I've been watching Steven Universe with my fiancee (a children's cartoon on Cartoon Network by Rebecca Sugar), and it wasn't until I got to Season 3 that I realized there's been a cryonics metaphor running in the background since the very first episode. If you want to introduce your kids to the idea of cryonics, this series seems like a spectacularly good way to do it.

If you don't want any spoilers, just go watch it, then come back.

Otherwise, here's the metaphor I'm seeing, and why it's great:

• In the very first episode, we find out that the main characters are a group called the Crystal Gems, who fight 'gem monsters'. When they defeat a monster, a gem is left behind, which they lock in a bubble-forcefield and store in their headquarters.

• One of the Crystal Gems is injured in a training accident, and we find out that their bodies are just projections; each Crystal Gem has a gem located somewhere on their body, which contains their minds. So long as their gem isn't damaged, they can project a new body after some time to recover. So we already have the insight that minds and bodies are separate.

• This is driven home by a second episode where one of the Crystal Gems has their crystal cracked; this is actually dangerous to their mind, not just body, and is treated as a dire emergency instead of merely an inconvenience.

• Then we eventually find out that the gem monsters are actually corrupted members of the same species as the Crystal Gems. They are 'bubbled' and stored in the temple in hopes of eventually restoring them to sanity and their previous forms.

• An attempt is made to cure one of the monsters, which doesn't fully succeed, but at least restores them to sanity. This allows them to remain unbubbled and to be reunited with their old comrades (who are also corrupted). This was the episode where I finally made the connection to cryonics.

• The Crystal Gems are also revealed to be over 5000 years old, and effectively immortal. They don't make a big deal out of this; for them, this is totally normal.

• This also implies that they've made no progress in curing the gem monsters in 5000 years, but that doesn't stop them from preserving them anyway.

• Finally, a secret weapon is revealed which is capable of directly shattering gems (thus killing the target permanently), but the use of it is rejected as unethical.

So, all in all, you have a series where when someone is hurt or sick in a way that you can't help, you preserve their mind in a safe way until you can figure out a way to help them. Even your worst enemy deserves no less.

Also, Steven Universe has an entire episode devoted to mindfulness meditation.  

OK, slight disclaimer, this is a bit of a joke article inspired by me watching a few recent videos and news reports about cryonics. Nevertheless, there is a serious side to it. 

Many people claim that it is irrational to sign up for cryonics, and getting into the nitty gritty with them about how likely it is to work seems to turn into a series of small skirmishes with no particular "win condition". Opponents will not say,

"OK, I will value my life at $X and if you can convince me that (cryonics success probability)*$X is greater than the $1/day fee, I will concede the argument".

Rather, they will retreat to a series of ever harder to falsify positions, usually ending up at a position which is so vague that it is basically pure mood affiliation and acts as a way to stop the conversation rather than as a true objection. I have seen it many times with friends. 

So, I propose that before you debate someone about cryonics, you should first try to sign then up for inverse cryonics. Inverse cryonics is a very simple procedure, fully scientifically tested that anyone can sign up for today, as long as they have a reasonably well-off benefactor to take the "other side" of the bet. Let me explain.

The inverse cryonics patient takes a simple revolver with 6 barrels, with one bullet loaded and spins the barrel on the gun, then shoots themselves once in the head¹. If the inverse cryonaut is unlucky enough to shoot themselves with a barrel containing a real bullet, they will blow their brains out and die instantly and permanently. However, if they are lucky, the benefactor must pay them $1 per day for the rest of their lives. 

Obviously you can vary the risk, rewards and timings of inverse cryonics. The death event could be postponed for 20 years, the risk could be cranked up or down, and the reward could be increased or decreased or paid out as a future discounted lump sum. The key is that signing up for inverse cryonics should be mathematically identical to not signing up for cryonics.

As a baseline, cryonics seems to cost ~$1/day for the rest of your life in order to avoid a ~1/10 chance of dying². Most people³ would not play ~10-barrel Russian Roulette for a $1/day stipend, even with delayed death or an instant ~$50k payout. 

In fact,

• if you believe that cryonics costs ~$1/day for the rest of your life in order to avoid a ~1/10 chance of dying⁴  and
• you are offered 11-barrel Russian roulette for that same ~$1/day as a stipend, or even an instant $50k payout

Of course, I'm sure opponents of cryonics won't bite this particular bullet, but at the very least it may provide an extra intuition pump to move people away from objecting to cryonics because it's the "risky" option. 

Comments and criticisms welcome. 

1. Depending on the specific deal, more than six barrels could be used, or several identical guns could be used where only one barrel from one gun contains a real bullet, allowing one to achieve a reasonable range of probabilities for "losing" at inverse cryonics from 1 in 6 to perhaps one in 60 with ten guns. 

2. And pushing the probability of cryonics working down much further seems to be very hard to defend scientifically, not that people haven't tried. It becomes especially hard when you assume that the cryonics organizations stick around for ~40 years, and society sticks around without major disruptions in order for a young potential cryonaut who signs up today to actually pay their life insurance fees every day until they die. 

3. Most intelligent, sane, relatively well-off people in the developed world, i.e. the kind of people who reject cryonics. 

4. And you believe that the life you miss out on in the future will be as good, or better than, the life you are about to live from today until your natural death at a fixed age of, say, 75. 

The Brain Preservation Foundation’s Small Mammalian Brain Prize has been won with fantastic preservation of a whole rabbit brain using a new fixative+slow-vitrification process.

• BPF announcement (21CM’s announcement)
• evaluation

• The process was published as “Aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation”, McIntyre & Fahy 2015 (mirror)

  We describe here a new cryobiological and neurobiological technique, aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation (ASC), which demonstrates the relevance and utility of advanced cryopreservation science for the neurobiological research community. ASC is a new brain-banking technique designed to facilitate neuroanatomic research such as connectomics research, and has the unique ability to combine stable long term ice-free sample storage with excellent anatomical resolution. To demonstrate the feasibility of ASC, we perfuse-fixed rabbit and pig brains with a glutaraldehyde-based fixative, then slowly perfused increasing concentrations of ethylene glycol over several hours in a manner similar to techniques used for whole organ cryopreservation. Once 65% w/v ethylene glycol was reached, we vitrified brains at −135 °C for indefinite long-term storage. Vitrified brains were rewarmed and the cryoprotectant removed either by perfusion or gradual diffusion from brain slices. We evaluated ASC-processed brains by electron microscopy of multiple regions across the whole brain and by Focused Ion Beam Milling and Scanning Electron Microscopy (FIB-SEM) imaging of selected brain volumes. Preservation was uniformly excellent: processes were easily traceable and synapses were crisp in both species. Aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation has many advantages over other brain-banking techniques: chemicals are delivered via perfusion, which enables easy scaling to brains of any size; vitrification ensures that the ultrastructure of the brain will not degrade even over very long storage times; and the cryoprotectant can be removed, yielding a perfusable aldehyde-preserved brain which is suitable for a wide variety of brain assays…We have shown that both rabbit brains (10 g) and pig brains (80 g) can be preserved equally well. We do not anticipate that there will be significant barriers to preserving even larger brains such as bovine, canine, or primate brains using ASC.

  (They had problems with 2 pigs and got 1 pig brain successfully cryopreserved but it wasn’t part of the entry. I’m not sure why: is that because the Large Mammalian Brain Prize is not yet set up?)
• previous discussion: Mikula’s plastination came close but ultimately didn’t seem to preserve the whole brain when applied.
• commentary: Alcor, Robin Hanson, John Smart, Evidence-Based Cryonics, Vice, Pop Sci
  

• donation link

To summarize it, you might say that this is a hybrid of current plastination and vitrification methods, where instead of allowing slow plastination (with unknown decay & loss) or forcing fast cooling (with unknown damage and loss), a staged approach is taking: a fixative is injected into the brain first to immediately lock down all proteins and stop all decay/change, and then it is leisurely cooled down to be vitrified.

This is exciting progress because the new method may wind up preserving better than either of the parent methods, but also because it gives much greater visibility into the end-results: the aldehyde-vitrified brains can be easily scanned with electron microscopes and the results seen in high detail, showing fantastic preservation of structure, unlike regular vitrification where the scans leave opaque how good the preservation was. This opacity is one reason that as Mike Darwin has pointed out at length on his blog and jkaufman has also noted that we cannot be confident in how well ALCOR or CI’s vitrification works - because if it didn’t, we have little way of knowing.

EDIT: BPF’s founder Ken Hayworth (Reddit account) has posted a piece, arguing that ALCOR & CI cannot be trusted to do procedures well and that future work should be done via rigorous clinical trials and only then rolled out. “Opinion: The prize win is a vindication of the idea of cryonics, not of unaccountable cryonics service organizations”

…“Should cryonics service organizations immediately start offering this new ASC procedure to their ‘patients’?” My personal answer (speaking for myself, not on behalf of the BPF) has been a steadfast NO. It should be remembered that these same cryonics service organizations have been offering a different procedure for years. A procedure that was not able to demonstrate, to even my minimal expectations, preservation of the brain’s neural circuitry. This result, I must say, surprised and disappointed me personally, leading me to give up my membership in one such organization and to become extremely skeptical of all since. Again, I stress, current cryonics procedures were NOT able to meet our challenge EVEN UNDER IDEAL LABORATORY CONDITIONS despite being offered to paying customers for years[1]. Should we really expect that these same organizations can now be trusted to further develop and properly implement such a new, independently-invented technique for use under non-ideal conditions?

Let’s step back for a moment. A single, independently-researched, scientific publication has come out that demonstrates a method of structural brain preservation (ASC) compatible with long-term cryogenic storage in animal models (rabbit and pig) under ideal laboratory conditions (i.e. a healthy living animal immediately being perfused with fixative). Should this one paper instantly open the floodgates to human application? Under untested real-world conditions where the ‘patient’ is either terminally ill or already declared legally dead? Should it be performed by unlicensed persons, in unaccountable organizations, operating outside of the traditional medical establishment with its checks and balances designed to ensure high standards of quality and ethics? To me, the clear answer is NO. If this was a new drug for cancer therapy, or a new type of heart surgery, many additional steps would be expected before even clinical trials could start. Why should our expectations be any lower for this?

The fact that the ASC procedure has won the brain preservation prize should rightly be seen as a vindication of the central idea of cryonics –the brain’s delicate circuitry underlying memory and personality CAN in fact be preserved indefinitely, potentially serving as a lifesaving bridge to future revival technologies. But, this milestone should certainly not be interpreted as a vindication of the very different cryonics procedures that are practiced on human patients today. And it should not be seen as a mandate for more of the same but with an aldehyde stabilization step casually tacked on. …

Warning: people will be trying to be pessimistic here.  Don't read this if you don't want to be reminded of scary outcomes.

Request: if you get an idea that you think might be too scary to post publicly even under the above warning, but you are willing to send it to me in a private message to aid in my personal decision-making, then please do :)

Motivation:

I like cryonics.  According to my parents and grandmother, I started talking about building an AI to help with medical research to revive frozen dead people when I was about 10 years old, and my memory agrees.  I began experimenting with freeing and unfreezing insects, and figured based on some positive results that it was physically possible to preserve life in a frozen state.  Cool!

