Upcoming event:

On Saturday July 7, 2012, the Institute for Evidence Based Cryonics and Cryonics Northwest will organize a symposium on cryonics and brain-threatening disorders in Portland, Oregon. The symposium will start at 09:00 am at the offices of Kaos Softwear. Entrance to the event is free.

This symposium is the first event of its kind in the history of cryonics and concerns one of the most important challenges facing aging cryonicists. Please register for the event on our Facebook page so we know how many attendees to expect.

The following speakers and presentations are confirmed and more speakers / activities may be added in the future:

Chana de Wolf – Neurogenesis in the Adult Brain and Alzheimer’s Disease

Early neuroanatomists considered the adult brain fixed and incapable of neurogenesis. Chana de Wolf will review the emerging evidence for adult neurogenesis and its implications for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease and other identity-destroying disorders.

Chana de Wolf has a master’s degree in Neuroscience and is the President of Advanced Neural Biosciences, Inc.

Aubrey de Grey, Ph.D. – Repairing the Aging Brain: The SENS Approach

Like all other organs, the brain accumulates molecular and cellular alterations throughout life that are eventually deleterious to its function. Unlike all other organs, it cannot be replaced wholesale by a new one created in the lab; the damage must be repaired piecemeal. In this talk I will survey the current status of repairing the three major forms of damage seen in the brain of elderly people: the amyloid plaques that accumulate in the extracellular space in Alzheimer’s disease, the various intracellular proteinaceous aggregates seen in all the major forms of neurodegeneration, and the loss of neurons of various types seen in the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and in aging in general. Relevance to revival of cryonics patiends and to certain schemes for uploading will also be discussed.

Dr. Aubrey de Grey is a biomedical gerontologist based in Cambridge, UK, and is the Chief Science Officer of SENS Foundation, a California-based 501(c)(3) charity dedicated to combating the aging process. He is also Editor-in-Chief of Rejuvenation Research, the world’s highest-impact peer-reviewed journal focused on intervention in aging. He received his BA and Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 1985 and 2000 respectively. Dr. de Grey is a Fellow of both the Gerontological Society of America and the American Aging Association, and sits on the editorial and scientific advisory boards of numerous journals and organisations.

Ben Best – Drugs, Supplements, and other Treatments to Mitigate and Prevent Alzheimer’s Disease

In the United State over 40% of people over age 84 develop Alzheimer’s Disease. Death by Alzheimer’s Disease for a cryonicist could mean death in the absolute sense, even if cryopreserved under the best of circumstances. Ben Best will discuss drugs, supplements, and other treatments to mitigate and prevent Alzheimer’s Disease, discussing the relevance of these preventative/mitigating agents to probable causes of Alzheimer’s Disease.

Ben Best has bachelor’s degrees in Pharmacy, Physics, Computing Science and Business (Accounting and Finance). He is President of the Cryonics Institute and has done extensive self-study of mechanisms of aging in general and Alzheimer’s Disease in particular.

Mike Perry, Ph.D. – Early Detection of Alzheimer’s Disease: Some Recent Progress

A new study has doubled the time interval for the first detectable changes in the brain of a person with Alzheimer’s disease (AD): from five years to ten years before dementia occurs.  Mike Perry will report on this advance and other progress that offers the possibility of both earlier detection and more effective treatments for AD.

Mike Perry has a Ph.D. in computer science and is the Care Services Manager at Alcor Life Extension Foundation. His book, Forever for All, offers a moral argument for the pursuit of life extension through cryonics, with an optimistic conclusion about the scientific prospects for immortality.

Max More, Ph.D. – Survival, Identity, and the Extended Mind

Can personal identity be reduced to the brain? If it cannot, does this offer challenges or advantages for cryonics? And what is the relevance of the concept of the extended mind for brain-threatening disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease? Alcor President Max More reviews recent theories about the mind and identity and their implications for personal survival.

Max More is the President & Chief Executive Officer of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation. More has a degree in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics from St. Anne’s College, Oxford University (1984-87). He was awarded a Dean’s Fellowship in Philosophy in 1987 by the University of Southern California. He studied and taught philosophy at USC with an emphasis on philosophy of mind, ethics, and personal identity, completing his Ph.D. in 1995, with a dissertation that examined issues including the nature of death, and what it is about each individual that continues despite great change over time.

About a month ago kalla724 posted a number of comments on this post, many of which were highly upvoted.

Synopsis: I) I think that kalla724 is too pessimistic about the practice of cryopreservation to preserve personal identity, because we don't know what level of synapse/active zone/protein structure is preserved in human brains, and we also don't know what level is required for personal identity. II) I think kalla724 is wrong about the required detail necessary to simulate a C. elegans. This is testable in the relatively near-term, and the results of that test might yield insight into whose argument in point I is stronger. 

I

kalla724's main argument: it is not possible (p = 10^-22) that cryonics will preserve personal identity, because replacing water with cryoprotectant will cause too much damage to proteins and lipids in the brain.

My view is that kalla724 is too pessimistic. To find a specific example to expand upon this intuition, I searched for "c elegans memory". I chose one of the first reviews in the results: http://learnmem.cshlp.org/content/17/4/191.full, published in 2010 by Ardiel and Rankin. Here's their first example: 

Rankin et al. (1990) were the first to characterize learning and memory in C. elegans. They studied plasticity of the “tap-withdrawal response” (TWR), a behavior whereby worms swim backward in response to a nonlocalized mechanical stimulus generated by tapping the Petri plate containing the worm. The magnitude of this reversal response is around 1 mm (roughly the length of the worm), but this can change with experience. Repeated administration of the tap results in a decrement of both the amplitude and the frequency of the response

The specific neurons mediating this are known: 

Using the circuits described by Chalfie et al. (1985) in conjunction with the neural wiring diagram (White et al. 1986), Wicks and Rankin (1995) identified the mechanosensory cells (ALM, AVM, PLM, and PVD) and interneurons (AVD, AVA, AVB, PVC, and DVA) mediating the TWR.

Through more science, they found that: 

the locus of mechanosensory habituation is in a part of the circuit unique to the TWR, i.e., the touch cells and/or the synapses between the touch cells and the interneurons. Now the hunt for the underlying molecular mechanism could begin.

There is some evidence for how the short-term component of the tap-withdrawal response plasticity. This is it: 

repeated activation of the touch cells results in autophosphorylation of the SHW-3–MPS-1 complex, thus diminishing K+ flux and prolonging the duration of mechanoreceptor potentials. This would slow the recovery from inactivation of EGL-19 (the L-type calcium channel mediating touch-evoked calcium currents) (Suzuki et al. 2003) and dampen cell excitability

This means that the complexes of proteins, working together, add phosphate groups to themselves as a post-translational modification. Each individual complex functions as a potassium ion channel, so changing its structure can alter the excitability of the cell.

Whether vitrification will preserve this specific post-translational modification is, as far as I know, an open question. The current cryoprotectant solution, M22, is pretty physiologic, which means that it functions similarly to water. But, we don't have this data. 

It's likely that when the protein complex undergoes autophosphorylation, other changes occur in the cell as well. If this led to changes in the cell's epigenome, which is very common, and the structure of the epigenome is retained by the cryopreservation, then the cell's epigenome could allow reverse inference of the state of its ion channels. We also don't have this data. 

The authors also discuss evidence for the long-term component of the tap-withdrawal response plasticity: 

the AMPA-type glutamate receptor subunit, GLR-1, was required for long-term habituation—glr-1 loss-of-function mutants habituated but did not retain decremented responses ... long-term habituation was associated with a significant reduction in the size, but not the number, of the GLR-1::GFP clusters in the posterior ventral nerve cord

This means that the number and distribution of a well characterized protein at the synapses of cells is highly correlated with the strength of the memory. This is consistent with current paradigms of long-term memory. 

Under ideal cryopreservation conditions, synaptic vesicles and receptor distributions are likely retained, even if some of the proteins may be a bit denatured. The data is far from perfect here, either. 

It's also important to stress that this only occurs under ideal conditions. Given the current practice of cryonics, cryoprotectant will not reach many or most areas of the brain. In these cases, there is a large amount of ice damage and the information is much more likely to be irretrievable. 

II

kalla724 says:

Uploading a particular C. elegans, so that the simulation reflects learning and experiences of that particular animal? Orders of magnitude more difficult. Might be possible, if we have really good technology and are looking at the living animal.

kalla724's requirement is that we look at live C. elegans to simulate them. But, the evidence above indicates a good correlation between AMPA receptor distribution and tap-withdrawal reflex. And there is good reason to believe that these features are retained by vitrification under ideal conditions. 

So, it seems to me that if you were to emulate a particular C elegans, you could add more receptors (or just up the strength parameter) at those synapses, and thus mimic the plasticity of the tap-withdrawal reflex. Looking at live animals would not be required. 

