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.

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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.




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.

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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

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?



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".



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".)




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?

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

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I might be wrong, but probably not.

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.

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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.



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.



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.



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.



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



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.



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.



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.

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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.

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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.)

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...



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?

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this discussion is pretty intense, good that i came around the Off topic section


i thought about your counterargument before writing my post and concluded it didn't hurt my reasoning. because once you are dead (by today's mainstream standards) and frozen, your original cause of death is probably not your biggest trouble. i've got a feeling that resurrecting frozen man is genuinely more difficult than cure most issues that might force him to get frozen. i admit that i don't have a scienfitic prove for this, if anyone knows how easy it is to reanimate someone frozen, i would greatly welcome his contribution. in my conception i saw a resurrection like sort of a holy grail in medicine


hmm, yeah, people are good and honest, but i don't know how much i would bet on that. by the way, i wonder what the signed contracts exactly say about time and conditions of thawing the customers. i would be just afraid that it will end like "Hmm, we should thaw the frozen people in our basement.", similar to today's "We shouldn't burn so much fossil fuels." or "Someone should accept the war refugees from XY." (possibly bad examples). i mean - everyone knows it should be done, but no one wants to do it.

in way, this discussion about cryonics is similar to religion. i am an atheist, i know i will lose. someone is religious, he might win or lose (and he believes he will win). with cryonics, i won't get myself frozen, i lose. someone gets himself frozen, he might win or lose (and he hopes he will win). both religion and cryonics are legitimate ways of dealing with the fear of death. just religion cost nothing and cryonics have some scientific basis

i hope i don't write too much nonsense, it is an hour and half after midnight here

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I might be wrong, but probably not.

I think everyone here is completely preoccupied with physical immortality. I don't expect to run into many of these problems, because I fully expect to upload into some sort of computing substrate. It simply doesn't make sense to stay limited by the computational capacity of 3 pounds of meat.

So. It's easy to believe that the aliens could (by design) hit on the tiny sliver of the space that defines individuals who are identical with you but, so improbable as to be nonsense that they could (by mistake) hit on the sliver that defines individuals?

(Also, to be ultra-pedantic, because it makes absolutely no difference to the thought experiment, we don't necessarily need the starting brain to be a valid human brain.)



So there is a set of mental states which are the same as you, independent of whether or not there's any shared brain history, but you can't get from one of these states to another state outside this set, because the process by which they change is not quite random. Why don't you just postulate that you are a monad created by a universe-simulation program created by nanites, and you only appear to interact with other substances? (After all, is it more likely that the secondingularity will happen in the future, or that it already happened in the past?)



I might not be! It's extremely unlikely, but perhaps tomorrow morning someone will wake up in my bed who I would not identify with (were I around to identify with anyone anymore). Or phrased less awkwardly; perhaps the person who wakes up in my bed tomorrow won't identify with me. (Although we shouldn't reject out of hand the possibility that only one of us will identify with the other, now should we? It seems to follow immediately from some of the things you've said, Daniel, that you would still identify with Yuggoth-Daniel (because you shared a brain) even if Yuggoth-Daniel didn't identify with you.)

I'm also perfectly happy to let facts which aren't facts about my personality, or even facts about my brain, contribute to identity. My personality could change a great deal tomorrow, and will surely change a great deal in the coming decades, but I would still care about that person the way I care about myself because we share abilities, responsibilities, friends, plans, and so on. A person whose personality is different by the same degree of magnitude but who didn't share those things with me would be much less interesting. (These are facts that are extremely unlikely to change tomorrow, but would certainly change if I was resurrected. For example, maybe my family wasn't saved frozen.)

Remember: these questions all come back to whether I should care enough about resurrected jts to go freeze myself for the same reasons that I currently avoid falling off tall buildings. In the world we live in, it is already the case that a huge number of people do not identify particularly strongly with the people they will become, and a small minority don't identify with these future people at all; we should probably add to that a significant number who wouldn't have identified particularly strongly with their future selves, had they had a more concrete idea of how these future selves would turn out. Not identifying with who you'll be in ten years is distressingly common, but identifying strongly with any body that was historically continuous with your own is equally vicious.

Redundant's reply is symptomatic. Not that I bear any ill-will towards sentient beings that run on "computing substrates", but why would I care very much about one, even if it started out bearing some sort of analogy to me?

I agree, but at least some people will die (and hopefully be frozen) before that is possible-- I've been talking about those people.



@jts, I don't think I've managed to communicate my position to you, because I don't recognize what you're saying back as being anything like what I thought I was saying. I think I need sleep because your questions aren't even making sense to me, and I'd rather not write something that amounts to, "did you read what I said?"

