Cryonics is free
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What Oregon Brain Preservation is doing isn’t exactly cryonics in the traditional sense. Most of what they offer is aldehyde-based brain preservation, which stores your brain at refrigerator temperatures. They do have a cryonics option, but it's not free—$15,000 for whole-head cryopreservation, or if you’re feeling more minimalist, $5,000 for just the brain.
fair enough! maybe i should edit my post with "brain preservation some through cryonics for indefinite storage with the purpose of future reanimation is sufficiently subsidized to be free or marginally free in some regions of the world" 😅
2I don't feel strongly about this one way or another, but I think it's reasonable to expend the term cryonics to mean any brain preservation method done with the hope for future revival as that seems like the core concept people are referring to when using the term. When the term was first coined, room temperature options weren't a thing. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PG4D4CSBHhijYDvSz/refactoring-cryonics-as-structural-brain-preservation
Do you happen to know whether we have reason to suspect that the aldehyde and refrigerator approach will be measurably less effective for future use of the stored brains, vs conventional cryopreservation?
Both aldehyde fixation and liquid-nitrogen cryopreservation are techniques easy to perform, and routinely employed in ~every biology lab for cell cultures. Reversing the latter is trivial and also routine; reversing the former is not possible with current tech.
How relevant you consider this is up to you. My guess is that people intuit that with improved technology, the relative difficulty of reversing these on the macro scale would be the same.
The enthusiasm for aldehyde-based chemical fixation preservation seems extremely misplaced to me. Biological viability is lost, and the original proteins can no longer return to a normal state. Traditional cryopreservation is much safer if you're looking for real prospects of revival—at least, that's how I see it.
probability of reverting biological viability of fixated brain seems plausibly higher to me than reverting structural integrity (connectome mapping) of traditional cryonics 🤷♂️ I'm still signed up with Alcor atm, but I'd rather vitrifixation
I am revisiting what I wrote earlier. In fact, I am now in favor of chemopreservation. It so happens that some time ago I was concerned about the "paradox of duplicates":
https://www.benbest.com/philo/doubles.html
"I would be happy to know Your Lordship's opinion, namely, whether, when my brain has lost its original structure, and when, a few hundred years later, the same materials are recreated in such a curious way that they become an intelligent being, I should say that this being will be me; or whether two or three of these beings would be formed from my brain; whether they will all be me, and therefore a single identical intelligent being."
— Letter from Thomas Reid to Lord Kames, 1775
Since then, I have revised my position to consider the copy paradox as unjustified. Initially, I was worried about this issue because once a patient is fixed, the proteins can no longer return to their original states, and the brain is biologically dead. A chemically fixed brain cannot simply be repaired with medical nanorobots and reheated; it must be scanned and emulated in the form of a whole brain emulation or reconstructed. In short, revival after fixation normally relies solely on the information while discarding the matter, which was problematic for me.
Then I read Michael A. Cerullo's theory of branched psychological identity. According to him, consciousness will continue to exist as long as there is continuity in a person’s psychological structure, memories, personality, dreams, and the causal relationships between different pieces of information. In short, if at least fifty percent of this structure can be reinstated, then identity has survived and consciousness continues. The theory asserts that if two copies are made, you will continue to exist independently in both; if three, four, or even a hundred copies are made, it is the same. Your consciousness is restarted at the point where it left off.
This is scientifically coherent if we consider that the human mind is defined by its substrate, the brain. The brain is a physical object governed by the laws of physics and composed of a finite physical quantity. It can therefore be described with information, such as bits. If you can recover a version sufficiently close to this model and reinstate it, you recover a person’s mind, and the problem of copying in the context of cryonics or duplication becomes completely unjustified.
Here is a link to Cerullo’s theory:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11023-014-9352-8
Now that I am a brancher, I logically have no objections to chemical fixation, and it is a form of preservation that interests me as much as cryonics.
Syd Lonreiro
Cool! Thanks for the update!
I also think upload is probably fine.
But also, while not an expert, I don't think I'd put most of my probaiblity mass on "it's physically impossible to 'unfix' a brain / return a protein to their original state".
I don't know. The brain preservation prize to preserve the connective of a large mammal was won with aldehyde-stabilization though
I don't know.
If the aldehyde preservation method is as good as traditional cryopreservation, then this looks like a pretty glaring market inefficiency—someone should be able to swoop in and undercut the established cryo companies.
I just don't know enough about the object level arguments to say much with confidence, but I'm a bit skeptical such a gap in the market exists.
I see absolutely no point in requesting whole-head preservation when preserving only the brain (which is essentially the same thing) costs significantly less than having your entire head preserved at Oregon Brain Preservation.
The only argument I’ve found in favor of whole-head preservation is that handling a slippery and fragile structure like the brain might cause problems—meaning it could be damaged in the process.
This trips my too-good-to-be-true alarms, but has my provisional attention anyway. The main reasons I'm not signed up for cryonics are cost, inconvenience, and s-risks. Eliminating cost (and cost-related inconveniences) could move me...but I want to know how this institution differs such that they can offer such storage at low or no cost, where others don't or can't.
