What will the failure rate be by the way? Ever think about that?
I daresay people do think about that. But look at it this way: What's the failure rate for revivification after cremation? What's the failure rate for revivification after burial? I personally believe that these techniques have a potentially non-zero revivification rate (we don't know for certain that we can't work backwards from aggregate environmental data), but even so, freezing the brain whole is going to give us success probabilities which are orders of magnitude higher.
Also whose going to re-animate all of these people/brains and what are they going to be paid by the week to do so?
Speculating on future economics is less fruitful than speculating on future motivation. Here's an emotionally moving argument, whether or not it's accurate:
The economic and motivational behaviors of a society are flexible. Societies have existed which are motivated by scientific curiosity or concern for the well-being of their fellow man. Such societies are more likely to resurrect a cryonaut than a society which is motivated purely by selfish profit. This is a good thing, as it means that I am more likely to resurrect into a society which shares my motivational values, than one which holds motivational values which I find contemptuous.
Will they be offered insurance and 2 weeks vacation every year? LOL.
This is, again, an emotional rather than a factual argument - you are attempting to force people's imagination to conjure familiar images of present-day economic working conditions. Statistically, the future is very unlikely to look like the present - note that the present, at any given point in history, looked very unlike its own past.
Will there be a re-animators union run by the teamsters? This is insanity people!
Again with the exclamation points. Also, mentioning union politics automatically hooks into people's political pack instincts, which degrades rational reasoning abilities. People here know this, so they tend to discount arguments which attempt to exploit such hooks.
By the way your $100,000 dollars today will be worth about $1,000 tomorrow. In other words: You probably couldn't spend enough money today to be successfully re-animated in the future.
That would be like Ben Franklin paying $500 to be cryogenically frozen in 1782 so he could be unfrozen in 2322. Do you honestly believe his $500 (useless old world dollars) would be enough to pay for his re-animation process in the future? The answer is NO.
Are you certain you understand how compound interest and investment work? This is directly from Wikipedia:
Franklin bequeathed £1,000 (about $4,400 at the time, or about $112,000 in 2011 dollars[139] each to the cities of Boston and Philadelphia, in trust to gather interest for 200 years. The trust began in 1785 when the French mathematician Charles-Joseph Mathon de la Cour, who admired Franklin greatly, wrote a friendly parody of Franklin's "Poor Richard's Almanack" called "Fortunate Richard." The main character leaves a smallish amount of money in his will, five lots of 100 livres, to collect interest over one, two, three, four or five full centuries, with the resulting astronomical sums to be spent on impossibly elaborate utopian projects.[140] Franklin, who was 79 years old at the time, wrote thanking him for a great idea and telling him that he had decided to leave a bequest of 1,000 pounds each to his native Boston and his adopted Philadelphia. As of 1990, more than $2,000,000 had accumulated in Franklin's Philadelphia trust, which had loaned the money to local residents. From 1940 to 1990, the money was used mostly for mortgage loans. When the trust came due, Philadelphia decided to spend it on scholarships for local high school students. Franklin's Boston trust fund accumulated almost $5,000,000 during that same time; at the end of its first 100 years a portion was allocated to help establish a trade school that became the Franklin Institute of Boston and the whole fund was later dedicated to supporting this institute.
Also, are you certain that you know how future economies will operate? "Money" may not necessarily continue to be a prime motivator.
Wake up people, honestly.
Continuing to show contempt for your audience is an excellent dominance display, but very poor at engaging rational thinking skills. Again - this site is about rational thinking skills. You will not do well to play primate-level affect-manipulation games here. If you want to perform affect-manipulation games here, you need to appeal to higher order emotional responses (pride in the reader's intelligence, for example, or wonder and excitement at future possibility).
The only human beings they may consider re-animating in the future would be those who made a phenomenal impact on society and the world in general (i.e. world renowned physicists, astronomers, Nobel laureates and possibly leaders of nations depending upon their resume).
This is actually a potentially valid argument, which (along with your "what will the failure rate be?" point) merits serious consideration. Historically, technologies are not fairly distributed. People should be having better discussions about the fairness of transhuman/post-singularity technologies. Your voice could lend valid input to that process, if you could learn to speak more clearly about it.
Even this seems highly unlikely due to the cost.
That seems patently absurd. There are MULTIPLE famous people from the past, that Hollywood has spent millions of dollars creating the illusion of "resurrecting". If it were possible to legitimately resurrect famous people, I daresay some reality / news commentary channel would be willing to spend millions of dollars per head just to resurrect them, for no other reason than to make a guest panel for some commentary show.
Otherwise, If you honestly believe they would take the time, effort and money to re-animate your average joe? Excuse me while I spit my coffee all over the room in laughter.
