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PSA: Very important policy change at Cryonics Institute
In the past, the Cryonics Institute has had a policy that said that they would not accept anyone who is not a member. This has changed. The policy now is that someone who has full legal authority over your body can sign you up after you die. It costs $36,250 to be frozen if you are not signed up, which is more expensive. They also will not do anything until you have been on dry ice for 2 weeks after they have been contacted, so not being a member is more risky.
This is very important news for anyone who is currently cryocrastinating. It means that you can drastically increase your chances of survival without filling out any forms. All you have to do is tell a loved one you want to be frozen upon death, and that you would like them to take responsibility for making sure this happens. This takes literally 30 seconds. Do it now!
This news might also be a reason to not sign up right away, if you think something better (like radical life extension or uploading) will come along in your lifetime. We should discuss this in the comments.
Edit: The general consensus of this discussion is that this is a really bad reason not to sign up for cryonics.
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Comments (98)
...and they probably won't do it when the time comes to act.
The history of cryonics teaches us that, while people often contact cryonics companies to freeze their already or soon-to-be dead relatives on their own incentive, it is a much more common situation that the relatives of a person who has already completed all the paperwork and paid for the cryopreservation with their own money try to actively prevent the preservation.
Note also that the non-signed-up people's relatives come from a population many orders of magnitude larger than signed-up people's relatives.
This does seem like valuable information, but conversely, 2 weeks on dry ice still sounds extremely harmful for survival odds, so this is probably not a good reason to put off signing up.
I don't see what the rush for signing up for cryonics is all about.
My understanding is that while I'm young, accidents are the most common cause of death, and it's hard to cryopreserve someone after an accident & cryonics works much better if you die in a hospital. So being covered for cryonics isn't that useful when you're young.
Once you accept that premise, it seems like you're better off just putting more money in to your retirement fund or other investments in order to pay for your suspension when you're older. Putting money in your retirement fund has tax benefits, and you'll actually make money through the interest you earn rather than losing money to an insurance company. (Insurance companies are only profitable because they take more money in through premiums than they pay out, while the stock market has historically gotten decent returns, at least in the US.) I don't find Rudi Hoffman's reasons to fund your suspension through insurance very convincing.
As an added benefit, you can put off the decision of whether you want to go for plastination or not, whether you're wealthy enough for full-body Alcor as opposed to head-only CI, and maybe other things until you have more information about cryonics technology and how much money you're going to earn over the course of your career. (Another possibility is that the cost of cryonics will drop drastically and you'll end up with way more life insurance than you wanted.)
Even if signing up through insurance is marginally better, it seems like a relatively small optimization, and I feel like I've got much better things to do at this stage of my life.
(FWIW, an LWer friend of mine who is a finance professional with a history of achieving above-market returns did a fairly thorough analysis of this, factoring in the possibility of an early un-suspended death, and independently came to the same conclusion I did.)
Did you get this the wrong way around? I thought Alcor was more expensive but offered both full-body and head-only, and CI only offered full-body.
I'm not a cryonics expert and assumed that CI, being cheaper, would do head-only. Thanks for the correction.
I would like to hear rebuttals of this reasoning, since it is a big contributor to my current cryocrastination and choice-stress.
The other big contributor is the article (written by Rudi himself) which insists that the cost of the procedure will increase significantly in our lifetimes and thus encourages you to fund your insurance as much as possible, rather just up to the current coverage costs.
It's not a rebuttal, exactly, but mostly this seems like haggling over the price.
If you believe that signing up for cryonics makes sense at 50, then presumably you believe that your probability (Pd50) of dying that year in a cryopreservable way (e.g., in a hospital, not in an accident, whatever), your probability (Pv) of being revived post-mortem if you die in a cryopreservable way, and your estimate of the value (V) of being revived post-mortem are such that (V * Pv * Pd50) is greater than the differential cost of signing up at 50 vs 51.
It seems clear that Pd50 is higher than Pd20. All this business about accidents aside, you're simply less likely to die at 20 than you are at 50. Call that factor X. You can look up actuarial tables to get a sense of it; it's probably smaller than 1000.
You can also look up what you pay for your first year of coverage if you sign up at 20, vs 50. Call that difference Y.
So, the question is, is your estimate of (Pv * V * X) higher than Y?
If so, then it seems that the value of signing up for a year of coverage at 20 is worth the cost.
If not, then it isn't.
I find the idea of being confident of this equation at 50 but not at 20 to be outright bizarre... it seems to me that the vast uncertainty inherent in estimating V and Pv is such that if I'm confident cryonics is a good bet at 50, a few orders of magnitude one way or the other ought not significantly alter my confidence.
For total deaths, sure; for cryopreservable deaths, I have my doubts.
Fair enough.
