Those resources could be directed to other methods of life extension.
None of which happens to work now, despite propaganda I've heard since the 1970's about imminent breakthroughs in superlongevity. The people who say we'll have 150 years life expectancies or whatever by some randomly postulated year in this century don't understand what "life expectancy" means. We determine life expectancy retrospectively from statistics gathered about populations of individuals who have already died, and we don't know until a significant number of people have died past the age of 150 to see if they constitute a trend, or instead represent statistical noise. Clearly we won't have the ability to gather those data in this century - I would have to wait until the year 2109 to see my 150th birthday - and I think all these "immortalist" obsessives like Ray Kurzweil just waste money and possibly damage their health by ingesting their "life extension" quackery.
By contrast, we can conduct experiments in brain cryopreservation which generate useful data in a timely fashion, like most other scientific experiments. If you want to see research into something which could show tangible returns for your survival, cryonics has some advantages over chasing after an anti-aging breakthrough which won't arrive for many decades, if not centuries.
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?