Thank you to each of the five contestants who entered an essay into the contest that was started a little over a week ago to explore cryonics as a prospective target for effective altruism. The five entries (listed chronologically) are:

1. jkaufman
2. deleted
3. RomeoStevens
   
4. jaime2000
5. Ishaan

All five of essays show evidence of much thought and hard work. Based on multiple readings of each, here are some brief impressions from each essay:

• The entry by jkaufman is intelligently written and even-handed, giving math-based arguments why cryonics might or might not be competitive with effective charities such as AMF. The bar set by such charities is very high. However, depending what utilitarian framework you use, cryonics could be competitive if the chances of it working are sufficiently good. On the other hand, when considered in person-neutral terms, advertising cryonics seems to be a better use of a given dollar than signing up, as chances are you could induce multiple others to sign up for the same money.
• The entry by deleted, which is presented in outline form, brings up several good points, although it does not defend all of them at length, and comes up slightly short of the 800 word target. Despite the brevity (and some spelling errors), I had a positive reaction to it personally, particularly the discussion of cryonics as a possible alternative to end-of-life intensive care. It would be interesting to see a more fleshed out version and/or multiple essays exploring the points touched on in this outline.
• The entry by RomeoStevens discusses, among other things, the prospect that money raised for cryonics is likely to be money that could not otherwise be raised for a beneficial purpose. Although similar in some respects to the jkaufman essay, it stresses the usefulness of self-interest in others (e.g. aging wealthy people) as a way to attempt to produce the most good. It also goes into some of the more counterintuitive points that argue for cryonics as potential EA, such as effects on low-funded/high-value research, and the altered time preference of a cryonicist.
• The entry by jaime2000 examines the necessary conditions for someone to be signed up for cryonics to determine which is the most efficient use of additional funding. This essay is well organized and sourced. It recommends building public awareness (for example, advertising) as the most efficient path to promoting cryonics.
• The entry by Ishann is an introspective look at why some utilitarians whose intuitions run contrary to cryonics (and life extension in general), as a person-neutral effective altruism target, might reconsider those intuitions when considering life extension in the absence of cognitive decline (the familiar status quo for extending life past 100).

Each of these impresses me as incredibly valuable in its own right, for its own reasons. I would encourage the authors to expand them into top-level posts now that the contest is over.

Prize Winner: The essay that that I think best makes its points is the one by RomeoStevens, which encompasses significant breadth and depth on this topic. Well done, RomeoStevens!

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).

Should you probably donate a bitcoin to your future self?

Bitcoin has been in the news a bit lately. In case anyone hasn't been following recent events, its price hit $266 per coin, toppled to $50, and then climbed back to a rate which has been between $80 and $140.

This goes to show its high volatility at the present time, which means that any individual trade you make will be something of a gamble with a noisy, hard-to-predict outcome. You could be buying in right before a boom or a bust. Buying and then selling at random intervals will probably cost you more money than you make, due to transaction fees. Trying to outsmart the market in the short term with nothing but your own human instincts and powers of induction will probably cost you even more money because Markets are anti-inductive. The most realistic way of making much money with bitcoin -- sans owning your own exchange, having skill and resources for serious technical analysis, a faster-than-usual trading bot, or fantastic luck -- is if you can determine that the current price is very poorly calibrated relative to its future value, and if you buy and hold very long-term.

Market swings constitute a psychological attack, assuming you know and care about them, so employing the buy-and-hold strategy can be more difficult than it looks. However, as it happens, you can render bitcoins almost purely unspendable (i.e. impossible to transfer via the network) for a finite period of time as a technical matter. You could for example create a brainwallet based on a lengthy memorized passphrase with a random value appended to it. The larger that appended value, the (exponentially) greater the amount of processing time needs to be spent to find out what it contains. Having access to the memorized passphrase gives you the overwhelming advantage over a brute force attacker, whereas the appended random value immunizes it against dictionary attacks. (Todo: Find or write a program for this. Prove it works, and move some of my bitcoin holdings to a wallet requiring a day or more to unlock.)

Early adopters with moderate crypto skills could thus have a distinct advantage compared to the average investor and realistically hope to beat the market on that basis if mere human psychology and resistance against short term panic-selling is the fundamental constraint. So that's one consideration that could play to our advantage. Assuming, that is, that bitcoin is worth taking seriously to begin with, and not just a matter of geeky fun.

The question that matters for that consideration (the one that differentiates long term speculation on bitcoin from various speculative bubbles in gold, real estate, tulips, etc.) is this: Of all the possible worlds, where is the probability mass concentrated with respect to the future of bitcoin, in terms of how it will actually be used? Is there an overwhelming tendency for bitcoin to fail and be replaced by other things (e.g. other cryptocurrencies, or fiat dollars) -- or is it actually likely (in at least the minimal sense of "not overwhelmingly unlikely") to turn into a major store of wealth in coming decades?

I rather think it is the latter. But first, let's consider what I believe to be the strongest argument against it, which unpacks to three parts:

1. Deflation. Bitcoin will never be more than 21 million coins strong due to the production rate going down by half every 4 years. That implies that it will always deflate, i.e. there will be less available to buy as time goes on.
2. Volatility. This is the natural result of deflation. As scarcity increases, people buy out of the speculative belief that value will rise forever. They fear to spend because really, who wants to have bought a million dollar pizza? Eventually, when enough of the value is due solely to this belief in future growth, people abruptly begin to sell, and the bubble bursts.
3. Distrust. Currency requires trust. Volatility decreases trust. If bitcoins continue to be volatile, because of deflation, which is built into the system, it cannot be trusted well enough to compete with more stable currencies -- and will therefore eventually die out.

