Comment on Inverse cryonics: one weird trick to persuade anyone to sign up for cryonics today!

Sat, 13 Aug 2016 12:11:15 GMT

Well, the position you're advocating here is certainly not one I - or other smart cryo advocates - agree with, but there is room for debate to be had. Let me keep it short for this comment though.

First of all, cryonics aims to vitrify people, not freeze them. This means they - ideally - turn into glass, not ice.

As such, they could not be thawed.

Going up a step in complexity, most cryo advocates don't believe that they will be revived in the same body, rather that the information that makes them who they are will be extracted and used to construct a real or virtual or robotic body.

Also, this:

They don't really know how to do this yet. How far along are they now? Have they frozen and thawed a mouse yet,

Putting aside that cryonics is not about freezing and thawing, there is the issue of wanting to wait until the revival side of cryonics is perfected. Well, sure, by the time science has advanced to that point, you would no longer have to make a probabilistic decision. But by that point, medical conditions - including aging - will probably have been eliminated. If you survive that far, good on you. But suppose we reach that point in 200 years' time. If you refuse cryonics because it's not yet proven, you will be dead by the time the proof comes.

So you have to make the decision right now: do you want to lose $1/day if cryonics doesn't work, or do you want to gain your life back if it does?

And this:

I won't let them freeze me earlier than that, because there's essentially no chance I'll be even able to walk and talk

I'm confused here. If you are cryopreserved (please, not frozen) at date X, and then at a later date X+100 they invent better revival technology, you can have that better revival technology used on you, even if it hadn't been invented when you were deanimated and cryopreserved! This seems so obvious to me that I'm confused about why you're objecting to it. Help me out?!

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