lsparrish comments on Cryonics Wants To Be Big - Less Wrong

28 Post author: lsparrish 05 July 2010 07:50AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (160)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: AlexM 12 July 2010 01:15:24PM 1 point [-]

Cryonics wants to be small, or why should the future want you?

All this technical discussion misses what I see as the major problem of cryonics if it works as advertised - why should the future want us?

Imagine if today were discovered few frozen Homo habilis and had technology to revive them. After, they would spend their lives in comfortable zoo that is paradise by ape men standards ( plentiful food! no dangerous beasts! warm shelter!)

Now try the same scenario, but with few millions of our frozen ancestors. The results will be same - at best, few dozens would be picked to be resurrected and studied, but I cannot see us welcoming millions of new hairy citizens.

Conclusion - to me it seems that if you want to maximize chance of future society resurrecting you, keep cryonics as close guarded secret of tiny elite...

Comment author: lsparrish 12 July 2010 03:30:54PM *  4 points [-]

Conclusion - to me it seems that if you want to maximize chance of future society resurrecting you, keep cryonics as close guarded secret of tiny elite...

I hear this from cryo skeptics all the time. Doubts -- not so much as to whether it works or not, but as to whether the patients who could be revived are human or not. Your whole argument treats the patients as dead and gone, and the people who would die without cryonics as expendable. It is simply not consistent with cryonics working in the first place.

If cryonics works in the first place, it means everyone who could be preserved but isn't, is a human casualty -- and everyone who could be reanimated but isn't is stuck in a coma against their will. I don't care if you give that an arbitrarily low probability, but if you are going to argue about what is the case if it does work, you have to remain consistent with that assumption if you want to criticize it effectively.

Luckily, future humans will have experience with suspended animation and radical surgery long before they can realistically revive a cryonics patient. Getting someone suspended with near-zero damage is an unsolved challenge, but few seem doubtful that it will be solved at some point. Repairing the damage of a current-day cryonics case is necessarily further down the road.

Simply having experience with reanimating suspendees (and seeing major surgery such as full body replacement using regrown organs), I expect they will have a much more enlightened perspective on this situation than your average cryonics critic today. Death will then be viewed as something extremely uncommon and in need of extremely good evidence before medical procedures and ethics can be cast aside.

Comment author: AlexM 12 July 2010 05:54:32PM 2 points [-]

I hear this from cryo skeptics all the time. Doubts -- not so much as to whether it >works or not, but as to whether the patients who could be revived are human or not.

No, the question is whether the advanced posthuman civilisation will see the frozen primitive men as human beings.

How many resources are we spending to save and improve lives of apes?

If cryonics works in the first place, it means everyone who could be preserved but >isn't, is a human casualty

The purpose of cryonics , at least as as advertised here, is to save specifically your life, not humanity in general. And, for the purpose, is simply better to be one of a few rare specimens than one in a mass.

and everyone who could be reanimated but isn't is stuck in a coma against their will.

why would they care about our will?

Death will then be viewed as something extremely uncommon and in need of >extremely good evidence before medical procedures and ethics can be cast aside.

death of one of them, yes, but one of us?

Comment author: RobinZ 12 July 2010 08:15:12PM 3 points [-]

How many resources are we spending to save and improve lives of apes?

How many resources are we spending to save and improve lives of the mentally retarded? My cursory research has over half a billion U.S. dollars in the United States in the year 2002.

Comment author: mattnewport 12 July 2010 08:57:40PM 3 points [-]

How many resources are we spending to save and improve lives of the mentally retarded? My cursory research has over half a billion U.S. dollars in the United States in the year 2002.

Surely the US spends more on healthcare than that?

Comment author: RobinZ 12 July 2010 09:09:19PM 0 points [-]

About a thousand times more by the government on health care, yes. This is just the estimates I found of governmental spending on people with mental retardation.

Comment author: mattnewport 12 July 2010 09:52:32PM 0 points [-]

Too subtle.

Comment author: RobinZ 12 July 2010 10:07:49PM 1 point [-]

I thought I was quite explicit. AlexM implied that future posthumans would not be interested in reviving comparatively moronic predecessors by suggesting their attitude towards these would be akin to our attitude towards apes. I suggested that the more appropriate analogy would be to human beings with developmental disabilities, for whom substantial sums of public money are spent. What's overly subtle about that?

Comment author: mattnewport 12 July 2010 10:11:35PM 3 points [-]

I meant I was too subtle. It was a joke. Apparently a failed one.

Comment author: RobinZ 12 July 2010 10:13:59PM 3 points [-]

Oh, yeah. That is clever. Probably would have worked better in person.