implicit point is correct that people who are much older than us should give more pause before dismissing this very important conditional probability as irrelevant.
Maybe, but a major point of this post is that it is bad epistemic hygiene to use generalizations like 'the vast majority of LW commenters' in a rhetorical argument. You and I both know many people who donate much more than 5% of their income to these kinds of organizations.
But I'm talking specifically about assuming that any given argument against cryonics is stupid. Yes, correct people when they're wrong about something, and do so emphatically if need be, but do not assume because weak arguments against your idea are more common that there do not exist strong arguments that you should presume your audience does not possess.
If the atmosphere is primarily based on memetics and rhetoric, than yes; but if it is founded in rationality, then the two should go hand in hand. (At least, my intuitions say so, but I could just be plain idealistic about the power of group epistemic rationality here.)
It's not a separate question, it's the question I was addressing. You raised the separate question. :P
What about 99% of Less Wrong readers? 99% of the people you're trying to reach with your rhetoric? What about the many people I know at SIAI that have perfectly reasonable arguments against signing up for cryonics and yet consistently contribute to or read Less Wrong? You're not actually addressing the world's population when you write a comment on Less Wrong. You're addressing a group with a reasonably high standard of thinking ability and rationality. You should not assume their possible objections are stupid! I think it should be the duty of the author not to generalize when making in-group out-group distinctions; not to paint things as black and white, and not to fall into (or let readers unnecessarily fall into) groupthink.
Correction: not 'you', me specifically. I'm young, phyisically and psychologically healthy, and rarely find myself in situations where my life is in danger (the most obvious danger is of course car accidents). It should also be noted that I think a singularity is a lot nearer than your average singularitarian, and think the chance of me dying a non-accidental/non-gory death is really low.
I'm afraid that 'this discussion' is not the one I originally intended with this post: do you think it is best to have it here? I'm afraid that people are reading my post as taking a side (perhaps due to a poor title choice) when in fact it is making a comment about the unfortunate certainty people seem to consistently have on both sides of the issue. (Edit: Of course, this post does not present arguments for both sides, but simply attempts to balance the overall debate in a more fair direction.)
Should we nominate a victim to write a post summarizing various good points either for or against signing up for cryonics (not the feasibility of cryonics technologies!) while taking care to realize that preferences vary and various arguments have different weights dependent on subjective interpretations? I would love to nominate Steve Rayhawk because it seems right up his ally but I'm afraid he wouldn't like to be spotlighted. I would like to nominate Steven Kaas if he was willing. (Carl Shulman also comes to mind but I suspect he's much too busy.)
(edit) I guess I don't fully understand how the proposed post would differ from this one (doesn't it already cover some of the "good points against" part?), and I've also always come down on the "no" side more than most people here.
I think I missed some decent points against (one of which is yours) and the 'good arguments for' do not seem to have been collected in a coherent fashion. If they were in the same post, written by the same person, then there's less of a chance that two arguments addressing the same point would talk past each other. I think that you wouldn't have to suggest a conclusion, and could leave it completely open to debate. I'm willing to bet most people will trust you to unbiasedly and effectively put forth the arguments for both sides. (I mean, what with that great quote about reconstruction from corpses and all.)
I don't think so - the points in the post stand regardless of the probability Will assigns. Bringing up other beliefs of Will is an ad hominem argument. Ad hominem is a pretty good argument in the absence of other evidence, but we don't need to go there today.
Really? Even if you buy into Will's estimate, there are at least three arguments that are not weak:
1) The expected utility argument (I presented above arguments for why this fails, but it isn't completely clear that those rebuttals are valid)
2) One might think that buying into cryonics helps force people (including oneself) to think about the future in a way that produces positive utility.
3) One gets a positive utility from the hope that one might survive using cryonics.
Note that all three of these are fairly standard pro-cryonics arguments that all are valid even with the low probability estimate made by Will.
That really depends a lot on the expected utility. Moreover, argument 2 above (getting people to think about long-term prospects) has little connection to the value of p.
Even a small chance that you will be there helps put people in the mind-set to think long-term.
Once again, my probability estimate was for myself. There are important subjective considerations, such as age and definition of identity, and important sub-disagreements to be navigated, such as AI takeoff speed or likelihood of Friendliness. If I was 65 years old, and not 18 like I am, and cared a lot about a very specific me living far into the future, which I don't, and believed that a singularity was in the distant future, instead of the near-mid future as I actually believe, then signing up for cryonics would look a lot more appealing, and might be the obviously rational decision to make.
Nope, "definition of identity" doesn't influence what actually happens as a result of your decision, and thus doesn't influence how good what happens will be.
You are not really trying to figure out "How likely is it to survive as a result of signing up?", that's just an instrumental question that is supposed to be helpful, you are trying to figure out which decision you should make.
Simply wrong. I can assign positive utility to whatever interpretation of an event I please. If the map changes, the utility changes, even if the territory stays the same. Preferences are not in the territory. Did I misunderstand you?
EDIT: Ah, I think I know what happened: Roko and I were talking about the probability of me being 'saved' by cryonics in the thread he linked to, but perhaps you missed that. Let me copy/paste something I said from this thread: "I tried to make it clear in my post and when talking to both you and Vladimir Nesov that I prefer talking about 'probability that I will get enough utility to justify cryonics upon reflection' instead of 'probability that cryonics will result in revival, independent of whether or not that will be considered a good thing upon reflection'. That's why I put in the abnormally important footnote." I don't think I emphasized this enough. My apologies. (I feel silly, because without this distinction you've probably been thinking I've been committing the mind projection fallacy this whole time, and I didn't notice.)