One more note:

Extrapolating results on personal identity from C. elegans to humans is not ideal. If the results are biased in one direction, we should expect more redundancy in mammalian neural systems than there are in nematode ones, because mammals have so many more brain cells. 

Edit 6/15: fixed format of quotes. 

Edit 6/16: added synopsis to clarify main points. 

Potentially of interest to my fellow antipodean LessWrongers. Stasis Systems Australia is a company seeking to start a cryonics facility in Australia. Their website is pretty sparse, but they just sent out a mailing list update on how they are going, and it doesn't appear that the information therein is located in any news section of the website, so I thought I'd post it here.

Hello,

We at  Stasis Systems Australia Ltd are happy to report our plans to build a cryonics facility in Australia are progressing well.

You may remember contacting us or attending our online meeting last year, but here's a quick reminder of what we're doing.

We are a group of Australasian cryonicists putting together a non-for-profit organisation to build and run the first cryonic storage facility in the southern hemisphere.

We're proud to have WA-based Marta Sandberg on the board of directors as an advisor, as she has a wealth of knowledge and experience from her ongoing role as a director of the  well-established Cryonics Institute.

We are now officially incorporated as a not-for-profit company, and one investor away from the magic number of ten that will trigger the next stage of the project - selecting a piece of land and starting construction!

We have had productive discussions with the NSW Department of Health, and are developing positive relationships with the Cryonics Institute, Alcor, and KrioRus.

We think what we’re doing is worthwhile and in the long term will be of great benefit to the Australasian community.  If you’d like to get involved either as an investor or a volunteer, that would be fantastic.  We’d love help with articles for the website, search engine optimisation, web graphics, or any other skill you have that we might need.

We would especially appreciate you passing this update on to anyone you know who might be interested.

 

Best regards,

The Stasis Systems Australia team

www.StasisSystemsAustralia.com

 

Follow @StaSysAus on Twitter

Like StaSysAus on Facebook

I've been considering lately whether it would perhaps be best to develop and promote terminology that splits cryonics into two distinct concepts for easier consumption:

1) old-style cryonics, cryopreserving people at the cost of nontrivial damage that can't yet be reversed, and

2) the tech goal of being able to demonstrably bring someone back from a (very low-damage) cryopreserved state.

"Real cryonics" vs "sci-fi cryonics", if you will.

As I reckon it, trying to achieve cryonics definition #2 in your lifetime is no more incredible on the surface than trying to defeat aging or engineer self-improving AI in a similar timeframe. Actually in some ways it seems easier. Yet it gets so much less press. Even cryonics advocates seem rarely prone to enthuse about it.

Is it possible that cryonics #1, as a feature of the collective mental map, is actually in the way of cryonics #2? Should I be worried, for example, that promoting cryonics #1 actually costs 100,000 lives per day over some stretch of future time because it is preventing people from noticing cryonics #2 and actually taking action on it?

Many people I talk to who are new to the topic seem to have some hazy preexisting idea of cryonics #2 that gets mangled up with cryonics #1. Perhaps they would grow into enthusiasts with attention spans for the subject matter if encouraged to pursue this simple-to-grasp concept in its own right, instead of trying to forcibly retrain into more advanced concepts.

Question:

What are your thoughts on cryogenic preservation and the idea of medically treating aging?

His response:

A marvelous way to just convince people to give you money. Offer to freeze them for later. I'd have more confidence if we had previously managed to pull this off with other mammals. Until then I see it as a waste of money. I'd rather enjoy the money, and then be buried, offering my body back to the flora and fauna of which I have dined my whole life.

Link

So being signed up for cryonics shifts my views on life and death, as might be expected.

In particular, it focuses my views of success on the preservation of my brain (everything else too, just in case, but especially the brain).  This means, obviously, not just the lump of meat but also the information within it.

If I'm suffering a degenerative disease to that meat or its information, I'm going to want to cryocide to preserve the information (and the idea of living through slow brain death doesn't thrill me regardless).

What I don't know is: given the current state of science, what sorts of things do I need to be worried about?

In particular, I'm wondering about Alzheimer's; does it appear to be damage to the information, or to the retrieval mechanism?

But any other such diseases interest me in this context.

Thanks!

-Robin

My uncle works in insurance. I recently mentioned that I'm planning to sign up for cryonics.

"That's amazing," he said. "Convincing a young person to buy life insurance? That has to be the greatest scam ever."

I took the comment lightly, not caring to argue about it. But it got me thinking - couldn't cryonics be a great opportunity for insurance companies to make a bunch of money?

Consider:

1. Were there a much stronger demand for cryonics, cryonics organizations would flourish through competition, outside investment, and internal reinvestment. Costs would likely fall, and this would be good for cryonicists in general.
2. If cryonics organizations flourish, this increases the probability of cryonics working. I can think of a bunch of ways in which this could happen; perhaps, for example, it would encourage the creation of safety nets whereby the failure of individual companies doesn't result in anyone getting thawed. It would increase R&D on both perfusion and revivification, encourage entrepreneurs to explore new related business models, etcetera.
3. Increasing the demand for cryonics increases the demand for life insurance policies; thus insurance companies have a strong incentive to increase the demand for cryonics. Many large insurance companies would like nothing more than to usher in a generation of young people that want to buy life insurance.¹
   
4. The demand for cryonics could be increased by an insightful marketing campaign by an excellent marketing agency with an enormous budget... like those used by big insurance companies.² A quick Googling says that ad spending by insurance companies exceeded $4.15 billion in 2009.

Almost a year ago, Strange7 suggested that cryonics organizations could run this kind of marketing campaign. I think he's wrong - there's no way CI or Alcor have the money. But the biggest insurance companies do have the money, and I'd be shocked if these companies or their agencies aren't already dumping all kinds of money into market research.

What would doing this require? 

1. That an open-minded person in the insurance industry who is in the position to direct this kind of funding exists. I don't have a sense of how likely this is.
2. That we can locate/get an audience with the person from step 1. I think research and networking could get this done, especially if the higher-status among us are interested.
3. That we can find someone who is capable and willing to explain this clearly and convincingly to the person from step 1. I'm not sure it would be that difficult. In the startup world, strangers convince strangers to speculatively spend millions of dollars every week. Hell, I'll do it.

I want to live in a world where cryonics ads air on TV just as often as ads for everything else people spend money on. I really can see an insurance company owning this project - if they can a) successfully revamp the image of cryonics and b) become known as the household name for it when the market gets big, they will make lots of money.

What do you think? Where has my reasoning failed? Does anyone here know anyone powerful in insurance? 

Lastly, taking a cue from ciphergoth: this is not the place to rehash all the old arguments about cryonics. I'm asking about a very specific idea about marketing and life insurance, not requesting commentary on cryonics itself. Thanks!

¹ Perhaps modeling the potential size of the market would offer insight here. If it turns out that this idea is not insane, I'll find a way to make it happen. I could use your help.

² Consider what happened with diamonds in the 1900s:

... N. W. Ayer suggested that through a well-orchestrated advertising and public-relations campaign it could have a significant impact on the "social attitudes of the public at large and thereby channel American spending toward larger and more expensive diamonds instead of "competitive luxuries." Specifically, the Ayer study stressed the need to strengthen the association in the public's mind of diamonds with romance. Since "young men buy over 90% of all engagement rings" it would be crucial to inculcate in them the idea that diamonds were a gift of love: the larger and finer the diamond, the greater the expression of love. Similarly, young women had to be encouraged to view diamonds as an integral part of any romantic courtship.

I searched but did not find any discussion comparing the merits of the two major cryonics providers in the US, so I figured it might be productive to start such a discussion myself by posing the question to the community: which provider would you choose, all things being equal: Alcor or the Cryonics Institute?

From my research, Alcor comes across as the flasher, higher-end option, while CI seems more like a Mom-and-Pop operation, having only two full-time employees. Alcor also costs substantially more, with its neurosuspension option alone running ~$80k, compared with CI's whole-body preservation cost of ~$30k. While Alcor has received far more publicity than CI, much of it has been negative. The Ted Williams fiasco is probably the most prominent example, although the accuser in that case seems anything but trustworthy. However, Alcor remains something of a shadowy organization that many within the cryonics community are suspicious of. Mike Darwin, a former Alcor president, has written at length on both organizations at http://www.chronopause.com, and on the whole, at least based on what I've read, Alcor comes across looking less competent, less trustworthy, and less open than CI.

