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Sniffnoy comments on Open Thread, August 2010 - Less Wrong
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I found TobyBartels's recent explanation of why he doesn't want to sign up for cryonics a useful lesson in how different people's goals in living a long time (or not) can be from mine. Now I am wondering if maybe it would be a good idea to state some of the reasons people would want to wake up 100 years later if hit by a bus. Can't say I've been around here very long but it seems to me it's been assumed as some sort of "common sense" - is that accurate? I was wondering if other people's reasons for signing up / intending to sign up (I am not currently signed up and probably will not get around to such for several years) also differed interestingly from mine. Or is this too off topic?
As for me, I would think the obvious reason is what Hilbert said: "If I were to awaken after having slept for a thousand years, my first question would be: Has the Riemann hypothesis been proven?" Finding yourself in the future means you now have the answers to a lot of previously open problems! As well as getting to learn the history of what happened after you were frozen. I have for a long time found not getting to learn the future history of the world to be the most troubling aspect of dying.
(Posting this here as it seems a bit off-topic under The Threat of Cryonics.)
It sure seems like a lot of people could feed their will to live by reading just the first half of an exciting fiction book.
We would need to drastically strengthen norms against spoilers.
One thought is that it's tempting to think of yourself as being the only one (presumably with help from natives) trying to deal with the changed world.
Actually I think it's more likely that there will be many people from your era, and there will be immigrants' clubs, with people who've been in the future for a while helping the greenhorns. I find this makes the future seem more comfortable.
The two major reasons I can think of for wanting to be in the future is that I rather like being me, and the future should be interesting.
The single largest motivation for me is just that a future which is powerful enough, and rich enough, and benevolent enough to revive cryonicists is likely to be a very pleasant place to be in. If nothing else, lots of their everyday devices are likely to look like marvelous toys from my point of view. The combination of that with the likelihood that if they can repair me at all, I'd guess that they would use a youthful body (physical or simulated) as a model is quite enough to be an attractive prospect.