Consider the procedure by which ancient Egyptians prepared a body for the afterlife.
In ancient Egypt, mummification was considered integral to one’s afterlife. The mummified body provided a place for a person’s ba, or spirit, to return to the body after death.
The process began with the evisceration of the body. All internal organs were removed- except the heart. The heart had to remain in place, it would testify for the deceased person in the afterlife. Often a scarab or other amulet would be placed over the heart to protect it in its voyage through the netherworld.
The brain was usually removed. A long, slightly hooked tool was introduced into the brain through the nose, swirled around to liquefy the brain. The head was then tipped forward and all contents of the skull poured out, again through the nose. It is not uncommon, as with our mummy, that the brain was left in place. It simply dried up and shrank during mummification.
The next step was to dessicate the body. The deceased was laid out under a mound of natron salts, salts native to the area, and not unlike today’s baking powder. Over a period of days, the salt absorbed all the moisture, the flesh shrank, and the skin darkened.
Egyptians used resins, cassia, cedar oil, myrrh, cassia, and palm wine as drying or anti-microbal agents in the embalming of the mummy. These, like the natron salts, helped to protect the body from decay.
The lungs, stomach, intestines, and liver were dried out and each placed in a canopic jar. The jars came in sets of four, and each of the Four Sons of Horus were assigned the duy of protecting the contents of one of the vessels.
Keep that in mind. Now consider how modern cryotechnicians prepare the body of a two-year-old girl who died in Thailand.
It involves moving the patient onto an ice bed, coating her in freezing materials, artificially restarting the heart with a “heart-lung-resuscitator,” administering over a dozen different medications, draining the blood and replacing it with medical grade antifreeze, opening the chest cavity to attach the major blood vessels to a machine that flushes out all remaining blood, then slowly lowering the body’s temperature, at a rate of 1˚ Celsius every hour. (After two weeks, the body reaches deep cryofreeze at -196˚ C.) Alcor had selected a well-equipped pediatrics hospital in California for the job.
…
Kanshepolsky examined the girl at the hospital before she was taken home, and discovered an alarming complication: since so much of her brain had been removed, her skull had filled with cerebrospinal fluid, which would make the procedure difficult.
“We typically drill two holes in the skull, so we can visually see the brain. If the brain begins to contract, it shows it’s working,” Drake said. That’s because the medical antifreeze Alcor uses dries the brain, and shrinks it. Alcor technicians also insert crucial instruments through the perforations. “Into those holes we’ll insert thermo-couplings, temperature probes basically, to monitor the brain temperature,” Drake said.
…
“Typically we’d move the head from the trunk of the body,” Drake told me. “We didn’t know what their reaction would be from the family, the mortuary, from border officials; this has to go through a number of shipping venues, customs, the TSA and so on. To see a frozen head in a box might have raised a number of red flags. In the US that’s not a big deal, but there, they may not be accustomed.” Instead, they kept the body intact, and frozen. “The entire patient was placed in a specially prepared dry ice shipping container and the cool down to dry ice temperature (-79 degrees C/-109 degrees F) began on-site,” More and Drake wrote. It proved to be an astute calculation; the container passed inspection.
“After the US Embassy in Thailand approved the shipment, the container was topped off with dry ice and shipped by airline to LAX for customs approval,” according to the official account. There, Alcor enlisted its mortuary agent in Buena Park to take the container. Drake and another Alcor operative drove down to collect it in what Kilma called an Alcor response vehicle. They topped off the container with dry ice, loaded it into the truck, got the necessary transit permits, and brought the human cargo back to Scottsdale. “The neuro separation was performed at Alcor after arrival and Matheryn became Alcor’s 134th patient,” according to the company.
Matheryn’s procedure was what Alcor calls a “neuro” in shorthand—where ultimately, just the brain is extracted and preserved, as opposed to the entire body. Her brain is now stored in a “Bigfoot Dewar,” a stainless steel, vacuum-insulated container filled with liquid nitrogen and kept at -196˚C, along with dozens of other masses of grey matter. The core of Einz’s two-year-old being now rests in cryofreeze in Arizona, in wait of a cure, and a means to regrow her body.
What’s the difference? Aside from the details, of course.
We can look at those old mummies today and recognize that everything done to them destroyed the tissue biologically, not that the Egyptians were aspiring to biological preservation. We shake our heads sadly at the idea that they were effectively preserving the person now.
I look at what those cryogenic frauds are doing to dead bodies, this elaborate ritual of surgical and chemical and pseudo-scientific alteration of the corpse with the hopeful idea that this process effectively preserves the person, and I have to shake my head sadly, too. This is just adding layers of technological modification to the dead, instead of decay. I have no hope that this is actually preserving anyone.
I also wonder what a future civilization would do if they inherited tanks of liquid nitrogen containing extracted blobs of diseased brains and decapitated heads. Does anyone really believe that they’d feel any obligation to resurrect them, even if they could? Think of the fate of so many Egyptian mummies, ground up and used in patent medicines, or propped up in museum displays. The more likely end is that there will be a rusted, broken tank in a museum, with a little plaque explaining how some 21st century Americans were so obsessed with immortality that they tortured cadavers.
I’m not even going to address the transhumanist technofetishist version of Pascal’s Wager: If you don’t freeze your body, you have zero chance of resurrection, but if you do, there’s a small chance that you’ll be brought back to life in the future
. Right. And maybe you’ll get teleported into the future if you spin widdershins three times while reciting the Lord’s Prayer backwards. Maybe! A tiny chance is better than no chance, right?
Yuck.
The RationalWiki article on cryonics (which I wrote most of) is about the best critical piece of writing on cryonics, and that’s saying really shockingly little. For all the fuss about it from transhumanists, and its popularity as a science fictional trope, there has really been very little effort put into debunking its claims in detail. So anyone who can go through the more fantastic “but there’s still a chance, right?” claims step by step would be welcomed. I’ve tried, but there’s always going to be another “but you can’t prove it isn’t true!” claim.
OK, I can’t even read that creepy horseshit from cryo guys there. My eyes gathered something about chopping up a little girl and nyehh slide on to the next thing. But I will say one thing in contradiction to the PZ writing. I wouldn’t hesitate to resurrect someone from 5000 years ago if I had the chance. I’m too curious to let the opportunity for learning slide by.
Of course, it’s impossible etc etc. But I’d do it.
And these Johnny-come-lately Christians think you just have to accept Jesus and repent of your sins. Mind you, some of them have already had their brains removed, so they’re starting on the right track at least.
That’s about the only reason I can imagine to resurrect an old body: as a historical curiosity.
A dead two-year-old? Not even that, sorry to say.
Heck, that’s nothing. We’re going to live forever…well, if you’re a billionaire: The Immortality Financiers.
For the rest of us, there’s always composting.
Reading the article, I’m much more worried about what they did to her before she died. I must seriously question whether 12 brain surgeries, 20 chemotherapy sessions and 20 radiation sessions in one year without an actual prospect of healing were done in her best interest or that of her parents.
I always thought that there was a great sci-fi story to be had in this. Some alien civilization comes to earth hundreds of years in the future and finds frozen decapitated heads, revives them and then sells them to the aliens back home as pets to be kept in a little aquarium in the alien’s living room.
Not exactly the resurrection these heads were hoping for! :-)
And even if they did, you can bet Procrastihibernation would ruin it.
If it didn’t cost anything, sure. But the resources required here are absurd. Ironically, you’d be more likely to achieve immortality if those resources were channeled elsewhere.
Hi Liz321 – you’re right – it’s been done. Larry Niven (A World Out of Time) envisions thawed corpsicles as slaves; and TJ Bass (the Godwhale) as detritus. Why would anyone assumethat the future owes them a living?
Well, putting an ancient Egyptian back together to the point where you could actually start asking some questions could be very interesting indeed.* Likewise, once humanity has put this dreary millenium well behind it, it might want to fill in some of the gaps.
Yes, there will be arkward moments, such as explaining to a patient how ‘mommy’ was found 150 years earlier and, because noone knew what to do with her, she was turned into deluxe footpowder. But on the whole it could still be worthwhile.
*””All right, where is the secret chamber with all the gold?”**
**Expensive research needs to be financed, after all. Fortunately the good archeologist, bad archeologist routine never fails.
Niven also wrote The Defenseless Dead wherein there was a proposal to thaw the corpsicles and use them for organ transplants.
So you’re woken up so far in the future that society has changed beyond recognition. Any education you have is equivalent to ‘Hey, I know about wheels!’ and the prevailing moral system seems arbitrary and quite possibly nonsensical to you, while yours seems barbaric to people born into that society.
Yep, sounds like fun to me…
@8: I think they would probably go straight to the frozen food market. “Transhumanist brains, for the busy bachelor on the go”.
Larry Niven has a novel that includes “corpsicles” be exploited as a resource instead of be welcomed by their descendants:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_World_Out_of_Time
Though, IIRC, the mechanism has some silliness about RNA playing a role in memory.
Yikes, I managed to substitute be for being twice in that last one. Time for more caffeine.
I’m a cryobiologist, and I can tell you not only will the procedure they describe not work in principle, it also is technically very difficult to perform and they don’t even successfully complete their own procedures very often (I discuss this on this podcast: http://www.causticsodapodcast.com/2014/11/03/freezing/).
Here’s the thing–there are a huge number of animals that survive freezing, and we’ve been studying this for the better part of the last century…and yet we still don’t know what the “thing” is that confers freeze tolerance. There are tons of biochemical correlates for sure (cryoprotectants, antifreeze proteins, ice nucleating agents, etc.), but none of them seems to be either necessary or sufficient. There are many animals missing one or more of those things that are still freeze tolerant, and many animals with all of those things that are not. And we can’t seem to induce freeze tolerance in whole animals that are not freeze tolerant, which is the real acid test for whether we understand the mechanisms (although of course many cell types seem to freeze fine).
