I like this post. Upvoted.
On a tangiential node, I had an experience today that made me take cryonics much more seriously. I had a (silly, in retrospect) near-miss with serious injury, and I realized that I was afraid. Ridiculously, helplessly, calling-on-imaginary-God-for-mercy afraid. I had vastly underestimated how much I cared about my own physical safety, and how helpless I become when it's threatened. I feel much less cavalier about my own body now.
So, you know, freezing myself looks more appealing now that I know that I'm scared. I can see why I'd want to have somewhere to wake up to, if I died.
Your comment suggests a convenient hack for aspiring rationalists to overcome their fear of cryonics.
Since you mentioned Benjamin Franklin, apparently when he died he left two trust funds to demonstrate the power of compound interest over a couple of centuries. The example of these trusts shows that the idea of a reanimation trust staying intact for centuries doesn't sound absurd:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin#Death_and_legacy
You forgot the most optimistic of all:
Within the immortalist community, cryonics is the most pessimistic possible position.
Indeed; I think the cryonics organizations themselves have a saying, "Cryonics is the second worst thing that can happen to you."
Cryonics can work even if there is no singularity or reversal tech for thousands of years into the future.
This doesn't alter your overall point much but this seems unlikely. Aside from the issue of the high probability of something going drastically wrong after more than a few centuries, low-level background radiation as well as intermittent chemical reactions will gradually create trouble. Unfortunately, estimating the timespan for when these will be an issue seems difficult but the general level seems to be somewhere between about 100 to a 1000 years...
Good post, upvoted.
I think that your remark
But the fact that we don't know what exact point is good enough is sufficient to make this a worthwhile endeavor at as early of a point as possible. It doesn't require optimism -- it simply requires deliberate, rational action.
assumes a utility function which may not be universal. In particular, at present I feel that the value of my personal survival into transhuman times is dwarfed by other considerations. But certainly your points are good ones for people who place high value on personally living into transhuman times to bear in mind.
Although it's not marked as the inspiration, this post comes straight after an article by many-decades cryonicist Charles Platt, which he wrote for Cryonics magazine but which was rejected by the Alcor board:
Platt discusses what he sees as the dangerously excessive optimism of cryonics, particularly with regard to financial arrangements: that because money shouldn't be a problem, people behave as though it therefore isn't a problem. When it appears clear that it is. To quote:
...In fact their determination to achieve and defend their
After reading Eliezer on it, I with certainty to sign up for cryonics, but I figured I'd wait until I had a more stable lifestyle. I'm currently traveling through Asia - Saigon, Vietnam right now, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia next. I figure if the lights go off while I'm here, it's not particularly likely I'd make it to a cryonics facility in reasonable time.
Also, it's the kind of thing I'd like to research a bit, but I know that's a common procrastination technique so I'm not putting too much weight on that.
Nice post, though it avoided the reason why I don't intend to get cryopreserved. That is, because it's way too expensive.
I think cryonics is a waste of money unless you want to make living copies of a dead person or otherwise have a reason to preserve information about the dead. Cryonics does not prevent the death of you, it just prevents the destruction of the leftovers as well.
What about - The SAI can reborn me no matter how long I will be dead and how poor my remains will be then?
You come off as assuming that the people in this thread are not aware of the personal identity debate. That doesn't really strike me as productive.
I know the debate exists, I just think the wrong side is winning (in this little corner of the Internet).
These discussions usually occur in an atmosphere where there is far more presumption than there is knowledge, regarding the relationship between the physical brain and elements of personhood like mind, consciousness, or identity.
The default attitude is that a neuron is just a sort of self-healing transistor, that the physical-computational reality in the brain that is relevant for the existence of a person is a set of trillions of physically distinct but causally connected elementary acts of information processing, that the person exists in or alongside these events in some vague way that is not completely specified or understood, and that so long as the cloud of information processing continues in a vaguely similar way, or so long as it is instantiated in a way with vaguely similar causality, the person will continue to exist or will exist again, thanks to the vague and not-understood principle of association that links physical computation and self.
The view of the self which naturally arises subjectively is that it is real and that it persists in time. But because of the computational atomism present in the default attitude (described in the previous paragraph), and also because of MWI dogma and various thought-experiments involving computer programs, the dominant tendency is to say, the natural view is naive and wrong, there's no continuity, you are as much your copies and your duplicates elsewhere in the multiverse as you are this-you, and so on ad infinitum, in a large number of permutations on the theme that you aren't what you think you are or what you appear to be.
