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Tim_Walters comments on You Only Live Twice - Less Wrong
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Even if the probability of being revived is sub-1%, it is worth every penny since the consequence is immortality
By that logic, one should pay to have prayers said for one's soul.
One could make a Drake's-Equation-style estimate of that "sub-1%" probability, but the dominant term is this: what are the odds that evolution, with no selection pressure whatsoever, has designed the brain so that that none of its contents are stored in a volatile way? Why write everything to disk if the computer never gets turned off?
Without hard evidence that the brain does that, I don't see any reason to rate the probability of revival significantly higher than zero. That's without even getting into whether it's really practical to extract what information there is.
Maybe there is such evidence and I just haven't seen it. I repeat: can anyone point me to some?
I don't think it takes an degree in nano-tech or cutting edge medicine to be more confident in the power of future technology than in the power of praying for souls. Even if it is granted that there aren't great reasons for supposing cryonic preservation is viable, it is a huge and unwarranted leap to say that is as intellectually vacuous as the ideas of prayers affecting souls.
The value of immortality does not seem infinite to me. Merely very large. The odds that magic or religion will save you seem vastly tiny. Sufficiently tiny that they are bad uses of time and energy even if the benefits are potentially very large.
Ah, desert-dryness of speech: capable of making even immortality sound boring and unappealing!
If you're looking for rationalizations for not giving into Pascal's Wager here, a better one might be "If I wanted to maximize my chance at immortality, paying 100$ for prayers is less effective than investing 100$ into cryonics."
You can only "invest $100" in cryonics by buying an insurance policy with a $100 premium that covers a very short period, where the chance of immortality is the probability that cryonics works multipled by the probability that you will die during the exact period covered by the premium before you have to pay a second premium. Because the chance that you will die during the period is non-zero, the return on the investment is also non-zero. However, the overhead for this investment is huge (and bear in mind that overhead includes such things as "everyone thinks you're crazy for making a single payment that only returns anything if you die within the week.")
Furthermore, what does it even mean to say "this instance of Pascal's Mugging maximizes my return, over several instances of Pascal's mugging"? If it's an instance of Pascal's mugging, the return is useless information and maximizing it is meaningless.