The best we can do is point to the fact that freeze tolerance is a paraphyletic trait, so there are likely multiple ways to accomplish the same physiological feat. And there is clearly lots about the physiological mechanisms that we don’t understand yet.
So I’m just in the early stages of learning about the LessWrong robot cult, the Silicon Valley neoreactionaries (aka. The Dark Enlightenment) and all the maddening ways they overlap… Anybody else seeing this? It is fucking ugly. Seems like yet more evidence of an escalating culture war that needs to play out between progressives and… techno-regressives, I guess. I wonder how long it’ll be before FtB gets swept up in that part of the conflict as well.
Let’s see, there’s also Transmetropolitan, where thawed cryogenics folks are brought out of their hibernation and pretty much go into immediate culture shock when they step outside and discover a world so alien they can’t even process it all. Most end up either dead or just living on the street and in shelters (which are still underfunded shitholes with no real social work being done).
I also vaguely recall another short story which featured three hibernators brought back at different points in the future. I forget what happened with one, but a second was disappointed to learn that inflation had undone his scheme to get rich off of compound interest, and the third was a fugitive from the law in our time who wakes up to find himself in a society as restrictive as living in prison.
Well, yes, the body could function as a statue (the deceased were also believed to be capable of inhabiting statues of themselves). But that wasn’t the primary reason for the ritual of mummification. Before final interment, the culminating ritual was performed, called “the opening of the mouth”, which reunited the ba and the ka of the deceased, which in turn made them an “awakened akh” and able to retain their identity in the afterlife. The baof a person who was not mummified and had not had all the proper rituals performed was believed to persist, but as a potentially troublesome spirit who could haunt the living and did not retain the full identity of the living person.
We imagine a great reverence for the dead in all of this, but underestimated, I think, is the degree to which fear of the dead was a driver as well. Powerful people made powerful spirits as well. Mummifying a king’s body and establishing and maintaining his funerary cult was as much about controlling the dead as it was about preserving their memory.
demiurge @18: our most effective defence is that they are generally fuckups who seriously think they can substitute meta-level-1 “thinking about thinking” or meta-level-2 “thinking about how to think about thinking” for level-0 “actually being good at things”. If you look at this particular singularitarian woo cluster, you will see a consistent pattern of high-flying speculation with a notable paucity of actual results. The far reaches of this woo cluster do what woomeisters do when boxed in: they pooh-pooh science itself and claim they have something better, and call people who don’t buy into their argumentation doing skepticism wrong. The key indicator is a lack of observable results. Similar to how, if scientology worked, you’d see the higher echelons of society filled with Clears in a very short time.
I mean, my own achievements are hardly stupendous, but I don’t claim they are either, or take money for them as a cause.
(Emphasis added)
Alcor? Elcor? Close enough…
One of the things I am most glad about when it comes to transhumanist woo is what total drivel it really is. I shudder to think what society would look like if it was not.
Imagine the 1% as a genetically and cybernetically augmented overclass that actually possessed the level of superiority over the ordinary person on the street they already think they have? Imagine the likes of Donald Trump with a much longer lifespan, able to amass more unearned wealth and influence over the course of several centuries? To the point where he could buy and sell every governmemnt on the planet at a whim, and the sick libertarian nightmare of a true corprotocracy was realised.
I don’t see a future like that turning out very well. It would be like today, only worse.
@22
Nice reference.
@21
Agreed for the most part, and jeebus is Eliezer ever a smug bastard.
The amount of money funneled into this ideology in Silicon Valley does seem to merit concern. Worse than that, though, I’m sickened by the apparent (if I’m not mistaken) appeal of those neoreactionary views I mentioned to STEM people (well, dudes mostly) more broadly. I’ve been in a very STEM-oriented campus for a few years while also acting as an atheist club president twice, so that’s probably where I’m getting this uneasy impression. This stuff IS genuinely persuasive to a lot of intelligent people who needlessly become pretty shitty people through adopting it.
I’d like to write more about this I have both 1) poor writing skills generally and 2) a temporary hand injury that are dissuading me. I’ll just recommend the blog Amor Mundi to everyone here who’s interested in this tangent (though be warned that it’s an eyesore and very verbose).
@Gregory Greenwood (#23):
Sounds more like a coprotocracy.
I guess Myers hasn’t heard of advances in organ vitrification:
http://www.brainpreservation.org/content/competitors
Cryopreservation of rat hippocampal slices by vitrification
http://www.21cm.com/pdfs/hippo_published.pdf
Heart of glass could be key to banking organs
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21929343.100-heart-of-glass-could-be-key-to-banking-organs.html#.VTAIdvnF8ud
http://www.oregoncryo.com/electronMicrographs.html
@26: We all know about the actual research in cryopreservation. That means we know that everybody who’s been frozen in the past, and everybody getting frozen now, and everyone getting frozen in the foreseeable future, is dead.
demiurge:
Well, there have already been quite a few pharyngula threads about these things in the past. But for now, techno-regressives are like scientologists or homeopaths. They’re not an especially dominant cultural force at the moment.
I don’t know what to predict about whether (or why/how) their influence is escalating. You could argue that generic technological progress gives some people more reasons to find it plausible that the Singularity is near or whatever, but it would be a mistake to say that technology is actually leading us in that direction. Alternatively, people might instead become more and more accustomed to and informed about rapid technological changes, in a way that helps them see how all of that is a lot of hot air (and undesirable even if it was feasible). I’m not saying we’ve reached the peak of this sort of bullshit yet, but there are obviously a lot of factors at play which prevent it from simply “escalating” or increasing monotonically.
It’s not just in STEM, of course. The arts/humanities are full of such bullshit as well. It’s worrying how much emphasis is placed on STEM programs in universities, especially with such a narrow focus on high-tech employment and enterprise (at the expense of, say, simply understanding the world). It seems worse when even that gets narrowed down some more to computing/AI/robotics — as if that were going to deliver the picture of the future. (Maybe it’s me, but techno-regressive bullshit about things like genetics, cryobiology, space colonization, etc., seems more peripheral to this mentality.)
Anyway, there are lots and lots and lots of resources are thrown in that general direction — and I’m convinced a lot of the art world is tagging along, out of a sense of self-preservation if for no better reason. For some perspective, something I found just the other day:
Of course, there is pushback in the arts against the sort of “techno-regressive” thought you’re talking about, but it’s not very well informed on the scientific front. There are plenty of worries about the ethics or aesthetics of it, but not so much about the physics (for example), to the extent it’s clear what the evidence even says.
@Anisopteran – There are even worse possibilities.
@Gregory Greenwood (#23)
I’ve love transhumanist fiction (fiction being a key word). Drivel it may be but it’s really some of my favorite scifi.
What you describe reminds me of Altered Carbon and subsequent books. Maybe I’m just projecting my feelings onto the work but I thought it was scathing of transhumanism. At the very least it was a future I’d never look forward to.
This really hit hard in the second book when a massive pile of cortical stacks (devices that backup a person’s personality and memories) are sold like kids toys on ebay.
@11Anisopteran
16 April 2015 at 11:17 am
Do not forget about Fry and the awesome futurama
Richard Smith @ 25;
True enough – it would certainly turn the lives of most people to excrement in short order.
There was an entire TV series based on that premise.
@19:
I was also thinking Transmetropolitan! As I recall, the frozen people were also sold a false bill of goods: they were frozen with the expectation of being thawed later, but the thawing technology didn’t actually exist yet. The freezers did what they did with the *hope* that *someday* *somebody* would figure out how to thaw people.
And the fact that eventually society *did* do that wasn’t all that peachy, either. It was considered a chore, a contractual obligation, a least-bad answer to the question of what to do with all these frozen people. So, like you said, they’d be thawed out and thrown right out into the world…. and the thawers would clap the dust off their hands and consider their work done.
jehk @ 30;
Like you, I like transhumanist fiction as well (everything from Neuromancer through Deus Ex to Ghost in the Shell – I have been meaning to read Altered Carbon and its sequels, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet), but very much with emphasis on the fiction; the problems start when you get people likle the singularitarians who take this stuff absolutely seriously, not seeing the works of people like the new wave authors as allegorical parallels for contemporary social issues (the class commentary of Gattaca, the ruminations upon dehumanisation and the nature of consciousness and life in Asimov’s I, Robot, the general existential questioning that is emblematic of the entire genre), but rather as a literal blueprint for tomorrow, where everyone who can afford it has cybernetic/genetically engineered superpowers and can be uploaded upon death and then ‘resleaved’ to achieve techno-immortality.
It somehows escapes such fans of real world transhumanism that the vast bulk of the fiction they base their vision of the future upon is dystopic for a reason – we already live in a global culture of haves and have-nots where the wealthy can unduly influence democratic processes and use their money to order society pretty much according to their own agendas. In a world where all indications are that eighty odd people will soon possess more wealth than the remaining human population combined, how could it be otherwise? Now add in the ability for the rich to pay for bodily upgrades, to further retrench and reinforce the unfair advantages afforded by wealth procured by whatever means, and the situation can only worsen. A future where the rich can afford guaranteed physical beauty and indefinitely extended youth, the althetic prowess of a world class athelete, along with genius level IQ, but the poor remain with the standard genetic lottery, can only become ever more unequal.
Then there is healthcare; the rich simply don’t get sick at all thanks to their enhanced immune system – and any injury or rare illness that does effect them can be dealt with by cybernetics or outright tissue regeneration courtesy of something like advanced stem cell technologies – while the poor still die from preventable illnesses becasue their medical insurance won’t cover the necessary treatment.