I just have trouble believing that it's a factor that's actually large enough to affect the EV calculations people are actually doing, to the extent that people do EV calculations before signing up for cryonics at all.
I'd be interested to see rough figures, if possible. I was under the (vague) impression that a life policy could be worth it given how much premiums go up as you age.
But yeah, I'm way more worried about my older friends and family failing to sign up.
Most of the time, when I listen to discussions like this I hear, "How much exactly do you want to not die?" To which my unequivocal response is "A WHOLE FUCKING LOT."
My impression is there is much lower-hanging fruit than cryonics for young people.
Although, I've recently heard that the Young Cryonicist Gathering ends up being worth more as a vacation than you pay for cryonics. So that seems worth considering if the event sounds appealing.
1) There are an awful lot of relatively probable accidents that end with me dying in a hospital after a trip to the emergency room. I'd actually really like to see statistics on what percentage of people who die in each age group have their brains squished. 2) If you take FAI seriously, it may be worthwhile to attempt to preserve yourself regardless of what kind of shape you're in. I'm not certain a superinteligence could repair damage I can't even begin to imagine how to repair, but I'm not very confident it can't in many cases either.
...From what little I've read, there's really no point if you wait that long.
Being on dry ice for two weeks is suicide. That's my take based on intermittent research for the past 12 years and talking to numerous cryobiologists.
interesting use of the word "suicide"
True, it could be "murder", "manslaughter" or "tragic accident" instead.
Right, murder of someone already dead
I see I misinterpreted your earlier comment. My mistake, vote corrected.
Even assuming your premise is correct (that cryopreserved humans can not be considered in any sense 'alive') it wouldn't be a misuse of the word suicide for that reason. Anissimov would be using the typical use of the word to express a claim that you believe to be false.
I just said it was interesting, that's all
I see people saying things like
but I'd thought the truth was nearer to
Do I have a mistaken idea of how useless mere freezing is for cryopreservation?
You do not. If you're frozen instead of cryopreserved, there is absolutely no chance that any simple procedure will be able to read out your mindstate.
However, there is still a chance[1] that a sufficiently smart intelligence would be able to time-reverse the ice damage and resurrect you that way, or at least extract enough data to construct a reasonable facsimile for your family and friends that's more than simply their memories. That might still be worth paying for, if you believe such intelligences will exist.
1: Pulling a number out of my ass, I'd say about 5% of the chance that vitrification works. I don't have much faith in the information-scattering abilities of ice crystals. I do, however, consider it possible that important data is stored in volatile form.
It may be a bit difficult for most individuals to visualize ice formation with enough clarity and detail. It is not just the expansion of water upon freezing that is a problem. Ice crystals don't appear out of nothing. They are formed out of water that is there. During freezing, the ice crystals initially get made of pure water, forcing everything else into inter-crystal spaces (smashing it together into smaller volume).
In addition to the already grave damage of shredding something that is made of fairly identical parts, the cell membrane fragments get to float in the concentrated brine (as the pure water was removed), which would assuredly restrict the space of possible states of multitude of proteins in the receptor gates and the like, losing information irreversibly. Which is also the case for most "cryoprotectants".
At molecular scale, there's no tiny scratches, lost hairs, and the like, that the future superintelligent Sherlock Holmes can look at with a better magnifying glass.
True. If the molecular scale matters, we're boned. :P
It definitely does, i.e. the ion gates and receptors and such are molecular complexes, and most of the information is virtually certain to be in the states of molecules (shapes for those that can be in either shape, adhesion of molecules, etc etc), the sort of stuff that will get irreversibly lost when proteins denature due to either high salinity or "cryoprotectants".
I'm skeptical that the brain could be this delicate in operation and still work as robustly as it does.
edit: I suppose it's plausible that memories could be stored this way if they're done so redundantly, in which case a systematic unraveling of proteins might destroy them in a way that normal wear-and-tear wouldn't.
"Virtually certain" seems like overreaching as far as I'm aware though - is this the standard point of view among biologists?
States of molecules are in no way delicate. There's points plotted on a line:
delicate----------------not so delicate------------robust--------------------will withstand solvent replacement or brine.
The molecules that unravel and change their shapes (and detach, and lose state information) upon the changes involved would never (for any practical meaning of never) change their shape in such ways in normal conditions. It is not delicate - it is just that changes in the properties of solvents are very non delicate kind of change at all.
There isn't so much of a "standard point of view" because the people in the area just really don't take cryonics seriously at all.
Here is a comment from one of the previous threads on the topic, with ensuing discussion.
Not even a superintelligence can restore an ice sculpture from a glass of water.
Yes.