But now that I'm in middle of convincing some folks I know to sign up for cryonics, I want to do due-diligence on some of the vague, hard-to-verbalize aversions they have to doing it.  This way, I can help them plan contingencies for / hedges against those aversions if possible, thereby making cryonics more viable for them, and maybe avoid accidentally persuading people do cryonics when it really isn't right for them (yes, I think that can actually happen).

There's already been a post on far negative outcomes, and another one on why cryonics maybe isn't worth it.  But what I really want to do here is conduct an interactive survey to compute which disutilities should be taken most seriously when talking to a new person about cryonics, to avoid accidentally persuading them into making a wrong-for-them decision.

And for that, what I really want to ask is:

 What's the most negative*plausible cryonics-works story that you know of?

Examples:

(1) A well-meaning but slightly-too-obsessed cryonics scientist wakes up some semblance of me in a semi-conscious virtual delirium for something like 1000 very unpleasant subjective years of tinkering to try recovering me.  She eventually quits, and I never wake up again.

(2) A rich sadist finds it somehow legally or logistically easier to lay hands on the brains/minds of cryonics patients than of living people, and runs some virtual torture scenarios on me where I'm not allowed to die for thousands of subjective years or more.

I think on reflection I'd consider (1) to be around 10x and maybe 100x more likely than (2)*, but depending on your preferences, you might find (2) to be more than 100x worse than (1), enough to make it account for the biggest chunk of disutility that can be attributed to any particular simple story or story-feature where cryonics works.

[* I would have said (1) was definitely more than 100x more likely before so many of my female friends have, over the years, mentioned that they were subject to some pretty scary sexual violence at some point in their dating lives.]

(Note: There's a separate question of whether the outcome is positive enough to be worth the money, which I'd rather discuss in a different thread.)

How to participate: 

• Top-level comments = stories.  Post your most negative*plausible story or story-feature as a top-level comment.
• A top-level upvote shall mean "essentially in my top-three".   Upvote stories that you'd consider essentially the same as one of your top-two stories, ranked by negativity*probability.  This means you can vote more than three times if your top stories get represented in variety of ways, so don't be shy.
• Lower-level comments = discussion!  Let's disagree about the relative probabilities and negativities of things and maybe change some of our minds!

Thanks for playing :)

PS I hope folks use these ideas to come up with ways to decrease the likelihood that cryonics leads to negative outcomes, and not to cause or experience premature fears that derail productive conversations.  So, please don't share/post this in ways where you think it might have the latter effect, but rather, use it as a part of a sane and thorough evaluation of all the pros and cons that one should reasonably consider in deciding whether cryonics working is on-net a positive outcome.

ETA -- What not to post:

Some non-examples of what this survey should contain...

• Examples where you don't get revived in any way.  These scenarios factor into the "will cryonics work for me" question, a question of probability that does not depend on your values, which I'd prefer to discuss is a separate thread because probabilities are easier to converge on without distracting ourselves with values questions. 

Edited nearly a year later to clarify: dry ice cryonics probably won't work, for reasons hinted at in the post, and stated by Gav in the comments, regarding nanoscale ice crystals. It seems like there may be less of a tradeoff between fracturing and having ice crystals now than there used to be, especially if newer approaches involving e.g. cryonics with persufflation end up working well in humans.

This post is a spot-check of Alcor's claim that cryonics can't be carried out at dry ice temperatures, and a follow-up to this comment. This article isn't up to my standards, yet I'm posting it now, rather than polishing it more first, because I strongly fear that I might never get around to doing so later if I put it off. Despite my expertise in chemistry, I don't like chemistry, so writing this took a lot of willpower. Thanks to Hugh Hixon from Alcor for writing "How Cold is Cold Enough?".

Summary

More research (such as potentially hiring someone to find the energies of activation for lots of different degradative reactions which happen after death) is needed to determine if long-term cryopreservation at the temperature of dry ice is reasonable, or even preferable to storage in liquid nitrogen.

On the outside view, I'm not very confident that dry ice cryonics will end up being superior to liquid nitrogen cryonics. Still, it's very hard to say one way or the other a priori. There are certain factors that I can't easily quantify that suggest that cryopreservation with dry ice might be preferable to cryopreservation with liquid nitrogen (specifically, fracturing, as well as the fact that the Arrhenius equation doesn't account for poor stirring), and other such factors that suggest preservation in liquid nitrogen to be preferable (specifically, that being below the glass transition temperature prevents movement/chemical reactions, and that nanoscale ice crystals, which can grow during rewarming, can form around the glass transition temperature).

(I wonder if cryoprotectant solutions with different glass transition temperatures might avoid either of the two problems mentioned in the last sentence for dry ice cryonics? I just heard about the issue of nanoscale ice crystals earlier today, so my discussion of them is an afterthought.)

Motivation

Using dry ice to cryopreserve people for future revival could be cheaper than using liquid nitrogen for the same purpose (how much would using dry ice cost?). Additionally, lowering the cost of cryonics could increase the number of people who sign up for cryonics-- which would, in turn, give us a better chance at e.g. legalizing the initiation of the first phases of cryonics for terminal patients just before legal death.

This document by Alcor suggests that, for neuro and whole-body patients, an initial deposit of 6,600 or 85,438 USD into the patient's trust fund is, respectively, more than enough to generate enough interest to safely cover a patient's annual storage cost indefinitely. Since around 36% of this amount is spent on liquid nitrogen, this means that completely eliminating the cost of replenishing the liquid nitrogen in the dewars would reduce the up-front cost that neuro and whole-body patients with Alcor would pay by around 2,350 or 31,850 USD, respectively. This puts a firm upper bound on the amount that could be saved by Alcor patients by switching to cryopreservation with dry ice, since some amount would need to be spent each year on purchasing additional dry ice to maintain the temperature at which patients are stored. (A small amount could probably be saved on the cost which comes from cooling patients down immediately after death, as well).

This LW discussion is also relevant to storage costs in cryonics. I'm not sure how much CI spends on storage.

Relevant Equations and Their Limitations

Alcor's "How Cold is Cold Enough?" is the only article which I've found that takes an in-depth look at whether storage of cryonics patients at temperatures above the boiling point of liquid nitrogen would be feasible. It's a generally well-written article, though it makes an assumption regarding activation energy that I'll be forced to examine later on.

The article starts off by introducing the Arrhenius equation, which is used to determine the rate constant of a chemical reaction at a given temperature. The equation is written:

k = A * e^(-E_a/RT)          (1)

Where:

• k is the rate constant you solve for (the units vary between reactions)
• A is a constant you know (same units as k)
• E_a is the activation energy (kJ/mol)
• R is the ideal gas constant (kJ/K*mol)
• T is the temperature (K)

I wrote a blog post arguing that people sign up for cryo more for peace of mind than for immortality. This suggests that cryo organizations should market towards the former desire than the latter (you can think of it as marketing to near mode rather than far mode, in Hansonian terms).

Perhaps we've been selling cryonics wrong. I'm signed up and feel like the reason I should have for signing up is that cryonics buys me a small, but non-zero chance at living forever. However, for years this should didn't actually result in me signing up. Recently, though, after being made aware of this dissonance between my words and actions, I finally signed up. I'm now very glad that I did. But it's not because I now have a shot at everlasting life.

http://specterdefied.blogspot.com/2015/06/a-cryo-membership-buys-peace-of-mind.html

For those signed up already, does peace-of-mind resonate as a benefit of your membership?

If you are not a cryonics member, what would make you decide that it is a good idea?

Brain Preservation Foundation President Kenneth Hayworth just wrote a synopsis of the recent ongoings from the major two competitors for the BPF prizes. Here is the summary: 

Brain Preservation Prize competitor Shawn Mikula just published his whole mouse brain electron microscopy protocol in Nature Methods (paper, BPF interview), putting him close to winning the mouse phase of our prize.

Brain Preservation Prize competitor 21st Century Medicine has developed a new “Aldehyde-Stabilized Cryopreservation” technique–preliminary results show good ultrastructure preservation even after storage of a whole rabbit brain at -135 degrees C.

This work was funded in part from donations from LW users. In particular, a grant to support the work of LW user Robert McIntyre at 21st Century Medicine that the BPF was able to provide has been instrumental. 

In order to continue this type of research and to bolster it, BPF welcomes your support in a variety of different ways, including awareness-raising, donations, and volunteering. Please reach out if you would like to volunteer, or you can PM me and I will help put you in touch. And if you have any suggestions for the BPF, please feel free to discuss them in the comments below. 

I wrote an article about the process of signing up for cryo since I couldn't find any such accounts online. If you have questions about the sign-up process, just ask.

A few months ago, I signed up for Alcor's brain-only cryopreservation. The entire process took me 11 weeks from the day I started till the day I received my medical bracelet (the thing that’ll let paramedics know that your dead body should be handled by Alcor). I paid them $90 for the application fee. From now on, every year I’ll pay $530 for Alcor membership fees, and also pay $275 for my separately purchased life insurance.

http://specterdefied.blogspot.com/2015/04/how-to-sign-up-for-alcor-cryo.html

Abstract: in this post I propose a protocol for cryonic preservation (with the central idea of using high pressure to prevent water from expanding rather than highly toxic cryoprotectants), which I think has a chance of being non-destructive enough for us to be able to preserve and then resuscitate an organism with modern technologies. In addition, I propose a simplified experimental protocol for a shrimp (or other small model organism (building a large pressure chamber is hard) capable of surviving in very deep and cold waters; shrimp is a nice trade-off between the depth of habitat and the ease of obtaining them on market), which is simple enough to be doable in a small lab or well-equipped garage setting.

Are there obvious problems with this, and how can they be addressed?

Is there a chance to pitch this experiment to a proper academic institution, or garage it is?

Originally posted here.

I do think that the odds of ever developing advanced nanomachines and/or brain scanning on molecular level plus algorithms for reversing information distortion - everything you need to undo the damage from conventional cryonic preservation and even to some extent that of brain death, according to its modern definition, if wasn't too late when the brain was preserved - for currently existing cryonics to be a bet worth taking. This is dead serious, and it's an actionable item.

Less of an action item: what if the future generations actually build quantum Bayesian superintelligence, close enough in its capabilities to Solomonoff induction, at which point even a mummified brain or the one preserved in formalin would be enough evidence to restore its original state? Or what if they invent read-only time travel, and make backups of everyone's mind right before they died (at which point it becomes indistinguishable from the belief in afterlife existing right now)? Even without time travel, they can just use a Universe-sized supercomputer to simulate every singe human physically possible, and naturally of of them is gonna be you. But aside from the obvious identity issues (and screw the timeless identity), that relies on unknown unknowns with uncomputable probabilities, and I'd like to have as few leaps of faith and quantum suicides in my life as possible.

