What I want, first of all, is to not be fooling myself. If cryonics is a way of having a copy of you made after your death, that's not survival as ordinarily understood; it's more like reproduction. If the present instance of me is still headed for oblivion, even if I sign up for cryonics, then yes, it does make me question the point of doing so. It means that cryonics is not a way for me to avoid death, and I may as well spend my time and energy on something else.
I can raise slippery-slope questions for myself: Let's suppose, as I like to do, that the self is some lump of quantum entanglement residing in the cortex of a living brain, and let's suppose that this quantum lump actually persists physically throughout the suspension process, so that revival really is like waking up, rather than being a matter of creating a whole new quantum lump and seeding it with the appropriate memories and dispositions. Is existence as a slumbering soul on ice really so different to revival as a copy, that only in the first case should I even consider cryonics?
And then there's the issue of memories. If there is no subjective difference between memories laid down during a lifetime, and memories implanted in a fresh copy, should I resist scenarios in which "I" might one day become the second sort of entity, on the grounds that the copy isn't really a fake, it's just a "me" which came to exist by an unusual path?
Given all the uncertainties, I'm not in possession of the one true algorithm for deciding the right way to answer these questions. But I think, if you want to be realistic, you should not imagine that resurrection from cryonic suspension is a simple happy process of losing consciousness in our time and regaining it in another. It's more that they will reconstruct you, just like Kurzweil reconstructing his father, or transhuman Conan Doyle fans "re"constructing a real-life Sherlock Holmes. And that has to have implications for the desirability of the procedure.
I'm currently trying to convince my parents to sign up for cryonics.
The problem is that they are completely opposed to the any form of life extension and/or immortality (and that’s without even mentioning something as "strange" as cryonics). Unfortunately, being their child, I have the intrinsic property that I can never know more about life then they do. The only thing they will believe are scientific studies from respectable scientists (a respectable scientist being someone who only says what they want to hear and is not me)
I have the arguments I gathered from Less Wrong and the Alcor Library. I’m focusing on my mother since my dad is impossible to convince without her support.
Her argument is that when you live for a very long time/forever wars are almost guaranteed to occur at least once in your lifetime and she doesn’t want to live through those. I asked her when, given that we could perfectly predict the future, we would know a war would break out tomorrow she would commit suicide today. Her answer was yes, as she couldn’t bear losing any of us and doesn’t want experience a war. I pointed out how I would feel if she died but she just dismissed the entire thing as crazy.
My parents aren’t religious at all, so that’s one less bridge to cross but for all the rest I would greatly appreciate anything that might help convince them.