One issue in particular is funding. Even though Alcor costs much more, it has many more expenses, and Darwin and others have questioned the long term financial stability of the organization. Ralph Merkle, an Alcor board member and elder statesman of cryonics who has made significant contributions to other fields like nanotechnology, a field he practically invented, and encryption, with Merkle's Puzzles, has essentially admitted(1) that Alcor hasn't managed its money very well:

"Some Alcor members have wondered why rich Alcor members have not donated more money to Alcor. The major reason is that rich Alcor members are rich because they know how to manage money, and they know that Alcor traditionally has managed money poorly. Why give any significant amount of money to an organization that has no fiscal discipline? It will just spend it, and put itself right back into the same financial hole it’s already in.

 As a case in point, consider Alcor’s efforts over the year to create an “endowment fund” to stabilize its operating budget. These efforts have always ended with Alcor spending the money on various useful activities. These range from research projects to subsidizing our existing members — raising dues and minimums is a painful thing to do, and the Board is always reluctant to do this even when the financial data is clear. While each such project is individually worthy and has merit, collectively the result has been to thwart the effort to create a lasting endowment and leave Alcor in a financially weak position."

Such an acknowledgement, though appreciated, is frankly disturbing, considering that members depend utterly on these organizations remaining operational and solvent for decades, perhaps even centuries, after they are deanimated.

Meanwhile, CI carries on merrily, well under the radar, seemingly without any drama or intrigue. And Ben Best seems to have very good credentials in the cryonics community, and Eliezer, one of the most prominent public advocates of cryonics, is signed up with them. Yet the tiny size of the operation still fills me with unease concerning its prospects for long-term survivability.

So with all of that said, besides cost, what factors would lead or have led you to pick one organization over the other?

1: http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/CryopreservationFundingAndInflation.html

And fear not lest Existence closing your
Account, should lose, or know the type no more;
The Eternal Saki from the Bowl has pour'd
Millions of Bubbles like us, and will pour.

When You and I behind the Veil are past,
Oh, but the long long while the World shall last,
Which of our Coming and Departure heeds
As much as Ocean of a pebble-cast.

    -- Omar Khayyam, Rubaiyat

A CONSEQUENTIALIST VIEW OF IDENTITY

The typical argument for cryonics says that if we can preserve brain data, one day we may be able to recreate a functioning brain and bring the dead back to life.

The typical argument against cryonics says that even if we could do that, the recreation wouldn't be "you". It would be someone who thinks and acts exactly like you.

The typical response to the typical argument against cryonics says that identity isn't in specific atoms, so it's probably in algorithms, and the recreation would have the same mental algorithms as you and so be you. The gap in consciousness of however many centuries is no more significant than the gap in consciousness between going to bed at night and waking up in the morning, or the gap between going into a coma and coming out of one.

We can call this a "consequentialist" view of identity, because it's a lot like the consequentialist views of morality. Whether a person is "me" isn't a function of how we got to that person, but only of where that person is right now: that is, how similar that person's thoughts and actions are to my own. It doesn't matter if we got to him by having me go to sleep and wake up as him, or got to him by having aliens disassemble my brain and then simulate it on a cellular automaton. If he thinks like me, he's me.

A corollary of the consequentialist view of identity says that if someone wants to create fifty perfect copies of me, all fifty will "be me" in whatever sense that means something.

GRADATIONS OF IDENTITY

An argument against cryonics I have never heard, but which must exist somewhere, says that even the best human technology is imperfect, and likely a few atoms here and there - or even a few entire neurons - will end up out of place. Therefore, the recreation will not be you, but someone very very similar to you.

And the response to this argument is "Who cares?" If by "me" you mean Yvain as of 10:20 PM 4th April 2012, then even Yvain as of 10:30 is going to have some serious differences at the atomic scale. Since I don't consider myself a different person every ten minutes, I shouldn't consider myself a different person if the resurrection-machine misplaces a few cells here or there.

But this is a slippery slope. If my recreation is exactly like me except for one neuron, is he the same person? Signs point to yes. What about five neurons? Five million? Or on a functional level, what if he blinked at exactly one point where I would not have done so? What if he prefers a different flavor of ice cream? What if he has exactly the same memories as I do, except for the outcome of one first-grade spelling bee I haven't thought about in years anyway? What if he is a Hindu fundamentalist?

If we're going to take a consequentialist view of identity, then my continued ability to identify with myself even if I naturally switch ice cream preferences suggests I should identify with a botched resurrection who also switches ice cream preferences. The only solution here that really makes sense is to view identity in shades of gray instead of black-and-white. An exact clone is more me than a clone with different ice cream preferences, who is more me than a clone who is a Hindu fundamentalist, who is more me than LeBron James is.

BIG WORLDS

There are various theories lumped together under the title "big world".

The simplest is the theory that the universe (or multiverse) is Very Very Big. Although the universe is probably only 15 billion years old, which means the visible universe is only 30 billion light years in size, inflation allows the entire universe to get around the speed of light restriction; it could be very large or possibly infinite. I don't have the numbers available, but I remember a back of the envelope calculation being posted on Less Wrong once about exactly how big the universe would have to be to contain repeating patches of about the size of the Earth. That is, just as the first ten digits of pi, 3141592653, must repeat somewhere else in pi because pi is infinite and patternless, and just as I would believe this with high probability even if pi were not infinite but just very very large, so the arrangement of atoms that make up Earth would recur in an infinite or very very large universe. This arrangement would obviously include you, exactly as you are now. A much larger class of Earth-sized patches would include slightly different versions of you like the one with different ice cream preferences. This would also work, as Omar Khayyam mentioned in the quote at the top, if the universe were to last forever or a very very long time.

The second type of "big world" is the one posited by the Many Worlds theory of quantum mechanics, in which each quantum event causes the Universe to split into several branches. Because quantum events determine larger-level events, and because each branch continues branching, some these branches could be similar to our universe but with observable macro-scale differences. For example, there might be a branch in which you are the President of the United States, or the Pope, or died as an infant. Although this sounds like a silly popular science version of the principle, I don't think it's unfair or incorrect.

The third type of "big world" is modal realism: the belief that all possible worlds exist, maybe in proportion to their simplicity (whatever that means). We notice the existence of our own world only for indexical reasons: that is, just as there are many countries, but when I look around me I only see my own; so there are many possibilities, but when I look around me I only see my own. If this is true, it is not only possible but certain that there is a world where I am Pope and so on.

There are other types of "big worlds" that I won't get into here, but if any type at all is correct, then there should be very many copies of me or people very much like me running around.

CRYONICS WITHOUT FREEZERS

Cryonicists say that if you freeze your brain, you may experience "waking up" a few centuries later when someone uses the brain to create a perfect copy of you.

But whether or not you freeze your brain, a Big World is creating perfect copies of you all the time. The consequentialist view of identity says that your causal connection with these copies is unnecessary for them to be you. So why should a copy of you created by a far-future cryonicist with access to your brain be better able to "resurrect" you than a copy of you that comes to exist for some other reason?

For example, suppose I choose not to sign up for cryonics, have a sudden heart attack, and die in my sleep. Somewhere in a Big World, there is someone exactly like me except that they didn't have the heart attack and they wake up healthy the next morning.

The cryonicists believe that having a healthy copy of you come into existence after you die is sufficient for you to "wake up" as that copy. So why wouldn't I "wake up" as the healthy, heart-attack-free version of me in the universe next door?

Or: suppose that a Friendly AI fills a human-sized three-dimensional grid with atoms, using a quantum dice to determine which atom occupies each "pixel" in the grid. This splits the universe into as many branches as there are possible permutations of the grid (presumably a lot) and in one of those branches, the AI's experiment creates a perfect copy of me at the moment of my death, except healthy. If creating a perfect copy of me causes my "resurrection", then that AI has just resurrected me as surely as cryonics would have.

The only downside I can see here is that I have less measure (meaning I exist in a lower proportion of worlds) than if I had signed up for cryonics directly. This might be a problem if I think that my existence benefits others - but I don't think I should be concerned for my own sake. Right now I don't go to bed at night weeping that my father only met my mother through a series of unlikely events and so most universes probably don't contain me; I'm not sure why I should do so after having been resurrected in the far future.

RESURRECTION AS SOMEONE ELSE

What if the speculative theories involved in Big Worlds all turn out to be false? All hope is still not lost.

Above I wrote:

An exact clone is more me than a clone with different ice cream preferences, who is more me than a clone who is a Hindu fundamentalist, who is more me than LeBron James is.

I used LeBron James because from what I know about him, he's quite different from me. But what if I had used someone else? One thing I learned upon discovering Less Wrong is that I had previously underestimated just how many people out there are *really similar to me*, even down to weird interests, personality quirks, and sense of humor. So let's take the person living in 2050 who is most similar to me now. I can think of several people on this site alone who would make a pretty impressive lower bound on how similar the most similar person to me would have to be.

In what way is this person waking up on the morning of January 1 2050 equivalent to me being sort of resurrected? What if this person is more similar to Yvain(2012) than Yvain(1995) is? What if I signed up for cryonics, died tomorrow, and was resurrected in 2050 by a process about as lossy as the difference between me and this person?

