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Vladimir_Nesov comments on This Didn't Have To Happen - Less Wrong
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I doubt religion is a significant cause of not becoming persuaded. The walls of taboo around the subject and the strength of absurdity heuristic seem to me to be about as high in atheists' minds. At least, that's my experience, and it is in harmony with intuition about how to expect the state of affairs to be. Does anyone have any kind of anecdotal data points on that?
Well - it is my girlfriend who said it. I think the primary damage done by religion to atheists is the propagation of such things as "No one can possibly know" (which even some atheists unthinkingly repeat), a general tradition of avoiding the subject, an idea that you can say anything you want, and the contamination-by-association of any possible trick for living on after you stop by breathing.
The question you want is: in a world where religion had never existed, but people's reasoning abilities were otherwise mostly the same level, how many people would now be signed up for cryonics? This is the damage done by religion alone.
Arguably religion does the most damage by de-legitimizing concerns like immortality and discontinuous world-changing events by surrounding them with a cloud of wishful and otherwise mistaken thinking.
Anecdotal? Sure. I'm pretty much an atheist and I'm not signed up for cryonics (and likely never will).
Less-anecdotally, you could compare the amount of atheists and/or non-religious people, to the amount actually signed up for cryonics. Without having the numbers handy, I'd guess that at least shows religion doesn't tell the whole story.
Why? Are you the sort of person who refuses to use the save-points in computer games?
Right now, there's virtually no evidence that cryonics works. If I wanted to spend money on something not proven to work, I could do it much more cheaply - I bet someone on the street outside would happily sell me an immortality potion for like 5 bucks.
It makes a lot more sense to me to spend my money on things that will make my life better, for reals.
What evidence would you expect if it did work (that is, if it was a true fact that N years in the future the cryonically preserved people will return to life)? What kind of evidence would you accept as sufficient to be persuaded that it works?
Probably something like this scenario (I just made up):
Basically, the process working ever would be evidence that the process might ever work. Until then, consider me in the 'control group'.
I think it was Mike Li who analogized this to refusing to get on an airplane until after it has arrived in France. The whole point of cryonics is as an ambulance ride to the future; once you're in the future, you don't need cryonics any more. I severely, severely doubt that anyone will ever again be frozen after the time a cryonics revival is possible.
Isn't there some gut, intuitive level on which you can see that your objection obviously makes no sense, because conditioning on the proposition that cryonics with present-day vitrification technology does in fact work as an ambulance ride to the future, we still would not expect to see a revival in the present time?
I take it more to be like refusing to get on an airplane until any one has arrived anywhere, ever.
For all I know, cryonics makes it harder to revive people. Not that I think it's likely that's the case, but it certainly doesn't seem worth my time and money.
It's like being the guy who checks the Wright brothers' calculations, finds them correct, and still refuses to leap onboard their untried prototype to escape a tiger, but instead prefers to stand and be eaten.
Look, conventional death makes it maximally hard to revive a person. Their information has dissipated. You would essentially need a time machine. Cryonics is a guaranteed improvement over that - at least you have something to work with.
Perhaps more like the Wright brothers were planning to figure out how to land the plane after they throw it off a cliff. And your example throws out the benefits of not signing up for cryonics, which are a major factor for me.
Do you believe in the "Then I would feel sorry for the good Lord. The theory is correct." situations?
Sure - if Einstein signed up for cryonics, I might even follow suit. But a lot of really smart people are signing up for 'heaven', and I'm not listening to them, either.
This is too unintuitive an assumption to use in a basic refutation. I doubt it's even true, if revival is performed by non-AGI means, simply because of improved preservation technology, which may well become possible at some point.
Agreed. Suppose we simply learn how to revive someone who's frozen first (unlikely, I know). Then, we would selectively freeze/unfreeze people based on the further limitations of medicine at the time (can treat gunshot wounds / can't treat lukemia)
Yes, that's one use case. I'm really not competent to estimate with any certainty how biologically feasible is that, and I assume it's not very feasible. If I remember correctly, the brains of currently preserved, even after vitrification, get cracked during the freezing, so they won't work even if unfrozen, detoxicated, etc. I don't know whether it's possible to find a solution to this problem with anything from the repertoire of current technology.
But the decision concerns the current situation. What do you answer on these questions?
What kind of evidence would it take to convince you that cryonics has a small, but considerable chance of working in the future, prior to there being any successful revivals?
I don't like to deal in probabilities, but I'd reckon a successful revival of a dolphin would count. Short of that? Probably nothing, if by 'considerable' you mean 'worth spending my money on'. Things other than evidence might convince me though - like my wife wanting to sign up for cryonics for whatever fool reason.
