Probability

When making long term investments in the stock market, one makes a hypothesis that a particlar share’s value wil go up. This could be an educated guess. It is not possible for him to test his hypothesis at that moment. Same thing goes in predicting ‘if mars will have earthlings in the year 2090. Based on its probablilty I guess, we can allocate funds for its research to make it a reality.

The hypothesis we have is something like, “Cryonics will suceed”. When we discuss about things of the future, we can’t really test the hypothesis now. We are forced to work with probability, existing eveidence and history, to predict what could be the outcome. This would then lead us to making educated guesses.

In the above success is defined based on if at any point in the future, there is a cryonaut who has atleast 50% of his memories at the time of revival, and who feels him to have the same identity as before being frozen.

A resulting probablity of events would be written as a set of events, each having a probability of success. In the end all these independent event probabilities will be multiplied to give us the final probability of success.

One such estimate has been done by Robin Hanson. There is another estimate from ~25 years ago with a much detailed reasoning of different probabilities.

Assume you die soon in a way a cryonics org can freeze you with its usual quality. (If not, you don’t have to pay for freezing.) Regarding the year 2090, consider the conditional probability of each of the following steps, given the previous steps:
1) Civilization still exists and has kept growing in technical capability.
2) Your cryonics org and it successors have kept you continuously frozen.
3) Someone is willing and allowed to pay modest costs to revive you.
4) Brain science has workable input/output models of relevant brain cell types.
5) Usual freezing quality preserved relevant model-needed details.
6) Cheap scanning tech slices & 2D scans brains at model-needed spatial, chem resolution.
7) Error correction codes reconstruct most connections across slices, fractures.
8) Cheap computers can real-time sim entire scanned sets of connected cells.
9) Sim life seems worth living enough that they don’t prefer suicide.
10) Such sims of you are as worthy as your kid of your identifying with them.
-Robin Hanson

Robin claims that, if there is a chance of 80% for everything except step 4 with 50% chance we still get to 6% chance of cryonics working for you in the end.

If you make 50K$/yr now, and value life-years at twice your income, and discount future years at 2% from the moment you are revived for a long life, but only discount that future life based on the chance it will happen, times a factor of 1/2 because you only half identify with this future creature, then the present value of a 5% chance of revival is $125,000, which is about the most expensive cryonics price now.

Open Issues

  • Understanding costs andchance of revival

  • Cost of being frozen and cost of additional life years.

  • Probability 20 years back

  • The cost to keep your body frozen vs other things you can do?

  • Criticisms: What to do after waking up from cryosleep