Not sure I'm parsing this right. Yes, I am determining what decision I should make. The instrumental question is a part of that, but it is not the only consideration.
What?! Roko, did you seriously not see the two points I had directly after the one about age? Especially the second one?! How is my lack of a strong preference to stay alive into the distant future a false preference? Because it's not a false belief.
Okay. Like I said, the one in a million thing is for myself. I think that most people, upon reflection (but not so much reflection as something like CEV requires), really would like to live far into the future, and thus should have probabilities much higher than 1 in a million.
We were talking about the probability of getting 'saved', and 'saved' to me requires that the future is suited such that I will upon reflection be thankful that I was revived instead of those resources being used for something else I would have liked to happen. In the vast majority of post-singularity worlds I do not think this will be the case. In fact, in the vast majority of post-singularity worlds, I think cryonics becomes plain irrelevant. And hence my sorta-extreme views on the subject.
I tried to make it clear in my post and when talking to both you and Vladimir Nesov that I prefer talking about 'probability that I will get enough utility to justify cryonics upon reflection' instead of 'probability that cryonics will result in revival, independent of whether or not that will be considered a good thing upon reflection'. That's why I put in the abnormally important footnote.
Similar to what I think JoshuaZ was getting at, signing up for cryonics is a decently cheap signal of your rationality and willingness to take weird ideas seriously, and it's especially cheap for young people like me who might never take advantage of the 'real' use of cryonics.
Good post. People focus only on the monetary cost of cryonics, but my impression is there are also substantial costs from hassle and perceived weirdness.
Really? I may be lucky, but I have quite the opposite experience. Of course, I haven't signed up due to my place of residence but I have mentioned it to friends and family and they don't seem to think much about it.
Thus triggering the common irrational inference, "If something is attacked with many spurious arguments, especially by religious people, it is probably true."
(It is probably more subtle than this - When you make argument A against X, people listen just until they think they've matched your argument to some other argument B they've heard against X. The more often they've heard B, the faster they are to infer A = B.)
This problem is endemic in the affirmative atheism community. It's a sort of Imaginary Positions error.
Um, isn't the knowledge of many spurious arguments and no strong ones over a period of time weak evidence that no better argument exists (or at least, has currently been discovered?)
I do agree with the second part of your post about argument matching, though. The problem becomes even more serious when it is often not an argument against X from someone who takes the position, but a strawman argument they have been taught by others for the specific purposes of matching up more sophisticated arguments to.
Yes. This is discussed well in the comments on What Evidence Filtered Evidence?.
No, because that assumes that the desire to argue about a proposition is the same among rational and insane people. The situation I observe is just the opposite: There are a large number of propositions and topics that most people are agnostic about or aren't even interested in, but that religious people spend tremendous effort arguing for (circumcision, defense of Israel) or against (evolution, life extension, abortion, condoms, cryonics, artificial intelligence).
This isn't confined to religion; it's a general principle that when some group of people has an extreme viewpoint, they will A) attract lots of people with poor reasoning skills, B) take opinions on otherwise non-controversial opinions based on incorrect beliefs, and C) spend lots of time arguing against things that nobody else spends time arguing against, using arguments based on the very flaws in their beliefs that make them outliers to begin with.
Therefore, there is a large class of controversial issues on which one side has been argued almost exclusively by people whose reasoning is especially corrupt on that particular issue.
I don't think many religious people spend "tremendous effort" arguing against life extension, cryonics or artificial intelligence. For the vast majority of the population, whether religious or not, these issues simply aren't prominent enough to think about. To be sure, when religious individuals do think about these, they more often than not seem to come down on the against side (Look at for example computer scientist David Gelernter's arguing against the possibility of AI). And that may be explainable by general tendencies in religion (especially the level at which religion promotes cached thoughts about the soul and the value of death).
But even that is only true to a limited extent. For example, consider the case of life extension, if we look at Judaism, then some Orthodox ethicists have taken very positive views about life extension. Indeed, my impression is that the Orthodox are more likely to favor life extension than non-Orthodox Jews. My tentative hypothesis for this is that Orthodox Judaism places a very high value on human life and downplays the afterlife at least compared to Christianity and Islam. (Some specific strains of Orthodoxy do emphasize the afterlife a bit more (some chassidic sects for example) ). However Conservative and Reform Judaism have been more directly influenced in by Christian values and therefore have picked up a stronger connection to the Christian values and cached thoughts about death.
I don't think however that this issue can be exclusively explained by Christianity, since I've encountered Muslims, neopagans, Buddhists and Hindus who have similar attitudes. (The neopagans all grew up in Christian cultures so one could say that they were being influenced by that but that doesn't hold too much ground given how much neopaganism seems to be a reaction against Christianity).
Reason #5 to not sign up: Because life sucks.
Huh, I think I may have messed up, because (whether I should admit it or not is unclear to me) I was thinking of you specifically when I wrote the second half of reason 4. Did I not adequately describe your position there?
You came pretty close.
Reason #6 not to sign up: Cryonics is not compatible with organ donation. If you get frozen, you can't be an organ donor.
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.
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.
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.
Reason #7 not to sign up: There is a significant chance that you will suffer information-theoretic death before your brain can be subjected to the preservation process. Your brain could be destroyed by whatever it is that causes you to die (such as a head injury or massive stroke) or you could succumb to age-related dementia before the rest of your body stops functioning.
