Welcome to Less Wrong, Timwi. It looks like you're relatively new here, so you might not know that the topic of cryonics has received a lot of discussion on LW, enough to appear in the tag cloud on the front page. People here tend to have relatively favorable views of it: some (including Eliezer Yudkowsky) are convinced that it's the right choice, have signed up, and advocate that everybody sign up, and even those who aren't convinced tend to at least see cryonics as a reasonable possibility that's worth considering.
Before getting too caught up in debating particular aspects of cryonics, you may want to take some to familiarize yourself with some of the ideas and arguments that have already been discussed on LW to get a better sense of the case for cryonics. The LW wiki entry and this post by Eliezer are good places to start, and they also give you various links to follow to learn more.
I think it's OK for a newcomer to post topics in the discussion forum that have already been discussed at length. You learn a lot more if you can actively engage in conversation rather than just reading what other people have written.
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?