So although vitrification right after diagnosed brain death relies on far smaller assumptions, and if totally worth doing - let me reiterate that: go sign up for cryonics - it'd be much better if we had preservation protocols so non-destructive that we could actually freeze a living human, and then bring them back alive. If nothing else, that would hugely increase the public outreach, grant the patient (rather than cadaver) status to the preserved, along with the human rights, get it recognized as a medical procedure covered by insurance or single payer, allow doctors to initiate the preservation of a dying patient before the brain death (again: I think everything short of information-theoretic death should potentially be reversible, but why take chances?), allow suffering patient opt for preservation rather than euthanasia (actually, I think it should be done right now: why on earth would anyone allow a person to do something that's guaranteed to kill them, but not allowed to do something that maybe will kill, or maybe will give the cure?), or even allow patients suffering from degrading brain conditions (e.g. Alzheimer's) to opt for preservation before their memory and personality are permanently destroyed.

Let's fix cryonics! First of all, why can't we do it on living organisms? Because of heparin poisoning - every cryoprotectant efficient enough to prevent the formation of ice crystals is a strong enough poison to kill the organism (leave alone that we can't even saturate the whole body with it - current technologies only allow to do it for the brain alone). But without cryoprotectants the water will expand upon freezing, and break the cells. But there's another way to prevent this. Under pressure above 350 MPa water slightly shrinks upon freezing rather than expanding:

So that's basically that: the key idea is to freeze (and keep) everything under pressure. Now, there are some tricks to that too.

It's not easy to put basically any animal, especially a mammal, under 350 MPa (which is 3.5x higher than in Mariana Trench). At this point even Trimix becomes toxic. Basically the only remaining solution is total liquid ventilation, which has one problem: it has never been applied successfully to a human. There's one fix to that I see: as far as I can tell, no one has ever attempted to do perform it under high pressure, and the attempts were basically failing because of the insufficient solubility of oxygen and carbon dioxide in perfluorocarbons. Well then, let's increase the pressure! Namely, go to 3 MPa on Trimix, which is doable, and only then switch to TLV, whose efficiency is improved by the higher gas solubility under high pressure. But there's another solution too. If you just connect a cardiopulmonary bypass (10 hours should be enough for the whole procedure), you don't need the surrounding liquid to even be breathable - it can just be saline. CPB also solves the problem of surviving the period after the cardiac arrest (which will occur at around 30 centigrade) but before the freezing happens - you can just keep the blood circulating and delivering oxygen.

Speaking of hypoxia, even with the CPB it's still a problem. You positively don't want the blood to circulate when freezing starts, lest it act like an abrasive water cutter. It's not that much of a problem under near-freezing temperatures, but still. Fortunately, this effect can be mitigated by administering insulin first (yay, it's the first proper academic citation in this post! Also yay, I thought about this before I even discovered that it's actually true). This makes sense: if oxygen is primarily used to metabolize glucose, less glucose means less oxygen consumed, and less damage done by hypoxia. Then there's another thing: on the phase diagram you can see that before going into the area of high temperature ice at 632 MPa, freezing temperature actually dips down to roughly -30 centigrade at 209~350 MPa. That would allow to really shut down metabolism for good when water is still liquid, and blood can be pumped by the CPB. From this point we have two ways. First, we can do the normal thing, and start freezing very slowly, so minimize the formation of ice crystals (even though they're smaller than the original water volume, they may still be sharp). Second, we can increase the pressure. That would lead to near-instantaneous freezing everywhere, thus completely eliminating the problem of hypoxia - before the freezing, blood still circulated, and freezing is very quick - way faster than can ever be achieved even by throwing a body into liquid helium under normal pressure. Video evidence suggests that quick freezing of water leads to the formation of a huge number of crystals, which is bad, but I don't know near-instantaneous freezing from supercooled state and near-instantaneous freezing upon raising the pressure will lead to the same effect. More experiments are needed, preferably not on humans.

So here is my preservation protocol:

1. Anesthetize a probably terminally ill, but still conscious person.
2. Connect them to a cardiopulmonary bypass.
3. Replacing their blood with perfluorohexane is not necessary, since we seem to be already doing a decent job at having medium-term (several days) cardiopulmonary bypasses, but that could still help.
4. Submerge them in perfluorohexane, making sure that no air bubbles are left.
5. Slowly raise the ambient pressure to 350 MPa (~3.5kBar) without stopping the bypass.
6. Apply a huge dose of insulin to reduce all their metabolic processes.
7. Slowly cool them to -30 centigrade (at which point, given such pressure, water is still liquid), while increasing the dose of insulin, and raising the oxygen supply to the barely subtoxic level.
8. Slowly raise the pressure to 1 GPa (~10kBar), at which point the water solidifies, but does so with shrinking rather than expanding. Don't cutoff the blood circulation until the moment when ice crystals starts forming in the blood/perfluorohexane flow.
9. Slowly lower the temperature to -173 centigrade or lower, as you wish.

And then back:

But let's start with something easy and small, like a shrimp. They already live in water, so there's no need to figure out the protocol for putting them into liquid. And they're already adapted to live under high pressure (no swim bladders or other cavities). And they're already adapted to live in cold water, so they should be expected to survive further cooling.

Small ones can be about 1 inch big, so let's be safe and use a 5cm-wide cylinder. To form ice III we need about 350MPa, which gives us 350e6 * 3.14 * 0.025^2 / 9.8 = 70 tons or roughly 690kN of force. Applying it directly or with a lever is unreasonable, since 70 tons of bending force is a lot even for steel, given the 5cm target. Block and tackle system is probably a good solution - actually, two of them, on each side of a beam used for compression, so we have 345 kN per system. And it looks like you can buy 40~50 ton manual hoists from alibaba, though I have no idea about their quality.

I'm not sure to which extent Pascal's law applies to solids, but if it does, the whole setup can be vastly optimized by creating a bottle neck for the pistol. One problem is that we can no longer assume that water in completely incompressible - it had to be compressed to about 87% its original volume - but aside from that, 350MPa per a millimeter thick rod is just 28kg. To compress a 0.05m by 0.1m cylinder to 87% its original volume we need to pump extra 1e-4 m^3 of water there, which amounts to 148 meters of movement, which isn't terribly good. 1cm thick rod, on the other hand, would require almost 3 tons of force, but will move only 1.5 meters. Or the problem of applying the constant pressure can be solved by enclosing the water in a plastic bag, and filling the rest of chamber with a liquid with a lower freezing point, but the same density. Thus, it is guaranteed that all the time it takes the water to freeze, it is under uniform external pressure, and then it just had nowhere to go.

Alternatively, one can just buy a 90'000 psi pump and 100'000 psi tubes and vessels, but let's face it: it they don't even list the price on their website, you probably don't even wanna know it. And since no institutions that can afford this thing seem to be interested in cryonics research, we'll have to stick to makeshift solutions (until at least the shrimp thing works, which would probably give in a publication in Nature, and enough academic recognition for proper research to start).

Content note: discussion of things that are worse than death

Over the past few years, a few people have claimed rejection of cryonics due to concerns that they might be revived into a world that they preferred less than being dead or not existing. For example, lukeprog pointed this out in a LW comment here, and Julia Galef expressed similar sentiments in a comment on her blog here. 

I use brain preservation rather than cryonics here, because it seems like these concerns are technology-platform agnostic.

To me one solution is that it seems possible to have an "out-clause": circumstances under which you'd prefer to have your preservation/suspension terminated. 

Here's how it would work: you specify, prior to entering biostasis, circumstances in which you'd prefer to have your brain/body be taken out of stasis. Then, if those circumstances are realized, the organization carries out your request. 

This almost certainly wouldn't solve all of the potential bad outcomes, but it ought to help some. Also, it requires that you enumerate some of the circumstances in which you'd prefer to have your suspension terminated. 

While obvious, it seems worth pointing out that there's no way to decrease the probability of worse-than-death outcomes to 0%. Although this also is the case for currently-living people (i.e. people whose brains are not necessarily preserved could also experience worse-than-death outcomes and/or have their lifespan extended against their wishes). 

For people who are concerned about this, I have three main questions: 

1) Do you think that an opt-out clause is a useful-in-principle way to address your concerns?

2) If no to #1, is there some other mechanism that you could imagine which would work?

3) Can you enumerate some specific world-states that you think could lead to revival in a worse-than-death state? (Examples: UFAI is imminent, or a malevolent dictator's army is about to take over the world.) 

What are the best options for cryonics in Europe?

AFAIK the best option is still to use one of the US providers(e.g. Alcor) and arrange for transportation. There is a problem with this though, in that until you arrive in the US your body will be cooled with dry ice which will cause huge ischemic damage.

Questions:

1. How critical is the ischemic damage? If I interpret this comment by Eliezer correctly we shouldn't worry about this damage if we consider future technology.
2. Is there a way to have adequate cooling here in Europe until you arrive at the US for final storage?

The following is authored by Colby Davis. I am posting for him because he doesn't have an account with any karma. Someone recently requested numbers on cryo preservation costs. I'll note that my own opinion is that for young people unlikely to die investing money in research is a better bet than investing directly in your own preservation.

Here is the link for the spreadsheet. Either download it or create a copy for yourself to edit.

Hey rationalists, here's the spreadsheet I presented the other night. For those who weren't there but are interested, this is a tool I designed to break down the costs associated with signing up for cryonics under different methods of financing it. Here are some instructions for using it.

Column B is where the user puts all the inputs: age, sex, probability you think that if you are frozen you will someday be successfully revived, and discount rate (for those unfamiliar with the term, this is like the reverse of an interest rate, the rate at which cash flows become less valuable to you as they extend further out into the future).

Column D is the probability that you will die in the next 20 years (the typical term for a term life insurance policy). It is calculated based on the "life table" sheet, which i stole from a government actuarial table online.

Column E is your current life expectancy, the number of additional years you have a roughly 50% chance of surviving through.

Column F is how much the monthly fee for a 20 year, $100,000 life insurance policy would cost you, assuming "exceptional" health, as determined by the top result at http://www.term4sale.com/

Column G is the present value of that policy, using your discount rate. This means that you should be indifferent between paying this amount right now and paying the figure in column F every month for the next 20 years.

Column H is the probability that you will die within the next 20 years AND sometime thereafter be successfully revived from cryogenic suspension, making the heroic assumption that your probability belief in column B is true.

Column I is simply the dollar present value amount spent per 1 percentage point reduction in (permanent) death. This is the value you want to consider most when deciding whether to sign up or not.

The next columns consider the alternative means of paying for a cryonics policy, saving up and investing in the stock market until you have enough money to pay for it outright.

Column K gives the future value after 20 years of investing the amount you would have spent on an insurance policy in the stock market instead, as well as the present value of that figure to you now, discounted back at the rate you gave. (This is not necessarily pertinent to the cryonics decision but is provided for comparison)

Column L is the amount you would have to invest monthly to have an expected future value of $100,000 by the end of your life expectancy.

Column M is the present value of foregoing that monthly amount for the rest of your life expectancy.

Column N is the probability you will die after you life expectancy (50%) AND be successfully revived assuming yours p-value.

And finally column O is the same measure as in Column I, using this alternative plan. A lower value in one column or the other (most of you will find column O to be the lesser value) means that you can reduce your probability of permanent death cheaper (or, reduce your probability of death by a greater amount for the same dollar amount) by pursuing the cheaper strategy.

Hope you enjoy!

- Colby  

P.S.