Does it have to be a dolphin, or would successful revival of a mouse count?
Try not to look up if that's been done before you answer. If you do know, try to imagine whether you'd count it as evidence, if you didn't already know.
No, that's out.
Yes, I do mean that.
This means, that no matter what you observe, you always estimate the probability of cryonics working as very low, right up to the point where it does succeed (if that ever happens). Which is equivalent to a priori estimating the probability of it working eventually very low also.
Do you believe that progress will never be made, that it will never be possible to revive a very slowly changing frozen body? In 100 years? In 10000 years? Never ever?
I tend to vacillate on the cryonics debate and for me its beside the point since I really can't afford it as a broke college student (who isn't particularly at risk of dying). But one can certainly imagine better evidence that it would work other than an actual revivification. All sorts of discoveries in cryobiology could provide additional evidence that cryonics will work. Better results freezing and reviving other animals, for example.
Inverting the event, you may say that you are looking for evidence that it will never, ever be possible to revive someone. What sort of evidence will work for that? You are not looking for what is impossible now, you are not looking at what will be impossible for the next 50 years. You are looking for what will never be possible.
I don't see how any details of the progress in technology are in the slightest relevant to that question.
That is a good point. But progress matter because there is a non-zero chance that some disaster strikes, or the cryogenics firm dissolves and you never get revived. I also think the farther into the future you get the less interested future people will be in reviving (by comparison) the mentally inferior. Plus I'd much rather wake up sooner than later since I'd rather not be so far behind my new contemporaries. So confidence that revival will be possible sooner than later increases the incentive to pay for the procedure.
Edit- also, the longer revivification technology takes the more likely the chances are for one of alicorn's dystopian scenarios. Plus the far future might be throughly repugnant to the values of the present day, even if it isn't a dystopia.
This sounds possible but not at all obvious. It seems to me that so far, interest in historical people and compassion for the mentally inferior have if anything increased over time. This certainly doesn't mean they'll continue to do so out into the far future, but it does mean I'd need some really good reasons to support expecting them to.
So I can envision future persons wanting to meet some people from the past for historical reasons as you say. But I'm not sure we'd bring back thousands of Homo Habilis if we had the chance. One or two might be interesting- but what would we do with thousands?
Vitrification works in organs. Neurons are being simulated in software. Stem cells tech is improving. We already pretty much have the electron-microscope and chemical assay tech to dice, slice, scan and digitize a frozen brain. We don't yet know exactly what to digitize, but neuroscience is a heavily studied field.
The fact of revival isn't here yet, but the peripheral evidence is strong.
You may be surprised, but none of these arguments significantly move me. I think that damage is too great and complex for such techniques to work for a long time, and when something will finally become up to the task, the particular list of hacks you mention won't be relevant at all.
I've seen slides, the earliest ones were really wrecked by ice, but a modern vitrification process is much less destructive. Cryonics is going to be very much LIFO, but the last few in might well be fixable with barely more than hacks.
I assume you mean to compare the ratio of atheists among general population to the ratio of atheists among signed up. Won't work very well, as the exposure to the argument is too tilted towards atheists, and it's too hard to correct for that
Nope, I meant compare amount signed up to the amount of atheists (raw numbers). That doesn't tell you whether religion is a factor in avoiding cryonics, but it does tell you whether religion is the only thing keeping everybody from signing up for cryonics. Since by far the majority of atheists are not signed up for cryonics, it's pretty clear that religion isn't what's stopping people.
ETA: Okay, Vladimir_Nesov (below) has convinced me I wasn't considering the same question.
That's silly. Too few people know of the idea, and it's too hard to persuade any given person. The question wasn't about absolute difficulty of getting the argument through, but on the relative effect of being religious on the ability of a person to accept the procedure.
I'm an atheist and I'm not currently persuaded by the case for cryonics. I'm unpersuaded purely on a (non-rigorous, informal) cost-benefit analysis. It just seems to me that there are better things to spend my money on. It seems to me that you can make a similar case for being a survivalist - stocking up on guns, ammo and emergency supplies in case of major disaster - and while the argument is sound I just don't judge the expected utility to be worth the outlay. The social stigma is certainly a factor in both cases.
Hmmm... Interesting point, I'm not at all sure how feasible the advantage of having a survivalist hideout is. On the other hand, my position on cryonics pushes the feasibility through the roof, so it's easier to decide.
