POLL: Cryonics - do you want to be frozen when you die?

[Joaz Banbeck]

...
This one sounds like a personal insult Joaz, did you really mean it that way?

No. Note the smiley.

And also note that I changed the possibly pejorative adjective 'mature' to the more neutral 'ready'.

Either way, it sounds supremely arrogant to make any assertion of being personally psychologically mature enough to conquer death...

To assert that some are ready is no more arrogant than to assert that some are not. Indeed, it is a lesser leap, as I am speaking about a small portion, whereas the contrary comment was apparently speaking about all.

Sigh. It is not an attack on Bantari. It is a protest against the centuries-old refrain of 'I/we are not comfortable with this, therefore you shouldn't do it." It happened with autopsies in the 1800s, it happened with the first heart transplants, it is happening now with stem cells, and is beginning to happen with freezing.

I don't begrudge Bantari his belief. Nor more so that I would argue with Victorians who were appalled at the thought of autopsies, or with the people in the 1960's who wondered where the soul would go when a heart was transplanted. I just want a separation. If you aren't ready for new tech, if you aren't comfortable with it, fine by me. You need not participate. But please don't universalize to say that everyone can't or shouldn't.

[Horibe]

No, you aren't ready for it. Some of us are.

Must...resist....temptation ....to....respond....

Well Joaz, no time like the present.

Whoops

[daniel_the_smith]

the control group is not doing well at all.

Oh? Compared to whom? I would say we're actually doing pretty dang well, and the mountains we have left to climb are more in quality of life than quantity of life.

Uh, I'm pretty sure you're not currently a member of the control group.

(ii) After resurrection, you will continue to forget things like you do know (or perhaps much faster, because of the lack of reinforcing stimuli), but for a much longer period of time.

So you think I might wake up in a society that can raise the dead but doesn't know how to fix poor memory? Which is the harder problem? This whole line of thinking makes no sense to me.

... Two bodies could share a brain and not have any of the same memories ...

What? How? How can you share a brain and not share any memories? That's like saying you share a heart but not ventricles...


I think, if I can sum up a bit: people change throughout their life; a 90 year old is not the same as his or her 10 year old self. We're OK with that kind of change, I think pretty much everyone is. There is a very real sense in which they are not the same person. If I wake up at time T, then at time T + 80 I will be a "different person" in that same sense, and I'm OK with that. It's a natural part of growth.

For you to make a personal identity argument against cryonics, you have to argue that between being frozen and reanimated, something will have changed that makes me not be me. I think that's been part of your argument, but you also seem to be implying that if I grow and develop after a reanimation, I'll no longer be me. I think that's true, but only in that same sense, and that I and most people are OK with that sort of incremental change. Even if we aren't, it happens to us every day.

Probabilities:

P(positive singularity) = 20%

P(nanotech|positive singularity) = 99.99% (the | means "given"; IOW, if there's a positive singularity, I think it's a virtual certainty that we'll have nanotech afterwards)

P(reanimation|~positive singularity) = .0001%

P(reanimation|negative singularity) = .001% (vast majority of potential negative singularities just destroy humans as a side effect. It takes a very special singularity featuring an intelligence that both cares about humans and wants them to suffer for this to happen)

P(reanimation|positive singularity) = Who knows? > 50% ?

P(brains well frozen can be reassembled with less impact than a stroke|positive singularity) = 95%

Put it all together: if any of the frozen are woken at all, most likely they will wake in a post-positive singularity world. We really have no idea what such a world will be like except that we know such a world finds it cheap to reanimate people. Given how hard that is, we can guess at what other problems they'll be able to solve. If a problem is less hard than repairing the neural connections in a brain for a few pennies, then it seems safe to assume it won't be a problem in any sort of future likely to wake the frozen.

And on difficulty: I expect successful reanimation requires on the order of thousands of years of time for a human-level intelligence with access to nanotechnology. (There are on the order of 100 trillion axions/dendrites that need to be examined for breaks, and probably other things to fix also; you do the math!) I do not expect people to be reanimated until THAT costs less than running a refrigerator. Once you wrap your mind around how difficult it will be to unfreeze someone, I think the things I'm claiming about societies capable of such feats become a lot easier to swallow.

