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jaibot comments on The Brain Preservation Foundation still needs money - Less Wrong Discussion
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Behavior like that has deepened my skepticism of the cryonics crowd - there are glaring discrepancies between professed beliefs and actual behavior.
Prisoner's dilemma. If someone else donates and I don't, I get to eat my cryopreservation and have it too. Or something like that.
At least this thread has rustled up a few more donations.
I think the best esplanation for this behavior is that cryonics is essentially a religious funeral ritual.
Most people who get cryopreserved don't really expect, at a deep level, that it will extend their life, much like most believers in traditional religions don't really expect an afterlife in the otherworld or reincarnation (that's why they all fear death and generally try to postpone it as much as possible).
Professing belief in the religious tenets and performing the required rituals may provide some emotional solace as long as willing suspension of disbelief (self-deception, if you prefer) can be maintained. That might explain the lackluster interest in a potentially falsifying experiment: should it turn out that preserved brains are manifestly damaged, maintaing suspension of disbelief would become much more difficult.
Another typical function of religious beliefs and rituals is social signalling: they are a way for a community (transhumanists, in the case of cryonics) to and maintain and reinforce social cohesion.
I think this hypothesis is worth bearing in mind. However, it doesn't explain advancedatheist's observation that wealthy cryonicists are eager to put a lot of money in revival trusts (whose odds of success are dubious, even if cryonics works) rather than donate to improve cryonics research or the financial viability of cryonics organizations.
Maybe it's something like the Egyptian pharaohs putting gold and valuables in their pyramids
The hypothesis "many people are engaging in cryonics as signalling/psychological-reassurance" is not incompatible with the hypothesis "there exist people interested in cryonics on a practical level, eager for potentially falsifying experiments". Indeed, it's even possible for both of these things to be true of a single person.
Many long-shot medical procedures serve similar functions - but this does not preclude them from being legitimate medical procedures. And there, too, I would expect a non-trivial subset of patients (and doctors) to be reluctant to seek out falsifying evidence.
There is likely some truth in your assertion that cryonics is fulfilling many of the same psychological and social functions of burial rituals - but that does not adequately explain all behavior in the cryonics arena.