With such a massive gulf existing between the rich and the poor, how long before the wealthy decide that they are just so darn superior to these mere mortals that they really amount to techno-Olympians? The ‘worthy’ will acheive apotheosis through technology anyway, leave the dregs in the mud where they belong, why should they put limits on the potential of these new posthuman gods? One person one vote? But what happens when one of those people is so much more capable than the other they are barely the same species anymore? Shouldn’t those who are more capable, better suited to lead, be afforded more power…?
Of course, that is only a problem if you think that such inequality and oppression is unjust; if you are the type of person who couldn’t care less about other people, and are certain that you will be one of that privileged transhuman elite, then it probably all sounds just dandy. Bearing that in mind, it is no surprise that so many singulatarians are also the nastiest stripe of economic libertarian arsehats.
Mark @26: you’re citing stuff that’s already been refuted in e.g. the RationalWiki article. All they said about the rat hippocampus was that it looked good, for example – restarting the neurons in question didn’t happen, recovering any data about connection strengths didn’t happen. If you’re making a claim, you need to make a claim that accounts for refutations already linked.
You do know, right, that PZ literally works freezing zebrafish brains, and would dearly love to recover information from them? That even the very best lab freezing of a tiny tiny zebrafish brain trashes it utterly? As he notes:
You’re arguing with someone who literally freezes brains for a living. And, er, you don’t.
You really can’t know what the future will do with cryo-corpses — witness the story “Bridesicle”, where revived women discover they’re being married off to the men who pay the revival expenses. (They revive just the head first, and interview her; if she doesn’t agree to the marriage, she’s sent back into the freezer)
vewqan @ 33;
Interesting stuff – I will have to track down Galaxy Express 999 and give it a watch. Reading the precis from the link, I noticed that I forgot the likely plight of the augmented poor in any such scenario, forced to get (probably cheap and crude) augmentations in order to remain employable, and then being beholden to the producers of that technology for things like maintenance for the indefinite future. If that producer is also their own employer then you get a high tech version of the old truck token system, doubly so if the augmentations are too expensive for the ordinary person to buy outright, and so remain the property of their employer even when they are integrated into the employee’s body, making leaving that job more than a little hazardous to one’s health…
@35 Gregory Greenwood
I don’t have much to add. Wonderful post. Real transhumanists worry me. They probably read the same fiction we do and have a completely different reaction. I wonder how much of the distopia I see is actually a utopia for them.
Well, maybe you already realize this, but “uploading” is equivalent to suicide plus cloning. (That can’t be an exact physical duplicate, mind you, supposedly just “close enough to count.”) Even if it were available to everyone, that’s not a kind of immortality for a person. It looks more like insurance fraud. You kill yourself, with the expectation that your clone-benefactor will inherit whatever you leave to them. It’s like faking your own death to collect on the money, except that you don’t fake it and somebody else (who you wrongly think of as yourself) is doing the collecting. Not the most well-thought-out scheme, if you ask me. Anyway, maybe it isn’t very explicit (or people don’t understand the implications) but intentionally or not, perpetuating inequality seems to be built right into the foundations of that idea.
Is there anyone here who wishes to ask any questions of a cryonicist, other than to join in the dogpile against the concept? If so, you might want to first skim the blog post I made a couple of years ago, at http://blog.datapacrat.com/2012/11/01/dpr-is-now-a-full-fledged-cryonicist/ , which covers the basics of my thought process.
I’ll try keeping an eye on this thread for at least a couple of hours for replies.
Not that I think they’ll ever be able to restore these brains (they’re shredded at the cellular level by ice crystals, that’s pretty much beyond hope if you ask me), but I wince when you suggest no one in the future would want to bring us back to life. I mean, that suggests you think people in the future will be just as monstrous as us. That may be true, but I like to actually hope that people will, eventually, actually care about strangers in the future.
I know that if Egyptian mummies actually COULD be brought back by us, right now, I’d feel morally obligated to bring them back. I mean, what’s the difference between not bringing someone back to life and killing someone in their sleep? A lot, yeah, what a stupid analogy on my part, but I mean in terms of them hoping to see another sunrise and us depriving them of it. I don’t think I’ve got the right to say “no” to that. The morally correct thing to do is bring them back, and then after months of language training, ask THEM if they want to keep living.
Frankly, if we ever managed to find some way to pull out “past states” of the timeline intact, I think we’d be morally obligated to bring back everyone who has ever died, working backwards to maintain all family and friendship connections. I mean, at LEAST all those who were slowly tortured to death by psychopaths. They deserve final thoughts other than “nothing I ever did mattered in my life and hope is a lie” (which I have to imagine everyone who’s tortured to death thinks). I just don’t see the difference between being dead and sleeping, except for the lack of waking up. If we could “wake them up”, we’d need to for the same reason we’re obligated to put coma patients on life support (until it’s determined they actually CAN’T wake up again, that is, brain death).
No, I don’t actually think we’ll get to that point. I’m just disagreeing with the moral apathy towards resurrection I’m seeing here.
DataPacRat’s blog:
It’s not possible. Heat death. Case closed.
False. If you never signed up in the first place, a fuckload of resources selfishly devoted only to you would be put toward better projects which affect vast numbers of other people, whose lives are every bit as meaningful (and finite) as yours.
DataPacRat #41:
1: That’s not even the basics of your thoughts on the process, so far as I can tell. It’s largely the basics (all 550–600 words of them (which; why would I need to ‘skim’ that?)) of your thoughts on the possible outcome, which basically amounts to Pascal’s wager, re-applied. Talking of which…
2: Where did you pull that 5% estimate of success from?
3: Do you not have dependents or relatives, or do you not know of a good charity, who might be glad of the effort, resources and money you’re throwing down this self-interested and foolhardy drain?
I’m at least glad for the research being done into cryogenics and inducing hibernation. Even if the whole “freezing heads in liquid nitrogen” is a stupid idea, maybe some version of hibernation will work in the future – god knows it would be useful for medical purposes.
One of the better SF treatments of the “Why would future people revive me?” was in Charles Sheffield’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow. The protagonist is trying to think of reasons for why future people might be interested enough in him to revive him down the line, and “had the money to pay for being frozen” is not one of them. He ultimately settles on the idea of personal and unique perspective on the music scene of the 21st century (he’s a composer), and it works – a music historian revives him a few hundred years down the line.
@36 Apples to oranges. PZ is trying to discover unknown aspects of how brain cells function. That is totally different from retaining structural information in a state that can be recovered later on using more advanced methods. There are advantages to vitrification by ultra-rapid decrease of temperature when you are working with very tiny samples, but with large organs this is physically impossible, and not what anyone is trying to do.
katiemarshall @17 Totally misleading. Vitrification is essentially the opposite of freeze tolerance. Case in point: ice nucleation. Freeze tolerant creatures use ice nucleation proteins to cause controlled freezing to occur. But when Wowk and Fahy vitrified their surviving rabbit kidney, they used ice blockers to prevent this. Nobody is suggesting that controlled freezing will ever work in humans. There are some shared challenges such as osmotic pressure, but it’s totally not the same thing.
@ the rest of the thread: The stupid, it burns!
consciousness razor #43
> a fuckload of resources selfishly devoted only to you
That wasn’t quite a question, but it seems close to one. Are people morally obligated to donate every spare cent they acquire to charity, to the level that that they have less than $300 a year to buy themselves luxuries?
An addendum to the science fiction citations above: don’t forget Clifford D. Simak’s 1967 Why Call Them Back from Heaven?, a novel looking at a society hosting vast banks of frozen bodies (and the corporation which manages both the bodies and their financial assets), in which failing to get a corpse into the official icebox in time not only costs you your own chance at hypothetical immortality but causes social ostracism on a level with murder today.
jehk @ 39;
They worry me too. At least they don’t have too much power and influence on society. At least, not yet.
I imagine most of it – to the hardened libertarian, any system that allows the privileged and powerful to become more privileged and powerful is always welcome. They always assume that they will be counted among the elite, and they couldn’t care less about anyone else.
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consciousness razor @ 40;
I agree completely that the whole uploading things is utter rubbish. The point I was making back @ 23;
Was how bad it would be for society if the fever dreams of the singularitarian brigade were actually possible, and the wealthy actually could extend their lives practically indefinitely, and with it their ability to amass wealth and power.
That said, I am sure that there will be some wealthy narcisists who will still try it anyway; the idea of someone out there who carries their exact genetic makeup, who looks like them and has been indoctrinated to think like them, would be too much for their arrogance to resist, and they would doubtless convince themselves that it would amount to a continuation of their own consciousness, even though it clearly would not be.
Immortality schemes never are. This is simply a more technological version of the fountain of youth, and just as illusory.
Exactly – the true aim of singularitarianism is not some high-minded quest to release all humanity from the limitations of our biology and the notional ‘tyranny’ of death – for the most part it is rather predicated upon finding new ways for the inequalities in society to be cemented, and to widen the gulf between the elite and the rest of us. it is about entrenching a more extreme version of the existing social and economic status quo dressed up in the gaudy trappings of a techno-utopian revolution.
What does that have to do with preserving your body for an indeterminate amount of time, with the vague hope that maybe someday you’ll live again for some length of time? (Presumably just to be frozen, starting the cycle over again, until eventually — as I said — that cannot physically happen anymore.)
What moral obligations do the rest of us have? Why shouldn’t we unplug the cryo machine supporting you, which is costing us so much for so long, if it only has a potential of benefiting you?
We do have moral obligations almost like what you’re talking about, but they don’t involve donations to charities (nor do they involve fixed figures like less than $300/year). You have to pay your taxes, to provide for a social safety net, education, infrastructure, and so forth. That is an obligation for social critters like us. There is no obligation on us that we must allow you to exploit us for the sake of your wealth and privilege.