There was a discussion at the meeting about whether the figure in column N was too high because it failed to account for the probability that poor stock market performance may leave you without enough money to afford the cost of cryonics. I believe this is false because since long-run stock returns distributions and life expectancies are approximately normally distributed and independent of one another, the chance that you will die late with a poor return (thus unable to freeze your head) is almost perfectly offset by the chance that you will die early with a great return (thus still able to freeze your head). So it's not that the mean is too high, but merely that there is a variance around it. I was trying to figure out how to work this into the spreadsheet but figured the uncertainty of our beliefs about cryonics was much more a confounding factor here than the probability distribution of possible stock-returns-time-paths.

Hello,

one question that I don't see answered is what is the duration of your life insurance? Should I buy life insurance for 20,30 years or unlimited?

I could pay more for a longer life insurance or pay less for an insurance that will cover 20 years and invest the difference and then some so that by the end of 20 years I will *hopefully* have enough money to pay for cryonics out of my own pocket.

Has anyone done an analysis on that?

If you're trying to prevent information-theoretic death by preserving the brain it's critical that the information that makes you be "you" actually be preserved. If you could freeze the brain in a way that did keep around the necessary information then some future civilization might be able to recover the person or the memories, but if the information is gone it's gone for good. The problem is, this is an untested medical procedure, and it's not something we should expect to get right flying blind.

In freezing a brain there are obvious things that can go wrong. For example, if you just cool it down to below freezing the water in the cells will turn to sharp little ice crystals, disrupting synapse structure and making a huge mess. We know about this now, though, so since the early 2000s cryonics organizations have used "cryoprotectants" which are able to vitrify the brain tissue and reduce [1] ice crystal formation. Beyond these known problems, however, there are many aspects of the brain structure that might or might not be relevant. Is information stored in the positions of proteins within the cells? Are phosphorylation states significant? What scale of preservation is sufficient?

Our normal approach is to try something, see if it works, fix apparent problems, and try again, each cycle getting us closer to something that does work. With cryonics the "see if it works" step isn't there, and there's only "check for known failures". So what we should expect is that the current process will be "good to the best of our knowledge" and then repeatedly our knowledge will expand about what matters and the process will need to be updated.

(Situations where current preservation technology fails to preserve something we know is required are actually kind of nice, because they're as close as we get to cryonics as an experimental science. Those are the cases when the process can actually improve because the feedback loop is temporarily closed.)

Imagine if in the development of In-Vitro Fertilization an inexplicable barrier stopped researchers from continuing any experiments past the "combine egg and sperm" stage. Instead they worked out something they thought was as good as they were going to get, documented it, and started freezing hopefully-fertilized eggs. How likely would it be that later we would be able to take these frozen eggs and complete the process? Much more likely would be that something unknown was wrong with the beginning of the process and these eggs would actually not be usable. Given that the brain is so much larger and more complex than these zygotes I expect the odds in the cryonics case are much worse.

Cryonics depends on a complex medical procedure developed under conditions of minimal feedback. Expectations for success like 80% or even more likely than not seem incredibly optimistic. When you can't test the output of a process because you don't know what counts as correct output it's very unlikely you've got the process right.

(I also posted this on my blog.)

[1] I say "reduce" instead of "eliminate" because as far as I can tell no one has actually taken random samples from a human brain that's been preserved with vitrification. There are ethical reasons why the cryonics organizations would not want to do this, but there being reasons why we don't wish to run a test doesn't mean we can act as if we already know the answer.

We recently saw a post in Discussion by ChrisHallquist, asking to be talked out of cryonics. It so happened that I'd just read a new short story by Greg Egan which gave me the inspiration to write the following:

It is likely that you would not wish for your brain-state to be available to all-and-sundry, subjecting you to the possibility of being simulated according to their whims. However, you know nothing about the ethics of the society that will exist when the technology to extract and run your brain-state is developed. Thus you are taking a risk of a negative outcome that may be less attractive to you than mere non-existence.

I had little expectation of this actually convincing anyone, but thought it was a fairly novel contribution. When jowen's plea for a refutation went unanswered, I began attempting one myself. What I ended up with closes the door on the scenario I outlined, but opens one I find rather more disturbing.

This Monday (November 11th 2013 EDIT: it has been postponed to November 18th 2013) I will participate in a 'scientific communication' competition Laval University. If I win, I will go to the Quebec Engineering Competition (http://cqi-qec.qc.ca/). If I win again, I will go to the Canadian Engineering Competition (http://cec.cfes.ca/).

I need to do a presentation of 15 to 20 minutes. Then the judges can ask me questions during 10 minutes. I will do my presentation on cryonics. I want to invest approximately 12 to 15 hours for preparing it. I will not have time to read everything there is on Internet about cryonics in that time period, so if some of you are familiar with the subject, I would appreciate if you could link me to the best resources on the scientific and ethic aspects of cryonics.

I will do my presentation with Google Drive Presentation. It will be in French. I will put the link here later on if someone wants to review the presentation (EDIT: the presentation is done; you can see it and comment it on Google Drive). Moreover, I would like to practice my presentation tomorrow in a Google+ hangout if some people want to watch and comment it.

Thank you.

P.S.: If there are any Canadian engineering students reading this, check out the competition: there's 7 categories and it's a really interesting competition in my opinion.

What plans could a prospective cryonicist try out, beyond simply signing up, that could increase the odds of eventually having a pleasant re-animation experience?

To show what I mean, here are the main ideas I've managed to come up with so far. None of these particular ideas are a standard part of a cryonics preservation package. Some are easier to implement than others, some are more likely to have an effect than others, some have potentially greater effect than others.

* Arranging for as much information about oneself (photo albums, emails, grade school report cards, etc) as possible to be placed on archival media and stored along with one's body. Reasoning: If the cryo-preservation procedure causes brain damage, and technology advances sufficiently before re-animation, then this information potentially allows for that damage to be at least partially reconstructed.

* Requesting additional data about the cryo-preservation procedure used on oneself be archived. Eg, requesting that, to whatever degree doesn't interfere with the procedure, it be videoed.

* Making arrangements for an animal body to be cryo-preserved with the same procedure one's own body was preserved with. A lab chimp would be ideal, but difficult to arrange for a number of reasons; more likely, a more common animal of around human mass would be feasible, such as a dog or goat. Even a few lab-rats might help. Reasoning: It gives future re-animators an additional opportunity to experiment with re-animation techniques, before attempting to re-animate a person.

* Noting down one's preferences and requests for future re-animators. Eg, from "I'd appreciate having a cat nearby to pet and calm down as I wake up" to "If you have to rebuild my body from scratch anyway, and it's within cultural norms, I would appreciate being gender _____" to "If you create a digital/electronic/computer/data copy of my mind, I would like a copy of that to be placed in offline, air-gapped storage, so that if every active copy of my mind is destroyed, there will always be that original backup available to re-instantiate myself." Or just more general ideas, such as, "My goal is to live forever, and I would prefer whatever means most likely lead to that happening to be tried."


I'm not nearly as creative as I wish I could be; so I'm hoping that the local group-mind here might be able to offer further ideas, or improvements or refinements to the above ones.

So: What extras can you think of?

I'm starting a contest for the best essay describing why a rational person of a not particularly selfish nature might consider cryonics an exceptionally worthwhile place to allocate resources. There are three distinct questions relating to this, and you can pick any one of them to focus on, or answer all three.

Contest Summary:

• Essay Topic: Cryonics and Effective Altruism
• Answers at least one of the following questions:
  
  1. Why might a utilitarian seeking to do the most good consider contributing time and/or money towards cryonics (as opposed to other causes)?
  2. What is the most optimal way (or at least, some highly optimal, perhaps counterintuitive way) to contribute to cryonics?
  3. What reasons might a utilitarian have for actually signing up for cryonics services, as opposed to just making a charitable donation towards cryonics (or vice versa)?
• Length: 800-1200 words
• Target audience: Utilitarians, Consequentialists, Effective Altruists, etc.
• Prize: 1 BTC (around $350, at the moment)
• Deadline: Sunday 11/17/2013, at 8:00PM PST

To enter, post your essay as a comment in this thread. Feel free to edit your submission up until the deadline. If it is a repost of something old, a link to the original would be appreciated. I will judge the essays partly based on upvotes/downvotes, but also based on how well it meets the criteria and makes its points. Essays that do not directly answer any of the three questions will not be considered for the prize. If there are multiple entries that are too close to call, I will flip a coin to determine the winner.

Terminology clarification: I realise that for some individuals there is confusion about the term 'utilitarian' because historically it has been represented using very simple, humanly unrealistic utility functions such as pure hedonism. For the purposes of this contest, I mean to include anyone whose utility function is well defined and self-consistent -- it is not meant to imply a particular utility function. You may wish to clarify in your essay the kind of utilitarian you are describing.

Regarding the prize: If you win the contest and prefer to receive cash equivalent via paypal, this wll be an option, although I consider bitcoin to be more convenient (and there is no guarantee how many dollars it will come out to due to the volatility of bitcoin).

In the past, the Cryonics Institute has had a policy that said that they would not accept anyone who is not a member. This has changed. The policy now is that someone who has full legal authority over your body can sign you up after you die. It costs $36,250 to be frozen if you are not signed up, which is more expensive. They also will not do anything until you have been on dry ice for 2 weeks after they have been contacted, so not being a member is more risky. 

This is very important news for anyone who is currently cryocrastinating. It means that you can drastically increase your chances of survival without filling out any forms. All you have to do is tell a loved one you want to be frozen upon death, and that you would like them to take responsibility for making sure this happens. This takes literally 30 seconds. Do it now!

This news might also be a reason to not sign up right away, if you think something better (like radical life extension or uploading) will come along in your lifetime. We should discuss this in the comments.

Edit: The general consensus of this discussion is that this is a really bad reason not to sign up for cryonics. 

Here is my understanding - correct me if I'm wrong:

Cryonics is only allowed once a person is determined legally dead: when the heart stops beating.

One of the reasons why they have to be dead seems to be that the majority of the population consider cryonics to be a death-sentence, as there is no guarantee at this time that subjects can be revived - regardless of if there's a cure for whatever ailment caused a person's death.

It is difficult at this time to improve the revitalizing process as the patients - or clients - are incapable of surviving as their body was already in the process of shutting down, and we do not have the technology to bring them fully back.

Now, to some conjecturing.

We might be able to more reasonably test the effectiveness of procedures to revive current patients if we had healthier people, ones not yet at death's door.

Here's where the ethical dilemma hits home: we could use people who are in good health, here defined as 'not terminally-ill or otherwise dying from health complications in the near future,' who are already intending to end their life. Simply stated, those who are suicidal.

For all intensive purposes they would cease to exist, which would be part of the appeal to that subgroup. At this time there is a probability of them dying from the procedure, which should be ok as they were self-destructing anyway. And if they don't die, they get the chance to reflect on their life or go at it again. In this way their death would be more beneficial to the whole.

The benefits to this would be the additional research into the effects of cryonics on the body and how to develop a procedure to guarantee that you CAN be revived once put under.

I am aware of a couple of problems: legal complications, how to find willing participants, etc., and am thinking of ways to resolve that.

I've just been thinking about this for the past week or so and wanted additional insight. Thoughts?

***On Suicide

For those opposed to suicide: this idea does not encourage people to kill themselves. Rather, it provides those who are already intent upon ending their existence a means to do so more honorably.