In regards to dementia, it isn't at all clear that that will necessarily lead to information-theoretic death. We don't have a good enough understanding of dementia to know if the information is genuinely lost or just difficult to recover. The fact that many forms of dementia have more or less lucid periods and periods where they can remember who people are and other times where they cannot is all tentative evidence that the information is recoverable.
Also, this argument isn't that strong an argument. This isn't going to be substantially altering whether or not it makes sense to sign up by more than probably an order of magnitude at the very most (relying on chance of violent death and chance that one will have dementia late in life).
This only makes sense given large fixed costs of cryonics (but you can just not make it publicly known that you've signed up for a policy, and the hassle of setting one up is small compared to other health and fitness activities) and extreme (dubious) confidence in quick technological advance, given that we're talking about insurance policies.
Not necessarily. Someone may for example put a very high confidence in an upcoming technological singularity but put a very low confidence on some other technologies. To use one obvious example, it is easy to see how someone would estimate the chance of a singularity in the near future to be much higher than the chance that we will have room temperature superconductors. And you could easily assign a high confidence to one estimate for one technology and not a high confidence in your estimate for another. (Thus for example, a solid state physicist might be much more confident in their estimate for the superconductors). I'm not sure what estimates one would use to reach this class of conclusion with cryonics and the singularity, but at first glance this is a consistent approach.
Right, but if it fits minimal logical consistency it means that there's some thinking that needs to go on. And having slept on this I can now give other plausible scenarios for someone to have this sort of position. If for example, someone puts a a high probability on a coming singularity, but they put a low probability that effective nanotech will ever be good enough to restore brain function.For example, If you believe that the vitrification procedure damages neurons in fashion that is likely to permanently erases memory, then this sort of attitude would make sense.
Note that I did not make any arguments against the technological feasibility of cryonics, because they all suck. Likewise, and I'm going to be blunt here, all arguments against the feasibility of a singularity that I've seen also suck. Taking into account structural uncertainty around nebulous concepts like identity, subjective experience, measure, et cetera, does not lead to any different predictions around whether or not a singularity will occur (but it probably does have strong implications on what type of singularity will occur!). I mean, yes, I'm probably in a Fun Theory universe and the world is full of decision theoretic zombies, but this doesn't change whether or not an AGI in such a universe looking at its source code can go FOOM.
If you were really the only non-zombie in a Fun Theory universe then you would be the AGI going FOOM. What could be funner than that?
Yeah, that seems like a necessary plot point, but I think it'd be more fun to have a challenge first. I feel like the main character(s) should experience the human condition or whatever before they get a taste of true power, or else they'd be corrupted. First they gotta find something to protect. A classic story of humble beginnings.
Agreed. Funnest scenario is experiencing the human condition, then being the first upload to go FOOM. The psychological mind games of a transcending human. Understanding fully the triviality of human emotions that once defined you, while at the same moment modifying your own soul in an attempt to grasp onto your lingering sanity, knowing full well that the fate of the universe and billions of lives rests on the balance. Sounds like a hell of a rollercoaster.
How serious 0-10, and what's a decision theoretic zombie?
A being that has so little decision theoretic measure across the multiverse as to be nearly non-existenent due to a proportionally infinitesimal amount of observer-moment-like-things. However, the being may have very high information theoretic measure to compensate. (I currently have an idea that Steve thinks is incorrect arguing for information theoretic measure to correlate roughly to the reciprocal of decision theoretic measure, which itself is very well-correlated with Eliezer's idea of optimization power. This is all probably stupid and wrong but it's interesting to play with the implications (like literally intelligent rocks, me [Will] being ontologically fundamental, et cetera).)
I'm going to say that I am 8 serious 0-10 that I think things will turn out to really probably not add up to 'normality', whatever your average rationalist thinks 'normality' is. Some of the implications of decision theory really are legitimately weird.
What do you mean by decision theoretic and information theoretic measure? You don't come across as ontologically fundamental IRL.
Hm, I was hoping to magically get at the same concepts you had cached but it seems like I failed. (Agent) computations that have lower Kolmogorov complexity have greater information theoretic measure in my twisted model of multiverse existence. Decision theoretic measure is something like the significantness you told me to talk to Steve Rayhawk about: the idea that one shouldn't care about events one has no control over, combined with the (my own?) idea that having oneself cared about by a lot of agent-computations and thus made more salient to more decisions is another completely viable way of increasing one's measure. Throw in a judicious mix of anthropic reasoning, optimization power, ontology of agency, infinite computing power in finite time, 'probability as preference', and a bunch of other mumbo jumbo, and you start getting some interesting ideas in decision theory. Is this not enough to hint at the conceptspace I'm trying to convey?
"You don't come across as ontologically fundamental IRL." Ha, I was kind of trolling there, but something along the lines of 'I find myself as me because I am part of the computation that has the greatest proportional measure across the multiverse'. It's one of many possible explanations I toy with as to why I exist. Decision theory really does give one the tools to blow one's philosophical foot off. I don't take any of my ideas too seriously, but collectively, I feel like they're representative of a confusion that not only I have.
Will, the singularity argument above relies on not just the likely long-term feasibility of a singularity, but the near-certainty of one VERY soon, so soon that fixed costs like the inconvenience of spending a few hours signing up for cryonics defeat the insurance value. Note that the cost of life insurance for a given period scales with your risk of death from non-global-risk causes in advance of a singularity.
With reasonable fixed costs, that means something like assigning 95%+ probability to a singularity in less than five years. Unless one has incredible private info (e.g. working on a secret government project with a functional human-level AI) that would require an insane prior.