It may be helpful to outline what exactly - in terms of information - makes an ice sculpture irrecoverable or recoverable. It is the fact that distinct ice sculptures will result in precisely identical glass of water. Even if you look at the individual water molecules in the glass and try to retrace their motion backwards, due to the introduction of unknowns (interaction of those molecules with the molecules in the actual glass, then in the air, etc etc), they map to every possible ice sculpture.
The ice sculpture is irrecoverable because the final state corresponds to many possible initial states.
Likewise, massive changes in the solvent - which occur in either cryoprotected or non-cryoprotected cryonics - will force bistable molecules and molecular complexes to transition into a third state, losing their state information. This is because changes in the solvent affect intermolecular forces between parts of a protein (making proteins denature, i.e. unfold or re-fold into a different shape), and between different proteins.
Cryonics as it is can not be seen as science fictional stasis field with cracking and distortion that can in principle be undone someday. It involves massive, many-to-one chemical changes.
It is clear that if the cryonics involved cooking your head in a pot and then freezing it - or even letting the head remain at room temperature for a few hours - the chances would seem fairly minuscule to you, due to extensive many to one chemical changes that would occur during cooking. Likewise, the chances of cryonics - without any cooking - seem fairly minuscule to me due to extensive many to one chemical changes that result from either the introduction of the "cryoprotectants" (at concentrations which denatures some proteins) or due to the concentration of all solutes including salt in the inter crystal boundaries (which also denatures proteins). This is all quite far outside the range of any "robustness" against normal environmental conditions, too - I do not expect memories to be any more delicate than rest of the changeable chemical state (By the way, more chemically 'robust' storage would also require more energy for writing memories).
Now, of course, given the unknowns, we can't tell for sure that cryonics does not work. But we can have no reasonable expectation for cryonics to work better than, say, doing good deeds in the hope that it raises chances at resurrection through some sort of look-into-the-past technology utilizing unknown laws of physics, or resurrection possibilities in simulated worlds, or the like - all the other things that no one can prove impossible.
I don't think that's a good analogy; IIRC organs (eg rabbit kidneys) have been successfully frozen and revived (good enough to implant), so it's more a matter of whether that can be extended to human brains (which, sure, may be more delicate) rather than being something inherently absurd.
Rabbit kidneys are much smaller than human brains.
The square-cube law is the main showstopper: you can remove heat form a thing at a rate proportional to its surface area, while its heat capacity is proportional to mass and thus to volume. Therefore, maximum attainable cooling speed decreases with size (if you try to cool any faster, youl'll just crack the surface).
Rabbit kidneys can be vitrified without using a toxic concentration of cryprotectants, moreover, IIUC the circulatory system of a kidney allows higher flow and pressure (a kidney is just a blood filter, after all), making cryoprotectant perfusion easier. Even then, cryopereservation isn't perfect: microscopic damage has been observed.
I am an absolute amateur, but wasn't vitrification about replacing the ice-crystal-generating water in the brain/body with a liquid that turns into a glass when cooled? If you can get that liquid into the furthest reaches of the brain, wouldn't you also be able to distribute coolant through its interior, turning the effective cooling surface area proportional to the volume?
Thanks for the information, but that suggests that preserving a human brain will be difficult and may require more advanced techniques than currently used, not necessarily that it's some crazy impossible thing that shouldn't even be thought about. Hell, maybe it would be possible to carefully cut up the brain into smaller chunks before freezing it (a sharp cut along the right line being perhaps not so damaging compared to bad freezing).
A lot of it is going to come down to exactly how memories are stored and how redundant they are. Last time I checked this wasn't yet fully understood. If they really do depend on fine details of molecules that are inevitably irreversibly scrambled by freezing, then it probably is impossible after all.
It's an exaggeration, but not far off. The information seems pretty damn fragile. From the linked thread: "The damage that is occurring - distortion of membranes, denaturation of proteins (very likely), disruption of signalling pathways. Just changing the exact localization of Ca microdomains within a synapse can wreak havoc, replacing the liquid completely? Not going to work."
The counterarguments appear to be "but do we really need all that detail for a good-enough copy of the person?" Which is a "prove my negative" - the people arguing that don't know either.
It's a double-edged negative... not only do we not know how good the copy will be, we don't know how good is good enough. (Of course, if our standards for "good enough" are sufficiently low, then they can be satisfied by other people being born.)
Ultimately the cryonics argument is that the value to me of someone who meets my standards for being me existing in the future is so high that any increase, however small, in the chance of that happening has a higher expected value than anything else I could do with the resources consumed by post-mortem cryonic preservation of my brain (or at least, higher EV than many things I am currently doing with them, which I should therefore give up doing in favor of cryonics).
That argument seems to me to be based on an incredibly oversimplified view of what the recovery process would look like. It's not going to involve restoring operation to the system.
Quite. We don't know, so what are the chances?
They don't need to be very high for cryonics to be an improvement on, y'know, definitely dying.