SUMMARY

Personal identity remains confusing. But some of the assumptions cryonicists make are, in certain situations, sufficient to guarantee personal survival after death without cryonics.

He has resumed posting at his blog Chronopause and he is essential reading for those interested in cryonics and, more generally, rational decision-making in an uncertain world. 

In response to a comment by a LW user named Alexander, he writes:

I have no objection to you promoting Chronosphere on LessWrong and would strongly encourage you to do so. But my guess is that you will find it an unrewarding, and possibly punishing exercise.... I’m not being trite when I say that people do NOT like reality.... Life is scary and hard, in fact, it is absolutely terrifying if looked at objectively, and things like cryonics and religion ostensibly exist to REDUCE that terror and to make to life (and death) more bearable.

For that to work, there has to be a happy sense of optimism and trust that everything is going to work out just fine. This makes sense, and, arguably, is even necessary, because the alternative would be that everyone who chose cryonics would have to more than a customer – they would have be involved – at least to some extent – as an activist. That’s asking an awful lot. But most of all, it is asking that people who opt for cryonics give up the comfort of the fantasy that they can be customers, buy the product, pay their money every month or every quarter, and that they will then be taken care of when the need arises. It means that they will have to do two exceedingly difficult and uncomfortable things:

1) Confront and understand the reality of the the many shortcomings and uncertainties of contemporary cryonics and live with them.

2) Work industriously, creatively and continuously to overcome those shortcomings.

It is very, very hard to create and sustain an organization and a community where the above two dictums are practiced. It is not only hard for the community members, it is hard for the community leaders.

(Sidenote: This reminds me of what Luke considers his most difficult day-to-day tasks.) 

...[I]f you expect to see cryonics organizations to have validated the quality of their brain cryopreservation technology under a wide variety of real world conditions, you will be disappointed. If you expect to see contingency planning for serious, inevitable near-term existential risks, such as pandemic disease, you will also be disappointed. Similarly, if you expect to see technologies in place to mitigate post-cardiac arrest normothermic ischemic injury, more accurately predict when a patient will experience cardiac arrest (i.e., is truly terminal), experience less cold ischemic injury, or be better protected from outside attack, again, you will be disappointed.

LessWrong is structured around the rational cognition of Eli[e]zer Yudkowsky and his colleagues. They posit that they have a better (i.e., more rational, more functional) way of decision making and of living their lives. They also advocate being signed up for cryonics, and in particular making cryonics arrangements with Alcor. [ed note: Actually I think EY is with CI.] I don’t dispute that this a better and more rational choice than having no cryonics arrangements. I would say that this is necessary, but not sufficient. Or in other words, a small, but wholly inadequate step in the right direction. More generally, I would say that LessWrong suffers from the same sort of deficiency that cryonics does. The world is clearly racing towards catastrophe on many fronts. In some areas these catastrophes are not due to any kind of bad “active” decision making by humans. For instance, any competent epidemiologist at the CDC or WHO can give you fairly precise odds of when the next global pandemic will occur with a mortality of 30% to 50% of the population. No expert in this area voice any doubt that such an outbreak will occur. It is not a question of if, but of when. It is also clearly the case that the general population will not be prepared and that vast numbers of people will die, including some you reading this. It is also clear that most or all cryonics patients will be lost in any such pandemic.

My point is, that if “immortalism,” which includes both radical life extension and cryonics, is to have any material chance of working, a far higher degree of cohesion, activism, planning and commitment are required. Pandemic disease is just one example. Crazy behavior in a multitude of forms is another – and it is arguably more prevalent, more virulent and more of an immediate threat.

So, my guess is that most of the other cryonicists of your generation will prove singularly uninterested in my message and that they will not want to do anything – and indeed, that most have not even signed up for cryonics! I sincerely hope you prove me wrong!

As to your last question, by no means have I given up on cryonics, nor will I ever, within reason. As long as it is at all practical to be biopreserved, it makes sense to do so. No matter how small the odds, some chance is better than no chance at all. I am signed up with Alcor for now.

On a related note, Carl Shulman has said that more widespread cryonics would encourage more long-term thinking, specifically about existential risk. Is it a consensus view that this would be the case? 

Every now and then people ask LW what sort of career they should pursue if they want to have a large impact improving the world. If we agree that cryonics would encourage long-term thinking, and that this would be beneficial, then it seems to me that we should push some of these people towards the research and practice of brain preservation. For example, perhaps http://80000hours.org/search?q=cryonics should have some results. 

Disclaimer: English is a foreign language for me. If you find any mistakes please inform me.

I am currently looking for information on cryonics since I have the intention to sign up. My current organization of choice is the Cryonics Institute with their one-time fee of $1,250 at sign-up and $28,000 for cryo-preservation which is an excellent offer given my age. I understand that most people choose to pay for cryopreservation by life-insurance. Since the cost of cryopreservation is lower than the €30,000 most insurers here in Germany take as minimum payout I still would have money left and wonder if I could put this money in some kind of trust to pay for "revival" and have some money in that future. Do any of you have plans like that and could share their information?

Also, do I understand correctly that the $28,000 at the Cryonics Institute are for cryopreservation only and that $88,000 figure is for cryopreservation, standby and transport to Michigan? In that case I of course need to get life insurance with higher pay-out but at my age that should not be a problem.

Are there any other institutes that offer cryopreservation of at least the brain that I should consider? I know of Alcor (expensive, I do not see the benefits) and KryoRus (seems cheap and require continuous funding that could be handled by a trust fund). Are there more I should know of?

If you have ideas, information I should consider or question I need to have answered, please feel free to reply in the comments.

In a post last August called Alzheimer's vs. Cryonics, I left the following comment:

23andMe recently showed that people of my genotype are more than twice as likely to develop Alzheimer's as others in my ethnic group. I have a 15% chance of getting Alzheimer's before I'm 80, up from 7%. See Patri's post about this.

An initial Googling has generated things like 'eat paleo', 'get caffeine', 'exercise', and 'use your brain'. I'm planning to do further research about decreasing Alzheimer's risk.

I really recommend that everyone do 23andMe for this precise reason.

wedrifid made an insightful response:

I wonder, how much does that single bit of information (doubling the chance) matter to those decisions? Should you have been doing those things anyway, for the Alzheimer's prevention and the other benefits? Is it the motivational factor of the formal personal certification that is important or the actual information?

wedrifid nailed it. Transhumanists have a huge interest in making the necessary lifestyle adjustments to prevent Alzheimer's. Even if cryonics were certain to work, I'd like it to be me that is resurrected when the technology is available, and I won't still be me if Alzheimer's gets its way.

So I've been keeping an eye out for relevant information. I haven't done rigorous research yet, but a friend recently sent me a study: "A molecular link between the active component of marijuana and Alzheimer's disease pathology." I've uploaded the full text of the article here.

A sample from the abstract:

Here, we demonstrate that the active component of marijuana, Delta9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), competitively inhibits the enzyme acetylcholinesterase (AChE) as well as prevents AChE-induced amyloid beta-peptide (Abeta) aggregation, the key pathological marker of Alzheimer's disease. [...] Compared to currently approved drugs prescribed for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease, THC is a considerably superior inhibitor of Abeta aggregation, and this study provides a previously unrecognized molecular mechanism through which cannabinoid molecules may directly impact the progression of this debilitating disease.

From the conclusion:

It is noteworthy that THC is a considerably more effective inhibitor of AChE-induced [Abeta] deposition than the approved drugs for Alzheimer’s disease treatment, donepezil and tacrine, which reduced [Abeta] aggregation by only 22% and 7%, respectively, at twice the concentration used in our studies.

Therefore, AChE inhibitors such as THC and its analogues may provide an improved therapeutic for Alzheimer’s disease, augmenting acetylcholine levels by preventing neurotransmitter degradation and reducing [Abeta] aggregation, thereby simultaneously treating both the symptoms and progression of Alzheimer’s disease.

I, for one, would like to know if smoking weed could help prevent a fate that's plausibly worse than death-and-cryonics. So for those who know more about biology than I do: how promising are these results? What else has been shown to help prevent Alzheimer's?

Singularitarians frequently lament the irrevocably dead and the lack of widespread application of cryonics. Many cryonocists feel that as many lives as possible should be (and in a more rational world, would be) cryopreserved. Eliezer Yudkowsky, in an update to the touching note on the death of his younger brother Yehuda, forcefully expressed this sentiment:

"I stand there, and instead of reciting Tehillim I look at the outline on the grass of my little brother's grave. Beneath this thin rectangle in the dirt lies my brother's coffin, and within that coffin lie his bones, and perhaps decaying flesh if any remains. There is nothing here or anywhere of my little brother's self. His brain's information is destroyed. Yehuda wasn't signed up for cryonics and his body wasn't identified until three days later; but freezing could have been, should have been standard procedure for anonymous patients. The hospital that should have removed Yehuda's head when his heart stopped beating, and preserved him in liquid nitrogen to await rescue, instead laid him out on a slab. Why is the human species still doing this? Why do we still bury our dead? We have all the information we need in order to know better..."