This argument actually has a kernel of truth and importance to it, which you utterly buried in contempt for your audience. Why are you deliberately weakening your own argument, when you have important things to say? Nevermind your failure to respect your audience; you are failing to respect yourself. Why are you doing this? What you are saying is too important to cover in shit like this.
Someone like ohhh lets say: "John Jones dollar store chain and BBQ restaurant magnate of Kentucky" OR "Jill Holloway trust fund baby of the Wal Mart clan"? ... If you believe such? You are nothing short of CRAZY.
Why do you believe that attacking an argument necessitates denigrating the arguer? Facts should stand on their own merits; why are you feeling the need to repeatedly insult the people you are communicating with?
If you pay for such a service? You are a naive and emotionally disconnected human being of the highest order plain and simple. 2+2=4 people.
I'm afraid I don't follow this at all; each sentence seems to have no connection to the previous, other than to convey a vague emotional sense of superiority, hostility and disdain. In what way do you believe that will help you "win" this argument?
Obviously some human beings self importance, fear of death and narcissism knows no bounds (OR any form of sanity).
I would tend to agree.
If you buy into this scam? I have a bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to sell you as well ...
You appear to be confused; how can I help?
Most people, given the option to halt aging and continue in good heath for centuries, would. Anti-aging research is popular, but medicine is only minimally increasing lifespan for healthy adults. You, I, and everyone we know have bodies that are incredibly unlikely to make it past 120. They're just not built to last.
But what are you, really? Your personality, your memories, they don't leave you when you lose a leg. Lose most parts of your body and you're still you. Lose your brain and that's it. [1] You are a pattern, instantiated in the neurons of your brain. That pattern is sustained by your body, growing and changing as you learn and experience the world. Your body supports you for years, but it deteriorates and eventually isn't up to the task any more. Is that 'game over'?
Perhaps we could scan people's brains at extremely high detail so we could run them in some sort of human emulator. This requires a thorough understanding of the brain, huge amounts of storage, unbelievably fast computers, and very detailed scanning. If it's even possible, it may be several hundred years away.
Our bodies aren't going to last that long, but what if we could figure out how to preserve our brains so that the information didn't decay? Then, if the future turned out to be one in which we had advanced brain emulation and scanning technology, we could be revived. I don't know if people in the future would want to spend the time or money to revive us, but in a future with technology this advanced, reviving a preserved brain as a computer simulation could be really cheap.
The most advanced technology for long-term tissue preservation today [2] is cryonics: freezing with vitrification. You add something to the blood that keeps ice crystals from forming and then freeze it. This is pretty much the same thing frogs do, hibernating frozen through the winter. The biggest organs that have been successfully brought back to working order after vitrification are rabbit kidneys, and the brain is a lot bigger and much more complex. While there are people applying this technique to human brains after death, it's very much a one way street; we can't revive them with current technology.
How much should it worry us that we can't reverse this freezing process? If we're already talking about revival via high-detail scanning and emulation, which is only practical after hundreds of years of technological development, does it matter that we can't currently reverse it? The real question in determining whether vitrification is sufficient is whether we're preserving all the information in your brain. If something critical is missing, or if something about our current freezing process loses information, the brains we think are properly preserved might be damaged or deteriorated beyond repair. Without a round trip test where we freeze and then revive a brain, we don't know whether what we're doing will work.
Another issue is that once you've frozen the brain you need to keep it cold for a few centuries at least. Liquid nitrogen is pretty cheap, but providing it constantly over such a long time is hard. Organizations fall apart: very few stay in business for even 100 years, and those that do often have departed from their original missions. Current cryonics organizations seem no different from others, with financial difficulties and imperfect management, so I don't think 200+ years of full functioning is very likely.
Even if nothing goes wrong with the organization itself, will our society last that long? Nuclear war, 'ordinary' war, bioterrorism, global warming, plagues, and future technologies all pose major risks. Even if these don't kill everyone, they might disrupt the cryonics organizations or stop technological development such that revival technology is never developed.
Taking all these potential problems and risks into account, it's unlikely that you can get around death by signing up for cryonics. In attempts to calculate overall odds for success from estimated chances of each step I've seen various numbers: 1:3, 1:4, 1:7, 1:15 and 1:400. I'm even more pessimistic: I calculated 1:600 when I first posted to lesswrong and have since revised down to 1:1000. To some people the probability doesn't matter, but because it's expensive and there are plenty of other things one can do with money, I don't think it's obviously the sensible thing to do.
(I also posted this on my blog.)
[1] Well, lose your heart and you're gone too. Except that we can make mechanical hearts and you stay the same person on receiving one. Not so much with a mechanical brain.
[2] Plastination is also an option, but it's not yet to a point where we can do it on even a mouse brain.