Reading through the vast majority of negative posts here makes me wonder why so many of you have taken so much time and trouble to write them if you think the whole subject is so much rubbish. Surely it doesn’t matter how people spend their own money on something that the nay-sayers consider to be worthless? No doubt there are many people who think going on luxury cruises to be a waste of money, but one doesn’t see reams of articles making this point.
I suggest that a possible explanation is that many of those who write here secretly want death avoidance to be possible, but don’t want to admit it. They may well know the popular arguments against cryopreservation, and want reassurance that they are not correct.
If they want to embrace death, they wouldn’t be writing here, they would be ending their own lives by the most painless and convenient method they could devise. If they are ill, do they go to a doctor or do they think their time has come and lie down and die like Queequeg in Moby Dick ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queequeg
The thing is, that cryonics is freeze, wait, reanimate. Admittedly no one at present really knows how reanimation to youthful good health could be achieved, or indeed whether it could ever be achieved. But that requires sure and certain knowledge of the future. No one has this.
Recall the learned calculations that heavier than air machines could not fly. They were correct at the time they were made. It was only future developments that changed things.
Daz #44
> Where did you pull that 5% estimate of success from?
A combination of finding out what factors other people thought would most significantly affect the probabilities, such as the likelihood of a cryonics organization remaining solvent until the estimated time when technology for revival becomes feasible, or the likelihood of the vitrification process being properly applied before significant ischemic damage to the brain; and, after taking some months to consider the matter, what my own best estimates of those factors were, using every mathematical trick I know to narrow the range of my initial, order-of-magnitude Fermi estimates to something more useful for establishing what my personal level of confidence on the issue was.
5% is actually slightly rounding up of my estimate, which is currently closer to 3%. (I prefer using logarithmic units for this process, called ‘decibans’, because it makes the math easier.) Most other cryonicists seem to peg their confidence at higher levels than I do – 10% to 15% is common, and I’ve seen optimists who peg it in the 90’s.
> Do you not have dependents or relatives, or do you not know of a good charity, who might be glad of the effort, resources and money you’re throwing down this self-interested and foolhardy drain?
Mu. (Your question is unanswerable as asked.)
I will agree that it’s “self-interested”; so is owning a smartphone, or subscribing to cable or satellite TV. “Foolhardy” depends at least in part on one’s estimate of how foolish the whole enterprise is, which, since it contains confidence levels that are inherently subjective, is merely a word that indicates your own belief that it won’t work – and I agree, in that I’m roughly 95% confident that it /won’t/ work.
For a relevant part of your question – I do know of a “good charity”, and have donated to the top charity recommended by GiveWell (at http://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities ), which was (and still is) the Against Malaria Foundation.
consciousness razor #50
> What does that have to do with preserving your body for an indeterminate amount of time, with the vague hope that maybe someday you’ll live again for some length of time?
Not much, as far as I can tell. Your earlier post seemed to imply that my annual spending of $300 to pay for the membership and insurance premiums to fund my cryonics was selfish to an immoral degree. Thus, the natural conclusion is that anyone who gives less than nearly all their disposable income to charity is also being selfish.
> Why shouldn’t we unplug the cryo machine supporting you, which is costing us so much for so long, if it only has a potential of benefiting you?
For one – the Cryonics Institute costs you nothing. It’s entirely self-funded, through its members’ dues and donations. A significant amount of that money is set up to be able to fund the preservation of its members indefinitely, in much the same way that a cemetery can have a trust set up to maintain its grounds indefinitely.
> your wealth and privilege.
You seem to be under something of a misapprehension. For privacy reasons, I won’t disclose my precise annual income; but I will say that it’s under USD $20k per year, and I have no expectation that it will measurably increase during my lifetime, short of a societal revolution.
It’s impressive, the number of gnurrs this topic has pulled from the voodvork out.
Last I heard (at a memorial for Oliver Selfridge), Marvin Minsky was still hopeful that technology would develop to allow minds (his in particular…) to be “uploaded” into machines, where they could continue to think (what ultimately becomes of an originally embodied “mind” which suddenly finds itself with no autonomic responsibilities and possibly no “unconscious” states, I have no idea, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s not good); but I don’t think his version of the fantasy involves any later “downloading” into organisms. I may, of course, be entirely confused on this issue.
>> Where did you pull that 5% estimate of success from?
>A combination of finding out what factors other people thought would most significantly affect the probabilities, such as the likelihood of a cryonics organization remaining solvent until the estimated time when technology for revival becomes feasible, or the likelihood of the vitrification process being properly applied before significant ischemic damage to the brain; and, after taking some months to consider the matter, what my own best estimates of those factors were, using every mathematical trick I know to narrow the range of my initial, order-of-magnitude Fermi estimates to something more useful for establishing what my personal level of confidence on the issue was.
>5% is actually slightly rounding up of my estimate, which is currently closer to 3%. (I prefer using logarithmic units for this process, called ‘decibans’, because it makes the math easier.) Most other cryonicists seem to peg their confidence at higher levels than I do – 10% to 15% is common, and I’ve seen optimists who peg it in the 90’s.
Please break down the mathematics in detail. I note this comment on LessWrong from an actual neuroscientist (part of this thread) which places the probability at something on the order of 10^-22. So you’ll appreciate I want to see your detailed working on precisely how you reached something on the order of 10^-2.
(This is something I asked quite a bit of cryonicists coming up with numbers on that order a few years ago. If you can do a detailed breakdown, you’ll be the first.)
lsparrish @46 is a PRATTer on cryonics. His actual answer when discussing this stuff on RationalWiki several years ago was nanobots. If engaging, I suggest you require actual falsifiable claims, and swat down all instances of “you can’t prove it isn’t true”.
@51, John de Rivaz
I find your attempts at armchair speculations about people here to be amusing. I think they indicate that you live in your own bubble of conspiracy thinking, and spend a lot of time dreaming up responses for the next person who looks at your ideas and tell you they are wrong. Especially since you came out of nowhere to declare all of this. You’ve got nothing.
Horoscope rubbish. Of course most people would like to live as long as they want to! That isn’t a deep insight you have, and it isn’t an “explanation” for why people naysay your rubbish.
Well, yes, thanks for pointing out how absurd the straw enemy is that you just invented.
It’s more like a pyramid scheme. Those aren’t typically sustainable for hundreds or thousands of years (or more: you leave that entirely out of the equation), so you won’t get the result you want.
But in zero-sum terms, whatever the price tag, it is costing us something. Those resources are going to that instead of somewhere else. Whatever accounting labels you put on that, the fact is that it’s better spent on basically any other imaginable thing.
And we already have to make difficult, triage-like decisions about medical care. We can’t afford to give everybody every treatment they want or need, no matter how expensive it is. When and if there is a fancy new (and expensive) groundbreaking treatment that would heal whatever ails you, how is increasing the number of patients supposed to make the situation better? If you weren’t being cryogenically supported, you at least wouldn’t even be a candidate for such a treatment (which probably isn’t worth) that we’d have to worry about. So who is supposed to pay for that part of it (not the cryo preservation), if you’re not doing it now, you won’t be when you’re frozen, and if you won’t be put into debt by it once you’re reanimated?
David Gerard #55
> Please break down the mathematics in detail.
For any reason I can think of for that question to be asked that I’d want to provide an answer, you’d probably be better off in examining more peoples’ breakdowns than just mine. To that end, I can recommend a spreadsheet on GoogleDocs at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1qn7c7rYmYx3KtqvhXTUGiiyuBk5e9kG3sA3jF-4zk6U/edit . I used those numbers while working out my own numbers.
(And I’m only partially fobbing you off onto that spreadsheet because I’ve had to replace my computer since I went through my number-crunching, and have lost track of whether or not I’ve still got a copy of the relevant textfile somewhere on a hard-drive. It would probably be faster for me to work out my numbers from scratch than to dig my earlier ones up, and that spreadsheet would likely form a major foundation of any such re-figuring.)
DataPacRat #52:
When quoting:
<blockquote>Paste quoted text here</blockquote>Produces:Which raises another question. What kind of timespan are you thinking of, and if it’s extremely long (say, over a century) what makes you think you will have anything to offer the society of that time?
So you have nothing to say about the current state of the actual research, but would rather have us rely on your analysis of trends in research? (Moore’s law springs to mind here as a clear example of why I feel this to be faulty reasoning when talking of cutting-edge science/technology. There is no reason why it should apply for all time, and every reason to suppose that there are physical limits to how small a transistor can be made, from both a physics and an engineering standpoint. I trust my analogy is clear.)
I’m not planning on extending my self-interest beyond my death. Nor am I planning on burdening some future society with it, by landing on their temporal doorstep with no guarantee that I will be able to support myself, in full knowledge that my education will be woefully lacking by their standards. You are. Why?
Yet you’re willing to waste time, effort and resources on it which could be used to benefit the society you currently live in, in hopes of becoming a burden on a future society. Nice.
It’s a good charity. It’s not what I asked.
consciousness razor #58
This seems to bring us back to the idea that any significant spending on oneself, instead of to benefit others, is immoral. If that is not the logical conclusion of your point, then I hope you can explain what you mean in another way that I might more easily be able to understand.
(Scratches head) Well, in general, isn’t the whole point of the medical system to keep people alive, and to work out whatever budget/cure-rate compromises are necessary?
If the technology ever is developed to reanimate corpsicles, I expect one of three main groups would provide any necessary funding. One is the cryonics organization itself – there’s a reason that my chosen provider herds its assets as conservatively as possible, for just such an occasion. Another is a cryonics mutual-support organization, such as the Society for Venturism, in which individual cryonicists pledge to try to help any frozen members, if their resources permit. And third, not all health-care systems are arranged in the fashion that the American system presently is (and I might as well mention that I’m not American); it is possible that preservation and reanimation will become as much a part of a future health-care system as inserting a stent into a Canadian’s arteries, and cost just as much as such a stent would cost that Canadian. Put another way – I’m not expecting you, or anyone else, to pay any more for my resurrection than you might already be paying in taxes for other peoples’ medical treatments.