Ignoring the debate concerning the merits of cryopreservation itself and the feasibility of mass cryonics, I would like to question the assumption that every life is worth preserving for posterity.

Consider those who have demonstrated through their actions that they are best kept excluded from society at large. John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer would be prime examples. Many people write these villains off as evil and give their condition not a second thought. But it is quite possible that they actually suffer from some sort of mental illness and are thus not fully responsible for their crimes. In fact, there is evidence that the brains of serial killers are measurably different from those of normal people. Far enough in the future, it might be possible to "cure" them. However, they will still possess toxic memories and thoughts that would greatly distress them now that they are normal. To truly repair them, they would likely need to have many or all of their memories erased. At that point, with an amnesic brain and a cloned body, are they even really the same person, and if not, what was the point of cryopreserving them?

Forming a robust theory of mind and realizing that not everyone thinks or sees the world the same way you do is actually quite difficult. Consider the immense complexity of the world we live in and the staggering scope of thoughts that can possibly be thought as a result. If cryopreservation means first and foremost mind preservation, maybe there are some minds that just shouldn't be preserved. Maybe the future would be a better, happier place without certain thoughts, feelings and memories--and without the minds that harbor them.

Personally, I think the assumption of "better safe than sorry" is a good-enough justification for mass cryonics (or for cryonics generally), but I think that assumption, like any, should at least be questioned.

This is the obligatory post of the recent xkcd comic:

http://xkcd.com/989/

Wired, "Inside the Strange Science of Cord Blood Banking" (Wikipedia):

In a nondescript commercial park on the outskirts of Las Vegas, a large cryogenic stem cell storage facility is ready to accept your baby’s blood. Cord Blood America in Las Vegas is one of dozens of private cord blood banks in the United States that, for a fee, will store stem cell-rich blood taken from a newborn baby’s umbilical cord.

Over one hundred thousand families save or donate cord blood annually, in the hopes it will one day provide medical help to their child or someone else.

“My vision is within the next 10 years we’ll see organizations like this develop into cellular therapy labs,” said Dr. Geoffrey O’Neill, vice president of CorCell, the subsidiary company that runs Cord Blood America’s Las Vegas facility. It’s beginning to happen now in countries like China and Mexico, he says.

...Reality is different. Leukemia, bone marrow failure, immune deficiency, metabolic diseases and sickle cell anemia — the diseases cord blood is typically needed for — require transplants of healthy cells. The cord blood of a child with leukemia would also carry the disease.

“If you have the money, and you want to bank your child’s own cord blood, you’re essentially investing in one of two things,” said Dr. Joanne Kurtzberg, director of the Duke Pediatric Bone Marrow and Stem Cell Transplant Program. “One, the possibility that another child in your family will need that cord blood, and that it matches. Or two, that somewhere in the future there will be new developments and new uses for your child’s cord blood — say in regenerative medicine or cell therapy. But to date, none of those exist.” While a few rare diseases, such as multiple myeloma and lymphoma, use stem cells taken from a patient’s own body, the chances of a child having these are vanishingly small.

...Parents pay $2,075 for the kit, courier fees and one year’s storage. CorCell charges a $125 annual storage fee after that. Some insurance companies offer discounts. CorCell has been in business for six years and stores about 30,000 samples; Geoffrey O’Neill, the vice president, says he recalls seven or eight samples being pulled for use. A CorCell customer service representative later estimated this at 25 to 30 samples. [30,000 / <30 = <1 in 1000 = <0.1%]

Inside the Cord Blood America facility, quotes painted on the walls are the first thing to capture the visitors’ attention: “The entire history of science is a progression of exploded fallacies,” proclaims Ayn Rand on one wall. “Do or do not, there is no try,” says Yoda on another. On another wall, Micky Rooney offers some advice: “You always pass failure on the way to success.”

See also Near / far thinking, cryonics estimates, & "Normal Cryonics".

I know celebrities cryocrastinate just as much as anyone else, but King seems like the kind of guy to go through with it.

http://www.cnn.com/2011/12/02/showbiz/larry-king-i-want-to-be-frozen/index.html?hpt=hp_t3

One of the sticking points for cryonics is how expensive it is. Unfortunately, the estimates on LW (eg. in Normal Cryonics) are likely to be low as they are current costs. This is starting to come to a head for Alcor, with Alcor's low growth rate meaning it faces a rising tide of aging members (hence that emphasis on young cryonicists) and fundamental flaws in its prices; the official word has come down in the latest issue of Cryonics, issue 2011 q4:

Tonight the Discovery Channel had on their Curiosity series  a program hosted by Adam Savage (of Mythbusters) on whether or not we could live indefinitely. The program probably did have some substantial impact on some people who have not been exposed to that sort of idea before, and may have been especially good at letting people understand that there's a definite possibility that the relevant discoveries might occur in their lifetimes.

However the piece was as a whole decidedly lacking in actual information.  First, the entire program was built around the conceit of Savage looking back from his thousandth birthday and talking about all the technologies that had allowed it to happen. In their hypothetical world, due to a severe car accident in 2022, Savage becomes the first person to benefit from a host of different technologies. There were zero actual interviews with scientists and although actual technological proposals were mentioned such as organ cloning and a brief segment on the SENS work of filtering blood cells, the vast majority was high-budget special effects segements of the new technologies. Also, cryonics was not mentioned at all, since in their hypothetical world, Savage had never needed that particular technology. Similarly, no mention is made of uploading, although Savage does gain cybernetic enhancements to his brain.

At a level of evaluation of narrative rather than  information, the entire piece was a bit incoherent and inconsistent. For example, Savage declares at one point that at age 130, he is then the oldest person in the world. This makes no sense in context since presumably after the basic technologies have been tested out on him they could then be applied to other people, some of whom will be older than he is. In the same section of the narrative, Savage has apparently become the head-engineer of the world's first space elevator construction project. A few centuries later, Savage then has to deal with an asteroid impact obliterating much of North America. My girlfriend remarked that the program came across almost as fanfic about Savage.

Overall, I can't recommend this much but it might do a good job getting people aware of these issues who don't currently know anything.  

Did anyone else see this? What did they think? 

Let it be noted, as an aside, that this is my first post on Less Wrong and my first attempt at original, non-mandatory writing for over a year.

I've been reading through the original sequences over the last few months as part of an attempt to get my mind into working order. (Other parts of this attempt include participating in Intro to AI and keeping a notebook.) The realization that spurred me to attempt this: I don't feel that living is good. The distinction which seemed terribly important to me at the time was that I didn't feel that death was bad, which is clearly not sensible. I don't have the resources to feel the pain of one death 155,000 times every day, which is why Torture v. Dust Specks is a nonsensical question to me and why I don't have a cached response for how to act on the knowledge of all those deaths.

The first time I read Torture v. Dust Specks, I started really thinking about why I bother trying to be rational. What's the point, if I still have to make nonsensical, kitschy statements like "Well, my brain thinks X but my heart feels Y," if I would not reflexively flip the switch and may even choose not to, and if I sometimes feel that a viable solution to overpopulation is more deaths? 

I solved the lattermost with extraterrestrial settlement, but it's still, well, sketchy. My mind is clearly full of some pretty creepy thoughts, and rationality doesn't seem to be helping. I think about having that feeling and go eeugh, but the feelings are still there. So I pose the question: what does a person do to click that death is really, really bad?

The primary arguments I've heard for death are: 

• "I look forward to the experience of shutting down and fading away," which I hope could be easily disillusioned by gaining knowledge about how truly undignified dying is, bloody romanticists.
• "There is something better after life and I'm excited for it," which, well... let me rephrase: please do not turn this into a discussion on ways to disillusion theists because it's really been talked about before.
• "It is Against Nature/God's Will/The Force to live forever. Nature/God/the Force is going to get humankind if we try for immortality. I like my liver!" This argument is so closely related to the previous and the next one that I don't know quite how to respond to it, other than that I've seen it crop up in historical accounts of any big change. Human beings tend to be really frightened of change, especially change which isn't believed to be supernatural in origin.
• "I've read science fiction stories about being immortal, and in those stories immortality gets really boring, really fast. I'm not interested enough in reality to be in it forever." I can't see where this perspective could come from other than mind-numbing ignorance/the unimaginable nature of really big things (like the number of languages on Earth, the amount of things we still don't know about physics or the fact that every person who is or ever will be is a new, interesting being to interact with.)
• "I can't imagine being immortal. My idea about how my life will go is that I will watch my children grow old, but I will die before they do. My mind/human minds aren't meant to exist for longer than one generation." This fails to account for human minds being very, very flexible. The human mind as we know it now does eventually get tired of life (or at least tired of pain,) but this is not a testament to how minds are, any more than humans becoming distressed when they don't eat is a testament to it being natural to starve, become despondent and die.
• "The world is overpopulated and if nobody dies, we will overrun and ultimately ruin the planet." First of all: I, like Dr. Ian Malcolm, think that it is incredibly vain to believe that man can destroy the Earth. Second of all: in the future we may have anything from extraterrestrial habitation to substrates which take up space and consume material in totally different ways. But! Clearly, I am not feeling these arguments, because this argument makes sense to me. Problematic!

