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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.
Note that if Wright brothers didn't believe that there was a considerable chance of the plain not crashing, it would be a bad investment to build the plain in the first place. The question is about the cost: does the current state of knowledge support the positive outcome sufficiently to think of designing a plane? To design a plane? To build a plane? To perform an experiment, risking its destruction? To test-pilot a plane, risking one's life?
The same goes for cryonics, here you risk something like 100 bucks a year.
So they haven't figured out the landing gear. So you might break your neck, might break your arm - but the tiger is sprinting towards you! It certainly will eat you!
I'll take my odds against a tiger rather than a cliff any day. How confident are you that you won't live forever?
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.
Missing the point I think. Einstein wasn't stating this as any sort of appeal to authority. He was expressing his confidence in his mathematical proofs.
Mathematical proofs are an appeal to authority. Their standards rest entirely on the ability of experts on Mathematics to understand them. If we had a canonical mechanical proof-checker or something, it might be a different story.
But they were Einstein's proofs. He was confident in the math that he understood. If he were trying to convince someone else, then yes he'd be using himself as an authority.
So, you concede that it's possible to know the outcome in advance without empirical observation of success.
Now, what makes Einstein a special person for this purpose? Can it be you that decides?
Sure, it could be me that decides. That's why I've decided. What's your point?
That was an allusion to this question, which you still haven't answered. If, in principle, you could indeed decide that successful revival is possible, based only on theoretical knowledge, before any successful revival was ever performed, then you should be able to explain what kind of indirect evidence it would take to persuade you that successful revival is sufficiently likely for you to decide to sign up for cryonics.
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?
Aside: it looks a lot more feasible to me if you don't try to repair the original biology, but rather try to extract information from it for re-instantiation. Then for example brain cracks become a problem in image-alignment rather than in nanosurgery.
This argument forced me to change my mind a little: indeed, to do the neurosurgery, you need an image anyway, possibly of the same order of resolution or even greater than required for scanning, so emulation may be easier than repair, and realignment of the image should be relatively easy once you have a scan. Still, I don't see emulation working for a long time still, I'd give it expected 60 to 150 years, and it's hard to say how the process will look at that point, on the progress of what kinds of technologies the feasibility of this process will depend.
http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/Reports/2008-3.pdf
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?
"Future persons" are not a monolithic agent; all it takes is one agent able and willing to revive you, maybe the cryonics organization. And as Mulciber said, compassion is a likely motivation as well.
Thousands would still only be one per ~million citizens. Cryonauts would be at least as rare.
That depends on on what the population is in the far far future and the future popularity of cryonics. The farther into the future we're talking about the more uncertainty we should have about these things. I was never claiming that it is particularly likely the preserved would be unwanted, just that such uncertainties give reason to be concerned with progress in cryobiology.
Frankly, I think that future societies will be so resources-rich that they'll revive everyone because the small increase in entertainment thus provided will easily pay for the costs. However, if that's not so, there's an advantage to being one of the rare early preservees over the common later ones you suppose might arise; we would have better novelty value, and we'd remember things from further back.
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.