>To that end, I can recommend a spreadsheet on GoogleDocs at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1qn7c7rYmYx3KtqvhXTUGiiyuBk5e9kG3sA3jF-4zk6U/edit . I used those numbers while working out my own numbers.
Thank you! (I find those numbers ridiculously optimistic, but that’s literally the first full answer I’ve ever had to that question.)
Transhumanist: someone who’s sense of self-importance represents an evolutionary leap beyond normal human self-importance.
David Gerard @56 You should be more clear about what points I’ve made that you think were refuted a thousand times. I’ve certainly had the dubious pleasure of this particular false equivalence of yours more than a time or two.
One episode (33) concerns a woman who goes stark-raving looney after spending several hundred years in precisely that predicament. The planet she lives on doesn’t fare much better—it’s laboring under some sort of structural adjustment regime and is forced to convert all its production over to making screws for export.
Daz #60
Thank you kindly. :)
I don’t put a lot of confidence into any predictions more than, say, fifty years from now; I don’t think I’d be able to predict the present given data up to fifty years ago. That said, I don’t expect to be able to offer much of anything to “society” that couldn’t be found elsewhere… however, I may be able to offer something to particular /individuals/, even if it’s nothing more than the satisfaction of fulfilling a promise to themselves.
Not at all – I’m not trying to convince anyone here to sign up; and even if I were, my own thoughts on the matter would be much less important than the data that can be found elsewhere.
There’s a metaphor floating around that cryonics is a “leaky lifeboat to the future”. There’s an expanded version, in which the reader is invited to imagine themselves as a member of a nearly-uncontacted stone age tribe, who has heard whisperings about the marvels that can be found in technologically advanced societies, and, upon discovering you’re ill, have to decide whether to make the journey and try to get help from them. By their standards, your education will be woefully lacking, and you may be unable to offer them anything they want in return for the cure you’re asking for… but it may still be worth going to the expense of building your leaky boat to row over there.
Don’t forget, when Adam Smithian capitalism does improve society, it does so by harnessing peoples’ individual selfishness to drive things. I’m not hoping to become a burden – I’m hoping to do a lot better than that. If it is possible to bring me back, in fact, I hope to be in roughly the social place as a new university student, who may cost society a certain amount in the short term to bring up to educational snuff, but in the longer term will not only be able to pay that cost back, but provide even more benefits.
I know. My actual answer to the question you asked was ‘Mu’, and I tried to guess at a better question you could have asked.
It’s not a question of whether it costs me more for you than it costs me for someone else (with an equivalent treatment). It’s a question of whether I should be paying for your treatment at all. Our taxes don’t pay for (or subsidize) medical treatments for corpses buried in some cemetery. We have no obligations of any kind toward them, because they’re dead. I don’t think future generations should feel bad at all if they don’t make sure you’re revived. They have their own lives to worry about, and the fact that they (at least some of them) understand that ultimately none of us can cheat death shouldn’t put them at a disadvantage.
vewqan @ 65;
This is getting almost uncanny – the creators of this show and I seem to think in an extremely similar fashion. I will have to watch it somehow now… ;-)
consciousness razor #67
If I may ask, do you think that society should subsidize university educations?
Looked at from a certain light, this is likely because the cost/benefit analysis of research into treating people buried in graveyard has been extremely disfavourable in the number of QALYs that any such treatment could be expected to produce. The numbers may eventually come out somewhat differently for cryonics.
There are a number of individuals, and even whole cultures, who would disagree with you about such non-obligation. And you are, of course, free to continue to feel that lack of obligation as strongly as you wish to.
I’m reserving final judgement on that issue until physics has gone for, say, at least a full millennium without any new data that disconfirms existing models. :)
>> It’s a question of whether I should be paying for your treatment at all.
> If I may ask, do you think that society should subsidize university educations?
I’m pretty sure you can’t reasonably compare subsidising university education to subsidising cryonics.
DataPacRat #66:
Which kinda sidesteps my question, doesn’t it. Why should these people want to resurrect someone who is quite likely to be unemployable and nothing but a drain on their resources?
Eh? I’m sure you know perfectly well that what i meant by ‘rely on’ was in relation to justifying your claim of a 5% chance of success.
So you’ll likely have no means of paying them for this treatment (which is a thing we do even outside the US, via indirect means such as taxes, national insurance schemes and so on), no guarantee that you will ever be able to pay for it by financial means, and no expectation of paying their society back ‘in kind’ by contributing to it in any significant way? Again, I have to wonder why they should bother resurrecting you.
Ah you’re hoping they’ll have created a utopia! I urge you to look at the world, especially in view of your fifty-year timescale. We’re already bequeathing them a fucked-up climate, dangerously depleted resources, a legacy of political mayhem, and gawd knows what other horrors. Why on Earth should we expect them to welcome members of our generations with anything but loathing and disparagement?
Most university students have a full adult life ahead of them in order to pa back the resources used to educate them. What age are you planning to go into storage at?
I think they should be free. But not for dead people, since they are not very good students.
That’s just ridiculous. Quote via wiki:
If somebody has a clear understanding of cryo-bio-whatever, I would expect some basic familiarity with thermodynamics. Not deepest humiliation.
It’s simply a matter of time. If you merely wanted to live some small and finite amount of time more than you would otherwise, then of course that’s a very different issue.
David Gerard #70
No, but I can compare bringing a revived cryonicist up to speed with post-modern society to a university education.
(Something wonky happened to my WordPress login to FreeThoughtBlogs, so I’m now logged in via another social media account.)
@ DataPacRat;
You seem to be reasonably confident that a cryonics firm could credibly remain solvent until such time as some wonder death-cure can somehow be created, I assume by some form of advanced nanotechnology or some other, as yet entirely unimagined, field of medicine. I am curious as to why you should feel such relative confidence. We are talking about reversing the complete cessation of biological function, undoing at least some inevitable early stage decomposition of immensly complex tissue groups, some of whom, like neural tissue, begin to deteriorate markedly immediately upon death, and reversing the inevitable ice crystal damage done to frozen tissue, that tends to rupture cell membranes and pretty much shreds soft tissues at the cellular level.
That is a lot of issues to address. Even optimistically speaking, we have one heck of a mountain to climb before we even come close to dealing with any one of them, still less all of them at the same time, making it very likely that we are talking about a substantial period of time elapsing before society can achieve what cryogenic proponents desire. in your post @ 66, you write;
But this seems very optimistic to me – what is under discussion would be a feat of unprecedented medical complexity. I can’t predict the future either, but as an example I consider it unlikely that humanity will have an interstellar civilisation up and running in fifty years. The fact that I can’t exactly predict what will happen half a century from now doesn’t mean that we can’t look at ball park probabilities, and the idea that we will have totally conquered death within such a short timeframe sort of sounds to me much like that other shibboleth of sci fi; strong AI, that has been ‘twenty years away’ for knocking on sixty years now. It probably will happen one day, but current estimates on timeframe from its proponents are consistently optimistic to say the least.
Taking all that into account, what if the death-cure in question takes much longer than fifty years, as seems likely? For convenience sake, lets assume that is actually possible. What if it takes hundreds of years, or even thousands (as is at the very least possible, and indeed likely)? Is it still resonable to assume that a corporation could endure over such a lengthy timespan? And if it didn’t hold togther, what then? Would you argue that society would have a moral obligation to maintain the cryosystems with public money for as long as it takes, in the knowledge that that committment could span centuries?
Also, matters medical are rarely as neat as we would like. As an example, what if this death-cure isn’t a ‘one and done’ treatment? What if extensive aftercare is required? What if it would result not in a single resurrection from nanotech/stem cells/*insert preferred sci fi medical McGuffin*, but an ongoing course of treatment that will have to be continued indefinitely, much as many people suffering from chronic conditions today will have to take medication for the rest of their lives? Wouldn’t that massively increase the costs entailed? And since it is likely that you would lack the means to support yourself in a future so far removed from this time period, how would the costs be met? Would that morally obligate this hypothetical future society to the expenditure of yet more public money that could be used for other things? is it reasonable that such a society should be required to foot the bill for your desire to defy your mortality indefinitely?
Daz #71
A very similar question could be asked about prospective parents. And newborns take a lot longer to become economically productive adults than cross-cultural immigrants.
When someone dies, why should anyone bother abiding by the terms of their will?
Well, for one, if I am resurrected, I expect that I’m most likely to be brought back by cryonicists who expect to die and be brought back in their own turn, not by random citizens who have no interest in the whole idea.
Why would I be brought back if whatever killed me can’t also be cured sufficiently to give me a reasonably long time before I’ll be expected to croak and have to be re-frozen?
consciousness razor #72
In the past centuryish, we’ve gone from the Big Freeze to the Big Crunch to the Big Rip, with excursions into such exotica as seriously considering Tipler’s Omega Point and the differences between the Multiple Worlds and Multiple Interacting Worlds interpretations of quantum mechanics. I understand thermodynamics as well as any other curious science geek; I simply don’t assign a 100% confidence level to the proposition that there are no escape hatches that can be discovered in the next few millennia. More than 99%, sure – but as I’ve already demonstrated, I’m willing to play low odds when the potential payoff is sufficiently large.
DataPacRat: Being a “full-fledged cryonicist” seems to mean nothing more than that you are a true believer, and have signed a contract to be frozen someday. That does not make you better informed, only more gullible.