I think that overall, the fear most people have about signing up for cryonics/AI/living forever is that they do not understand it. This is probably true for me; it's probably why I don't grok that life is good, always. Moreover, it is probable that the depictions of death as not always bad with which I sympathize (e.g. 'Lord, what can the harvest hope for, if not for the care of the Reaper Man?) stem from the previously held to be absolute nature of death. That is, up until the last ~30 years, people have not been having cogent, non-hypothetical thoughts about how it might be possible to not die or what that might be like. Dying has always been a Big Bad but an inescapable one, and the human race has a bad case of Stockholm Syndrome.

So: now that I know I have and what I want, how do I use the former to get the latter?

Check out the latest episode of Castle (Headcase) to see Cryonics covered in mainstream fiction in a not entirely terrible manner. The details are not exactly accurate but probably not more inaccurate than similar fictionalised coverage of most other industries. In fact there is one obvious implementation difference that the company in Castle uses which is how things clearly ought to be:

Amulets of Immortality

It is not uncommon for cryonics enthusiasts to make 'immortality' jokes about their ALCOR necklaces but the equivalent on the show make the obvious practical next step. The patients have heart rate monitors with GPS signalers that signal the cryonics company as soon as the patient flatlines. This is just obviously the way things should be and it is regrettable that the market is not yet broad enough for 'obvious' to have been translated into common practice.

Other things to watch out for:

• Predictable attempts by the cops to take the already preserved body so they can collect more evidence.
• A somewhat insightful question of whether the cryonics company should hand over the corpsicle without taking things to court because that way they would not risk legal precedent being set based on a case where there are unusual factors which may make them lose. It may be better to lose one patient so that they can force the fight to happen on a stronger case.
• Acknowledgement that only the head is required, which allows a compromise of handing over the body minus the head.
• Smug superiority of cops trying to take the cryonics patient against the will of the patient himself, his family and the custodians. This is different than cops just trying to claim territory and do their job and to the hell with everyone else, it is cops trying to convey that it is morally virtuous to take the corpse and the wife would understand that it was in her and her corpsicle husband's best interest to autopsy his head if she wasn't so stupid. (Which seems like a realistic attitude.)
• Costar and lead detective Beckett actually attempts to murder a cryonics patient (to whatever extent that murder applies to corpsicle desiccation). For my part this gave me the chance to explore somewhat more tangibly my ethical intuitions over what types of responses would be appropriate. My conclusion was that if someone had shot Beckett in order to protect the corpsicle I would have been indifferent. Not glad that she was killed but not proud of the person killing her either. I suspect (but cannot test) that most of the pain and frustration of losing a character that I cared about would be averted as well. Curious.
• Brain destroying disease vs cryonicist standoff!
• Beckett redeems herself on the 'not being an ass to cryonicists' front by being completely non-judgemental of the woman for committing "involuntary euthenasia" of her tumor-infested husband. (Almost to the point of being inconsistent with her earlier behavior but I'm not complaining.)
• A clever "Romeo and Juliet" conclusion to wrap up the case without Beckett being forced to put the wife in jail for an act that has some fairly reasonable consequentialist upsides. Played out to be about as close to a happy ending as you could get.

I want to sign up for cryonic suspension. I haven't done so yet because I haven't been able to decide which organization to use. I'm not expecting you guys to choose for me, but it would be very helpful if those of you who are signed up (or will sign up) would say which organization you went with and why.

I've found the following three organizations. Did I miss any that I should be considering?

• http://www.americancryonics.org/
• http://www.cryonics.org/
• http://www.alcor.org/

I'm in the US midwest area, if that will make a difference. My goal would be to maximize the chance of this working. My sub-goal would be to spend the least amount of money. I'm not old yet, so I expect to be able to get funding from life insurance.

If an American signs up for cryonics and pays their ~$300/year, what are their odds of being revived? Talking to people at LessWrong meetups I've heard estimates of 1 in 2.  My friend George Dahl, whose opinion I respect a lot, guesses "less than 1 in 10^6". Niether has given me reasons, those numbers are opaque. My estimate of these odds pretty much determines whether I should sign up.  I could afford $300/year, and I would if I thought the odds were 1:2, but not if they were 1:10^6. [1]

In order to see how likely this is to work, we should look at the process. I would sign up with a cryonics company and for life insurance. I'd go on living, enjoying my life and the people around me, paying my annual fees, until some point when I died. After death they would drain my blood, replace it with something that doesn't rupture cell walls when it freezes, freeze me in liquid nitrogen, and leave me there for a long time. At some point, probably after the development of nanotechnology, people would revive me, probably as a computer program.

There's a lot of steps there, and it's easy to see ways they could go wrong. [3] Let's consider some cases and try to get probabilities [4]:

Update: the probabilities below are out of date, and only useful for understanding the comments.  I've made a spreadsheet listing both my updated probabilities and those for as many other people as I can find:  https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/...

EDIT 2011-09-26: jsalvatier suggested an online spreadsheet, which is very sensible.  Created

EDIT 2011-09-27: I've updated my probabilities some, and made the updates on the spreadsheet.

Since it came to my attention that signing up for cryonics is not as pointless as I'd once thought, I've been pondering how to sell my dad on the idea.

This is somewhat urgent for a couple of reasons. First, he's already pushing sixty and would meet increased resistance in acquiring another life insurance policy at a much steeper rate than myself. Second, even given his age, he could afford to sign us both up easily, and after some consideration, convincing him seems like the more efficient path to being signed up myself than trying to arrange it for myself alone. And, well, he's my dad, and while he has his flaws, he's kind of awesome.

The sticking point, I can easily predict, will be getting passed his Cached Skepticism towards the concept of Cryonics. He is proud of being Skeptical; it's important to his self-concept, so I need to hit him with an opening that he can't easily dismiss. I would predict that if I simply linked him to Alcor's webpage, absolutely nothing would happen. I need something that will motivate him to investigate.

The frustrating part, is that I'm quite sure that if he'd never heard of cryonics before, he'd have no resistance to the idea beyond the basic pain of dispelling the emotional numbness towards a Certain Doom by suggesting it might not be certain after all. Unless my model of him is very much inaccurate, his Cached Skepticism of Cryonics is the only notable obstacle. I would appreciate any recommendations on which if any articles in particular would be best for initially getting through that.

My grandfather died several years ago, before I began to seriously consider cryonics. He deteriorated markedly as he approached death. Nevertheless, he was smart enough to want to be part of the new technologies "the kids were putting out these days." At age 90, with some help, he created a blog and posted this entry:

As my memory weakens, I no longer perform much, but I deeply enjoy life. My wife, Genie, and my three daughters help me a lot, with food, walks, talks, and gifts. I usually feel good. Many other people say and do nice things for me.

...

Life began as cells 3 ½ billion years ago and gradually spread out from one species to another. There is no evidence of any species living after death. Therefore, each human should enjoy life, itself. Long before our Earth formed, our Universe spread out 14 billion years ago, long after material existed, which may have been forever. On that basis, I think human lives are a result of amazing development. We can enjoy life deeply into old age and on almost to death. No human should weaken true enjoyment by physically attacking another human. A human may argue with another human with the purpose of keeping both lives enjoyable.

 

When approaching death, a person should overcome huge pain by mental concentration or medicine and enjoy the remainder of life. This can be done by listening to music, relatives, friends, reading, and other actions. Life can be pleasant to the end, or about to the end. Enjoy yourself. Be nice to others.

 

The unedited entry (still up, along with other postings to his blog) concerns the mental topics that were occupying him at the end of life: mainly birdwatching and overpopulation. I post it here as evidence that even a very old person, suffering the mental and physical burdens of advanced old age, can still enjoy themselves and value life.

From one perspective, it is the ramblings of an old man succumbing to dementia. From another, it is proof that life is never a thing to be easily surrendered.

Enjoy yourself. Be nice to others.

