[mmaro]

Anyone remotely interested in cryonics should go read about it on LessWrong[1], instead of reading the same ol' ambivalent/pro-death comments. The only good reasons (that I can think of right now) not to sign up are if (1) you can't afford the ~$50/month or whatever your life insurance premiums + member dues would be, or (2) you rely on the financial support of people who are strongly anti-cryonics.

Keep in mind that after you suffer your serious accident/illness, you won't have the time/money/energy to sign up for cryonics, and you'll have more trouble convincing your next of kin to support you. And you probably won't be able to get any life insurance to pay for it, obviously.

[1] http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Cryonics

[dpark]

>The only good reasons (that I can think of right now) not to sign up are if (1) you can't afford the ~$50/month or whatever your life insurance premiums + member dues would be, or (2) you rely on the financial support of people who are strongly anti-cryonics.

Or you think it's dumb and fruitless and a waste of money. We don't have any way of predicting the expected value of cryopreservation. It could be that after you get frozen, an earthquake/tsunami takes out the power and you thaw. Or the company goes under. Or you get abandoned. Or any number of other things.

How likely are you to be unfrozen/cured/revived? No one can say for sure, but it's probably pretty unlikely. On the other hand, what's the likelihood that your estate can do something useful with an extra $25k? That's pretty likely.

[jpulgarin]

How can you say that cryonics working is "probably pretty unlikely" if "we have no way of predicting the expected value of cryopreservation". You can give probabilities to the events that would make cryonics fail and come up with an expected value.

[dpark]

As the other commenter said, not all unknowns are equal. It's possible that Hitler was secretly frozen and will be the first person thawed in the event that we learn how. I doubt anyone can assign a true probability to that possibility, but most everyone would agree it's extremely unlikely.

And no, you can't put a probability on those events which might make cryonics fail, because you don't know how long it will be before we discover a way to revive and restore those that have been frozen. It might happen tomorrow (likely not), or it might never happen. On a long enough timeline, the probability of failure approaches 1.

You also can't really assign a probability that you will personally be unfrozen. Sure, you pay $50/mo to be maintained, but that's wholly different from the $100k it might cost to thaw you.

There are so many ways cryonics could fail you, and really only one way they could succeed.

[lsparrish]

You don't pay $50/month after you die (that would be a unworkable business model for obvious reasons), rather the $100k or so goes mostly into a trust which pays for your maintenance (more like $100/year, could be far lower on a larger scale) after you are gone. Alcor's funding minimums are higher than CI's partly because they are expecting reanimation to be costly. They also pay ongoing costs mostly from member dues so far, so the patient care trust is just sitting there accumulating interest to be later used for reanimation.

If you can get the probability of failure in any given year low enough, the half-life of the organization could be brought up to thousands of years. You can also set up back-up organizations that are obligated to take over if one of them fails. It's a matter of diversification.

[dpark]

Obviously you do not personally pay after death, but you set aside money for a trust before hand, which amounts to the same thing.

I disagree with your assertion that you can get the company to live thousands of years. How many human organizations have lasted that long? Even the Catholic church has only been around for 2k (so they claim at least) and I can't think of anything else that approaches that longevity, not even nations. And there are way too many cases for potential failure to calculate real probabilities so arguing about getting them low enough is moot.

[lsparrish]

We don't need the specific organization to survive thousands of years in its original form, we just need cryonics patients to be passed ahead peacefully to another organization in the event of failure. But yeah, religions are an example of something organized lasting thousands of years, under historical conditions.

We haven't yet had a chance to experiment with things under conditions of universal literacy, the absence of much armed conflict, and other amenities of the modern world. Certain things (fashions, cultural memes) seem to get replaced quickly under such conditions, but that doesn't seem likely to extend to something like a trust fund.

Cryonicists certainly have more motive than the average person to promote stability, literacy, and nonviolence.

[lsparrish]

> Obviously you do not personally pay after death, but you set aside money for a trust before hand, which amounts to the same thing.

This is a good point, but it bears stressing that the bulk of the trust fund is there for reanimation and as protection against economic instability. Only a very tiny fraction gets used for ongoing expenses, at least in the current Alcor situation.

[burgerbrain]

Not all unknowns are equally likely.

Downvoter: I raise you a Russell's Teapot.

[karanbhangui]

put that bootcamp logic to work bro!

[thret]

If there's a non-zero chance that you will be returned to life at some point in the future, then however unlikely that chance is worth 25k. It is a lottery; the cost is small compared to the payoff and it rationalises hope.

[jpulgarin]

I have discovered a way of extending anyone's life. I will extend yours if you send me 25k via paypal. You can find my email in my profile. Note that this is a non-zero chance.