In case people have not read it, I recommend Schopenhauer's Essay on Suicide, found here: http://www.egs.edu/library/arthur-schopenhauer/articles/essays-of-schopenhauer/on-suicide/

I know from personal experience how hard it is to actually go through the final process to sign up for cryonics - no matter how theoretically in favour one is. For me, it was Robin Hanson's offer of an hour of chat that sealed the deal - it seemed much easier to focus on getting to that interview, than on potentially saving the whole of my future :-)

Anyway, I'm offering my services to help out others who might want to get that final push over the line. What am I offering? Well, the opportunity to send me money! Simply pledge something like "if I don't get signed up for cryonics by such and such a date, I will send Stuart Armstrong $X".

This sounds incredibly mercenary - I'm offering you the possibility of sending me money? This seems to be a misunderstanding of the whole meaning of the word "offering". Well, for a start, I'm certain that I will never receive that money - if someone pledges "in a year's time, I will have signed up for cryonics, or I will send Stuart Armstrong $200", then I read that as "in a year's time, I will have signed up for cryonics". Because no-one likes losing money they could keep by doing something they want to (want to) do. So what I'm offering is the possibility to make yourself sign up for cryonics.

In fact, I'll do it this way: if I ever get any money from such a pledge, I'll redistribute that money to other people who took the pledge and did sign up. If it's not too many people, I can probably offer one hour chats as well, for those interested.

Of course, this works just as well if you pledge to give money to someone else, not just me, so I encourage you to pledge to whoever you like! Just make sure that:

1. You don't pledge the money to a charity you approve of - you should have no justification for avoiding signing up. Failure is a failure, not an act of generosity.
2. You pledge the money to someone who will take the money from you if you fail - or else the whole thing doesn't work at all. I promise to do so!
3. You bear in mind that these things take longer than you expect (planning fallacy and all that). Pledge a year, aim to have it done in six months.

I already have one person pledged for £100 in a year's time, and I'm fully confident they'll be signed up before that. If I have their permission, I'll let you know as soon as it happens.

The bitcoins that I had set aside for a Cryonics contest two years ago (and were unredeemed) are suddenly worth a lot more.

Details: I had added 10 bitcoins to get things started, and there were 4.75 worth of additional donations. These were partially lost when the hosted online wallet that I was using (MyBitcoin) was hacked, but 49% was recovered. As of today, after refunding part of the donated money, it is now worth 5.2675. I will be adding from my personal store to bring it up to an even 5.5. At $140 per coin, the new total is $770.

I've decided to follow the buy-and-hold strategy for at least another year, since it worked so well. I don't have exact details on what I'll do with it, but it will not be converted or spent for at least one year, and will eventually be used for promoting cryonics in some way.

Some things I have in mind if it gets big include:

• subsidizing cryonics dues for low-income people
• covering funding shortfalls for those unable to obtain life insurance due medical problems
• cryonics scholarships to support the development of expertise in neural cryobiology, the dying process, and other neglected areas of concern to cryonics
• hiring a public relations team professionally to repair the image of cryonics
• research to improve viability and reduce dehydration
• empirical validation through scanning the connectome

Contributions can be made to:

1Jdn36JUwvJdr3Qiie4aAseFdcoTsND9Qo

(Updated, since the previous address was attached to my personal wallet on an outdated client, which was causing money to be moved out of it by accident. The above is a brainwallet with a reasonably secure passphrase, generated using Blockchain.info.)

I'm writing to recommend something awesome to anyone who's recently signed up for cryonics (and to the future self of anyone who's about to do so). Robin Hanson has a longstanding offer that anyone who's newly signed up for cryonics can have an hour's discussion with him on any topic, and I took him up on that last week.

I expected to have a fascinating and wide-ranging discussion on various facets of futurism. My expectations were exceeded. Even if you've been reading Overcoming Bias for a long time, talking with Robin is an order of magnitude more stimulating/persuasive/informative than reading OB or even watching him debate someone else, and I'm now reconsidering my thinking on a number of topics as a result.

So if you've recently signed up, email Robin; and if you're intending to sign up, let this be one more incentive to quit procrastinating!

Relevant links:

The LessWrong Wiki article on cryonics is a good place to start if you have a bunch of questions about the topic.

If you want to argue about whether signing up for cryonics is a good idea, two good and relatively recent threads on that subject are under the posts on A survey of anti-cryonics writing and More Cryonics Probability Estimates.

And if you are cryocrastinating (you've decided that you should sign up for cryonics, but you haven't yet), here's a LW thread about taking the first step.

Aaron Winborn writes:

TLDR: http://venturist.info/aaron-winborn-charity.html

So maybe you've heard about my plight, in which I wrestle Lou Gehrig in this losing battle to stay alive. And I use the phrase "staying alive" loosely, as many would shudder at the thought of becoming locked in with ALS, completely paralyzed, unable to move a muscle other than your eyes.

But that's only half the story. Wait for the punchline.

As if the physical challenges of adapting to new and increasingly debilitating disabilities were not enough, my wife and two young daughters are forced to watch helplessly as the man they knew loses the ability to lift a fork or scratch an itch, who just two years ago was able to lift his infant daughter and run with the 7-year-old. The emotional strain on my family is more than any family should have to bear. Not to mention the financial difficulties, which include big purchases such as a wheelchair van and home modifications, and ultimately round the clock nursing care, all of it exacerbated by the fact that we have had to give up my income both because of the illness and to qualify for disability and Medicaid.

Meet me, Aaron Winborn, software developer and author of Drupal Multimedia, champion of the open source software movement.

Years ago, I worked for the lady of death herself, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, the author of On Death and Dying. Of course, I knew that one day I would need to confront death, but like most people, I assumed it would be when I was old, not in the prime of my life. Not that I'm complaining; I have lived a full life, from living in a Buddhist monastery to living overseas, from marrying the woman of my dreams to having two wonderful daughters, from teaching in a radical school to building websites for progressive organizations, from running a flight simulator for the US Navy to working as a puppeteer.

I accept the fact of my inevitable death. But accepting death does not, I believe, mean simply rolling over and letting that old dog bite you. Regardless of the prevalent mindset in society that says that people die and so should you, get over it, I believe that the reality we experience of people living only to a few decades is about to be turned upside down.

Ray Kurzweil spells out a coming technological singularity, in which accelerating technologies reach a critical mass and we reach a post-human world. He boldly predicts this will happen by the year 2045. I figured that if I could make it to 2035, my late 60s, that I would be able to take advantage of whatever medical advances were available and ride the wave to a radically extended lifespan.

ALS dictates otherwise. 50% of everyone diagnosed will die within 2 to 3 years of the onset of the disease. 80% will be gone in 5 years. And only 10% go on to survive a decade, most of them locked in, paralyzed completely, similar to Stephen Hawking. Sadly, my scores put me on the fast track of the 50%, and I am coming up quickly on 3 years.

Enter Kim Suozzi.

On June 10 of last year, her birthday, which is coincidentally my own, Kim Suozzi asked a question to the Internet, "Today is my 23rd birthday and probably my last. Anything awesome I should try before I die?" The answer that she received and acted on would probably be surprising to many.

On January 17, 2013, Kim Suozzi died, and as per her dying wish, was cryonically preserved.

She was a brave person, and I hope to meet her someday.

So yes, there we have it. The point that I am making with all this rambling. I hope to freeze my body after I die, in the hope of future medical technologies advancing to the point where they will be able to revive me.

The good news is that in the scheme of things, it is not too terribly expensive to have yourself cryonically preserved. You should look at it yourself; most people will fund it with a $35K-200K life insurance policy.

The bad news for me is that a life insurance policy is out of the question for me; a terminal illness precludes that as an option. Likewise, due to the financial hardships in store for us, self-funding is also out of the question.

When I learned about Kim Suozzi's plight, I reached out to the organization that set up the charity that ultimately funded her cryopreservation. The Society for Venturism, a non-profit that has raised funds for the eventual cryopreservation of terminally ill patients, agreed to take on my case.

Many of you reading this post have already helped out in so many ways. From volunteering your time and effort to our family, to donating money towards my Special Needs Trust to help provide a cushion for the difficult times ahead.

I am so grateful for all of this. It means so much to me and my family to know that there is such a large and generous community supporting us. I hate to ask for anything more, especially for something that may seem like an extravagance.

But is it really an extravagance?

If I were to ask for $100,000 for an experimental stem cell treatment, I doubt that we would even be having this conversation. No one in their right mind would even consider a potentially life-saving procedure to be an extravagance.

And what is cryonics, but a potentially life-saving procedure?

People choose from among many options for their bodies after death. Some choose to be buried, some choose cremation. Some choose to donate their bodies to science. That last is precisely what happens with cryonics: in addition to helping to answer the obvious question of will future revival from cold storage be possible, many developments in cryonics help modern medicine with the development of better preservation for organ transplantation and blood volume expanders.

Yes, I admit that the chances of it working are slim, but have you looked at the state of stem cell research for ALS lately? Consider that the only FDA approved medication to treat ALS, Rilutek, will on average add 3 months to one's lifespan, and you might begin to see my desperation.

But you should be happy with the life you've had. Why do you want to live forever?

The only reasonable response to that is to ask why do you want to die?

I love life. Every morning, even now with my body half paralyzed, I awaken with a new sense of purpose, excited to take on the day. There is so much I have yet to do. There are books to write, games to create, songs to sing. If I can get the use of my arms and hands again, there are gardens to plant, houses to build, space ships to fly. And oh, the people to love.

So please help me to realize this, my dying wish.

http://venturist.info/aaron-winborn-charity.html

"The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen."

- Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

Blog post: http://aaronwinborn.com/blogs/aaron/open-source-software-developer-terminal-illness-hopes-opt-out-death

Hacker news discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5211602

I'm about a third of the way through "Debt: The First 5,000 Years" by David Graeber, and am enjoying the feeling of ideas shifting around in my head, arranging themselves into more useful patterns. (The last book I read that put together ideas of similar breadth was "Economix: How and Why Our Economy Works" by Goodwin.) "Debt" goes into the origins of debts, as compared to obligations; and related topics, such as exchanges considered beneath economic notice ("Please pass me the salt"), debts too big or unique to be repaid, peaceful versus violent interactions, the endless minor obligations that form the network of social connections, and even the basis of whole societies.

The reason I'm posting about this book here... is that it's giving me some new perspectives from which to consider the whole cryonics subculture, and, for instance, why it remains just a subculture of a couple of thousand people or so. For example, a standard LessWrong thought experiment is "Is That Your True Rejection?"; and most of the objections people raise to cryonics seem to be off enough that, even if those objections were solved, those particular people still wouldn't sign up - that is, they feel some fundamental antipathy to the whole idea of cryonics, and unconsciously pick some rationalization that happens to sound reasonable to them to explain it.

Kim Suozzi was a neuroscience student with brain cancer who wanted to be cryonically preserved but lacked the funds. She appealed to reddit and a foundation was set up, called the Society for Venturism.  Enough money was raised, and when she died on the January 17th, she was preserved by Alcor.  

I wasn't sure if I should post about this, but I was glad to see that enough money was raised and it was discussed on LessWrong here, here, and here.