I never argued that this objection alone is enough to tip the scales in favor of not signing up. It is mostly this argument combined with the idea that loss of measure on the order of 5-50% really isn't all that important when you're talking about multiverse-affecting technologies; no, really, I'm not sure 5% of my measure is worth having to give up half a Hershey's bar everyday, when we're talking crazy post-singularity decision theoretic scenarios from one of Escher's worst nightmares. This is even more salient if those Hershey bars (or airport parking tickets or shoes or whatever) end up helping me increase the chance of getting access to infinite computational power.
Wut. Is this a quantum immortality thing?
No, unfortunately, much more complicated and much more fuzzy. Unfortunately it's a Pascalian thing. Basically, if post-singularity (or pre-singularity if I got insanely lucky for some reason - in which case this point becomes a lot more feasible) I get access to infinite computing power, it doesn't matter how much of my measure gets through, because I'll be able to take over any 'branches' I could have been able to reach with my measure otherwise. This relies on some horribly twisted ideas in cosmology / game theory / decision theory that will, once again, not fit in the margin. Outside view, it's over a 99% chance these ideas totally wrong, or 'not even wrong'.
My understanding was in policies like Roko was describing you're not paying year by year, you're paying for a lifetime thing where in the early years you're mostly paying for the rate not to go up in later years. Is this inaccurate? If it's year by year, $1/day seems expensive on a per life basis given that the population-wide rate of death is something like 1 in 1000 for young people, probably much less for LWers and much less still if you only count the ones leaving preservable brains.
I haven't yet read and thought enough about this topic to form a very solid opinion, but I have two remarks nevertheless.
First, as some previous commenters have pointed out, most of the discussions of cryonics fail to fully appreciate the problem of weirdness signals. For people whose lives don't revolve around communities that are supportive of such undertakings, the cost of signaled weirdness can easily be far larger than the monetary price. Of course, you can argue that this is because the public opinion on the topic is irrational and deluded, but the point is that given the present state of public opinion, which is impossible to change by individual action, it is individually rational to take this cost into account. (Whether the benefits ultimately overshadow this cost is a different question.)
Second, it is my impression that many cryonics advocates -- and in particular, many of those whose comments I've read on Overcoming Bias and here -- make unjustified assertions about supposedly rational ways to decide the question of what entities one should identify oneself with. According to them, signing up for cryonics increases the chances that at some distant time in the future, in which you'll otherwise probably be dead and gone, some entity will exist with which it is rational to identify to the point where you consider it, for the purposes of your present decisions, to be the same as your "normal" self that you expect to be alive tomorrow.
This is commonly supported by arguing that your thawed and revived or uploaded brain decades from now is not a fundamentally different entity from you in any way that wouldn't also apply to your present brain when it wakes up tomorrow. I actually find these arguments plausible, but the trouble is that they, in my view, prove too much. What I find to be the logical conclusion of these arguments is that the notion of personal identity is fundamentally a mere subjective feeling, where no objective or rational procedure can be used to determine the right answer. Therefore, if we accept these arguments, there is no reason at all to berate as irrational people who don't feel any identification with these entities that cryonics would (hopefully) make it possible to summon into existence in the future.
In particular, I personally can't bring myself to feel any identification whatsoever with some computer program that runs a simulation of my brain, no matter how accurate, and no matter how closely isomorphic its data structures might be to the state of my brain at any point in time. And believe me, I have studied all the arguments for the contrary position I could find here and elsewhere very carefully, and giving my utmost to eliminate any prejudice. (I am more ambivalent about my hypothetical thawed and nanotechnologically revived corpse.) Therefore, in at least some cases, I'm sure that people reject cryonics not because they're too biased to assess the arguments in favor of it, but because they honestly feel no identification with the future entities that it aims to produce -- and I don't see how this different subjective preference can be considered "irrational" in any way.
That said, I am fully aware that these and other anti-cryonics arguments are often used as mere rationalizations for people's strong instinctive reactions triggered by the weirdness/yuckiness heuristics. Still, they seem valid to me.
While I understand why someone would see the upload as possibly not themselves (and I have strong sympathy with that position), I do find it genuinely puzzling that someone wouldn't identify their revived body as themselves. While some people might argue that they have no connection to the entity that will have their memories a few seconds from now, the vast majority of humans don't buy into that argument. If they don't, then it is hard to see how a human which is cooled and then revived is any different than a human which who has their heart stopped for a bit as they have a heart transplant, or for someone who stops breathing in a very cold environment for a few minutes, or someone who goes to sleep under an anesthesia, or even someone who goes to sleep normally and wakes up in the morning.
Your point about weirdness signaling is a good one, and I'd expand on it slightly: For much of society, even thinking about weird things at a minimal level is a severe weirdness signal. So for many people, the possible utility of any random weird idea is likely to be so low that even putting in effort to think about it will almost certainly outweigh any benefit. And when one considers how many weird ideas are out there, the chance that any given one of them will turn out to be useful is very low. To use just a few examples, just how many religions are there? How many conspiracy theories? How many miracle cures? Indeed, the vast majority of these, almost all LW readers will never investigate for essentially this sort of utility heuristic.
JoshuaZ:
The problem here is one of continuum. We can easily imagine a continuum of procedures where on one end we have relatively small ones that intuitively appear to preserve the subject's identity (like sleep or anesthesia), and on the other end more radical ones that intuitively appear to end up destroying the original and creating a different person. By Buridan's principle, this situation implies that for anyone whose intuitions give different answers for the procedures at the opposite ends of the continuum, at least some procedures that lie inbetween will result in confused and indecisive intuitions. For me, cryonic revival seems to be such a point.
