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qmotus comments on The Brain Preservation Foundation's Small Mammalian Brain Prize won - Less Wrong Discussion

43 Post author: gwern 09 February 2016 09:02PM

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Tags: philanthropy plastination charity chemopreservation bpf cryonics

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Comment author: qmotus 12 February 2016 04:03:59PM 0 points [-]

A major difference here is that if I sign up for those medical procedures, then I pretty much know what to expect: there is a slight chance that I get cured, and that's it. This is not the case with cryonics. I find it quite likely that cryonics would work, but there's hardly any certainty regarding happens then: I might wake up in just about any form (in a biological body, as an upload) in just about any kind of future society. I would have hardly any control over the outcome whatsoever.

Sure, maybe there would be many more who would sign up, but nevertheless I think it takes a very special kind of person to be ready to take such a leap into the unknown.

Comment author: V_V 12 February 2016 05:54:20PM 0 points [-]

If revival had been already demonstrated then you would pretty much already know what form you will be going to wake up in

Comment author: qmotus 12 February 2016 07:36:24PM 0 points [-]

Well, yeah, but whatever society can demonstrate that doesn't need to freeze people in the first place.

Comment author: gwern 12 February 2016 08:30:29PM 2 points [-]

That's not true. I can think of at least 3 ways in which a society which has demonstrated successful revival could also still need to freeze people:

  1. You could die of something that will be curable in a few years and you know to high confidence what you will wake up as because society or revival methods won't change much.
  2. The emulation route could wind up being best long before magic nanobots cure all bodily ills, so you must die (so your brain is fixed well enough for slicing & scanning) but you know what you will wake up as almost immediately.
  3. There could be treatments or cures but of poor enough efficacy that you rationally prefer the risks of immediate death-then-preservation than try them (you have a fatal disease which can be cured only by a prefrontal lobotomy; alternately, you can go into cryopreservation; which do you prefer?).
Comment author: V_V 12 February 2016 10:26:35PM *  0 points [-]

4.You have a neurodegenerative disease, you can survive for years but if you wait there will be little left to preserve by the time your heart stops.

Comment author: gwern 13 February 2016 04:42:46PM 2 points [-]

I saw that as falling under #3. There are treatments for dementia and Alzheimer's but they all suck and one can rationally prefer the risk of immediate death to losing it all. This comes up a lot linked with assisted-suicide, as does the attendant legal risks for oneself and the cryonics org (some of Mike Darwin's blog touches on the effects of aging, and I think Ettinger himself took the dehydration route a few years ago).

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