Over the past few months I've been doing a lot of reading about cryonics, and though I agree with the arguments of Eliezer Yudkowsky and Robin Hanson on the issue, I still feel uncomfortable about actually signing up. Upon reflection, my true rejection is my fear of the social cost of cryonics, i.e. being perceived as weird and completely incomprehensible by everyone around me. I've read the "Hostile Wife Phenomenon" article on Depressed Metabolism, the New York Times Magazine article on Robin Hanson's personal situation (as well as Robin's reply), and scores of comments on LessWrong, and it looks a lot of cryonicists do indeed experience the feeling that Eliezer describes in Lonely Dissent.

My concerns about the social cost of cryonics can be broken down into two categories:

• Loss of existing relationships with family, friends, etc. I value the relationships I currently have with my family and friends, and signing up for cryonics would jeopardize many of these relationships. Most of my friends and family members are not interested in rationality and would be completely baffled if I decided to sign up. Nonetheless, I do not want to lose these relationships, as they are currently an important part of my life; I would consider my life to be significantly worse than it is now if I had to sever a lot of these emotional ties.
• Increased difficulty of forming relationships in the future. I'm not particularly good at forming new relationships, and I'm very worried that signing up for cryonics will create an insurmountable social stigma that will make it nearly impossible for me to do so.

Overall, though, I have very little information about what the social cost of cryonics really is beyond a few scattered anecdotes and secondhand descriptions of cryonicists' lives. Ultimately, I don't really know how many of my fears would actually be realized if I signed up. This makes it difficult to for me to make a decision, as I am very risk-averse and I feel reluctant to choose something that could potentially make the next six or seven decades of my life miserable. As a result, I have decided to engage in some data collection.

To do so, I would like to hear about your experiences. If you are currently signed up for cryonics, I would very much appreciate it if you took a minute or two to describe the effects that signing up has had on your relationships and your social life in general. If you are not signed up, your feedback on this topic is still welcome. Links to articles would be good, but discussion of personal experiences would be better.

The podcast 'Stuff you should know' has done an episode on cryonics.

Available here: 

http://podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2011-08-30-sysk-cryonics.mp3?_kip_ipx=862998473-1315175433 

I don't know much about the subject, but what do people think of it as a depiction of cryonics in popular culture? 

From a GQ interview:

A while ago, a piece of gossip appeared in a British newspaper, alleging that Cowell had declared—while dining with the British prime minister at the time, Gordon Brown—that upon his death he plans to be frozen. Cowell tells me he doesn't recall this discussion ("I had dinner with him a couple of times, but I can't remember talking about that—that's probably why I wasn't invited back a third time") but agrees that, although he has yet to make the arrangements, this is indeed his plan.

"It's an insurance policy," he reasons. "If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. If it does work, I'll be happy. If it's possible, and I think it will be, why not have a second crack? Does that sound crazy? I think it's a good idea."

For your consideration, a psychology study as summarized by The Economist in "How dead is dead? Sometimes, those who have died seem more alive than those who have not":

"They first asked 201 people stopped in public in New York and New England to answer questions after reading one of three short stories. In all three, a man called David was involved in a car accident and suffered serious injuries. In one, he recovered fully. In another, he died. In the third, his entire brain was destroyed except for one part that kept him breathing. Although he was technically alive, he would never again wake up.

...each participant was asked to rate David’s mental capacities, including whether he could influence the outcome of events, know right from wrong, remember incidents from his life, be aware of his environment, possess a personality and have emotions. Participants used a seven-point scale to make these ratings, where 3 indicated that they strongly agreed that he could do such things...and -3 indicated that they strongly disagreed.

...the fully recovered David rated an average of +1.77 and the dead David -0.29. That score for the dead David was surprising enough, suggesting as it did a considerable amount of mental acuity in the dead. What was extraordinary, though, was the result for the vegetative David: -1.73. In the view of the average New Yorker or New Englander, the vegetative David was more dead [-1.73] than the version who was dead [-0.29].

...they ran a follow-up experiment which had two different descriptions of the dead David. One said he had simply passed away. The other directed the participant’s attention to the corpse. It read, “After being embalmed at the morgue, he was buried in the local cemetery. David now lies in a coffin underground.”...In this follow-up study participants were also asked to rate how religious they were.

Once again, the vegetative David was seen to have less mind than the David who had “passed away”. This was equally true, regardless of how religious a participant said he was. However, ratings of the dead David’s mind in the story in which his corpse was embalmed and buried varied with the participant’s religiosity. Irreligious participants gave the buried corpse about the same mental ratings as the vegetative patient (-1.51 and -1.64 respectively). Religious participants, however, continued to ascribe less mind to the irretrievably unconscious David than they did to his buried corpse (-1.57 and 0.59).

That those who believe in an afterlife ascribe mental acuity to the dead is hardly surprising. That those who do not are inclined to do so unless heavily prompted not to is curious indeed."

The study is "More dead than dead: Perceptions of persons in the persistent vegetative state":

Patients in persistent vegetative state (PVS) may be biologically alive, but these experiments indicate that people see PVS as a state curiously more dead than dead. Experiment 1 found that PVS patients were perceived to have less mental capacity than the dead. Experiment 2 explained this effect as an outgrowth of afterlife beliefs, and the tendency to focus on the bodies of PVS patients at the expense of their minds. Experiment 3 found that PVS is also perceived as “worse” than death: people deem early death better than being in PVS. These studies suggest that people perceive the minds of PVS patients as less valuable than those of the dead – ironically, this effect is especially robust for those high in religiosity.

Ed Yong points to another interesting study, the 2004 "The natural emergence of reasoning about the afterlife as a developmental regularity":

Participants were interviewed about the biological and psychological functioning of a dead agent. In Experiment 1, even 4- to 6-year-olds stated that biological processes ceased at death, although this trend was more apparent among 6- to 8-year-olds. In Experiment 2, 4- to 12-year-olds were asked about psychological functioning. The youngest children were equally likely to state that both cognitive and psychobiological states continued at death, whereas the oldest children were more likely to state that cognitive states continued. In Experiment 3, children and adults were asked about an array of psychological states. With the exception of preschoolers, who did not differentiate most of the psychological states, older children and adults were likely to attribute epistemic, emotional, and desire states to dead agents. These findings suggest that developmental mechanisms underlie intuitive accounts of dead agents' minds

Jach on Hacker News makes the obvious connection with cryonics; see also lukeprog's "Remind Physicalists They're Physicalists".

Tl;dr: Cryonics companies have a pre-written bottom line. If people believe cryonics has a reasonable chance of success, they are significantly morally obligated to form a charity that would give cryonics away, as such a charity would be far more effective in convincing, and by extension saving people, since it would have no incentive to pre-write a bottom line. Over time, such a charity would increase general demand for cryonics, bringing it into the mainstream and making traditional cryonics companies more successful.

Let us assume for the purposes of this post, as I'm sure many of you believe, cryonics stands a reasonable chance (Let's pick p = 0.05) of being successful. It seems pretty clear that you have a pretty strong moral obligation to attempt to get people signed up for cryonics. There is a lot of talk about things like Cryonics versus charity. Robin Hanson even has a post "Cryonics as Charity", although he means an entirely different thing than I do. But in searching, I was surprised not to find a post that asked this question: why isn't there a charity that provides cryonics to, for example, people that can't afford it? Or one offering it to the greatest minds of our time, in the hopes that they'll be around for all of our futures?

There's been a lot of speculation as to why cryonics isn't more popular. The answer, at least for me, is obvious. There's a tremendous dearth of reliable information on the subject. The fundamental problem with medicine is the information gap between consumer and provider - consumers don't have the scientific knowledge to make an informed purchase. But in conventional medicine, you can easily get a second opinion, whereas in cryonics, few people, from the media to medical professionals, take it seriously enough to offer a well thought out second opinion, even if that opinion is against it. And what information I have seen linked to on the subject is generally published by CI or Alcor. Ironically, when I asked for "unbiased" information on the matter, I got exactly what I wasn't looking for - information from a company that wants me to pay them, at minimum, $200,000. The result? An informational balance where one side presents no argument, and the other side presents an argument with a pre-written bottom line.

This is where the idea of a charity comes in. A charity would have no financial incentive to pre-write the bottom line, and is generally seen as a more reputable source of information, as it should be. Furthermore, it would help destigmatize cryonics, as part of the stigma (as I see it, I can't really tell you what gives me this impression) is that you've been "hoodwinked" by the companies. Obviously, it's not tenable for everyone to freeload their way to cryonics. But a charity would serve to bring cryonics into the mainstream and increase demand, providing a (more) neutral source of information. Which would, in time, make organizations like CI and Alcor far more popular.

I've run in to the argument that cryonics beats VillageReach on a simple "shut up and multiply" level, by assuming an infinity vs finite tradeoff. Having read the Fun Theory sequences, it struck me that this wasn't a reasonable assumption, so I sat down, re-read a few relevant posts, shut up, and multiplied.