In any case, I honestly don't see any way to establish, as a matter of more than just subjective opinion, at which exact point in that continuum personal identity is no longer preserved.
This seems similar to something that I'll arbitrarily decide to call the 'argument from arbitrariness': every valid argument should be pretty and neat and follow the zero, one, infinity rule. One example of this was during the torture versus dust specks debate, when the torturers chided the dust speckers for having an arbitrary point at which stimuli that were not painful enough to be considered true pain became just painful enough to be considered as being in the same reference class as torture. I'd be really interested to find out how often something like the argument from arbitrariness turns out to have been made by those on the ultimately correct side of the argument, and use this information as a sort of outside view.
I share the position that Kaj_Sotala outlined here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/1mc/normal_cryonics/1hah
In the relevant sense there is no difference between the Richard that wakes up in my bed tomorrow and the Richard that might be revived after cryonic preservation. Neither of them is a continuation of my self in the relevant sense because no such entity exists. However, evolution has given me the illusion that tomorrow-Richard is a continuation of my self, and no matter how much I might want to shake off that illusion I can't. On the other hand, I have no equivalent illusion that cryonics-Richard is a continuation of my self. If you have that illusion you will probably be motivated to have yourself preserved.
Ultimately this is not a matter of fact but a matter of personal preference. Our preferences cannot be reduced to mere matters of rational fact. As David Hume famously wrote: "'Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger." I prefer the well-being of tomorrow-Richard to his suffering. I have little or no preference regarding the fate of cryonics-Richard.
I don't mean to insult you (I'm trying to respect your intelligence enough to speak directly rather than delicately) but this kind of talk is why cryonics seems like a pretty useful indicator of whether or not a person is rational. You're admitting to false beliefs that you hold "because you evolved that way" rather than using reason to reconcile two intuitions that you "sort of follow" but which contradict each other.
Then you completely discounted the suffering or happiness of a human being who is not able to be helped by anyone other than your present self in this matter. You certainly can't be forced to seek medical treatment against your will for this, so other people are pretty much barred by law from forcing you to not be dumb with respect to the fate of future-Richard. He is in no one's hands but your own.
Hume was right about a huge amount of stuff in the context of initial epistemic conditions of the sort that Descartes proposed when he extracted "I think therefore I am" as one basis for a stable starting point.
But starting from that idea and a handful of others like "trust of our own memories as a sound basis for induction" we have countless terabytes of sense data from which we can develop a model of the universe that includes physical objects with continuity over time - one class of which are human brains that appear to be capable of physically computing the same thoughts with which we started out in our "initial epistemic conditions". The circle closes here. There might be some new evidence somewhere if some kind of Cartesian pineal gland is discovered someday which functions as the joystick by which souls manipulate bodies, but barring some pretty spectacular evidence, materialist views of the soul are the best theory standing.
Your brain has physical continuity in exactly the same way that chairs have physical continuity, and your brain tomorrow (after sleeping tonight while engaging in physical self repair and re-indexing of data structures) will be very similar to your brain today in most but not all respects. To the degree that you make good use of your time now, your brain then is actually likely to implement someone more like your ideal self than even you yourself are right now... unless you have no actualized desire for self improvement. The only deep change between now and then is that you will have momentarily lost "continuity of awareness" in the middle because your brain will go into a repair and update mode that's not capable of sensing your environment or continuing to compute "continuity of awareness".
If your formal theory of reality started with Hume and broke down before reaching these conclusions then you are, from the perspective of pragmatic philosophy, still learning to crawl. This is basically the same thing as babies learning about object permanence except in a more abstract context.
Barring legitimate pragmatic issues like discount rates, your future self should be more important to you than your present self, unless you're mostly focused on your "contextual value" (the quality of your relationships and interactions with the broader world) and feel that your contextual value is high now and inevitably declining (or perhaps will be necessarily harmed by making plans for cryonics).
The real thing to which you should be paying attention (other than to make sure they don't stop working) is not the mechanisms by which mental content is stored, modified, and transmitted into the future. The thing you should be paying attention to is the quality of that content and how it functionally relates to the rest of the physical universe.
For the record, I don't have a cryonics policy either, but I regard this as a matter of a failure to conscientiously apply myself to executing on an issue that is obviously important. Once I realized the flaw in my character that lead to this state of affairs I began working to fix it, which is something that, for me, is still a work in progress.
Part of my work is analyzing the issue enough to have a strongly defensible, coherent, and pragmatic argument for cryonics which I'll consider to have been fully resolved either (1) once I have argument for not signing up that would be good enough for a person able to reason in a relatively universal manner or (2) I have a solid argument the other way which has lead me and everyone I care about including my family and close friends to have taken the necessary steps and signed ourselves up.
When I set up a "drake equation for cryonics" and filled in the probabilities under optimistic (inside view) calculations I determined the value to be trillions of dollars. Under pessimistic assumptions (roughly, the outside view) I found that the expected value was epsilon and realized that my model was flawed because it didn't even have terms for negative value outcomes like "loss of value in 'some other context' because of cryonics/simulationist interactions".
So, pretty much, I regard the value of information here as being enormously large, and once I refine my models some more I expect to have a good idea as to what I really should do as a selfish matter of securing adequate health care for me and my family and friends. Then I will do it.