What does that sentence even mean?
"Figure out the past state from the current state". Or at least some close approximation of the past state.
Which involves attempting to time-reverse the laws of physics, on some level. Which is impossible, strictly speaking, but you may be able to get close enough for government purposes.
I don't see any possible scenario where this applies, so long as you are insurable. Cost of cryonics through term life insurance is cheap, and the risks of 2 weeks on a slab is huge.
But by all means, if you don't have a cryo plan yet, then have that conversation with your loved one, now.
The two-week delay makes sense from a risk management perspective, but it makes this change a really, really bad reason to put off signing up. The only interesting case I see offhand is the one where the person with legal control of the corpse wants them cryopreserved, but the dead person inside does not.
Question: when people say that two weeks on dry ice is suicide, is the 'two weeks' part significant? Are two weeks on dry ice worse than two days and better than two months on dry ice or is it that the moment you get frozen without cryoprotectant, you're done?
I think it's the latter.
That seems prima facie to be really, really detrimental for the purposes of keeping the informational state unscrambled / recognizable (it may be sensible from a legal / PR POV, but I'm not much interested in that).
In a fun twist, it may well turn out that the "first" reconstituted bodies are worse off (lower-fidelity reconstruction), and you could argue that once mankind (shepharded by an automated sheepdog) reached a stage of thawing the dead, you're better off waiting for the trajectory to continue on, i.e. to stay frozen for a few centuries longer until perfect fidelity is achieved (on the flipside, society may be even less recognizable). One way to do that is to make sure the damage is severe, e.g. by botching the cryonic procedure somewhat, such as staying on dry ice for 2 weeks. Shmart (the 'h' is an artifact)!
o.O
that is a terrible idea. The damage could very easily be severe enough that you just killed yourself such that even a superintelligence couldn't figure out who you'd been.
Well, I'm glad we agree the two week waiting period is bad policy.
That is possible, but I do not think that damaged bodies are any more likely to be last than they are likely to be first.
Why? It seems obvious to me that the first recovered bodies will be those that were frozen shortly before the recovery procedure was available, with the best freezing procedure at that time.
Why this part?
Presumably to illustrate that you (person in charge) and the authorities storing the body will cooperate with them.
I wonder if cryonauts ever prepare some kind of detailed information packet about their personalities, values, etc. to help a future superintelligence put them back together. It seems like getting a full genome sequence, some personality test data, and maybe some video of you would be very cheap on the scale of current cryonics costs. The genome would be expensive, but prices seem to be falling steadily, so in a few years it might be a trivial expense compared to cryonics.
Does anyone do anything like this?
Under what conditions would it matter? If a reconstruction of me isn't accurate enough to tell how extroverted I am, for example, then a "25%" on an accompanying form isn't going to help much. If you don't know what a picture looks like, "the average color is 0x295a5e" isn't enough information to help.
A full genome sequence might be enough information to be slightly useful, but cryonauts have trillions of those already frozen. ;-)
If the future denizens are capable of restoring a cryogenically frozen person to life they shouldn't need our help with the DNA sequencing. After all, we can do that with fairly good reliability today on mummies and bog men so our Walt Disneys shouldn't be too hard to get a decent sample out of.
The epigenome, on the other hand, is a stickier issue; there's a lot of proteins vital to gene expression which are not going to fair well in either the initial freeze or long-term storage. Once we get reliable sequencing of that I'd say that sort of info would be much closer to what you're thinking of.
Considering Michael's comment this post might be an information hazard as it will encourage people to cryosticate ("I can always tell a loved one on my death bed").
This post seems much more appropriate for the Discussion section.
Really? According to the most recent survey, 55% of Less Wrong is either cyrocastinating or still thinking about whether or not they want to sign up. I tried to make the post as short as possible to not waste anyone's time, while trying to get what I think is a very important message across to as many of that 55% as possible.
If a mod disagrees with me, I would not be offended at all if this gets moved to discussion.
Left it in Main for a bit and then moved to Discussion.
Thanks. That seems like the best way to maximize visibility in the short term without getting in the way in the long term.
This will increase cryocrastinating by a factor far greater than the number of people actually being cryopreserved because they randomly told a love one about this.
You mean a loved one who is willing to shell out $36,250.
Where 'willing' includes the case where your estate is worth more than $36,250, they inherit it and they are 'willing' to honour your wishes regarding the disposition thereof even if they are not legally obliged to by you telling them formally in your will.
I suppose that even the people who, in contrast with expert opinion, assign non-negligible chance of success to prompt cryonics with vitrification (e.g. the kind of procedure Mike "Darwin" suggests), will agree that two weeks on dry ice without any form of cryoprotection mean no realistic chances of success.
What does the fact that the Cryonics Institute is offering that implies about their honesty and/or competence?