Yeah, you others, I’ve heard the stories. You’re not frozen, you’re vitrified, as if that is somehow an improvement. That just means your tissues are saturated with glycerol, ethylene glycerol, or DMSO, or some other wacky cocktail concocted by the company getting your money, as you’re cooled, removing the water that would otherwise crystallize. Go ahead, take a healthy rat and drain its brain, replace half of its water with glycerol or whatever, then rehydrate…and tell me if the rat is anything but dead afterwards. You don’t even need to cool it to liquid N2 temps — just do a replace and restore of brain fluids.
I know about the work on brain slices. I’m unimpressed. Even if you got partial physiological function out of a vitrified and restored slice (you don’t even have that), you haven’t gotten around the problem of getting uniform saturation of a whole brain — one little missed spot, and you’ve got the equivalent of a major stroke.
Slicing the brain into little thin slabs to get more thorough penetration isn’t a solution. Here’s another experiment for you: take a living rat brain. I’ll even let you cut sloppy thick sections, say 100µm. Now slap ’em back together. Is the rat doing a little happy dance?
Heck, I’ll be even more generous. Just cut one coronal slice through the middle of a rat brain. Stitch it back together. Is it alive or dead?
You guys are all excited because there’s a technique that preserves the superficial morphology of brain tissue to a greater degree…while making serious chemical changes to it, as if that’s irrelevant. It looks good, so you’re signing up, while as far as function goes, it’s as crude and destructive as an ancient Egyptian embalmer sticking hooks up your nose.
#76: Yep. Pascal’s Wager.
Because the terms of their wills don’t include statements such as “make me immortal.” If any do say such things, those items should not be enforced because it is selfish, myopic, ignorant, wishful-thinking asshattery. If a legal system starts trolling itself like that, not only will your absurd terms be disregarded, but so will lots of others.
DataPacRat #75:
It could, if one were willing to take analogies to ridiculous extremes in order to sidestep the question. As I see you are. Well done.
Oh I dunno. Emotional attachment? And again, you sidestep the question. You’re risking being a burden for a goodly number of years on a society containing people who have no such attachment to you. I’ve been to a fair few funerals, and I’ve never yet known the corpse to sit up and demand decades of financial and medical support from those present or from their society.
And, in the course of getting this education they’re going to provide you with and so on, and the life you plan to live in their society, you’re not planning on interacting with any citizens other than fellow corpsicles?
Ah, so you’re not only planning on not being defrosted until your illness is curable, but until the Howard Families have divulged all their secrets? You’re now betting on at least two strands of research. And you still claim this has a decent chance of occurring in fifty years or so?
It has very little to do with cosmological models, none of which violate the second law.
Let me know when you start building perpetual motion machines. Note that people have been not-doing-that for as long as there have been people, not just the last 100 or 1000 years.
Until then, you’ve got nothing.
Gregory Greenwood #74
The odds of my cryonics organization failing are a significant part of why I estimate my odds of being reanimated as being merely ~3-5%, rather than, say, ~6-10%.
As this seems to be the theme of a number of similar questions, I feel like it’s worth mentioning that it can be entirely valid to make plans that include the step, “And at this point, I don’t know what will happen, so I don’t know what I’ll do.” I hope that I’ll live long enough to be able to work out and promote socially-acceptable answers to these questions; and if I don’t, that my fellow travelers will be able to pick things up where I left off.
If we’re talking about ‘indefinitely’, then that also gives me plenty of time to educate myself to post-modern standards and become able to support myself, and to pay back whatever resources were used to help me when I needed help. For your question about ‘public money’, we already have a well-established set of meta-systems to work out how public money should be allocated, which I have only as much input on as any other voter. Given that, over the last forty years, only a couple of thousand people across the entire planet have signed up for cryo, we’re unlikely to be able to act as an effective lobby group for more than being left alone to do our own weird thing.
PZ Myers #78
I hate to disagree with our good host, but not every game-theory problem that can be placed into a 2×2 payoff matrix is dismissible as being merely a Pascal’s Wager.
Daz #80
I know for a fact that there are people, alive right now, who would prefer that I was dead rather than alive, due to irreconcilable conflicts of values. (This is one of the reasons that I have tried to ensure that no photographs of me are available online, and that my location is never given to a greater accuracy than my half-million-population regional municipality.) If I’m reanimated, there will nigh-certainly be more people who think I should be dead, nevermind mere “loathing and disparagement”.
I don’t live my life to please everybody.
Er, no; I’m not specifically positing that any given technology will be available in fifty years, I’m positing that by fifty years or so from now, any positing I make will be at least as likely to be false as true, and probably moreso.
(On a meta level, it’s been a few hours, and I’ll probably be signing off for the night soon.)
DataPacRat #83:
On the other hand, when the question being posed is as silly as ‘Does a big man in the sky really exist to care if I masturbate?’ or ‘Can a person survive being placed in a meat-freezer for decades?’ it pretty much is dismissible as being merely a Pascal’s wager.
Point of order: the principle argument against Pascal’s Wager is that as an argument for Blaise Pascal’s preferred form of religious observance, it’s a false dichotomy. If, in fact, we were certain that either there is no God or that God is as Pascal believed him to be (and we thought, as Pascal did, that acting as if one believed could cure one of unbelief), then Pascal’s wager would be a correct application of decision theory.
There’s no such false dichotomy in the case of cryonics. Either future generations will be able and willing to revive corpsicles, or they won’t. Merely calling the cryonics decision a Pascal’s Wager is far from dispositive.
Daz, that just throws the question back on the particular subjective probabilities and utilities one assigns. If you think it’s an actual counter-argument, you’re committing the Pascal’s Wager Fallacy Fallacy.
(I see DataPacRat got there before I finished signing in, but I do love the sound of my own voice…)
“If I do this one little thing, sure there is little chance of it having any effect at all, but in the highly unlikely event that I’m right, I get the infinite reward of living forever! So I would be stupid to NOT do it!”
How is that NOT Pascal’s Wager?
(BTW, I’m not signed up for cryonics or currently considering it. It’s just that I dislike fallacious arguments, and since Bayesian decision theory is what I do for a living, I’m well-positioned to spot this one.)
Eh?
Pascal’s wager, line one:
Blaise Pascal was Catholic. He wasn’t trying to get people to say the Shema or kneel towards Mecca. That’s how his wager goes wrong as an application of decision theory.
No the problem with pascal’s wager is that it tries to work without evidence, which makes it symmetrical (it gives you no reason to think one option gives you a reward while the other doesn’t, and vice versa).
With Cryonics we can at least agree which option is throwing away a chance, however small.
If it’s not the principle one, there is an argument is that it’s a confused epistemological clusterfuck.
If we’re allowed to have more than one sound argument against Pascal’s Wager (to avoid a meta-false dichotomy about what the argument is and how it must be refuted), then pointing out that something is a form Pascal’s Wager doesn’t imply it fails in the same ways for all such counter-arguments. The most you can say is that it’s not like the argument for a god in some ways — but we already knew that and it isn’t relevant to the idea that they have a similar form.
At least in this case we have some hope of calculating how likely it is that a probabilistic version of the second law is false. Vanishingly small: pretty much as close to zero as you want that “we’re all going to die” is false, just on those grounds if not on many others.
In the case of the existence of benevolent sky-wizards, it’s not clear how to even do that calculation. But the suggestion is that we have some absurdly simple way to calculate it anyway, which is intended to make the odds look more reasonable than they actually are. By confusing a silly cost/benefit analysis with a reason to believe a fact is true.
Corey Yanofsky, I quite simply do not know what the hell you’re on about. Pascal’s wager makes no claim about the existence of a god—whichever god or belief system—but about whether one should act as if a god exists.
It falls down because if one is claiming, as Pascal was, to follow honest reasoning, one cannot convince oneself of the truth or non-truth of a proposition merely because such belief might be profitable. The possibility of profit is not evidence in favour of the proposition’s truth or non-truth. And Christianity’s god (which was Pascal’s default assumption for any putative god*) specifically demands belief, and is a mind-reader.
*Which brings up the obvious fail: which of the many mutually-damning belief systems is one supposed to follow, after being fooled by Pascal’s slight-of hand?
Well, Cryonics doesn’t seem like even a small chance. All such techniques look like they will destroy the mind beyond repair.
brianpansky, getting a little off track here, but that’s not the relevant counter-argument for this thread (unless you think that future generations will revive people and then cause them enough suffering to make resurrectees wish they were dead, I suppose). The counter-argument I gave above (which is weaker than the one you describe) is what’s needed to show that a mere analogy of a decision problem with Pascal’s Wager does not invalidate the application of decision theory.
The counter-argument you give defeats not just Pascal’s Wager, but also the arguments of later, more ecumenical writers, who were arguing that if Pascal’s Wager can simply bring a person to believe in “generic theism” it has done its job.
consciousness razor, I don’t know why one would care that the two arguments have a similar form when one is a correct application of decision theory, and the other isn’t. (Applications of decision theory take probabilities and utilities as inputs; disputes about the inputs are a separate issue.)
Daz, if you think Pascal’s Wager “falls down because if one is claiming, as Pascal was, to follow honest reasoning, one cannot convince oneself of the truth or non-truth of a proposition merely because such belief might be profitable”, then it what way does an analogy between Pascal’s Wager and the cryonics decision impugn the latter? That only makes sense if you think cryonicists are arguing that one should believe cryonics works because if it does work then one extends one’s life. I doubt you think that’s their argument.
What do you think is meant by the statement “Yep. Pascal’s Wager”? Fucked if I know. But that’s what you’re arguing against.
There’s a reasonable interpretation that it’s not suggesting the contents of the arguments are identical. They are similar in form and motivation, failing for similar formal and informal reasons. That may not align with your framing of Pascal (who didn’t even talk about decision theory or utility in modern terms), but it doesn’t need to, since there are various good reasons to reject it. Is that false? Fallacious? Unreasonable? Why? Because you wanted to interpret it in a highly-specific way?