I could go on, and I know there's more to respond to in your post, but I have stuff to do.

[Laman]

the more i think about it, the more i get feeling that achieving immortality is not as desirable as one would think. i can't express good arguments for my opinion, but there is a more narrow problem:

people, who let themselves be frozen today, won't be ever be resurrected, especially not in a world where humans are immortal
why? making a natural human lifespan unlimited brings at least one trouble - potential (infinite) overpopulation and to prevent that unavoidably heavy reproduction regulations. basically you would have to wait for someone to die in order to be allowed to have children. and deaths are very rare in our hypothetical world, generally only by injuries causing immediate death or by severe brain damage.
in this world any cryogenic companies have no longer any real or potential customers, so nothing forces them to preserve the frozen bodies any longer and nothing forces them to reanimate them. they once got their money and any further activity just decreases the profit. reanimation would actually be strongly opposed by society, in such a tight and restricted life space. because of the long time gap since our present, no family members care about their frozen ancestors. all in all, only reasons to thaw any of the ancient frozen geezers are feeling of moral obligation or interest in history.
historical reasons surely can save only small number of lucky ones and given human selfish nature and frequent preference of present to future, it would be very hard not to prefer present to past, so i don't give much chances to people feeling enough obliged to the frozen ones

essence of my argument is in assumption that people will still want to reproduce. it can be disputed. but i think this desire is hardcoded into genes of all living beings by evolution so it can't be fast wiped out by any technological improvements and social changes. i personally believe there is no objective philosophical meaning of life, reproduction being the only real biological one, even now. and with an infinitely long lifespan importance of having children could possibly even grow, because if you can spend time with anything, no activity really matters so much anymore and people will naturally seek for something to give their lives a meaning

Laman, born to die

[robinz]

I think genuine immortality would be rather frightful. I think it would be very nice (assuming one could maintain quality of life) to live for 200 or 300 years, perhaps even a thousand or so - but that's nothing compared to infinity (that's actually literally true in a fairly precise mathematical sense ). I'm pretty sure that eventually, at some point, immortality would become horrible (so, should they exist, in the long run I'm pretty sure I would find heaven and hell indistinguishable). Good job I don't believe in anything of that sort, then

[Kirby]

I think genuine immortality would be rather frightful. I think it would be very nice (assuming one could maintain quality of life) to live for 200 or 300 years, perhaps even a thousand or so - but that's nothing compared to infinity (that's actually literally true in a fairly precise mathematical sense ). I'm pretty sure that eventually, at some point, immortality would become horrible (so, should they exist, in the long run I'm pretty sure I would find heaven and hell indistinguishable). Good job I don't believe in anything of that sort, then

I suspect that, if we lived for 200 or 300 years on average, it would not seem like a long time to live, but still a normal amount of time to live. We would probably still have concern for our mortality, and wish that we could live for, perhaps, 1000 years.

It's a pity when a human doesn't live past their teenage years. But this is quite common for some other animals.

I think we measure the basis for what is long against what we are used to.

If I live another year, I am living quite a few more moments. As a human, I will probably take most of them for granted.

[daniel_the_smith]

the more i think about it, the more i get feeling that achieving immortality is not as desirable as one would think. i can't express good arguments for my opinion, but there is a more narrow problem:

people, who let themselves be frozen today, won't be ever be resurrected, especially not in a world where humans are immortal
why? making a natural human lifespan unlimited brings at least one trouble - potential (infinite) overpopulation and to prevent that unavoidably heavy reproduction regulations. basically you would have to wait for someone to die in order to be allowed to have children. and deaths are very rare in our hypothetical world, generally only by injuries causing immediate death or by severe brain damage.
in this world any cryogenic companies have no longer any real or potential customers, so nothing forces them to preserve the frozen bodies any longer and nothing forces them to reanimate them. they once got their money and any further activity just decreases the profit. reanimation would actually be strongly opposed by society, in such a tight and restricted life space. because of the long time gap since our present, no family members care about their frozen ancestors. all in all, only reasons to thaw any of the ancient frozen geezers are feeling of moral obligation or interest in history.
historical reasons surely can save only small number of lucky ones and given human selfish nature and frequent preference of present to future, it would be very hard not to prefer present to past, so i don't give much chances to people feeling enough obliged to the frozen ones

