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DataPacRat comments on Stupid Questions April 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Which cryonicist to thaw?
Say that, in thirty-plus years, you're still alive and I've been cryonically preserved for a while. What could I have done during my life to convince you to apply your finite resources to resurrect me, rather than someone else?
Would it make a difference if the only potentially available resurrection method was destructive mind uploading, for which a vitrified brain would happen to be an ideal test subject?
The first attempts at reviving are going to focus on testing the resurrection method. I'm not sure if you want to be in that bunch.
If you want then it's important for the people who resurrect you to check whether your personality is intact or changed.
If you would fill out a personality test every month and that test would provide stable values before your death, it would be interesting to check whether your personality stays stable.
Having a complex Anki deck that contains information about cards that should be in your mind would also be useful for that purpose.
A personality change might simply be because of the new, futuristic environment. One could control for this by bringing personality-stable people from a poor, underdeveloped country into civilisation.
My understanding was that written personality tests tend to have low accuracy although I could easily be wrong in that belief. I think video recordings might be more useful.
As an alternative, what would you think of assuming a certain degree of advance in computation and psychology, and making arrangements to store every bit of digital data I've ever typed, or decided was worth storing in my personal e-library?
More data is likely better when you want to check whether anything in the mind is lost.
Setting up a trust fund to pay whoever resurrects you would help.
Curious whether you would basically need to architect the terms assuming that your resurrectors are unfriendly.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'architect', but as I don't believe there are any current trust funds set up in quite this way, it would likely require designing a custom legal instrument. In which case, not only would I recommend involving a contract lawyer to handle the pitfalls of terminology, but also spending some time working out the game-theory aspects of the payout to avoid perverse incentives of the more likely scenarios - eg, you don't want to incentivize would-be resurrectors to bring you back early and with brain damage, when it's plausible that waiting a bit longer would be in your own interests.
Alternately, the terms of the trust fund may be less important than choosing an executor willing to interpret those terms in the way you meant, rather than the way they were written. ... Which, should your first choice pass away or retire, brings up a whole host of other issues about how to choose replacements.
Do you know why there aren't? There are trust funds set up so that the interest pays for the cost of being cryopreserved. I would have assumed that they'd have clauses in them where, once the person is thawed, the money goes to whoever thawed them. We don't want people kept frozen just so they can get money from those trust funds.
... Um, are you sure? For the cryo organizations I'm aware of, there /is/ no continuing cost of being cryopreserved for the individual - it's all up-front cost, with the funding going to the organization so /it/ can handle those continuing costs.
People who ask this sort of question assume that the cryonics era just comes and goes in a few decades. I find it more likely that cryonics or its successor technologies will become part of mainstream medicine indefinitely. If you have an illness or injury (probably some new kind of pathology we haven't seen yet) that the health care providers in, say, the 22nd Century don't know how to treat, they would put you in some kind of biostasis for attempted revival in, say, the 24th Century, when medicine has advanced enough to know what to do.
So why would people in the 22nd Century want to revive and rejuvenate and transhumanize people from the 21st Century? Well, they might return the favor for their resuscitators in the 24th Century.
Say that, in thirty-plus years, you're still hale and hearty and I've been seriously ill for a while. What could I have done during my life so far to convince you to apply your finite resources to heal me, rather than someone else?
Given that it's questionable whether I'm going to have enough finite resources to bring my aging cat to the vet in the near future; and I live in Canada, with its single-payer health care system; it's a somewhat more complicated question than it may seem. Given past evidence, some minimal qualifications might involve me knowing that you exist, and knowing that I was able to help you, and knowing that the help I could provide would make a difference (this latter being one of the harder qualifications to satisfy). Given all of /that/... one potential qualification might be the possibility for future reciprocation, either directly, or by being part of a shared, low-population social group in which your future contribution could still end up benefiting me - such as, say, the two of us being part of a literally-one-in-a-million group working together to try to find some way to permanently cheat death.
There are probably other answers, including ones that I don't recognize due to my limited knowledge of human psychology and my finite insight into my own motivations... but that one seems to have some measure of plausibility.
You signed a contract allowing people developing resuscitation technology to use you as one of their first experimental human revivals.
ETA: Someone has to be the first attempted revival, but I suspect that it may be last in, first out. The later you get frozen, the better the freezing technology, and the sooner the technology to reverse it will be developed. By the time people can be frozen and thawed routinely, there will still be vaults full of corpsicles that no-one knows how to revive yet. All the people in Alcor today might eventually be written off as beyond salvaging.
Hm... under current law, the cryonically preserved are considered dead, and thus any contracts they signed are no more enforceable than a contract with a graveyard to perform one form of burial instead of another. The existing cryonics companies have standardized contracts. I can't think of any way to create the contract you describe. Do you have any further details in mind?
I wasn't concerned with the legal details, which will vary from time to time and place to place. At the moment, what obligates Alcor to keep their bodies frozen?
And there are wills. You can already will your body to medical research.
The legal regime that cryonics has operated under has been reasonably stable for the past thirtyish years, with some minor quibbles about registering as a cemetery or not. What reasons lead you to believe that the relevant laws will undergo any more significant changes in the next thirtyish years?
At least in part, the fact that the directors are also members, and desire for their own bodies to be kept frozen after they die.
Legally, that's essentially what the wills of cryonicists already do. (In Ontario, the relevant statute is the 'Trillium Gift of Life Act'.)
You would need to be able to provide value for me - so you would need to have skills (or the ability to gain skills) that are still in expensive and in demand, and society would need to give me an enforceable right to extract that value from you. Slavery or indentured servitude, perhaps.
If I may ask, are you yourself a cryonicist who might end up facing the question from either side?
You seem to be assuming that immediate economic value is the only value worth considering; was this your intent?
Does this criteria apply to present-day questions that are in vaguely the same ballpark? That is, do you choose who to help based on whether or not you can force them to pay you?
Good point here - I don't usually have any mechanism to force people to pay me. I usually to help based on how likely I think it I am to get what I want out of it. A few examples:
I'm not sure what you mean by economic value. If you mean money, no. I think that humans value many things. I could certainly see a respected artist being revived even if the reviver could not directly tax the artist's production.
I'm not a cryonicist at this time. I do think there's a pretty good chance that either cryonics, brain uploading, or something similar will see some people from my lifetime recreated in a form after their deaths.
It's already legal to perform a medical procedure to save someone's life without their consent if they're not capable of consenting, and then demand payment. You could still go bankrupt, but that causes problems so if you're capable of repaying you probably would.
That's slightly terrifying, but I guess makes sense as an incentive to perform life saving medical interventions