Corey Yanofsky #96:
You appear to be going a long way merely to criticise a bit of snark, I must say.
I was merely pointing out that well-known phenomenon, GIGO. The 2×2 payoff matrix referred to, just like any other logical system, cannot produce a sensible answer if you insist on putting non-sensible propositions into it. That part I fully admit, was snark. I was saying ‘This thing you’re doing: it’s equivalent to wasting time and energy worrying about what your imaginary friend in the sky might think of your actions.’
My snark aside:
Pascal’s wager claims to produce the answer ‘We should believe in a god,’ without giving us any evidential support for the existence of such a creature. The cryo question claims we should waste resources on a dubious project, without providing evidential support for that project’s having a reasonable chance of success.
The two seem close enough to me, for the one to be used as analogy for the other. I do not claim that they are exactly equivalent. An exact analogy is usually not an analogy at all, but a description of the very thing under discussion.
consciousness razor, it was mentioned three times prior to DataPacRat #82. In each case it seems to just be a label for a decision problem with a low probability of a large payoff. I guess my point is that the specific (multiple) ways that Pascal’s Wager goes wrong in the original context are not actually problems for cryonicists applying similar reasoning. Here on Pharyngula, referring to the cryonics decision as a Pascal’s Wager is just a fnord — a cheap rhetorical trick. The actual dispute is about the appropriate probabilities to assign to various possible outcomes.
My besetting vice — and a good reminder that I’m procrastinating. And on that note, I surrender the floor.
Point of order. It was actually in response to my claim that we can’t “cheat death” because it would violate thermodynamics. If somebody got cryonics to work somehow (without too many whacky hidden assumptions), it makes no difference, because even then there is still a finite amount of time for anybody to live. “Avoiding death” isn’t something a working and well-supported cryonics program would give us. Or any program consistent with physics. You really do need to break physics to get that.
Of course that can’t be ruled out logically (since these are empirical facts), but the chances of that are stupendously tiny, much much worse than being “dubious” or having a “reasonable chance of success.” Throw out everything you think you know about the way the world works, except for stuff like equations of motion or constants of nature. That’s the hope. It’s really is that bad. It’s right up there with believing you’re being tricked by a Cartesian demon, that you’re living in the Matrix, that you started existing just a moment ago, that a sky-wizard has magic powers to give you an everlasting soul, etc.
And I don’t think wishful thinking can help us determine facts like that. (But I wouldn’t wish any of those anyway….)
Oh, I don’t know. Over the years I seem to have frozen a fair few calculus students’ brains pretty solid.
Ah, an even more dubious project then.
Anyone got Lazarus Long’s phone number?
> Yeah, you others, I’ve heard the stories. You’re not frozen, you’re vitrified, as if that is somehow an improvement. That just means your tissues are saturated with glycerol, ethylene glycerol, or DMSO, or some other wacky cocktail concocted by the company getting your money, as you’re cooled, removing the water that would otherwise crystallize.
Careful, there might be people out there who think you actually know what you are talking about. Of course it’s a freaking improvement, and of course we’re talking mostly about morphology when we say that.
> Go ahead, take a healthy rat and drain its brain, replace half of its water with glycerol or whatever, then rehydrate…and tell me if the rat is anything but dead afterwards. You don’t even need to cool it to liquid N2 temps — just do a replace and restore of brain fluids.
Restoring the fluid is an additional source of osmotic damage beyond the step of replacing it with CPAs, so there’s that. But you are talking as if we were depending directly on cellular viability as our criterion.
> You guys are all excited because there’s a technique that preserves the superficial morphology of brain tissue to a greater degree…while making serious chemical changes to it, as if that’s irrelevant. It looks good, so you’re signing up, while as far as function goes, it’s as crude and destructive as an ancient Egyptian embalmer sticking hooks up your nose.
Nobody is remotely crazy enough to claim that vitrified brains *function* normally (even if you hypothetically drained the CPAs without additional harm and replace them with ideal medium). Nor even that the process to cause them to function again would be simple from the current technological standpoint. We are excited about morphology (in fact, that’s practically all we care about at this point) because we think that’s probably all that matters, in terms of raw information storage.
You should describe precisely how that is unlikely/untrue if you want to be taken seriously contra cryonics, especially if you want to keep using this stupid egyptian mummy analogy.
If we COULD reversibly preserve a whole brain, that would be big news indeed. Every cryonicist would be singing in the streets and it would be a radical transformation in the whole paradigm. To get there from here, we would have to solve some really hard problems with heat removal, CPA delivery, genetics, blood brain barrier, and so on.
Citation needed. I think you find you are wrong, but can’t admit that.
You can’t get there from here. You degrade the chemicals in the brain with all the changes. Bye-bye memories.
Anyone having difficulty blockquoting, please see Daz’s comment #60. Quoting properly makes it easier to read your comments and follow the conversation.
Pierce R. Butler @48:
Thank you! That’s the story I was trying to remember.
Not only that, society had placed such an emphasis on their presumed immortal resurrection that everyone lived in voluntary poverty, in order to save enough to be prosperous in their hypothetical future lives…
Simak is a seriously underappreciated science fiction author. I should track down more of his work.
currently some folks are trying to harvest mastodon dna from frozen corpses to implant into current elephants. Perhaps these frozen humans dna might have some usefulness to re-inject some lost evolutionary traits in the far future. Other than that the premise of resurrection doesn’t fly. Even the current crop of humans who escape near death always appear to have different personalities after the event, or so it is reported.
@105 I’m confused by your comment. What do you think I find, and how do you think I find it?
@108 Some people do freeze their DNA too. But the morphological traits of the brain seem more likely to contain the info needed to reconstruct your personality/self. Two different sources of information (DNA + connectome) would be better than either one by itself though.
@60,
Well, Barlow in Kornbluth’s “The Marching Morons” did have to offer something!
Why, why would anyone want to live forever?! I’ve said for a long time that, for the most germane example, Heaven is a much worse problem than Hell for the Abrahamic religions. On a smaller scale, the transhumanist brigade seem to have the same kind of mental virus in their systems…
PZ and others are right; this is Pascal’s Wager the way the Jetsons would imagine it. Death is a mercy. Extended consciousness is torture for minds like ours. Do not fear the Reaper (I think she looks like Sailor Saturn anyway…).
Azuma Hazuki @ 112
Well, yes. On the other hand, “living until one no longer desires to, followed one’s preferred death” takes longer to say.
@112 Everything about that comment looks wrong to me.
1. Heaven > Hell, since both are eternal and all else equal you’d prefer not to suffer forever. (The only argument against Heaven that makes sense is where the indignity of submitting to God for eternity outweighs eternal torture.)
2. Transhumanists have immunized themselves against a cultural virus prevalent in the atheist community, i.e. deathism, the idea that death is good/beneficial. Ironically, religious people have similar regard for death in practice but this is because they think of death as a gateway to a better life.
3. Not really PW, as it does appeal to evidence, albeit not as strong as some would like.
4. Death isn’t a mercy, the effect death has of preventing future suffering is the only merciful aspect. This effect can also be produced with anesthesia in many situations.
5. Extended consciousness is only torture if by that you mean sleep deprivation. Longer lifespans (assuming health remains constantly good) aren’t worse than short ones (in any currently measurable respect).
anteprepro #87
What you’re describing is a decision theory problem, not a Pascal’s Wager. PW includes a few other elements which take it out of being valid decision theory, such as his leaving out a whole range of choices other than to believe in one particular version of Christianity or disbelieve in it.
I’ll put it another way: Say you learn of a lottery with tickets of a certain price, a jackpot of a very high, practically infinite, value, and a low chance of winning. By your description, that would count as a Pascal’s Wager, even though a valid method of dealing with the issue is to multiply the odds of winning by the jackpot and to compare that expected benefit with the expected cost of paying for a ticket.
In parallel, the cost of a “ticket” for cryonics is on the order of $300 per year; and my estimate of its likelihood of success is on the order of 3%. If I believe the value of the “jackpot”, being brought to life after I’m dead, is at least $10,000, then paying for cryonics is a valid and logically-consistent choice. If I think resurrection is less valuable than that, then it wouldn’t be. The lower the confidence I have in cryonics’ success, then the greater I would have to value a resurrection for it to be a valid choice. If, for example, I believed that it only had a 0.003% chance of success, then I would have to consider a resurrection to have a value equivalent to $10,000,000 for the choice to make sense – and there are plenty of insurance companies which calculate a human life to be worth less than that.
This isn’t a Pascal’s Wager – it’s simple cost/benefit analysis. At this level, you don’t even need to figure out how many micromorts per year you’re faced with, or with concerns about which theory of identity is most useful, or anything like that; just how likely you think it is for reanimation to ever become possible, and how much your life is worth to you.
Azuma Hazuki #112
Living Forever Is Awesome
@114/LSParrish: I think you’re missing a few points here…
I didn’t say from our perspective that Hell would be better; I said for Abrahamic theism, Heaven presents a worse problem. Two different things. Briefly, the existence of Heaven either utterly demolishes the free-will theodicies so popular with Plantinga’s crowd, or you can sin and be thrown out of Heaven, which makes it both a hideous North Korean cult of personality and means that as time T approaches infinity, everyone will eventually piss Yahweh off and be thrown into Hell (as any event with non-zero probability will happen at least once in infinite time).
Death qua death is neither good nor evil. I am looking forward to it, but not before I accomplish a certain mission. Personally, I am extremely existentially tired, and have had enough of humanity in general, but that does not make death good or evil. It just is.
Ehh…okay, this is fair. The form is the same but at least there’s something plausible here…
May you never be in a situation where you have to rethink this statement. As for me…the Reaper has shown herself to be the best doctor on several occasions.