essence of my argument is in assumption that people will still want to reproduce. it can be disputed. but i think this desire is hardcoded into genes of all living beings by evolution so it can't be fast wiped out by any technological improvements and social changes. i personally believe there is no objective philosophical meaning of life, reproduction being the only real biological one, even now. and with an infinitely long lifespan importance of having children could possibly even grow, because if you can spend time with anything, no activity really matters so much anymore and people will naturally seek for something to give their lives a meaning

Laman, born to die

You've described a world full of people smart enough to become immortal but dumb enough that they can't escape to the stars. I don't think such a future is likely, but I agree that if it happened, the "corpsicles" won't be reanimated.

I think genuine immortality would be rather frightful. I think it would be very nice (assuming one could maintain quality of life) to live for 200 or 300 years, perhaps even a thousand or so - but that's nothing compared to infinity (that's actually literally true in a fairly precise mathematical sense ). I'm pretty sure that eventually, at some point, immortality would become horrible (so, should they exist, in the long run I'm pretty sure I would find heaven and hell indistinguishable). Good job I don't believe in anything of that sort, then

If you're alive and that bored, you can always kill yourself (in most futures, anyway). If you're dead, you can't change your mind. After living a long time, maybe I will agree with you, but maybe I won't, and personally I'd like to decide then and not now.

[robinz]

I agree with that - assuming one has the possibility of suicide. Immortality (as in most afterlife scenarios) would seem to preclude it by definition, though

[jts]

Probabilities:

P(positive singularity) = 20%

...

P(reanimation|~positive singularity) = .0001%

...

And on difficulty: I expect successful reanimation requires on the order of thousands of years of time for a human-level intelligence with access to nanotechnology. (There are on the order of 100 trillion axions/dendrites that need to be examined for breaks, and probably other things to fix also; you do the math!) I do not expect people to be reanimated until THAT costs less than running a refrigerator. Once you wrap your mind around how difficult it will be to unfreeze someone, I think the things I'm claiming about societies capable of such feats become a lot easier to swallow.

Well, we agree on one of those probabilities, give or take an order of magnitude.

I can't imagine having a productive conversation about something that will happen after the singularity. It would be rather like trying to argue about what will happen after the second coming. "Will pi still be transcendental?" "No, no, Jesus/the nanites will make circles slightly different than they are, so that it comes out even." What can you say?

So you think I might wake up in a society that can raise the dead but doesn't know how to fix poor memory? Which is the harder problem? This whole line of thinking makes no sense to me.

Well, we're talking about a number of different things here. One is freezing, unthawing, and repairing healthy brains, and then installing them in new bodies. Another is freezing, unthawing, and repairing whole bodies (healthy, unhealthy, in hospice). These both seem highly improbable to me (and also, separately, not hugely desirable), but the idea that we will freeze, unthaw, and repair *dead* bodies.... death is not kind to our bodies, and especially not to our brains. If you are imagining that we will be reviving people who died and were frozen the next day, you're imagining something so implausible that you might as well imagine anything else you want. But in that case, why not imagine that beneficient time-travelling aliens will scan our brains at the point of death and reincarnate us in the far future? I find that scenario even more awesome.

But yes, I think that it's probably far easier to freeze, unthaw, repair, and reinstall a brain than to, as you so blithely put it, "fix poor memory".

... Two bodies could share a brain and not have any of the same memories ...

What? How? How can you share a brain and not share any memories? That's like saying you share a heart but not ventricles...

I'm asking you what you would think about a body which has the same brain in its cranium for, say, five thousand years. Imagine that society hasn't gotten around to fixing poor memory yet. (The nanites are forgetful.) The persons associated with these bodies and brains each have a set of memories, and there is no intersection between their memories. They share a brain, but no memories. (If there's any cardiac analogy, I'd say it's like saying "they share a heart, but no blood".)

