Up front, I'll say that I am not signed up for cryonics, and have no particular plans to. (Yes, I know this means that I will almost certainly be permanently dead within 50 years.) Nobody else at the meet-up was signed up, although some expressed a vague intention to do it one day.
Anyway, an argument in favour is not only that you are likely to wake up (if you wake up at all) in a favorable situation, but you can look forward to a greatly extended lifespan, since making living bodies last longer seems like an easier problem than resuscitating corpsicles frozen with the crude technology of today. This multiplies the utility by a huge amount.
Despite that and other arguments, and a personal desire to live a healthy life for as long as possible, I remain unenthusiastic about devoting a substantial proportion of my resources to the project (not just money -- you cannot buy cryonics like you can buy a picture to hang on your wall, you need a plan for the actual suspension). Small probabilities of stupendous outcomes fail to move me even if their product is greater than the cost. You can play the figures like a guitar and get any answer you want.
A downside that I haven't seen much attention paid to, although it does get mentioned from time to time, is the problem of having the organisation that has the care of your corpsicle surviving long enough, and taking good enough care. You can't freeze a social structure and put it in a vat for a century -- it has to live through all the time that you don't. What are the chances?
A surprisingly large number of firms have lasted for centuries, even in war-torn countries like Germany:
The Cambridge UK meet-up on Saturday 12 February went really well. Many thanks to everyone who came and provided a wonderful and entertaining discussion.
One of the topics that came up was that of cryonics. This is the idea of having your body (or maybe just your brain) frozen after death, to be thawed and revived in the far future when medical technology has advanced to the point where it can heal you. Is this a rational thing to do?
The argument I heard from some of the other attendants effectively boils down to “what have you got to lose?” In other words, have yourself frozen just in case it works and you can be resurrected.
This struck me as awfully reminiscent of Pascal’s Wager, which is similarly a “what have you got to lose?” type argument. Cited in its original form, it is about belief in a god and goes something like this:
This argument falls down on many counts, but I’ll concentrate on a specific one. It makes a far-fetched assumption about the set of possible outcomes. It assumes that there are only the two possibilities quoted and no others. It ignores the possibility of a god that only rewards sceptical atheists.
Coming back to cryonics, the argument seems to proceed approximately like this:
If I haven’t already made it abundantly clear, the assumption that the future you wake up in is at all desirable for you is a far-fetched one. It ignores the possibility of waking up as a slave with no opportunity for suicide.
What are everybody’s thoughts on this?