jkaufman comments on More Cryonics Probability Estimates - Less Wrong

20 Post author: jkaufman 17 December 2012 08:59PM

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Comment author: jimrandomh 18 December 2012 10:39:59PM *  4 points [-]

As far as I can tell there's really only one path to success, and it's the one I put here.

I raised an alternative path to success when we discussed this Sunday, at the end when you asked for probability of "other failure" and I argued that it should go both ways. Specifically, I suggested that we could be in a multiverse such that being cryopreserved, even if poorly, would increase the probability of other universes copying you into them. I don't remember the probability I gave this at the time, but I believe it was on the order of 10^-2 - small, but still bigger than your bottom-line probability of 1/1500 (which I disagree with) for cryonics working the obvious way.

Some other low-probability paths-to-win that you neglected:

  • My cryopreservation subscription fees are the marginal research dollars that prevent me from dying in the first place, via a cryonics-related discovery with non-cryonics implications
  • I am unsuccessfully preserved but my helping cryonics reach scale saves others; a future AI keeps me alive longer because having signed up for cryonics signaled that I value my life more
  • While my cryopreserved brain is not adequate to resurrect me by itself, it will be combined with electronic records of my life and others' memories of me to build an approximation of me.
Comment author: jkaufman 19 December 2012 01:50:16AM 1 point [-]

Whoops; this totally slipped my mind. Thanks for including them here.