I think, if I can sum up a bit: people change throughout their life; a 90 year old is not the same as his or her 10 year old self. We're OK with that kind of change, I think pretty much everyone is. There is a very real sense in which they are not the same person. If I wake up at time T, then at time T + 80 I will be a "different person" in that same sense, and I'm OK with that. It's a natural part of growth.

For you to make a personal identity argument against cryonics, you have to argue that between being frozen and reanimated, something will have changed that makes me not be me. I think that's been part of your argument, but you also seem to be implying that if I grow and develop after a reanimation, I'll no longer be me. I think that's true, but only in that same sense, and that I and most people are OK with that sort of incremental change. Even if we aren't, it happens to us every day.

There are two separate points at which you might need to consider that your identity has changed. One is that, due to problems with (or features of! ) resurrection, or the new environment in which you find yourself, or something else entirely, your newly resurrected identity is (or very quickly becomes) different from your old identity. The other is that, after some period of time, your most recent identity becomes different from your newly resurrected identity.

I'm asking you (and any other cryo-sympathizers, or anyone for that matter) how big the difference would have to be, at either of those points, for you to no longer think that the resurrected person was you.

So far you've given two responses: one is that it's actually impossible for the person not to be you if technology is sufficiently advanced for reanimation to work (which does not answer the question), and the other is that you would consider any person to be you, so long as the change took place sufficiently slowly (although you haven't said how slowly...).

Your concept of identity leads to some interesting possibilities, by the way. For example, imagine the time-travelling aliens scan your brain, but they badly screw up the first copy when they reanimate you (in fact, by a bizarre coincidence, he's exactly like Joaz). No problem, though, they just make another copy of you, and this one is perfect, electron for electron. However, over a period of thousands of years, the failed copy (the one that started out as Joaz) ends up becoming exactly like you in any aspect you choose to stipulate, while the one that started out as a perfect copy of you ends up becoming an incomprehensible, barely human entity that shares nothing with you at all. Then, when the aliens decided to take both copies of you back into the past to visit you (a family reunion of sorts). The one who is exactly like you is Joaz, you say, and the strange betentacled being is Daniel?

[Laman]

You've described a world full of people smart enough to become immortal but dumb enough that they can't escape to the stars. I don't think such a future is likely, but I agree that if it happened, the "corpsicles" won't be reanimated.

by this we are getting much further into science fiction. first, with immortality the natural population growth becomes exponential. so not only people would have to be able to find other habitable planets / make other planets habitable / build enormous space ships or space stations to live in, but they would have to be able to do so exponentially faster and faster, while still consuming limited local resources

this brings questions like what ways of space travel will be found and how will price and required time grow with the distance, and i doubt we have enough information to seriously discuss them

but not only they have to be able to manage the threat of overpopulation somehow, they have to find solution so convenient and cheap that they could easily afford to give space for a bunch of people no one is interested in and who won't be beneficial to the society at all

[Joaz Banbeck]

...
people... who let themselves be frozen today, won't be ever be resurrected, especially not in a world where humans are immortal...
in this world any cryogenic companies have no longer any real or potential customers, so nothing forces them to preserve the frozen bodies any longer and nothing forces them to reanimate them...

This motivation might be true if there were some overnight transition to immortality. But virtually all technological improvements of this scale occur gradually. The theory may be discovered in a flash, but the implementation and its consequent social changes takes years, decades, or even centuries. ( Computers are still changing things, 50+ years after the invention of the transistor. Nuclear weapons are constantly changing the face of international relations 70+ years after the first atom was split. Heck, we're still coping with the introduction of gunpowder to some third world nations. )

Nobody will become immortal overnight. There will be a gradual implementation of life-lengthening technologies. There will be a long intermediate period when some medical problems are fixable and some are not. That is the crucial issue.

So there will be a long period of time when some people are going in and some are coming out.

