Brief recap of cryonics

Cryonics is the technology where in people are frozen immediately in liquid N2 after being declared dead, in the hopes of giving future science the best chance to revive us. It can be about replacing damaged tissues to organs, to reconstructing your entire brain and simulating it and so on, such that life after revival is worth living enough. It is estimated that there is a 5% chance that Cryonics will succeed.

A human being can sign up for cryonics using his life insurance and so on. It is the belief that the money you pay when compounded will pay for your revival. There are other possibilities as well, like someone wealthy pays for your revival.

From the assumption that our value system cannot tolerate death, we infer that cryonics might seem useful to us in that it can save lives. Active action/inaction leading to the final death of an individual is not alright!

Criticism

I just googled “Criticism cryonics” and another article popped up. This article is titled [“The False Science of Cryonics”]. Recently I observe that it is very hard to obtain the truth. You can see many articles, but how do you know what is the truth in it?

Primarily the accusation is that people are falsely being sucked into cryonics which is a scam as it has no chance of working. This is followed by a some biology here and there. This part I cannot make complete sense of, as it requires a lot of reading and understanding. But my point stays that we are talking about an advanced civilization, say for example, a couple of centuries from now.

But The freezing process might damage the cell structure!

Ditto as previous, we do what we think is the best chance for future generations to revive us (currently a 5% chance).

SIM life

One of the possibilities of revival seems to be being a simulation. Robin Hanson talks about it here. It is not clear how this simulation exists. Is it going to be a robot or just a simulation running online in a server, in non-living things etc… But it is believed that this life will be worth living enough.

The question raised by the author is will this sim be “you”? Will the sim have consciousness? The author further adds some more confusing but seemingly meaningful sentences together.

I am not here to debate on the meaning of “YOU”. Or for that matter try to answer vague definition based questions like, “When are YOU not YOU anymore.

Having read the comments here is my answer to the article: You is as a result of atoms and their configuration in a particular manner, and we don’t suppose there is a ghost(soul) hiding in there somewhere influencing things. If that is the case, assuming great science and a kick ass future-advanced-civilization to help us, it should be possible to create even multiple instances of “you” - the configuration. But I suppose one will do, to keep “me” alive.

Teleportation seems acceptable to us. So should this. Both the cases have a clear discontinuity in consciousness. What is stopping you from accepting the new YOU, be it teleported-new-YOU or sim-new-YOU!

Open Issues

0) There could be several other technologies that could extend life, why push for cryonics?

1) How does he determine the probabilities of each of the events. Some people estimate different probabilities. Whom to trust? Based on what?

2) The math is highly unclear, regarding calculating the present value of a life year after we have been revived.

3) How many life years or how many people can one save with the same money one spends on cryonics. Why is it the best use of money?

4) Is this type of technology only going to be available to the wealthy?

5) Why would the future generation invest in reviving only a few people?

6) what to do after being revived?

7) handling parents and familia? Not allowing them to grieve

8) cryonics alright. But differentiate Cryonics and current practices and companies like alcor which are being run with shit loads of money!

9) Actual cost of cryonics for you? Which institute? Problems with staying overseas?

Roadblock

It is clear I think, that cryonics has little evidence to support that it will work in the future. And indeed the burden of proof is on cryonics to show that it will work. It is like with technologies of the future (living in mars etc… ), where in a lot of time and money will be invested, on basically very little initial information, speculations and possibly out-right guesses. Having heard of the 5% chance of success by Robin Hanson and the 15% or 0.2% chance of success by Stephen B Harris, we see some methodologies used to understand if Cryonics might work or not.

Ultimately the goal is about saving people, saving as many lives as one can. It hurts to loose people, and then here is your chance. The more the people who join, the more funding for research and more chance of success for cryonics. With our best guesses and evidence available now, a type of freezing is being done to store bodies in the way we think the future civilization can take it over from there. But I guess that is the best the community can do, in addition to continuously performing research. As a by-product you might get to live a long life, live in a an advanced civilization, and possibly meet people from your own lineage.

To all the religious people who are hoping to live a long eternal happy life, this is possibly the closest you are going to get. We need to increase our overall probability of succeeding. We need to invest in everything that we can get our hands on!

People are dying Alfred!

In the comments of this article I found something wonderful written by kebekdisk, I have copied it verbatim so as to keep it alive forever.

In case you get downhearted by all the cryonic naysayer, it helps to remember other things the naysayers have dismissed.

“The actual building of roads devoted to motor cars is not for the near future, in spite of many rumours to that effect.” – Harper’s Weekly, 1902

“That the automobile has reached the limit of its development is suggested by the fact that during the last year no improvements of a radical nature have been introduced.” – Scientific American, 1909

“The ordinary ‘horseless carriage’ is at present a luxury for the wealthy; and although its price will probably fall in the future, it will never, of course, come into as common use as the bicycle.” – Literary Digest, 1899

“What can be more palpably absurd than the prospect held out of locomotives travelling twice the speed of stagecoaches?” – Quarterly Review, 1825

“While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially I consider it an impossibility, a development of which we need waste little time dreaming.” – Lee De Forest, 1926

“Louis Pasteur’s theory of germs is ridiculous fiction”. – Pierre Pachet, Professor of Physiology at Toulouse, 1872

“Flight by machines heavier than air is impractical and insignificant, if not utterly impossible.” – Simon Newcomb, Director, U.S. Naval Observatory, 1902

“Heavier than air flying machines are impossible.” – Lord Kelvin

“Radio has no future.” – Lord Kelvin

“X-rays will prove to be a hoax.” – Lord Kelvin

“Most people don’t believe something can happen until it already has. That’s not stupidity or weakness, that’s just human nature.” ― Max Brooks

“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” Thomas Watson, President of IBM, 1943

Have a great day !

With this I continue with another series for now, as I am unable to understand numbers and probabilities right now. I expect these numbers to guide me to make my decision in the future. I will investigate in the direction of numbers soon. :)