Source

Edit:  It looks like Alcor actually worked with her to lower the costs, and waived some of the fees.

Edit 2:  The Society for Venturism has been around for a while, and wasn't set up just for her.

I am not currently signed up for cryonics. I am considering it, but have not yet decided whether it is the right choice. Here's my reasoning.

I am very sure of the following:

1. Life is better than death. For any given finite lifespan, I'd prefer a longer one, at least within the bounds of numbers I can reasonably contemplate. 

2. Signing up for cyronics increases the expected value of my lifespan.

But then I also believe the following:

3. I am not particularly exceptional among the set of human beings, and so should not value my lifespan much more than that of other humans. I obviously fail at this in practice, but I think the world would be a much better place if I and others didn't fail so often.

4. The money it would take to sign up for cryonics, though not large, is enough to buy several centuries of healthy life each year if given to givewell's top malaria charities. Since on average I expect to live another 50-60 years without cryonics, the investment would need to increase the expected value of my lifespan by at least 5,000 years at minimum to be morally acceptable to me. 

5. There is a chance we'll discover immortality in my lifetime. If so, then if I signed up for cryonics the payout is 0, and the people who died because I bought insurance instead of charity are people I could have saved for far longer.

So, what do you think is the probability that immortality will be discovered in my lifetime? What about the probability that, if signed up for cryonics, I will live into the far future? These priors would seem to be the key for me to decide whether signing up for cryonics is morally acceptable to me.

Aschwin de Wolf, a cryonics researcher at Advanced Neural Biosciences, has written two new articles discussing reasons for sticking with cryopreservation as opposed to chemopreservation.

Chemical Brain Preservation and Human Suspended Animation

Excerpt:

Executive Summary

Scientific and practical considerations strongly support cryopreservation rather than chemopreservation for the stabilization of critically ill patients. Technology for achieving solid state chemopreservation of brains larger than a mouse brain does not yet exist. Chemical fixation is irreversible without very advanced technologies. Chemical fixation permits no functional feedback or development pathway toward reversible suspended animation. By contrast, cryopreservation seeks to maintain viability of the brain as far downstream as our capabilities and resources permit — an approach that reflects our view of cryonics as an extension of contemporary medicine. Cryopreservation preserves more options in that a cryopreserved brain could be scanned in future, or later chemically fixed, but the process of chemical fixation cannot be reversed and replaced by just low temperature storage. The cost benefits of chemopreservation over cryopreservation are exaggerated, largely because the standby and treatment procedures for effective chemopreservation would be just as extensive as for cryopreservation, if not more so, even assuming that highly toxic chemicals could be worked with safely in the field. Chemopreservation is being inherently tied to mind uploading, an association that is likely to limit its acceptance as a form of experimental critical care medicine by apparently requiring acceptance of the idea of substrate independent minds.

In praise of cold

Excerpt:

Some observers believe that cryonics advocates are reluctant to subject their theories to experimental scrutiny because this could damage their (uncritical) belief in future resuscitation. Similarly, one might think that cryonicists would react with a mix of hostility and dismissal to alternative strategies for personal survival. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, it is exactly because our personal survival is at stake that forces us to be wary of dogmatism.

For this reason, I have always been interested in chemical fixation as a (low cost) alternative for cryonics. In fact, years before all the talk about the “connectome” and “plastination” I spent considerable time exchanging messages with Michael Perry at Alcor about the technical and practical feasibility of chemical brain preservation. But no matter how open minded I tried to be about this approach, I kept running into the same challenges over and over again.

The challenge that has concerned me the most is whether a delayed start of chemical brain fixation will produce incomplete distribution of the chemical fixative in the brain because of ischemia-induced perfusion impairment. Thinking about the technical problem of “no-reflow” is not the first thing on the mind of someone who first hears about the idea of using chemical fixatives to preserve the brain. In my case, this concern was not just “theoretical.” In my lab I have spent many years looking at the effects of cerebral ischemia on cryopreservation and chemical fixation. Last year we decided to broaden our investigations to delayed chemical fixation and we have not been pleased at what we have observed so far. After 1.5 years of room temperature storage the delayed aldehyde fixed brains are falling apart and continue to decompose. In small animals one might imagine that such perfusion impairment could be overcome by immersing the brains in the fixative instead but human brains are simply too large. By the time that the fixative would have reached the core of the brain, extensive autolysis will have occurred.

TLDR: Chemopreservation can't be (and generally isn't) dismissed out of hand by cryonicists, but there are definite tradeoffs which would need to be accounted for. The bulk of the costs of cryonics have to do with needing prompt stabilization to have a decent shot at it working, and that doesn't change for chemopreservation patients.

Chemical preservation carries practical penalties, for example, in terms of the toxicity of chemicals that need to be on-hand at the deanimation site. The complete negation of cellular viability makes some kinds of experiments harder for chemical fixation (functional testing of the tissue for viability) whereas others are easier (embedding in resin for scanning). Empirical science has a place for both, but there are more practical advantages for cryonics in the clinical setting.

I propose it is altruistic to be replaceable and therefore, those who strive to be altruistic should strive to be replaceable.

As far as I can Google, this does not seem to have been proposed before. LW should be a good place to discuss it. A community interested in rational and ethical behavior, and in how superintelligent machines may decide to replace mankind, should at least bother to refute the following argument.

Replaceability

Replaceability is "the state of being replaceable". It isn't binary. The price of the replacement matters: so a cookie is more replaceable than a big wedding cake. Adequacy of the replacement also makes a difference: a piston for an ancient Rolls Royce is less replaceable than one in a modern car, because it has to be hand-crafted and will be distinguishable. So something is more or less replaceable depending on the price and quality of its replacement.

Replaceability could be thought of as the inverse of the cost of having to replace something. Something that's very replaceable has a low cost of replacement, while something that lacks replaceability has a high (up to unfeasible) cost of replacement. The cost of replacement plays into Total Cost of Ownership, and everything economists know about that applies. It seems pretty obvious that replaceability of possessions is good, much like cheap availability is good.

Some things (historical artifacts, art pieces) are valued highly precisely because of their irreplacability. Although a few things could be said about the resale value of such objects, I'll simplify and contend these valuations are not rational.

The practical example

Anne manages the central database of Beth's company. She's the only one who has access to that database, the skillset required for managing it, and an understanding of how it all works; she has a monopoly to that combination.

This monopoly gives Anne control over her own replacement cost. If she works according to the state of the art, writes extensive and up-to-date documentation, makes proper backups etc she can be very replaceable, because her monopoly will be easily broken. If she refuses to explain what she's doing, creates weird and fragile workarounds and documents the database badly she can reduce her replaceability and defend her monopoly. (A well-obfuscated database can take months for a replacement database manager to handle confidently.)

So Beth may still choose to replace Anne, but Anne can influence how expensive that'll be for Beth. She can at least make sure her replacement needs to be shown the ropes, so she can't be fired on a whim. But she might go further and practically hold the database hostage, which would certainly help her in salary negotiations if she does it right.

This makes it pretty clear how Anne can act altruistically in this situation, and how she can act selfishly. Doesn't it?

The moral argument

To Anne, her replacement cost is an externality and an influence on the length and terms of her employment. To maximize the length of her employment and her salary, her replacement cost would have to be high.

To Beth, Anne's replacement cost is part of the cost of employing her and of course she wants it to be low. This is true for any pair of employer and employee: Anne is unusual only in that she has a great degree of influence on her replacement cost.

Therefore, if Anne documents her database properly etc, this increases her replaceability and constitutes altruistic behavior. Unless she values the positive feeling of doing her employer a favor more highly than she values the money she might make by avoiding replacement, this might even be true altruism.

Unless I suck at Google, replaceability doesn't seem to have been discussed as an aspect of altruism. The two reasons for that I can see are:

• replacing people is painful to think about
• and it seems futile as long as people aren't replaceable in more than very specific functions anyway.

But we don't want or get the choice to kill one person to save the life of five, either, and such practical improbabilities shouldn't stop us from considering our moral decisions. This is especially true in a world where copies, and hence replacements, of people are starting to look possible at least in principle.

Singularity-related hypotheticals

1. In some reasonably-near future, software is getting better at modeling people. We still don't know what makes a process intelligent, but we can feed a couple of videos and a bunch of psychological data points into a people modeler, extrapolate everything else using a standard population and the resulting model can have a conversation that could fool a four-year-old. The technology is already good enough for models of pets. While convincing models of complex personalities are at least another decade away, the tech is starting to become good enough for senile grandmothers.
   
   Obviously no-one wants granny to die. But the kids would like to keep a model of granny, and they'd like to make the model before the Alzheimer's gets any worse, while granny is terrified she'll get no more visits to her retirement home.
   
   What's the ethical thing to do here? Surely the relatives should keep visiting granny. Could granny maybe have a model made, but keep it to herself, for release only through her Last Will and Testament? And wouldn't it be truly awful of her to refuse to do that?
2. Only slightly further into the future, we're still mortal, but cryonics does appear to be working. Unfrozen people need regular medical aid, but the technology is only getting better and anyway, the point is: something we can believe to be them can indeed come back.
   
   Some refuse to wait out these Dark Ages; they get themselves frozen for nonmedical reasons, to fastforward across decades or centuries into a time when the really awesome stuff will be happening, and to get the immortality technologies they hope will be developed by then.
   
   In this scenario, wouldn't fastforwarders be considered selfish, because they impose on their friends the pain of their absence? And wouldn't their friends mind it less if the fastforwarders went to the trouble of having a good model (see above) made first?
3. On some distant future Earth, minds can be uploaded completely. Brains can be modeled and recreated so effectively that people can make living, breathing copies of themselves and experience the inability to tell which instance is the copy and which is the original.
   
   Of course many adherents of soul theories reject this as blasphemous. A couple more sophisticated thinkers worry if this doesn't devalue individuals to the point where superhuman AIs might conclude that as long as copies of everyone are stored on some hard drive orbiting Pluto, nothing of value is lost if every meatbody gets devoured into more hardware. Bottom line is: Effective immortality is available, but some refuse it out of principle.
   
   In this world, wouldn't those who make themselves fully and infinitely replaceable want the same for everyone they love? Wouldn't they consider it a dreadful imposition if a friend or relative refused immortality? After all, wasn't not having to say goodbye anymore kind of the point?

These questions haven't come up in the real world because people have never been replaceable in more than very specific functions. But I hope you'll agree that if and when people become more replaceable, that will be regarded as a good thing, and it will be regarded as virtuous to use these technologies as they become available, because it spares one's friends and family some or all of the cost of replacing oneself.

Replaceability as an altruist virtue

And if replaceability is altruistic in this hypothetical future, as well as in the limited sense of Anne and Beth, that implies replaceability is altruistic now. And even now, there are things we can do to increase our replaceability, i.e. to reduce the cost our bereaved will incur when they have to replace us. We can teach all our (valuable) skills, so others can replace us as providers of these skills. We can not have (relevant) secrets, so others can learn what we know and replace us as sources of that knowledge. We can endeavour to live as long as possible, to postpone the cost. We can sign up for cryonics. There are surely other things each of us could do to increase our replaceability, but I can't think of any an altruist wouldn't consider virtuous.