Most people who hear about cryonics seem to reflexively assume that there will be one period of time when people go in, followed by a waiting time of hundreds or thousands of years, followed by a third period of time when people are coming out. They often assume this without realizing that they have assumed it. They then conclude that is unreasonable to assume continuity though the second time period. ( If such assumptions were correct, I would agree with them. ) But progress is not so cut and dried.

Technological improvements take time. There will be a long period of time when some are going in and some are coming out.

There will be a time when people are being thawed because AIDS or cancer is curable with a single pill, while others are being frozen because they've been infected by grey goo 114b which nobody knows how to stop. Those waiting to be frozen, or the friends and relatives of the frozen, will have a strong motivation to see that thawing contracts are honored.

--------------------------------------

Independent of contracts about freezing, there is a general motivation of most members of society to see that all contracts are honored. Currently, I want to see a dispute between neighbor A and neighbor B handled fairly and according to law, not necessarily because I care about the dispute itself or the parties involved, but because I want a fair opportunity when my turn comes if I should have a dispute with neighbor C.

As people live longer and longer lives, this interest in honoring contracts should be greatly magnified, for no longer are we talking about people who want to see fair treatment available in the next several decades, but we will have people who seek a legal/social system that guarantees them fair treatment for multiple millenia.

[daniel_the_smith]

I can't imagine having a productive conversation about something that will happen after the singularity. It would be rather like trying to argue about what will happen after the second coming. "Will pi still be transcendental?" "No, no, Jesus/the nanites will make circles slightly different than they are, so that it comes out even." What can you say?

I agree, but I'm not discussing post-singularity futures in general, only ones that also happen to reanimate cryonically frozen bodies. That gives us a clue as to how powerful they are.

If you are imagining that we will be reviving people who died and were frozen the next day, you're imagining something so implausible that you might as well imagine anything else you want. But in that case, why not imagine that beneficient time-travelling aliens will scan our brains at the point of death and reincarnate us in the far future? I find that scenario even more awesome.

I think you have hours, not days, to freeze a deceased brain. The longer you wait, the harder it will be to repair. More damaged brains will either never be wakened, or will be wakened further in the future. I think there's essentially no chance for embalmed & buried bodies, I didn't mean to imply that if that's what you thought I meant.

But yes, I think that it's probably far easier to freeze, unthaw, repair, and reinstall a brain than to, as you so blithely put it, "fix poor memory".

I believe the very nature of a singularity has to involve an intelligence explosion, specifically intelligence about how to make intelligence. So, I say P(able to fix memory|positive singularity) = 99.9999%. I essentially can't imagine any post-singularity future where people can't have their memory fixed if they want to.

I'm asking you what you would think about a body which has the same brain in its cranium for, say, five thousand years. Imagine that society hasn't gotten around to fixing poor memory yet. (The nanites are forgetful.) The persons associated with these bodies and brains each have a set of memories, and there is no intersection between their memories. They share a brain, but no memories. (If there's any cardiac analogy, I'd say it's like saying "they share a heart, but no blood".)

OK, that makes a bit more sense. As I said above, I can't imagine how such a future could come about, but it's an interesting question. Note that this has nothing to do with cryonics. Perhaps a better example would be someone who lives through the singularity and refuses to have their memory fixed. I think I would call them the same person as an outside observer, but I wouldn't expect them to recognize each other as the same person if they met via time machine.

There are two separate points at which you might need to consider that your identity has changed. One is that, due to problems with (or features of! ) resurrection, or the new environment in which you find yourself, or something else entirely, your newly resurrected identity is (or very quickly becomes) different from your old identity. The other is that, after some period of time, your most recent identity becomes different from your newly resurrected identity.

Right, and my point is that the second has nothing to do with cryonics but with longevity in general.

I'm asking you (and any other cryo-sympathizers, or anyone for that matter) how big the difference would have to be, at either of those points, for you to no longer think that the resurrected person was you.

I think I said before, I don't make a binary distinction. So, if me!justafterreanimation's brain layout is 99.9% the same as me!justbeforefreezing, then after waking I'm 99.9% me. And I would find that an acceptable trade off for 1000 extra years of life.