[lsparrish]

There's an astronomically high probability that you're saying this to make a point, not because you have secret information. That fits perfectly with my model of expected human behavior. The question would be why your model of expected cryobiology/physics/future scientific development places its chance of success in anything like a similarly low category.

[jpulgarin]

I'm just arbitraging thret's belief that any non-zero chance of returning to life is worth 25k - nothing to do with cryonics.

[thret]

And if I had an infinite supply of funds I would take all chances, regardless of credibility. I do not.

You do not get points for reductio ad absurdum arguments.

[evgen]

Sounds a lot like Pascal's wager; small cost, high benefit, equally ridiculous probability of a payoff...

[burgerbrain]

Well, at least cryo tanks are tangible.

[wazoox]

The probability that they stay in shape for even a couple of centuries is abysmally low (how many companies survive that long?).

The probability that, in the unlikely case your dead frozen head isn't thrown away at some point in time, you can be revived from it is so extraordinarily remote that I don't see the point.

It is way more likely that at some point technology will allow to simulate famous personalities from their writings, photos, etc than from a frozen piece of meat.

When you're dead, you're dead. Get over it, most people who have been are dead, too. And like the saying goes, cemeteries are full of indispensable men.

[burgerbrain]

Don't get me wrong, I'm not big on the stuff. But it's no Pascal's Wager either. This is way better than supernatural shit. This is a bad bet, not an impossible bet / illogical argument.

[lsparrish]

If you think a person can be reanimated from their writings, even a tiny piece of carefully preserved neural tissue should be extremely valuable for making sure the person is simulated accurately.

You should probably stop using the terms "dead" and "frozen" in this context. Cryopreservation seeks to avoid ice crystal formation, and cryonics seeks to avoid death. So it has the effect of affirming the consequent.

[gwern]

That is not true, and when you express it like that, it is a Pascal's wager! I would not pay 25k for a 0.00001% chance of revival, because I do not value my life at >25 billion USD.

[vacri]

Also often forgotten is that biology isn't like an on/off switch - will you come back the same way physcially? Mentally? Could you live with having lost some of your higher mental facilities?

[gwern]

Given the mental damage done by aging (http://www.gwern.net/DNB%20FAQ#aging), it is a fact that ~>98% of humans, given the opportunity to live with having lost some of their higher mental facilities, will in fact choose to live.

[lsparrish]

I don't expect to survive with my memories all intact unless I am very lucky. However the complete regeneration of missing parts and restoration of lost functions seems like a very solvable problem.

The fact that a large portion of cryonics funding will eventually go towards this kind of research and thus help non-cryonics patients who have brain injuries is a rather significant spillover benefit.

[mmaro]

That's a reasonable concern, but at this meta level there are two things going in cryonics' favor: there's a good chance you're overconfident about its non-utility[1], and there's a chance that your reanimation comes much earlier than expected, so the cumulative risks don't add up to much.

And FWIW, Alcor and Cryonics Institute don't require power for storage; they require deliveries of liquid nitrogen. I don't think either facility has much earthquake/tsunami risk, either.

[1] Personally, I would want to be > 99% sure about this before completely giving up on cryonics.

[dpark]

So much hand waving...

On what basis do you claim there's a good chance I'm overconfident about cryonics' non-utility? I could say your overconfident in its utility and be standing on ground at leas as firm a you.

There's also a chance that you never get reanimated, or that you're reanimated by future humans who torture you to see how ancient humans react to stimulus, or any number of other possibilities that make cryonics unattractive.

[dpark]

Ugh, too late to edit. your -> you're; leas as firm a -> least as firm as

I'm blaming autocorrect for these...

[nknight]

> Personally, I would want to be > 99% sure about this before completely giving up on cryonics.

That same logic can be used to justify spending inordinate resources on any sort of snake oil. Why should cryonics be special?

[jpulgarin]

You don't know what logic he used, only his conclusion.

Perhaps the logic is:

* If something is agreed to have a chance of extending my life for thousands of years by more than 5% of people whose thinking I respect and

* it costs less than 200k and

* there are no obvious people who are profiting from this then

* I want to be >99% sure about it not being viable before giving up on it.

[dpark]

Since religion promises eternal life, and a large number of respected scientists are religious, I assume that you are Christian, right? Also Muslim? And maybe Jewish?

[jpulgarin]

What? I never said I used that logic.

[nknight]

He hasn't made that argument or anything close to it. The most he's said/implied is that $50/month is worth it. If he has some other logic, he'll need to share it if he hopes to convince anyone. Otherwise, he's just a guy standing on the sidewalk with a bottle of magic pills.