As an altruist, I conclude that replaceability is a prosocial, unselfish trait, something we'd want our friends to have, in other words: a virtue. I'd go as far as to say that even bothering to set up a good Last Will and Testament is virtuous precisely because it reduces the cost my bereaved will incur when they have to replace me. And although none of us can be truly easily replaceable as of yet, I suggest we honor those who make themselves replaceable, and are proud of whatever replaceability we ourselves attain.

So, how replaceable are you?

The odds of a successful cryonic revival may me one in several thousand, or five percent, or ninety percent; the error bars on the various sub-parts of the question are very broad.

But if those assumptions work out, and if at least some people placed in suspension in the near future will be successfully revived in the far future...

... then are there any useful arrangements which can be made now, which have little-to-no present cost (beyond the cryonic arrangements themselves)?

For example, if someone were to make an announcement along the lines of, "If anyone makes a promise to try to assist in my cryonic revival, and to assist me in getting myself established thereafter; then I promise to try to assist those people with their cryonic revivals, and assisting them, ahead of anyone who hasn't made such a promise.", then what downsides would there be to having made it? Would making it create any perverse incentives, which could be avoided? Do the potential benefits, especially the benefit of a potential increase in the odds of being revived, outweigh the potential costs?

Would it be better to make promises to specific people while one is alive, instead of making an open-ended promise? That is, I might try to convince EYudkowsky to make a mutual-assistance agreement with me personally, in hopes that one of us will one day be able to help the other; or I might make the agreement so broad that people can make their promise to help me even after I'm dead.

How large would the benefits be of unilaterally promising to help someone else, without even asking for a reciprocal promise? Or, put another way, how big would the costs be if I were to simply announce that, if it's ever in my power, I'll try to assist in EYudkowsky's revival?

Does anyone care to try figuring out the Prisoner's-Dilemma-like aspects of this, such as the probability that someone in such a pact would renege on their end of it, and how the terms could be adjusted to minimize the benefits and maximize the costs of such anti-social behavior?

While browsing some of the websites on cryonics, I've come across this page, a spreadsheet which performs a quick analysis of the odds of a successful cryonic revival. It allows a user to enter their estimates of various events happening in a given period, such as the failure of the cryonics facility due to various causes, when revival technology will be developed, and so forth. (There's also a more advanced calculator here, which I'm not going to worry about at the moment.)

What are your best estimates of the relevant factors?

(Or, in case it might save a step: my own current age is 35, and my current estimate of my mean time of death across all my futures is when I'm 78. Given that, what is your best estimate of the probability that I'll be successfully revived from cryonic suspension?)

I've finally decided to take the plunge and make the arrangements for my eventual cryonic preservation. To help myself make sure that I actually follow through with everything necessary, I'm publicly pre-committing myself here to accomplish that.

As initial evidence that I'm actually serious about doing this, I've sent an email to The Cryonics Institute today, whose contents were as follows:

I have decided to finally stop procrastinating and make the necessary arrangements for my eventual cryonic preservation, and I have chosen CI to make those arrangements with.

I have looked through your membership pages and online sample forms, and I believe that I can work through my end of the paperwork without any real trouble, although I would still appreciate any advice you have to offer. For example, I live in Canada, about an hour's drive from Toronto, which might affect which forms are necessary.

Before I send my initial payment, I would at least like to confirm the basic details, and let you know who the money is coming from. It appears that, to start things off, I can Paypal you USD $110, for the yearly membership fee plus the first quarter's dues; after which I would mail you a physical, signed copy of the yearly membership application. After that, there will be a variety of documents to sign and have witnessed; and the insurance plan to arrange for. Is that a reasonable summary?

For the life insurance, I am thinking of a 20-year term policy with RBC (Royal Bank of Canada). Have you had any dealings with them previously, to know whether or not there will be any problems in setting the Cryonics Institute as the beneficiary? Do you have any recommendations about how large a benefit in excess of the basic USD $35,000 amount the policy should pay out, such as to cover currency-exchange fluctuations or the 'local help' rider?

Is there anything else you would recommend be discussed before I make that initial payment and set the ball in motion?

After occasionally researching cryonics over the past couple years, I remain confused about what happens certain situations.  Could we create, collaboratively or otherwise, a comprehensive flowchart or decision tree that represents what options exist if, for example, one is a member of CI, but has not yet funded the procedure, and enters a life-threatening coma?  Or which situations one needs to fund SA for standby or transport?  

This or something like it seems like low-hanging fruit for preventing cryocrastination, at least in my case - I want to fully understand the system before investing in it.

I just read this article (which is well worth reading for anyone interested in cryonics).  One of the important things that the article points out is that, while it takes some time for the memory structures of the brain to degrade due to ischemia, one of the more rapid effects is blood clotting in the fine capillaries of the brain after fairly brief ischemia.  This reduces the flow of cryoprotectant, and causes large swathes of neural tissue to be frozen, instead of vitrified, which would be catastrophic for personal identity.  While this is not a problem for best-case 'standby' cryonics, it is a problem for those who cannot afford a standby team, or are simply hit by cars.

Being an engineer, my first thought is that this is ridiculous, and there has to be a better solution to the problem.  It may be possible to build a device, maybe the size of a shoe box, which can be deployed in the field by a minimally-trained amateur (like a defibrillator), and perfuses the brain with cold saline and anti-coagulants -- or even a synthetic oxygen carrier).  I'm picturing a cylinder of fluid, large needles with sterilizing caps for tapping the jugular and carotid arteries, and a gas cylinder to provide pressure.  You'd simply break a chemical cold pack, put a plastic neck brace in place and insert the needles, and press a button.

Such a device could even be useful to non-cryonicists, as a way to prevent ischemic injury in people found medically dead at the scene of an accident, during transport to the hospital.  

Does anyone with more of a medical background know if such a machine would be at all feasible?  I can't imagine it would be expensive to construct.      

If you don't believe in an afterlife, then it seems you currently have two choices: cryonics or permanent death.  Now, I don't believe that cryonics is pseudoscience, but it's still pretty poor odds (Robin Hanson uses an estimate of 5% here).  Unfortunately, the alternative offers a chance of zero.  I see five main concerns with current cryonic technology:

1. There is no proven revival technology, thus no estimate of costs
2. Potential damage done during vitrification which must be overcome
3. Because it cannot be legally done before death, potential decay between legal death and vitrification
4. Requires active maintenance at very low temperature
5. No guarantee that future societies will be willing to revive

So I wonder if we can do better.

I recall reading of juvenile forms of amphibians in desert environments that could survive for decades of drought in a dormant form, reviving when water returned.  One specimen had sat on a shelf in a research office for over a century (in Arizona, if I recall correctly) and was successfully revived.  Note: no particular efforts were made to maintain this specimen: the dry local climate was sufficient.  It was suggested at the time that this could make an alternative method of preserving organs.  Now the advantages of this approach (which I refer to flippantly as "dryonics") is:

1. Proven, inexpensive revival technology
2. Apparently the process does not cause damage itself
3. Proven revival technique may overcome legal obstacles of applying before legal death
4. Requires passive maintenance at low humidity (deserts would be ideal)
5. Presumably lower cost makes future revival more likely (still no guarantee, but that is a post in itself)

There is one big disadvantage of this approach, of course: no one knows how to do it (it's not entirely clear how the juvenile amphibians do it) or even if it would be possible in larger, more complex organisms.  And, so far as I know, no one is working on it.  But it would seem to offer a much better prospect than our current options, so I would suggest it worth investigating.

I am not a biologist, and I'm not sure where one would start developing such a technology.  I frankly admit that I am sharing this in the hope that someone who does have an idea will run with it.  If anyone knows of any work on these lines, or has an idea how to proceed, please send a comment or email.  Or even if you have another alternative.  Because right now, I don't consider our prospects good.

[Note: I am going on memory in this post; I really wish I could provide references, but there does not seem much activity along these lines that I can find.  I'm not even sure what to call it: mummification?  Probably too scary.  Dehydration?  Anyway feel free to add suggestions or link references.]

He writes this essay in response to someone who writes about their "gut level emotional response when [they] thought about dogs being likely killed by an as yet unproven and dangerous medical procedure." 

I recommend the whole thing. If you are going to read it all, note that some text is duplicated near the end, though there is one paragraph at the very end which is not. 

First, he describes how animals share empathy and emotions with humans:

It is a maxim of the Animal Rights ideologues that "a rat is a dog is a boy." [PETA] This is patently not true, and might just be denounced as absurd on its face. But, it is true that rats, dogs and boys share important properties, or more generally, that rats, dogs and people share important properties. I have a huge reservoir of experience with rats, dogs and people. All three have a well developed sense of self, the ability to read my face and determine my mental state, and, obviously, the ability to experience most, if not all of the basic emotions and mental states that humans experience: anxiety, fear, emotional attachment to others (or their own and other species), sexual arousal and release, anticipation, enjoyment, curiosity, and so on. Most importantly, they have the ability to experience empathy - to extend their internal feelings to others. Well socialized rats and dogs know that the people they interact with can be hurt, provoked, pleased, and otherwise be emotionally and physically affected by their actions and they, in turn, act accordingly within the limits of their abilities to do so. Neither "pet" dogs nor rats bite their owners with abandon nor destroy their homes. This isn't just "conditioned behavior," but rather is the result of a more global understanding that humans, like them, can feel; and thus can be rewarded or made to suffer.

This is a very important and valuable property to people. it is so valuable that, when members of our own species fail to demonstrate it, we imprison them or even kill them! Jails and prisons are full of people who either lack empathy, or lack the ability to act upon it. What then does it say of us if we treat animals in ways that demonstrate a lack of understanding or respect for their feelings - for their ability to suffer or experience pleasure?

The answer is that it would, at first glance, say that we were either sociopaths, profoundly ignorant of the nature of animals, or taken over by some ideology which induced a state of perceptual blindness to their plight. Thus, what I am saying here is that I agree that it is neither reasonable nor moral (within our value structure as empathetic beings) to regard animals as unfeeling automatons, let alone treat them as such.

However, there is a problem with this approach to dealing both with our fellow humans and with other animals as the sole guide to our actions. The problem is, put simply, this: The native state of man and beast is one of unfathomable suffering.

Next, he explains ethics in a way that seems to correspond with a lot of Eliezer's writing: 

The central moral kernel of almost every religion is that we are born into a world of injustice and suffering. There can be little quibbling with that observation, since everywhere we turn we see living systems whose very structure brings them into "conflict" with their environment and causes enormous suffering. This is how it has always been. It is the reality of our existence in this universe. Evolution, the beautiful star studded sky at night, the cool lapping ocean - they don't give a damn about anything, least of all a mouse in a cage with cancer or a woman with her breast rotting off. And as far we can tell, they never will.

The best the universe has done so far is to produce us - creatures who both can and do care about injustice and suffering. If you believe in a Grand Design, or some other teleological explanation that results in universal justice, then, go to the mirror right now and take a long hard look, because buddy, you are it - you are as good as it has gotten, so far.

Then, unless you are cretin or a fool, or both, realize that suffering and injustice are both inescapable contemporary and future realities which you have to deal with rationally (or not) as you choose. You do not get to choose Door Number 3, which is "no suffering and injustice." In fact, even you kill yourself straightaway to avoid inconveniencing a mouse with a plow, the suffering and injustice will continue to march on, even for billions and billions of years.