Taken together, this seems like a pretty good knock-down argument. It apparently implies, as a matter of basic economic law, that some other cryptocurrency must win over it in the long term, and/or that fiat money will retain its dominance. But the thing to notice is that it's not so effective against bitcoin as a massive store of wealth per se, so much as a currency that will be directly used, in a manner directly analogous to how government-backed monetary units are used. Non-currency forms of wealth which serve some other purpose can safely handle quite a bit more volatility, because their value is not dependent on being trusted as a currency, but rather as a value storage mechanism.

Here is the general scenario that I think holds more probability mass than bitcoin-as-a-traditional-currency, and yet works as a fairly realistic alternative to bitcoin-as-a-flop:

• Bitcoin will fall out of circulation as a currency because of its relative volatility.
• Nonetheless, alternate currencies will be built into the blockchain.
• These alternate currencies will be designed for stability, instead of deflation.
• Mechanisms for trading alternate currencies for bitcoins will be part of the protocol.
• Rather than a currency, bitcoin plays a role as a scarce, fungible, stabilizing commodity.
• The ease of turning it into these successful alternate currencies gives it the ability to outcompete traditional options like gold.

Can this be done? Consider the following more specific scenario as an example:

1. Alice puts 100 bitcoins in a currency wallet denoted "dollars".
2. Alice withdraws 10,000 of a currency called "dollars" from an associated address.
3. The network knows that there are 100 times as many dollars as bitcoin, and makes a note of this.
4. The network will not allow Alice to withdraw bitcoins from the currency wallet until she replaces the dollars.
5. Bob puts 99 bitcoins in a currency wallet also denoted "dollars"
6. Bob withdraws 10000 dollars from it.
7. In the event that Alice replaced her dollars and withdrew her bitcoins quickly, the network recognizes this as valid. But in the event that she did not, the dollar is recognized as having more value and the network will not permit Bob to withdraw that amount unless he has 101 bitcoins in the wallet.

This is just one example I've come up with, and may not be the best. Various other schemes are possible. (For example, it could be possible for any dollar-owner to convert them back to bitcoin, as opposed to the person who originally minted them.) What the various possible models for doing this have in common is that they allow you to set up currencies which dynamically increase and decrease in supply, depending on how much bitcoin people are willing to invest into them, and how badly people want bitcoins back later on.

A competing scenario to the above would be one in which a better-optimized cryptocurrency protocol implements this, or some other stability-prone algorithm and thus outcompetes the volatile, easily manipulated, "primitive" bitcoin protocol in use today. I used to think I could just jump on the bandwagon when this comes around, maybe strategically sell someone a pizza and end up a millionaire.

However, I've somewhat lost faith in that possibility of late because I realized that bitcoin is much more powerful than it seems, and is capable of substantial self-modification if needed for compatibility with a newer and better system. The only thing locking us to the current protocol is the degree to which bitcoin-owning miners find it in their best interests to continue to use it as it is. A competing algorithm that makes bitcoins more valuable without violating existing expectations would probably not be hard to get people to update to.

Another thing that makes me think bitcoin will tend to self-improve to the point of winning against competitors is that at least some people with substantial assets in bitcoin form are likely to be very proactive in defense thereof. Assuming they remain committed to the long game, and are able to acquire sufficient short-term wealth to pursue their goals, they can do a number of things to defend it against the various plausible attacks: Hiring programmers to improve the client software and render it less hackable, hiring lobbyists to protect it against regulatory interference, employing botnets to attack competitor currencies, slowing down or preventing transactions that appear to be going through anonymizing laundries that could be associated with tax-dodging and illegal drugs, and so forth.

So it seems to me like owning at least one bitcoin and holding onto it for long-term purposes is probably a good idea.

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.)

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

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.

Upcoming event:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Learning to program in a given language requires a non-trivial amount of time. This seems to be agreed upon as a good use of LessWrongers' time.

Each language may be more useful than others for particular purposes. However, like e.g. the choice of donation to a particular charity, we shouldn't expect the trade-offs of focusing on one versus another not to exist.

Suppose I know nothing about programming... And I want to make a choice about what language to pick up beyond merely what sounds cool at the time. In short I would want to spend my five minutes on the problem before jumping to a solution.

As an example of the dilemma, if I spend my time learning Scheme or Lisp, I will gain a particular kind of skill. It won't be a very directly marketable one, but it could (in theory) make me a better programmer. "Code as lists" is a powerful perspective -- and Eric S. Raymond recommends learning Lisp for this reason.

Forth (or any similar concatenative language) presents a different yet similarly powerful perspective, one which encourages extreme factorization and use of small well-considered definitions of words for frequently reused concepts.

Python encourages object oriented thinking and explicit declaration. Ruby is object oriented and complexity-hiding to the point of being almost magical.

C teaches functions and varying abstraction levels. Javascript is more about the high level abstractions.

If a newbie programmer focuses on any of these they will come out of it a different kind of programmer. If a competent programmer avoids one of these things they will avoid different kinds of costs as well as different kinds of benefits.

Is it better to focus on one path, avoiding contamination from others?

Is it better to explore several simultaneously, to make sure you don't miss the best parts?

Which one results in converting time to dollars the most quickly?

Which one most reliably converts you to a higher value programmer over a longer period of time?

What other caveats are there?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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