This kind of ties in with point 1 above. Our minds don’t seem able to handle extremely long spans of time, especially not outside our natural type of environment. Imagine what 10,000 years of subjective time in a sensory-deprivation tank would do to us.
It can be streamed for free, but keep in mind the translation note on this page.
@117/Azuma Hazuki
Okay, this is clearer now. For some reason I read that differently.
Fair enough, but transhumanism does not make the same claims about free will and submission to God that Abrahamic theism does.
You say here that free will implies ability to rebel, hence some probability of rebellion exists over time, which means that eternal free will is incompatible with eternal submission. A theist might disagree with some of the latent assumptions there, but overall it makes sense to me.
So how does this apply to transhumanism?
That’s worth investigating empirically, when we have a sample of extremely long lived individuals. Centenarians seem not to be particularly less happy, Misao Okawa actually said on her 117th birthday that life seemed short. This seems to be something that varies a lot among individuals.
This is an interesting question, as I don’t know the answer, and I suspect nobody does. I can imagine coping strategies, for example constructing elaborate social situations in my head or attempting to fully understand every math concept I’ve ever come across in passing.
In a certain sense, this situation would be freeing, as one would no longer be pressed for time or under competitive pressures, so activities like daydreaming would not need to be cut short. I suspect that for a certain subset of people, they would be able to cope just fine (be happier than they otherwise would be) once they got used to it, but this is probably rare in the current population (it would drive most of us crazy). I’m not so sure the chance of going crazy goes up over time though, as you might get better at coping with practice. A person who survives sane for 1,000 years might be practically guaranteed to survive to 10,000 years.
Well, there’s also the part where the God of the bible is a horrifically evil entity that I wouldn’t worship even if there was proof that deity existed and instead would actively work against it. It’s not indignity in that case, it’s morals.
Second… heaven sounds fuck all awfully boring. “Sit here and sing praises. Forever” That is torture of a different sort. So it’s either fire or mental anguish. Yay. I’d likely end up trying to bite God’s kneecaps before a decade was over.
My 92 year old grandmother is in excellent health. Two years ago she told me that she is looking forward to dying. She’s *tired*. She feels she’s lived enough, done enough. She’s not going to actively try to die, but all the same she still will be happy to finally die.
Forgot to mention this wickedly funny little exchange in an early episode:
Tetsuro: So that’s Mars.
Maetel: They’ve raised the air pressure here up to the levels on Earth, but it’s taken them a century to do so.
Tetsuro: They created it artificially?
Maetel: Exactly. It’s a place where humans can live without any difficulty. Yet, the only ones who live here are people with machine bodies.
Tetsuro: So they didn’t even have to bother raising the air pressure to Earth levels.
Maetel: Indeed. It was a complete waste of effort.
I’m very fond of GE999 because it doesn’t patronize the viewer or rely on ridiculous Ayn Rand-style strawman caricatures, unlike Greg Egan (in either his old rabidly transhumanist incarnation or his new rabidly anti-transhumanist one.)
The character of Yuki actually comes very close to representing the mentality of a modern transhumanist—she tries to use her own resources to provide machine bodies to those who can’t afford them. (In the end her clients are murdered by the local machine-body monopolist, who frames her for the crime.)
Oof. Sorry about the unclosed tag…
Not sure what the moral obligation not to worship an evil entity is in this hypothetical situation, assuming there are no negative consequences and no chance of success if you worked against them. It seems more like an indignity (or something like it).
One might justifiably trade an eternity in hell for a miniscule chance of overthrowing such an entity, but that would be altering the thought experiment from the one normally posed by believers, I think. You’d have to start by refuting God’s omnipotence to some degree, perhaps first get them to accept that God losing a fight against a human is possible by the established supernatural mechanics of their mythology.
She’s 92 years old and healthy for a highly senescent person, is what you mean. I don’t consider aging to be health-neutral. To do the experiment the right way, you’d have to restore her to the same kind of health as a young person and then ask if she is still tired of living. Would she actually take a pill to restore her 92 year old state of frailty?
My 92 year old grandma can outwalk me, and I’m 32 years old. She has no heart, kidney, liver, lung, brain or hormonal issues aside from being post-menopausal. She has some arthritis in her hands. I have arthritis in my neck and knees. Looking at her, you’d guess she was in her mid 60s. Grandma is *healthy*. And tired. As I said, she feels she’s done enough things. She’s ready to go. My other grandmother is 90 and told me at 80 (and also healthy) that she’d reached a point where death was no longer scary and seemed welcoming. This was mentioned because I had brought up how different I felt from my peers, with my hyper-awareness of mortality.
Basically, you’ve prejudged the outcome you want, and fudged up an arbitrary probability estimate to justify it. 3% isn’t even a realistic probability for a company to last centuries, let alone any of the other factors at all. I think you’ve underestimated the complexity of the proposed resurrection by many many many orders of magnitude. Divide your estimates by the Avogadro constant and you’d be getting close to mine.
davek23 #126
Not at all. After I learned of the cost of cryonics, I was genuinely unsure whether or not it was worth the cost. Given the stakes, it seemed to me to be very important to try to work out the numbers involved as accurately as I could, and to then base my decision on them. So I worked out the probabilities as best I could, and only then made my decision about whether or not to sign up, based on them.
Perhaps, perhaps not; but whether or not centuries will be needed is an open question.
That is entirely possible. It is also possible that you are overestimating it. It seems unlikely that either of us is going to be able to significantly alter the other’s estimation, unless one of us is able to present information that the other has not already incorporated into their estimate, and the other is willing to treat that data seriously. If both of those conditions apply, plus a few other details, then we might be able to apply Aumann’s Agreement Theorem and help each other bring our estimates closer to the most accurate possible estimate. However, as far as each of us is concerned, the other is a random citizen of the internet, and neither of us has much incentive to go to the effort required to try to change the other’s mind, so it seems unlikely that this will happen. However, if you want to start, then I would recommend taking a look at the spreadsheet I mentioned above – https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1qn7c7rYmYx3KtqvhXTUGiiyuBk5e9kG3sA3jF-4zk6U/edit – and describing where exactly your probability estimates significantly differ from one of the listed sets.
Totally. You want something, and won’t look at evidence against it. You believe like any godbot. You have nothing but your faith, like they do. I look at the evidence that says you are dead when frozen. End of story.
Nerd #128
If cryonics is the most feasible method for significant life extension, then I want to believe that cryonics is the most feasible method for significant life extension. If cryonics is /not/ the most feasible method for significant life extension, then I want to believe that cryonics is not the most feasible method for significant life extension.
I am perfectly willing to examine and consider at any available evidence about cryonics. However, people who follow the writings of our good host should know that not all evidence is created equal – and the hearsay opinions of random internet strangers, who haven’t demonstrated that they’ve done any more reading into the topic than I have, is evidence of fairly low quality compared to other available evidence.
Which isn’t even getting into the entire concept surrounding the idea about having evidence that a particular technological feat will never be possible, and how confident it is possible to be about such a statement. There are limits to how confident a human in present-day society can be about /any/ statement. As one example of such a limit, there are, to an order of magnitude, about ten billion people; at least one of which who has mental processes that are sufficiently disconnected from reality that they can be absolutely convinced of a falsehood. Thus, one limit to the strength of one’s beliefs is that they shouldn’t be higher than nine billion, nine hundred ninety-nine million, nine hundred ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred ninety-nine out of ten billion. This applies to believing that a given proposition is true, or if it’s false. If someone is claiming a certainty about a proposition’s truth-value that’s greater than ten 9’s, then it’s quite safe to ignore their certainty in excess of that amount. (Put another way, for any practical decision making, it’s generally safe to constrain one’s confidence levels to be between -100 and 100 decibans.)
There are, nearly always, much greater constraints on how strong a belief should be limited to; and it’s at least theoretically possible to gather evidence of sufficient strength to exceed the limit I just described; but I find this particular limit to be a very handy rule-of-thumb.
I respect that you have some evidence, but I don’t think your experiment is controlled well enough to be convincing. First, I still think if your grandmothers were restored to the health and vitality of youth, they would not want to be returned to their former aged-yet-apparently-healthy state in order to die sooner, despite what they currently may say. They would probably accept the new decades of time and go on to explore different things they didn’t have a chance to do in their previous lifetimes.
Second, their feelings might have a lot to do with the fact that they have always anticipated dying in their 90’s or so, and thus had motive to modify their feelings/preferences over time. Note the description that it is “no longer” scary — obviously this represents a change. Heck, I could see myself coming fully to terms with the prospect over enough decades, given a rock-solid belief in its inevitability and/or moral rightness. Imagine having such a weight hanging over you for all those years, and now it’s about to be gone.
Third, it’s worth noting that your sample is selected for people who have descendants covering two generations — a childless person in their 90’s might be much less inclined to be sanguine about their upcoming extinction.
Regardless, it’s a small sample size. I doubt I’ll ever feel the same as your grandmothers. Misao Okawa apparently didn’t feel that way on her 117th birthday.
I think you’ve misjudged the urgency of prioritization here. People who turn to cryonics are often reluctant to do so in light of the alternatives (pouring massive amounts of research into the mechanisms of aging, as Aubrey de Grey advocates, for example).
If I were a billionaire, I’d probably be putting up grants for the tech milestones needed for reversible brain vitrification.
Uncertainty cuts both ways. You think a company cannot realistically survive beyond a century with probability >3%, but you have ignored the prospect that the company’s direct survival is not necessary. In the event that cryonics becomes a mass cultural movement where patient well being is valued as a cultural norm, we would find ourselves shuffling possession of the bodies to the most financially sound organizations, perhaps ending up in the hands of very long-term stable organizations such as religions or governments. Patients could even be moved to an off-planet facility.
That sounds absurdly overconfident.