There are no easy choices.

The best you can do is to choose carefully and rationally what kinds of misery you will inflict and to work, relentlessly, to minimize it and to make the universe a more just place. Those decisions will be informed by your values - by what you hold most worthy and in highest esteem. You are, of course, free to choose mice over men, a hunter-gatherer life over that of an agrarian, the world of the primitive or technological civilization.

Next, he tackles questions about whether animal research is, on net, beneficial: 

However, what you are not free to do, at least not around me, is to spew out lies and moral falsehoods about the supposed real nature of the universe and the real consequences of the choices you (and others like you) make. If you think that animal's have rights in the classical and real sense that has historically been applied to humans, then I will call you a liar and a moral blackguard who would, and has, condemned not only countless humans to unnecessary suffering and death, but countless animals whom humans value highly (our companion animals and livestock) as well - because much of veterinary medicine is a direct result of animal research.

If you argue that humans should be used in research, there I would agree with you. Most of the pharmacological research done with rodents is junk science which has led to few real medical advances. But be advised that such research will be ugly and terrifying and very likely costly in some meaningful proportion to the benefit it yields.

I am sorry to be so harsh, but technological civilization has robbed most of the Western world of any sense of reality - of how the universe works and of just how much suffering accrues from every frozen ready meal and every lipstick or plastic bottle of beverage consumed.

That dreamy, soft-bellied state of unreality is intolerable and it is also incompatible with our continued existence as a technological species, and probably as a species at all.

And it is most certainly incompatible with any hope we can currently see of the universe becoming a more just, decent and humane place.

Thus, I see your feelings and attitudes as profoundly incompatible both with your long term personal survival, and that of our species. As such, they evoke in me a feeling of revulsion and strong feeling of anger for the damage they have already caused to biomedical research - and will likely continue to cause.

Next, he goes into details of what animal lifespan research entails: 

I would also like to note that "the worst" of animal research in terms of inflicting suffering is not the acute experimental work conducted by cryonicists and most other mainstream medical research, but rather is to be found in the work of gerontologists conducting life span studies on rodents and primates. Research which virtually all on this list serve avidly lap up and never criticize - even though much, if not most of it, is junk science.

I can say, without reservation, that of all the pain, horror and cruelty that I have inflicted, either inadvertently, or as an anticipated consequence of research, by far the most cruel work I've ever (done or) observed is that of the gerontologist doing lifespan studies. ... 

The fact is, that aging animals get a dreadful array of truly horrible and disgusting pathologies and, because they are not humans receiving human medical care, they die in fantastically gruesome ways more often than not. ...

Rodents often develop not only mammary neoplasms [breast cancers], but tumors of the food pouches and buccal mucosa [inside lining of the cheeks]. Since there is no surgical intervention, these masses often grow to colossal size, ulcerate, break down and fungate. A common cause of death is starvation, which is truly terrible to watch. Sometimes, the animals lose the ability to drink, in which case death is mercifully faster and less painful as a result of dehydration.

The visceral and bone pain that results from tumor invasion of vital organs, the skeleton and joints must be unimaginable. And cancers kills the majority of animals in gerontological lifespan studies. I've seen animals languish in their cages for weeks or months being slowly consumed by lesions so revolting I could barely force myself to handle them in order to document their decline.

And of what the lucky ones who don't die of cancer? Are they in rodent care homes in tiny beds with tiny egg crate mattresses with a staff of rodents careers to lick their bums and turn them? Hardly. As animals age and develop spondylosis [spine osteoarthritis] and sarcopenia [age-related loss of muscle mass], they become unable to reach their anuses and urogential areas with their mouths. As a result, they cannot clean themselves, and they develop an ammonia-generating, bacteria infested crusting of urea and feces in these delicate areas, which, not infrequently results in ulceration. They are often blind from cataracts, and are, of necessity, usually housed one to a cage (they have a propensity to cannibalism, especially if calorie restricted), so they die alone, slowly, most often of starvation and dehydration.

Of course, the first question that likely comes to most peoples' minds upon hearing this a tale of horror is, "For the love of god man, why don't you euthanize such poor creatures, or at least medicate them for pain?" The answer is that you can't, not without developing a whole new, complex and costly model which has highly specific (and uniform) and almost completely NONSUBJECTIVE algorithms for when euthanasia should take place. And, you can forget about knowing what the "maximum lifespan" is, because it is flat out impossible to tell how long a moribund and likely suffering animal will live. I've seen animals I thought were certain to die within days survive for MONTHS! And so has every other experienced gerontological researcher.

That is the reality gerontological lifespan research.

So, you want to trespass on the territory of the gods and life forever, or even just another 50 or 500 years longer and you want to do it whilst being a nice guy? Give me a break!

The ending is poignant, and I think an excusable violation of Godwin's law: 

Cryonics has largely been taken over by this moral world-view and with an understandable, if inexcusable accompanying moral cowardice which dictates that we hide our animal research and cower in fear because the "Animal Rights" people will attack us (and by implication our poorly protected patients stored in vulnerable, unhardened facilities). This is the direct path to the Dark Ages or to the Soviet, or to the Third Reich, which was ironically, the only nation-state to completely ban animal research because of its cruelty and inhumanity. Instead, they built concentration camps and turned loose the likes of Holzhoner, Rascher, Mengle, Whichtman, Caluberg and countless others like them on humans, who, unlike animals, have the rich perceptual ability to comprehend their own mortality and to contemplate, at length, the certain inevitability of their fate.

Darwin does not mention it in this essay, but he is a vegetarian, and his dog is cryopreserved at Alcor. 

Following the news that Kim Suozzi has terminal brain cancer and wants to be cryopreserved, many of us have donated to help her out, while others, including me, planned to donate when CI set up a fund to receive donations on her behalf. Now the Society for Venturism has set up a fund, and it is time for us to follow through on those plans. (Unless you are really insisting that the fund be managed by CI specifically.)

(ETA: Kim has posted on this herself.)

Remember the Brain Preservation Foundation? This is Kenneth Heyworth's project to test methods of brain preservation, with a large rewards going to (1) the first group to preserve a mouse brain, and (2) the first group to preserve a large mammalian brain. Two teams, attempting preservation via cryonics and plastination respectively, are ready to have their mouse brain preservations evaluated. But the BPF lacks the funds to carry out the tests (5nm 3D scans of a randomly selected cubic millimeter to verify high-fidelity preservation).

Solicitations for donations have come from both Robin Hanson and Eliezer Yudkowsky, but the response has been...underwhelming thus far.

The BPF general fund has 9 donors listed; The Evaluation Fund has 5, one of whom is BPF's President. This does not include large donations from the anonymous $100k prize backer, Robin Hanson, John Smart, Daniel Crevier, and (again) Kenneth Hayworth. This puts an upper limit on the number of people in the world willing to donate to find out if there exists a method of reliably preserving brains indefinitely at...18 people.

I know that there are more than 17 other people like me in the world, who really want to see the results of these attempts. A world in which brains can be cheaply preserved indefinitely is a world I want to live in - and it would just be sad if this project fizzled because it lacked the funds to verify the already-existing results.

Donate here.

(Title is tongue-in-cheek, "preservation" would've been more appropriate but less catchy)

With [news like that](http://news.discovery.com/history/preserved-brain-bog-england-110406.html), how hard can it be when you actually do want to preserve a brain:

> A human skull dated to about 2,684 years ago with an "exceptionally preserved" human brain still inside of it was recently discovered in a waterlogged U.K. pit, according to a new Journal of Archaeological Science study.

> The brain is the oldest known intact human brain from Europe and Asia, according to the authors, who also believe it's one of the best-preserved ancient brains in the world. (...) Scientists believe that submersion in liquid, anoxic environments helps to preserve human brain tissue.

Unfortunately for the poor guy / brain, we killed his survival prospects. He did go with the cheap option of just saving the head. Speculating, if he got found another few centuries from now, he might've been a patient, not "archeological remains".

On a more serious note, I'd like the perspective of someone signed up for cryonics on this:

With people signed up for cryonics nowadays - I hear it even comes with a necklace! - I wonder what role the signalling aspect (to others, more importantly to oneself, feeling safer from death) plays versus the actual permanent-death-evading.

Having been present for (mouse) brain slice experiments done immediately after extraction, being confronted with the rapidly progressing tissue decay, the most important aspect that could easily be optimised - apart from research into other methods of preservation - was the time from the extraction to the experiments. Each minute made a tremendous difference. Not a surprise: as the aphorism in neurology (stroke therapy) goes, "time is brain".

What leads me to somewhat doubt the seriousness of the actual belief in brain preservation, versus the belief in belief that's based on minimising existential angst, is that the obvious idea of "when death is approaching with an ETA of less than X, commit suicide with cryonics on immediate standby" is not an integral part of the discussion. X may be weeks, or even years, based on how serious you take cryonics.

The above incidentally contains a way of betting to indicate the strength you assign to the actual prospects of cryonics, versus the role it plays for you psychologically. Isn't betting on your beliefs encouraged in this community? (NB: the "suicide" is just included to avoid legal ramifications.)

Regardless of future technological advances, orders of magnitude less brain damage will certainly pose less of a problem than the delay caused even by a couple of hours. A couple of hours = your brain tissue is already a scorched battlefield! Both necrosis and apoptosis get started within minutes.

Measuring your actual belief in the success of cryonics (for someone signed up for cryonics), waiting for death by natural causes doesn't indicate a lot of confidence when even a few weeks of life seem to be measured more highly than a tremendous increase in the actual prospects of cryonics working.

Or do you have above mentioned plans in place for when your life expectancy is less than X months/years (for whatever reason)?

My paternal grandmother is dying of cancer (not brain cancer). She is still relatively healthy, and is taking chemo, but there is little hope of remission (and even if that does happen, she'll probably die of heart failure fairly soon). Her current plan is to be cremated and have the ashes buried in a graveyard (in my opinion, the worst of both of the "standard" approaches, but that's not the point of this post).

I would prefer if she were cryopreserved, but am unsure how to even begin to broach the subject. I also have no idea how to convince her. She is not particularly religious, but is concerned with leaving as much money for my grandfather (and later my parents and me) as possible. I have previously discussed cryonics with my parents; my father brushed off the idea and my mom looked into it but dismissed the idea because the future isn't likely to want her (I find this argument ridiculous on several grounds). This means that I can't count on them to help talk to my grandmother. I may be able to talk to my grandfather first, but this would probably not be much of an asset: he is into several different conspiracy theories (the most recent ones center around the world secretly being controlled by the "elites" who use the U.S. President, U.K. Prime Minister, etc. as figurative puppets), but my grandmother doesn't seem to believe these and probably wouldn't listen much to his talk of cryonics either.

Any suggestions of how to broach the topic or convince her once the topic is broached would be appreciated. I am currently at my grandparents' house, but am leaving less than a day after posting this (most of which will be spent at the local nighttime, and thus asleep). I would prefer not to upset her, both for obvious reasons and because I may not be able to bring myself to bring it up on the day we depart if it will cause us to leave on a bad note.