Would it change your mind if that computer program [claimed to] strongly identify with you?
I'm not sure I understand your question correctly. The mere fact that a program outputs sentences that express strong claims about identifying with me would not be relevant in any way I can think of. Or am I missing something in your question?
Well right, obviously a program consiting of "printf("I am Vladmir_M")" wouldn't qualify... but a program which convincingly claimed to be you.. i.e. had access to all your memories, intellect, inner thoughts etc, and claimed to be the same person as you.
No, as I wrote above, I am honestly unable to feel any identification at all with such a program. It might as well be just a while(1) loop printing a sentence claiming it's me.
I know of some good arguments that seem to provide a convincing reductio ad absurdum of such a strong position, most notably the "fading qualia" argument by David Chalmers, but on the other hand, I also see ways in which the opposite view entails absurdity (e.g. the duplication arguments). Thus, I don't see any basis for forming an opinion here except sheer intuition, which in my case strongly rebels against identification with an upload or anything similar.
If you woke up tomorrow to find yourself situated in a robot body, and were informed that you had been killed in an accident and your mind had been uploaded and was now running on a computer, but you still felt, subjectively, entirely like "yourself", how would you react? Or do you not think that that could ever happen? (that would be a perfectly valid answer, I'm just curious what you think, since I've never had the opportunity to discuss these issues with someone who was familiar with the standard arguments, yet denied the possibility)
For the robotic "me" -- though not for anyone else -- this would provide a conclusive answer to the question of whether uploads and other computer programs can have subjective experiences. However, although fascinating, this finding would provide only a necessary, not a sufficient condition for a positive answer to the question we're pursuing, namely whether there is any rational reason (as opposed to freely variable subjective intuitions and preferences) to identify this entity with my present self.
Therefore, my answer would be that I don't know how exactly the subjective intuitions and convictions of the robotic "me" would develop from this point on. It may well be that he would end up feeling strongly as the true continuation of my person and rejecting what he would remember as my present intuitions on the matter (though this would be complicated by the presumable easiness of making other copies). However, I don't think he would have any rational reason to conclude that it is somehow factually true that he is the continuation of my person, rather than some entirely different entity that has been implanted false memories identical to my present ones.
Of course, I am aware that a similar argument can be applied to the "normal me" who will presumably wake up in my bed tomorrow morning. Trouble is, I would honestly find it much easier to stop caring about what happens to me tomorrow than to start caring about computer simulations of myself. Ultimately, it seems to me that the standard arguments that are supposed to convince people to broaden their parochial concepts of personal identity should in fact lead one to dissolve the entire concept as an irrational reification that is of no concern except that it's a matter of strong subjective preferences.
Getting copied from a frozen brain into a computer is a pretty drastic change, but suppose instead it were done gradually, one neuron at a time. If one of your neurons were replaced with an implant that behaved the same way, would it still be you? A cluster of N neurons? What if you replaced your entire brain with electronics, a little at a time?
Obviously there is a difference, and that difference is significant to identity; but I think that difference is more like the difference between me and my younger self than the difference between me and someone else.
Roko:
It would probably depend on the exact nature of the evidence that would support this discovery. I allow for the possibility that some sorts of hypothetical experiences and insights that would have the result of convincing me that we live in a simulation would also have the effect of dramatically changing my intuitions about the question of personal identity. However, mere thought-experiment considerations of those I can imagine presently fail to produce any such change.
I also allow for the possibility that this is due to the limitations of my imagination and reasoning, perhaps caused by unidentified biases, and that actual exposure to some hypothetical (and presently counterfactual) evidence that I've already thought about could perhaps have a different effect on me than I presently expect it would.
For full disclosure, I should add that I see some deeper problems with the simulation argument that I don't think are addressed in a satisfactory manner in the treatments of the subject I've seen so far, but that's a whole different can of worms.
That would fall under the "evidence that I've already thought about" mentioned above. My intuitions would undoubtedly be shaken and moved, perhaps in directions that I presently can't even imagine. However, ultimately, I think I would be led to conclude that the whole concept of "oneself" is fundamentally incoherent, and that the inclination to hold any future entity or entities in special regard as "one's future self" is just a subjective whim. (See also my replies to kodos96 in this thread.)
Well said.
I think this is true. Cryonics being the "correct choice" doesn't just depend on correct calculations and estimates (probability of a singularity, probability of revival, etc) and a high enough sanity waterline (not dismissing opportunities out of hand because they seem strange). Whether cryonics is the correct choice also depends upon your preferences. This fact seems to be largely missing from the discussion about cryonics. Perhaps because advocates can't imagine people not valuing life extension in this way.
I wouldn't pay 5 cents for a duplicate of me to exist. (Not for the sole sake of her existence, that is. If this duplicate could interact with me, or interact with my family immediately after my death, that would be a different story as I could delegate personal responsibilities to her.)
Hi, I'm pretty new here too. I hope I'm not repeating an old argument, but suspect I am; feel free to answer with a pointer instead of a direct rebuttal.
I'm surprised that no-one's mentioned the cost of cryonics in relation to the reduction in net human suffering that could come from spending the money on poverty relief instead. For (say) USD $50k, I could save around 100 lives ($500/life is a current rough estimate at lifesaving aid for people in extreme poverty), or could dramatically increase the quality of life of 1000 people (for example, cataract operations to restore sight to a blind person are around $50).