A lot of the factors you have to consider when deciding the likelihood of being revived with cryonics are the same risk factors you'd consider for maintaining a survivalist hideout but operating in the opposite direction. The more likely you consider economic or social collapse, natural disasters or other societal disruptions which would make a cryonic revival less likely the more value you'd place on survivalist preparations. It's plausible to me that my chances for living long enough to see radical life extension become feasible would be improved by survivalist preparations to a greater extent than expending the same resources on cryonics would improve my chances of being revived at some future date. The relative benefits here would depend on age and other personal factors, though again I'm not claiming to have done a rigorous cost-benefit analysis.
Factors may be the same, but the probabilities of success are on the different sides of these factors. Where cryonics succeeds, survivalist hideout is likely unnecessary, but where cryonics fails, survivalist hideout is only useful within the border cases where the society breaks down, but it's still possible to survive. And there, how much does the advance preparation help? Groups of people will still be more powerful and resilient, so I'm not convinced it's of significant benefit.
I think the history of the 20th Century has quite a few examples of situations where society broke down to a large extent within certain regions and yet it was possible to survive (in a world which overall was progressing technologically) for long enough to relocate somewhere safer. Survival in those situations probably depends on luck to quite an extent but survivalist type preparations would likely have increased the chance of survival. The US (where cryonics seems to be most popular) did not really suffer any such situations in the 20th century, with the possible exception of a few natural disasters, but much of Europe and Asia did.
I think the main area where I differ from most cryonics advocates on the probability of it working is in the likelihood of the cryonics institution surviving intact until revival is possible. I think in a future scenario somewhat like WWII in Europe or the cultural revolution in China a cryonics institution would be unlikely to survive but human civilization would as would lucky and/or prepared individuals.
How much do you expect it to cost?
At a guess somewhere around a $250,000 value life insurance policy? I don't know how much that costs but somewhere around $2000 a year maybe? I could go and look it up but those are my off the top of my head guesses.
$120/year*
The Cryonics Institute does whole-body preservation for $28,000. (I looked it up.)
That is cheaper than I expected. Surprisingly cheap - storage costs must be pretty low if that covers initial preservation and enough funds for the investment return to cover storage in perpetuity.
Liquid nitrogen is not very expensive.
Still, that money presumably has to fund storage costs in perpetuity. Assuming some of the money goes to up-front freezing costs, say you have $25,000 in 20 year TIPS yielding a fairly risk free inflation indexed 2.5%, you've got $625 a year to cover storage. That barely pays for a small self-storage unit around here. It's almost suspiciously cheap.
Liquid nitrogen is on the order of $80 - which is either the cost per month per cryostat or the cost per customer per year, I don't recall which. The Cryonics Institute owns its own building, and you can keep more than one body in a single cryostat (big cylinder of liquid nitrogen).
The annual fixed costs of cryonics are practically nothing. The costs would decline even further with economies of scale and the scale to invest in better technology. Immortality for everyone in the United States would be a rounding error in the stimulus bill.
For everyone? Well, there'd also be the cost of building the facilities... Anyways, maybe we really should try to push something like that? (Yeah yeah, I know, unlikely.)
Anyways, did you get the PM I sent? (About talking me through some of the specifics of actually signing up?)
Also, don't bother with whole-body preservation. It's useless, because regrowing a body is the least of revival problems, and it's harmful, because your brain spends longer warm while the whole useless hunk of meat attached to it is cooling down. Plus it costs more.
I'd feel more comfortable with that if we knew more about the extent to which the glial cells around the heart -- not to mention the remainder of the nervous system -- play a role in learning, decisionmaking, emotion etc. I'd hate to lose any non-recoverable data from those systems and have to recreate it, e.g. learning to walk again or being missing emotional reactions, or who knows what else. I think I'd want to keep the "useless hunk of meat" around, just in case, even if it had to be separated from the head for better cooling.
If they did play such an important role in human thought, wouldn't you expect there to be case studies of people who become psychologically impaired after heart surgery (in particular, the installation of an artificial heart)?
CI only offers full-body, but it's cheaper than Alcor's neuro option.
I find that my absurdity heuristic gives a strong signal against. Also, we can't be certain that it will work and we can't be certain how well it will work. This makes it very hard for me to evaluate as an investment. If I can't quantify the payoff or the odds, how can I justify the expense?
That's how the absurdity heuristic is supposed to work. But sometimes, it goes hilariously wrong, turning into an absurdity bias. You can't be certain, but you can make estimates.
Every time you decide one way or the other, you make an implicit estimate. If you decide not to invest, you basically state that, given you current knowledge, you judge the investment as not worthwhile. This is not at all the same as "not being able to evaluate". You have to, every time you need to make a decision. What remains is to make sense of your decision, trying to not get it wrong.