What if I can't get a good body? (current objection). There are a few variations on this:
I will probably be in old age if I'm frozen, so I might wake up in the future as an old person. If they can make me a young body, that's not a problem, but should I assume that they're going to be able to do that? Maybe waking up from cryo in the future will involve being on life support for long periods of time while we're waiting for the technology for new bodies.
Who is going to pay for my new body? I have no idea what that would cost, so I can't possibly save for it now, and I'm not sure it's a good idea to assume that money will be N/A in the future. I'm pretty sure that all my skills would be worthless at that time, but not convinced that there would be money to make me a decent body at that time.
What if I wake up with no body at all... I'm imagining waking up as a head in a jar or a brain in some kind of server rack of brains.
What if the bodies are ill-conceived? I'm imagining waking up as a brain inside of R2D2 and having about the same quality of life as a mobile trash can. If you think this out, being stuck inside of an R2D2 body would be a really, really horrible fate - which I explain here.
There are certain things I'd like to retain the ability to do, and for some of those, I will need to be anatomically correct.
Once again, if I sign up now, I'll be an early adopter, which may mean that the technology for putting people into new bodies is still experimental and I may end up as a test subject.
You are overwhelmingly likely not to wake up in a body, depending on the details of your instructions to Alcor.. Scanning a frozen brain is exponentially cheaper and technologically easier than trying to repair every cell in your body. You will almost certainly wake up as a computer program running on server somewhere.
This is not a bad thing. Your computer program can be plugged into software body models in convincing virtual environments, permitting normal human activities (companionship, art, fun, sex, etc.), plus some activities not normally possible for humans. It'll likely be possible to rent mechanical bodies for interacting with the physical world.
I heard that women are difficult to convince when it comes to signing up for cryo. In mentioning cryonics to a dying person, there seems to be a consensus that it's not going to happen. I encountered a post: Years saved: Cryonics vs VillageReach, which addressed my main objection (that the amount of money spent on cryo may be better spent on saving starving children, especially considering that you could save multiple children for that amount of money with high probability whereas you save only one life with low probability by paying for cryo). Now I'm open to being persuaded.
My first instinct was to go read a lot about cryo, but it dawned on me that there are a lot of people here who will want to convince family members, some of them female, to sign up - and these people may appreciate the opportunity to practice on somebody. It has been argued that "Brilliant and creative minds have explored the argument territory quite thoroughly." but if we already know all of the objections and have working rebuttals for each, why is it still thought of as extra difficult to get through to women? If there were a solution to this, it would not be seen as difficult. There must be something that pro-cryo people need for persuading women that they either haven't figured out or aren't good enough at yet.
So, I decided to offer myself for experiments in attempting to convince a woman to sign up for cryo and took a poll in an open thread to see whether there was interest. I don't claim to be perfectly representative of the female population, but I assume that I will have at least some objections in common with them and that persuading me would still be good practice for anyone planning to convince family members in the future. Having a study on persuading women would be more scientific but how do you come up with hypotheses to test for such a study if you have no actual experience persuading women?
So, here is your opportunity to try whatever methods of persuasion you feel like with no guilt, explore my full list of objections without worrying about it being socially awkward, (I will even share cached religious thoughts, as annoyed as I am that I still have them.), and I will document as many of my impressions and objections as I can before I forget them.
I am putting each objection / impression into a new comment for organization. Also, I have decided to avoid reading anything further on cryo, until/unless it is suggested by one of my persuaders.
Well, have fun getting inside my head.