Another reason that people are willing to sacrifice the natural view wholesale has to do with attachment to the clarity that comes from mathematical, physical, and computational concepts. These concepts also have an empirical side to their attraction, in that science has validated their use to a certain degree. But I think there is also a love of the types of objective thought that we already know how to perform, a love of them for their own sake, even when they do not easily mesh with something we would otherwise consider a reality. An example would be the flow of time. If there were no mathematical physics which treats time as just another sort of space, we would say, of course time passes; it may be a little mysterious, a little hard to describe (see St Augustine), but of course it's real. But since we have geometric models of space-time which are most easily apprehended in a timeless or static fashion (as a single self-existent geometric object), the flow of time is relegated to consciousness, subjectivity, illusion, even denied outright.
The matter-of-fact belief in uploading (in the sense that a digital emulation of your brain will be conscious and will be you), in cryonics, and a few of the other less baroque permutations of identity, doesn't necessarily derive from this quasi-platonic absorption in abstract objectivity. It can also come from "thought-experiment common-sense", as in your scenario of a world where cryonics or uploading is already common. But the abstract attachment to certain modes of thought is a significant factor in this particular intellectual environment, and in discussions where there is an attempt to think about these matters from first principles. And apparently it needs to be pointed out that everything which is "subjective", and which presents a problem for the standard picture (by which I mean, the combination of computational atomism and physical ontology), is quickly discarded as unreal or is treated as a problem that will take care of itself somehow, even though the standard picture is incredibly vague regarding how identity, mind, or consciousness relates to the physical and biological description.
I lean in the other direction, because the standard picture is still very vague, and also because subjective appearances have evidential value. We have every reason to look for models of reality in which time is real, the self is real, and so on, rather than bravely biting the naturalistic bullet and asserting that all that stuff is somehow unreal or otherwise ontologically secondary. Last year I suggested here that the exact physical correlate of the self might be a specific, very large irreducible tensor factor in the quantum state of the brain. That wasn't a very popular idea. There's also the idea that the self is a little more mesoscopic than that, and should be identified with a dynamic "functional organization" glued together more by causality than by anything else. I think this idea is a little fuzzy, a little problematic, but it's still superior to the patternist theories according to which physical continuity in space and time has nothing to do with identity; and perhaps you can see that on this theory also, a destructive upload or a cryonic resurrectee isn't you - because you were the particular dynamical process which terminated when you died, and the upload and the cryo-copy are distinct processes, with a definite beginning in time which came long after the end of the earlier process on which they were modeled.
You ask how, in a world where cryonic suspension and mind uploading are commonplace, a person could arrive at the intuition that identity does not persist across these transformations. All it would take is the knowledge that a self is an entity of type X, and that in these transformations, one such entity is destroyed and another created. These questions won't remain unanswered forever, and I see no reason to think that the final answers will be friendly to or consistent with a lax attitude towards personal identity. To be is to be something, and inside appearances already tell us that each of us is one particular thing which persists in time. All that remains is to figure out what that thing is, from the perspective of natural science.
Thank you for the thoughtful reply. I see the problem with overly cavalier attitudes to personal identity as a reproducible pattern, but I'm not quite willing to let the continuous process view out of the hook that easily either.
It seems awfully convenient that your posited process of personal identity survives exactly those events, blinking ones eyes, epileptic fits, sleep, coma, which are not assumed to disrupt personal identity in everyday thought. Unless we have some actual neuroscience to point to, all I know is that I'm conscious right now. I don't s...
Within the immortalist community, cryonics is the most pessimistic possible position. Consider the following superoptimistic alternative scenarios:
Cryonics -- perfusion and vitrification at LN2 temperatures under the best conditions possible -- is by far less optimistic than any of these. Of all the possible scenarios where you end up immortal, cryonics is the least optimistic. Cryonics can work even if there is no singularity or reversal tech for thousands of years into the future. It can work under the conditions of the slowest technological growth imaginable. All it assumes is that the organization (or its descendants) can survive long enough, technology doesn't go backwards (on average), and that cryopreservation of a technically sufficient nature can predate reanimation tech.
It doesn't even require the assumption that today's best possible vitrifications are good enough. See, it's entirely plausible that it's 100 years from now when they start being good enough, and 500 years later when they figure out how to reverse them. Perhaps today's population is doomed because of this. We don't know. But the fact that we don't know what exact point is good enough is sufficient to make this a worthwhile endeavor at as early of a point as possible. It doesn't require optimism -- it simply requires deliberate, rational action. The fact is that we are late for the party. In retrospect, we should have started preserving brains hundreds of years ago. Benjamin Franklin should have gone ahead and had himself immersed in alcohol.
There's a difference between having a fear and being immobilized by it. If you have a fear that cryonics won't work -- good for you! That's a perfectly rational fear. But if that fear immobilizes you and discourages you from taking action, you've lost the game. Worse than lost, you never played.
This is something of a response to Charles Platt's recent article on Cryoptimism: Part 1 Part 2