What if the future is hellish and I won't be able to die? (Current objection)
I realize there are lots of interesting technologies coming our way, but there are a lot of problems, too. I don't know which will win. Will it be environmental collapse or green technology? FAI or the political/other issues created by AI? Will we have a world full of wonders or grey goo? Space colonies or alien invasions? As our power to solve problems grows, so does our ability to destroy everything we know. I do not believe in the future any more than I believe in heaven. I recognize it as a potential utopia / dystopia / neither. I do not assume that the ability to revive preserved people would make us utopia-creating demigods any more than our current abilities to do CPR or fly make our world carefree.
A new twist, waking up into this world, would be that I may not be able to die. The horrors that I could experience in a technologically advanced dystopia might be much worse than the ones we have currently. Dictators with ufAI armies, mind control brain implants, massive environmental and/or technological catastrophes.
There is one thing worse than dying, and that's living an unnaturally long time in a hellish existence. If I sign up for cryo, I'll be taking a risk with that, too.
What if the future is hellish and I won't be able to die? (Current objection)
From this post (which is a great source of insight on many particular cryonics objections):
...(5) You somehow know that a singularity-causing intelligence explosion will occur tomorrow. You also know that the building you are currently in is on fire. You pull an alarm and observe everyone else safely leaving the building. You realize that if you don’t leave you will fall unconscious, painlessly die, and have your brain incinerated. Do you leave the building?
Answering yes to
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.