How can we say it's moral to value such a long shot at elongating my own life as being worth more than 100-1000 lives of other humans who happened to do worse in the birth wealth lottery than I did?
like this: I value my subjective experience more than even hundreds of thousands of other similar-but-not-me subjective experiences.
additionally, your argument applies to generic goods you choose over saving people, not just cryonics.
This is also an argument against going to movies, buying coffee, owning a car, or having a child. In fact, this is an argument against doing anything beyond living at the absolute minimum threshold of life, while donating the rest of your income to charity.
How can you say it's moral to value your own comfort as being worth more than 100-1000 other humans? They just did worse at the birth lottery, right?
I have been heavily leaning towards the anti-cryonics stance at least for myself with the current state of information and technology. My reasons are mostly the following.
I can see it being very plausible that somewhere along the line I would be subject to immense suffering, over which death would have been a far better option, but that I would be either potentially unable to take my life due to physical constraints or would lack the courage to do so (it takes quite some courage and persistent suffering to be driven to suicide IMO). I see this as analogous to a case where I am very near death and am faced with the two following options. (a) Have my life support system turned off and die peacefully.
(b) Keep the life support system going but subsequently give up all autonomy over my life and body and place it entirely in the hands of others who are likely not even my immediate kin. I could be made to put up with immense suffering either due to technical glitches which are very likely since this is a very nascent area, or due to willful malevolence. In this case I would very likely choose (a).
Note that in addition to prolonged suffering where I am effectively incapable of pulling the plug on myself, there is also the chance that I would be an oddity as far as future generations are concerned. Perhaps I would be made a circus or museum exhibit to entertain that generation. Our race is highly speciesist and I would not trust the future generations with their bionic implants and so on to even necessarily consider me to be of the same species and offer me the same rights and moral consideration.
Last but not the least is a point I made as a comment in response to Robin Hanson's post. Robin Hanson expressed a preference for a world filled with more people with scarce per-capita resources compared to a world with fewer people with significantly better living conditions. His point was that this gives many people the opportunity to "be born" who would not have come into existence. And that this was for some reason a good thing.
I couldn't care less if I weren't born. As the saying goes, I have been dead/not existed for billions of years and haven't suffered the slightest inconvenience. I see cryonics and a successful recovery as no different from dying and being re-born. Thus I assign virtually zero positives to being re-born, while I assign huge negatives to 1 and 2 above. This is probably related to the sense of identity mentioned in this post.
We are evolutionarily driven to dislike dying and try to postpone it for as long as possible. However I don't think we are particularly hardwired to prefer this form of weird cryonic rebirth over never waking up at all. Given that our general preference to not die has nothing fundamental about it, but is rather a case of us following our evolutionary leanings, what makes it so obvious that cryonic rebirth is a good thing. Some form of longetivity research which extends our life to say 200 years without going the cryonic route with all the above risks especially for the first few generations of cryonic guinea pigs, seems much harder to argue against.
I'm surprised that you didn't bring up what I find to be a fairly obvious problem with Cryonics: what if nobody feels like unthawing you? Of course, not having followed this dialogue I'm probably missing some equally obvious counter to this argument.
If I were defending cryonics, I would say that a small chance of immortality beats sure death hands-down.
It sounds like Pascal's Wager (small chance at success, potentially infinite payoff), but it doesn't fail for the same reasons Pascal's Wager does (Pascal's gambit for one religion would work just as well for any other one.) - discussed here a while back.
Here's another possible objection to cryonics:
If an Unfriendly AI Singularity happens while you are vitrified, it's not just that you will fail to be revived - perhaps the AI will scan and upload you and abuse you in some way.
"There is life eternal within the eater of souls. Nobody is ever forgotten or allowed to rest in peace. They populate the simulation spaces of its mind, exploring all the possible alternative endings to their life." OK, that's generalising from fictional evidence, but consider the following scenario:
Suppose the Singularity develops from an AI that was initially based on a human upload. When it becomes clear that there is a real possibility of uploading and gaining immortality in some sense, many people will compete for upload slots. The winners will likely be the rich and powerful. Billionaires tend not to be known for their public-spirited natures - in general, they lobby to reorder society for their benefit and to the detriment of the rest of us. So, the core of the AI is likely to be someone ruthless and maybe even frankly sociopathic.
Imagine being revived into a world controlled by a massively overclocked Dick Cheney or Vladimir Putin or Marquis De Sade. You might well envy the dead.
Unless you are certain that no Singularity will occur before cryonics patients can be revived, or that Friendly AI will be developed and enforced before the Singularity, cryonics might be a ticket to Hell.
What you're describing is an evil AI, not just an unFriendly one - unFriendly AI doesn't care about your values. Wouldn't an evil AI be even harder to achieve than a Friendly one?
An unFriendly AI doesn't necessarily care about human values - but I can't see why, if it was based on human neural architecture, it might not exhibit good old-fashioned human values like empathy - or sadism.
I'm not saying that AI would have to be based on human uploads, but it seems like a credible path to superhuman AI.
Why do you think that an evil AI would be harder to achieve than a Friendly one?
Agreed, AI based on a human upload gives no guarantee about its values... actually right now I have no idea about how Friendliness of such AI could be ensured.
Maybe not harder, but less probable - 'paperclipping' seems to be a more likely failure of friendliness than AI wanting to torture humans forever.
I have to admit I haven't thought much about this, though.