So far you've given two responses: one is that it's actually impossible for the person not to be you if technology is sufficiently advanced for reanimation to work (which does not answer the question), and the other is that you would consider any person to be you, so long as the change took place sufficiently slowly (although you haven't said how slowly...).

I'm not sure that's a fair reading of what I've said. The first I think I just answered; the second (which is not really a problem with cryonics, but with long life in general):

Define mu-change to be the maximum amount of change an ordinary human brain undergoes in a second. (Brains constantly change as you learn, etc. Just looking at a different scene causes millions of neurons to change state.)

Then: I recognize as me, any individual containing a brain, the informational content of which can be traced through space time back to my brain right now, with the restriction that in any continuous second along the traced path the amount of change that takes place in the information representing my brain is less than or equal to that of a mu-change.

(in fact, by a bizarre coincidence, he's exactly like Joaz)

This isn't a conceivable mistake. There are about 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion connections in the human brain. Putting that in numbers; it would take 500TB just to describe the connection map of a particular brain (if you can store a connection in 5 bytes-- and this is a lower bound, much other information will be needed besides). The space of possible human brains is ENORMOUS: there are (2^4,000,000,000,000,000)! permutations (that's (factorial of (two raised to the 4 quadrillionth power))-- again, this is a lower bound). Perhaps a few million or billion of them are recognizable as me. There's no conceivable mistake that could, starting with the number representing me, end up with the one representing Joaz: A small mistake that changes, say, 8 billion bits will end up with something 99.998% me. A large mistake, equivalent to picking a random number of 4 quadrillion bits, will produce a brain that doesn't even function; most permutations will not describe valid human brains. To pick a random number of that size and end up with the one describing Joaz's brain is an event so improbable as to make the lottery seem like a sure thing.

[daniel_the_smith]

by this we are getting much further into science fiction. first, with immortality the natural population growth becomes exponential. ...

And the number of frozen people stays static. When there are 10^20 humans, unfreezing the < 100,000 or so that actually managed to get frozen acceptably well is not going to be a big deal.

[jts]

(in fact, by a bizarre coincidence, he's exactly like Joaz)

This isn't a conceivable mistake.

Sorry, I was just being funny. It doesn't matter who he starts out as. While the mistake's chances of being a particular person are tiny, his chances of being a person are quite high. (And Joaz has just as good a chance as anyone else! )

(But I find the following interesting: you are happy to admit that, out of inconceivably large numbers of brain states that represent brain states of sentient individuals, at the moment of resurrection only a few million of them could possibly be the brain states of Daniel. Nonetheless, after a sufficient amount of time has lapsed, any of them could be Daniel.)

[daniel_the_smith]

(in fact, by a bizarre coincidence, he's exactly like Joaz)

This isn't a conceivable mistake.

Sorry, I was just being funny. It doesn't matter who he starts out as. While the mistake's chances of being a particular person are tiny, his chances of being a person are quite high. (And Joaz has just as good a chance as anyone else! )

I know, I just hadn't had my fill of pedantry for the day.

Also, I disagree-- I think the fraction of 4 quadrillion bit numbers that represent valid human brains is still vanishingly small, even if there are billions of possible representations of any individual. 12 billion humans (or however many have ever lived) times 1 billion representations is a huge number, but it's minuscule compared to the *factorial* of two to the 4 quadrillionth, which is so large I don't even know how to estimate it. Also, I think my numbers are orders of magnitude too small, and the strength of my argument scales with the factorial, so...

(But I find the following interesting: you are happy to admit that, out of inconceivably large numbers of brain states that represent brain states of sentient individuals, at the moment of resurrection only a few million of them could possibly be the brain states of Daniel. Nonetheless, after a sufficient amount of time has lapsed, any of them could be Daniel.)

I also don't agree with this. Mu-changes are a not-quite-random walk from a starting position. I don't know where it will take me, but I know it won't take me everywhere, and at no time will I wake up thinking I'm Joaz. There are lots of ideas that I'd put an extremely low probability that any future me would come to agree with.

Also, if you don't accept something like what I described, how do you know you'll be the same person tomorrow?