I will say, it seems we have totally different concepts of what constitutes personal identity: Under my concept, if everyone I knew were to die, I'd still be (a very unhappy) me. But under yours, if everyone you knew died, it seems you would somehow be a different person? For you, personal identity is about a (person, environment) system? I don't think that's the case for me at all.

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BTW, for those who may have missed the significance of this exchange, 'control group' in this context refers to the people who have died, were buried, and are rotting.

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Right. And a lot of them did pretty well. The ones who did poorly, by and large, had lives that were unhappy, unsuccessful, oppressed, painful, lonely, cruel, and so on, and so forth; I don't think "too short" really ranks that high up there. The ones who did well, on the other hand, were not necessarily the nonagenarians. In a huge number of cases, halving the lifespans of the more fortunate rotters would not have put them in with the unfortunate rotters, and doubling the lifespans of the latter would not have put them in with the former. Or would you disagree?



Yes, I lean towards a (person, environment) system. That's a perfectly fine way of putting it. But you seem to have assumed that I think that if X is a part of someone's identity, then it's a necessary part of their identity, which neither of us thinks. If one friend dies that changes me a tiny bit; if all my friends die that changes me a little more; if everyone I've ever known dies that changes me quite a great deal. And in particular, there's a pXe interaction turn; large changes in the p term can lead to small changes in identity, large changes in the e term can lead to quite small changes in identity, but large changes in both terms simultaneously can lead to quite large changes in identity.

A very short story:

The two versions of stj are different in one crucial respect: the second one remembers being jts, the first does not. And, if one accepts that memory is identity, the second one is jts, the first one is not.

I recall a friend of mine telling me a rather short but poignent story. He said, "I'm seventy five years old, and I wake up with a different woman every morning!" It was his best attempt to cope with the fact that his wife of 55 years has severe Alzhiemers.

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I wonder if identity can be treated as a universal attribute of a person. What if it is not? In other words, I may have my own sense of identity, which is perceived differently from how others interpret my identity. This seems consistent with the idea that memory can be associated with identity. However, if a person changes quite a bit, to themselves, they might be the same person, whereas to an external observer, they might be somebody different.

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No. "Disagree" might not be the right word, but I have a completely different perspective. None of them exist anymore. Whether they did "well" or not in life, death ended them all without regard or pity. The only reason we're ok with this is because nature is not a person you can prosecute in a court of law for murder.

Let me state this another way. There are various systems of morality, but nearly all of them include the idea that it's wrong to end the life of another. It's even wrong to do nothing and allow someone to die. Nearly all of our medical advances amount to, "No, nature, you will no longer kill us this way." The limit of this process is, "Nature, you will not kill us at all. We, ourselves, will decide what 'enough' life is for us." I'd prefer to see the limit of that process without being frozen, but I'd like to see it having been frozen if the alternative is not seeing it at all. (bold because I think that sums up my thoughts on the whole subject.)




So if personal identity is a function of time (perid(t)), you're saying that perid(t+1) = perid(t) + (environmental effects at time t) + (other effects)? ...because that's exactly what I was trying to express earlier; mu-change = max((environmental effects at any time) + (other effects)). And actually, under this model, your personal identity is slowly changed by the environment, but is not dependent on the environment.





if jts' brain were replaced by aliens with another, unrelated brain, I would not consider the resulting stj to be the same person, even though it would take people quite a while to figure it out. If jts had a stroke which caused this, I would regard it a tragedy but the individual would still be jts. If this was a natural development of jts' personal identity, of course I would, too.

Actually, a stroke may exceed a mu-change. In the case of a stroke, perhaps I think that the individual is 99% jts. (an unrelated brain transplant definitely exceeds a mu-change and, given that brain space is so large, probably shares on the order of < .01% of the brain state with jts)

A stroke is a good example for the other thing, too: A stroke would corrupt/destroy some amount of my brain state, but it could never turn me into Joaz, or any other individual. Valid brain states are so few and far between that any random external change is likely to be a detriment; a large enough change (say, on the order of 10 simultaneous strokes) will move you out of the current individual's brain state, but you don't get a new individual, you get a vegetable. That's why, if you wake up tomorrow in stj's old body, you would look for a cause; that doesn't just happen randomly.

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I agree with some of the things that you are saying, but I think that, under a number of systems of morality, some might be OK with allowing individuals to die under certain circumstances.

An example of this might be if someone is very ill, and the family must decide whether they should continue to allow for the person to live. Perhaps even more of a controversial topic is the idea of abortion. And even in some cases, someone may be suffering, and the idea of ending their life may seem more "moral" than trying to preserve their suffering.

I think that many people are often in favor of preserving life, but I can't say that it's always black and white matter.

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