I am not liking long term cryonics for the following reasons: 1) If an unmodified Violet would be revived she would not be happy in the far future 2) If a Violet modified enough would be revived she would not be me 3) I don't place a large value on there being a "Violet" in the far future 4) There is a risk of my values and the values of being waking Violet up being incompatible, and avoiding possible "fixing" of brain is very high priority 5) Thus I don't want to be revived by far-future and death without cryonics seems a safe way for that
I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask this or even if it is possible to procure the data regarding the same, but who is the highest status person who has opted for Cryonics? The wealthiest or the most famous..
Having high status persons adopt cryonics can be a huge boost to the cause, right?
Thanks for this post. I tend to lurk, and I had some similar questions about the LW enthusiasm for cryo.
Here's something that puzzles me. Many people here, it seems to me, have the following preference order:
pay for my cryo > donation: x-risk reduction (through SIAI, FHI, or SENS) > paying for cryo for others
Of course, for the utilitarians among us, the question arises: why pay for my cryo over risk reduction? (If you just care about others way less than you care about yourself, fine.) Some answer by arguing that paying for your own cryo maximizes x-risk reduction better than the other alternatives because of its indirect effects. This reeks of wishful thinking and doesn't fit well with the preference order above. There are plenty of LWers, I assume, who haven't signed up for cryo, but would if someone else would pay the life insurance policy. If you really think that paying for your own cryo maximizes x-risk reduction, shouldn't you also think that getting others signed up for cryo does as well? (There are some differences, sure. Maybe the indirect effects aren't as substantial if others don't pay their own way in full. But I doubt this justifies the preference.) If so, it would seem that rather than funding x-risk reduction through donating to these organizations, you should fund the cryo preservation of LWers and other willing people.
So which is it utilitarians: you shouldn't pay for your own cryo or you should be working on paying for the cryo of others as well?
If you think paying for cryo is better, want to pay for mine first?
Question for the advocates of cryonics: I have heard talk in the news and various places that organ donor organizations are talking about giving priority to people who have signed up to donate their organs. That is to say, if you sign up to be an organ donor, you are more likely to receive a donated organ from someone else should you need one. There is some logic in that in the absence of a market in organs; free riders have their priority reduced.
I have no idea if such an idea is politically feasible (and, let me be clear, I don't advocate it), however, were it to become law in your country, would that tilt the cost benefit analysis away from cryonics sufficiently that you would cancel your contract? (There is a new cost imposed by cryonics: namely that the procedure prevents you from being an organ donor, and consequently, reduces your chance of a life saving organ transplant.)
This is a valid point, but it is slightly OT to discuss precise probability for cryonics. I think that one reason people might not be trying to reach a consensus about the actual probability of success is because it may simply require so much background knowledge that one might need to be an expert to reasonably evaluate the subject. (Incidentally, I'm not aware of any sequence discussing what the proper thing to do is when one has to depend heavily on experts. We need more discussion of that.) The fact that there are genuine subject matter experts like de Magalhaes who have thought about this issue a lot and come to the conclusion that it is extremely unlikely while others who have thought about consider it likely makes it very hard to estimate. (Consider for example if someone asks me if string theory is correct. The most I'm going to be able to do is to shrug my shoulders. And I'm a mathematician. Some issues are just really much too complicated for non-experts to work out a reliable likelyhood estimate based on their own data.)
It might however be useful to start a subthread discussing pro and anti arguments. To keep the question narrow, I suggest that we simply focus on the technical feasibility question, not on the probability that a society would decide to revive people.
I'll start by listing a few:
For:
1) Non-brain animal organs have been successfully vitrified and revived. See e.g. here
2) Humans have been revived from low-oxygen, very cold circumstances with no apparent loss of memory. This has been duplicated in dogs and other small mammals in controlled conditions for upwards of two hours. (However the temperatures reduced are still above freezing).
Against:
1) Vitrification denatures and damages proteins. This may permanently damage neurons in a way that makes their information content not recoverable. If glial cells have a non-trivial role in thought then this issue becomes even more severe. There's a fair bit of circumstantial evidence for glial cells having some role in cognition, including the fact that they often behave abnormally in severe mental illness. See for example this paper discussing glial cells and schizophrenia. We also know that in some limited circumstances glial cells can release neurotransmitters.
2) Even today's vitrification procedures do not necessarily penetrate every brain cell, so there may be severe ice-crystal formation in a lot of neurons.
3) Acoustic fracturing is still a major issue. Since acoustic fracturing occurs even when one is just preserving the head, there's likely severe macroscopic brain damage occurring. This also likely can cause permanent damage to memory and other basic functions in a non-recoverable way. Moreover, acoustic fracturing is only the fracturing from cooling that is so bad that we hear it. There's likely a lot of much smaller fracturing going on. (No one seems to have put a sensitive microphone right near a body or a neuro when cooling. The results could be disconcerting).
You're trying to get to the truth of a different matter. You need to go one level meta. This post is arguing that either position is plausible. There's no need to refine the probabilities beyond saying something like "The expected reward/cost ratio of signing up for cryonics is somewhere between .1 and 10, including opportunity costs."
I told Kenneth Storey, who studies various animals that can be frozen and thawed, about a new $60M government initiative (mentioned in Wired) to find ways of storing cells that don't destroy their RNA. He mentioned that he's now studying the Gray Mouse Lemur, which can go into a low-metabolism state at room temperature.
If the goal is to keep you alive for about 10 years while someone develops a cure for what you have, then this room-temperature low-metabolism hibernation may be easier than cryonics.
(Natural cryonics, BTW, is very different from liquid-nitrogen cryonics. There are animals that can be frozen and thawed; but most die if frozen to below -4C. IMHO natural cryonics will be much easier than liquid-nitrogen cryonics.)
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.)