In Continuous Improvement, Eliezer ballparks a good fun-theory life as having a maximum length of around 28,000 years. In Robin Hanson's Cryonics Probability Breakdown, he assigns cryonics a conjoint probability of about 6%. 28,000 * 0.06 gives us a net return of 1,680 expected years.

Full body suspension from the Cryonics Institute currently costs $28,000.

VillageReach, according to GiveWell, can save an infant's life for less than $1,000.

For the price of Cryonics, we thus save 28 lives. 1680 expected years, divided by 28, puts the break-even point at an average lifespan of 60 years for those infants saved. A quick peak at Wikipedia suggests that the average African life is under 60 years for the majority of the continent, although there are some important nuances to really get a full picture.

Obviously, these are rough numbers, and I doubt many people base their decisions solely on "years lived". I do find it rather interesting that cryonics is currently about on par with one of the most effective charities in the world on that metric, however :)

Today this girl I met comes to my place, allegedly to get some books about her new interests, singularity, immortalism, cryonics.

Actually, she wanted to ask me a question, a question about which I could use some rational opinion.

She says: "So, here is the real reason I came here. I'm thinking of making a documentary, a movie, and it would be about, well.... about you."

(I am shocked)

"So, yes, a movie about you, and the fact that you want to live forever, it would have interviews with friends, parents, girlfriend, and a lot with you" "What do you think?" 

(I sit down in the floor to think about it)

The conversation continues and I generally sense she wants to do something interesting, somewhat controversial, kind of humoristic, but at the same time striking some topics that are really unheard of around here (Brazil)

Now, I am looking for opinions. From an utilitarian perspective, and given that I am directing the Humanity+ or Transhumanist group of Brazilians, should I go with it?   My concern is basically not about me, but about how will a movie about me influence, positively or negatively, the growing H+ movement in Brazil, given the inferential distances, prejudices, and mysterianism that might surround the whole interaction between the movie's memes, and the spectator's memes. 

(from here below, the translation is google tradutor, not mine)

Positive aspects: The film would be seen at festivals, and at least a few hundred to tens of thousands of people would see it. These people might be intrigued by the prospect of living much, and it could become a platform for attracting people to transhumanismolatino (and eventually to other stuff, like GWWC and Singinst, but that is a side dish).

It would be a good opportunity to bring out various issues that in Brazil have been neglected until now. (cryonics, transhumanism, biological immortality, singularity)

Reinforce my good habits, like eating healthily, work more earnestly, etc ...

Negative aspects: it may end up passing a bad image of me (imagine the mythical average person, not that smart, somewhat religious,  seeing a  guy who wants to live forever in a video, is very strange) and therefore my bad image would spread to stuff I represent, like the Provisional Team, the Singularity Institute, Transhumanismo Latino, etc......

May defame my image with women (who would date an immortalist after all .....)

 I may become a stigma simplified, I  would just be classified as an immortalist, and no other characteristics will ever cross the knowledge of people, they always see me just like that. And the institutions that I represent / drive, would suffer accordingly.

I have put up a poll in the comment section down here, so that I can know your opinion, please take the time to vote, thank you.

Ben Best: Robert Ettinger deanimated today at around 4pm Eastern Time. He was under hospice care and had an ice bath sitting by his bedside.

Obituaries: Mike Darwin, Washington Post, Telegraph

Wikipedia

Mike Darwin has posted some financial history of Alcor in a post, "The Armories of the Latter Day Laputas, Part 5". While there were some errors (see the comments), Darwin has apparently corrected them.

It makes interesting reading in general. It's not a straight analysis of filings like Brandon's "SIAI - An Examination", but more of a financial history (eg. the graph of revenues vs expenses etc.)

It seems that the non-profit Stasis Foundation is planning to build a cryopreservation "castle" (dubbed the "Timeship") in the San Antonio area.  My parents pointed me to this article, which was carried in the Austin American-Statesman.  I can't find a site for the Stasis Foundation; (here's the Google search and here's the Timeship propaganda page).  The article discusses the effort in the context of a potential loss of tax exemption for not moving the project forward in a timely manner.

So is anyone familiar with this group?  What advantages do they seek by having this facility that can't be achieved with existing cryonics non-profits?

I’m hoping to sign up for cryonics when I can afford it, and I’m not sure which agency and treatment plan to get.

As of this Cryonics institute document, whole-body suspension with Alcor costs $200,000. Neurosuspension costs $80,000. With the cheaper but possibly lower quality Cryonics Institute, whole-body suspension costs $28,000 and they don’t do neurosuspension. American Cryonics Society is in between, costing $155,000 (again, no neurosuspension option).

What are the upsides and downsides of these options, in the eyes of people who are signed up, considering signing up, or know a lot about the subject? Also, I know there are some people here who have looked at cryonics and found it a bad decision. Input from them is also welcome.

http://www.dailycamera.com/boulder-county-news/ci_18282009?source=most_viewed 

I'd imagine the efficacy is halfway between proper cryonics and embalming and burying; the more interesting part may be the festival.  Nederland is a small town 20 miles from Boulder, CO.  I doubt the festival attendees are cryonics advocates, but they don't seem prone to the negative associations corpsicles often raise.  Perhaps it's just because Boulder, Colorado is full of weirdos, but I wonder if there are more exploitable effects in play.

This TED talk on suspended animation by Mark Roth captivated me when I first saw it last year, and I have been eagerly trying to follow developments on the subject ever since.

My question for the lesswrong crowd is, if suspended animation were available today in such a way that you could "skip" years, decades or even centuries in a de-animated state while not aging or aging only slightly, would you go for it? Would it be the rational thing to do, or would it be more rational to wait until you really needed it, for example, when you are nearing end of life or if you get diagnosed with an incurable, terminal illness?

What about friends and family? I can see people not wanting to use it because it would mean "waking up" in a world where the people they care about no longer exist. This is also an issue with cryonics, and I believe was the main reason Heinlein chose to be cremated rather than cryopreserved. However, the moral dilemma is more complicated, because with cryonics, it happens after you're dead, but with suspended animation, it must be done while you're still alive, so unless you get de-animated towards the end of your life, you've made a conscious decision to spend your remaining time on Earth in the future with other people rather than with those around you in the present. However, I could also see it being easier to sell people on than cryonics, if it worked as advertised, because it would be more of a sure thing, and might even be cheaper. I could even see it becoming so popular that a large percentage of the population opts out of their present life and the problems it presents them, hoping to "sleep" their way to a better future, causing problems of population imbalance.

I'm bringing this subject up here because I find the concept fascinating, and it doesn't seem to get nearly as much attention as cryonics, yet it will be much more disruptive if/when it ever arrives.

[Edit: I did not mean to post this, just save it as a draft (I only remember pressing the 'save and continue' button, not the 'submit' button. That shouldn't've posted it, right?).

Anyway, that's why it dissolves into slightly cryptic point form notes to myself at the end. Don't have the time right the now to flesh it out, so I'm just leaving it as is.]

I just noticed that there is no facebook group with this aim. I would like to create one. I feel that it *might* be a way to finally get enough 'special interest/human rights' force concentrated on the problem to fix it, if the presentation is done well.

Would anyone like to help me write the group description and accompanying information, optimizing for effectiveness?

Such a group would have two main audiences, and two main purposes:

1 - For those who already understand and support cryonics, it would be a means to coordinate action and share information.

2 - For those who have never really thought about cryonics before, but may well be open to the idea, it would serve as an introduction and hopefully cause them to join the first group.

As regards the first group, the only major point to stress that springs to my mind is the importance of keeping their *effectiveness* foremost in mind when taking their actions, which mostly just means reminding them to be very friendly, polite, and pleasant while pestering and trying to educate the bureaucrats and politicians.

But for the second group, well, I don't need to describe the difficulty in leading people to understanding across this particular inferential distance. How to do it in a snappy, engaging way?

- The essential human issues at the root here: Hope and love, and freedom.

- That the group is intended for people in BC and people with friends and family here put in danger by the law.

- technical skepticism

- moral confusion

- image. Narrative, short story

Resources I am thinking of drawing on are:

Scientists' Open Letter on Cryonics

Ben Best's FAQs

This page on BC's anti-cryonics law at the Canadian Cryonics Society

This article in the Tyee

letter to mom after Sandy's death

Next week I'll be attending the second annual Young Cryonicists conference, which Eliezer attended before writing Normal Cryonics. I expected there to be discussion about it on lesswrong, but there hasn't been, so here it is.

• Who else is going? Is EY going? 
• What do you expect to get out of it?
• How can we use it to maximize winning?

Reference;

The most official thing I can find about the conference. (PDF)

Normal Cryonics by Eliezer Yudkowsky on Less Wrong