I mean, it's not a big secret, there's a wealthy person behind it. And there's 2 potential motivations for it:
1) altruistic/mission-driven
2) helps improve the service to have more cases, which can benefit themselves as well.
But also, Oregon Brain Preservation is less expensive as a result of:
1) doing brain-only (Alcor doesn't extract the brain for its neuro cases)
2) using chemical preservation which doesn't require LN2 (this represents a significant portion of the cost)
3) not including the cost of stand-by, which is also a significant portion (ie. staying at your bedside in advance until you die)
4) collaborating with local funeral homes (instead of having a fully in-house team that can be deployed anywhere)
5) only offering the service locally (no flights)
I visited Oregon Brain Preservation, talked with Jordan Spark and exchanged emails, and been following them for many years, and Jordan seems really solid IMO.
Cryonics Germany people seem very caring and seem to understand well how to work with a thanatologist. I also had email exchanges with them, but not as much.
🤷♂️
Concerns about personal s-risks makes sense.
not including the cost of stand-by, which is also a significant portion (ie. staying at your bedside in advance until you die)
I assumed this was an overstatement. A quick check shows I'm wrong: TomorrowBio offer whole body (€200k) or just brain preservation (€60k). The 'standby, stabilisation and transport' service (included in the previous costs) amount to €80k and €50k respectively. I expected it to be much less.
That said, they still set aside €10K for long term storage of the head. I guess this means your head has a higher chance of being stored safety.
We're increasing the prices to €75k for brain-only. 15k for long-term storage, 60k for SST, without good SST it's not "cryopreservation", its freezing people.
And "Cryonics is free" is really a bad title. Not just because it's not true, but the organizations that offer it pro bono (paid by 3rd parties) should only be used by people who can't otherwise afford it. Else, they will cease to exist soon due to limited funding.
(disclaimer: I run tomorrow.bio)
Btw, Im happy to answer any question re cryopreservation if anybody is interested, just reach out.
You might want to know that I took a look through the site, and was curious, but I just closed the page the moment the “Calculate your contribution” form refused to show me the pricing options unless I gave it an email address.
Oregon Brain Preservation uses a technique allowing fridge temperature storage, and seem well funded, so idk if the argument works out
Idk the finances for Cryonics Germany, but I would indeed guess that Tomorrow Bio has more funding + provides better SST. I would recommend using Tomorrow Bio over Cryonics Germany if you can afford it
To add to bogdanb's comment below, you might want to be careful because you seem to be 'forcing' people to subscribe to promotional newsletters in order to get a price quote which, aside from being quite a nasty thing to do, is also a blatant violation of European GDPR regulations for which you could receive a hefty fine
I don't understand the s-risk consideration.
Suppose Alice lives naturally for 100 years and is cremated. And suppose Bob lives naturally for 40 years then has his brain frozen for 60 years, and then has his brain cremated. The odds that Bob gets tortured by a spiteful AI should be pretty much exactly the same as for Alice. Basically, its the odds that spiteful AIs appear before 2034.
if you're alive, you can kill yourself when s-risks increases beyond your comfort point. if you're preserved, then you rely on other people to execute on those wishes
Killing oneself with high certainty of effectiveness is more difficult than most assume. The side effects on health and personal freedom of a failed attempt to end one's life in the current era are rather extreme.
Anyways, emulating or reviving humans will always incur some cost; I suspect that those who are profitable to emulate or revive will get a lot more emulation time than those who are not.
If a future hostile agent just wants to maximize suffering, will foregoing preservation protect you from it? I think it's far more likely that an unfriendly agent will simply disregard suffering in pursuit of some other goal. I've spent my regular life trying to figure out how to accomplish arbitrary goals more effectively with less suffering, so more of the same set of challenges in an afterlife would be nothing new.
Killing oneself with high certainty of effectiveness is more difficult than most assume.
Dying naturally also isn't as smooth as plenty of people assume. I'm pretty sure that "taking things into your hands" leads to higher amount of expected suffering reduction in most cases, and it's not informed rational analysis that prevents people from taking that option.
If a future hostile agent just wants to maximize suffering, will foregoing preservation protect you from it?
Yes? I mean, unless we entertain some extreme abstractions like it simulating all possible minds of certain complexity or whatever.
Right, but you might prefer
- living now >
- not living, no chance of revival or torture >
- not living, chance of revival later and chance of torture
It's not obvious to me that those are the same, though they might be. Either way, it's not what I was thinking of. I was considering the Bob-1 you describe vs. a Bob-2 that lives the same 40 years and doesn't have his brain frozen. It seems to me that Bob-1 (40L + 60F) is taking on a greater s-risk than Bob-2 (40L+0F).
(Of course, Bob-1 is simultaneously buying a shot at revival, which is the whole point after all. Tradeoffs are tradeoffs.)
Is the argument for the s-risk concern just basically that the suffering in some scenarios could be so great that you have to get sort of Pascal mugged? Or is there reason to think there actually a significant probability of extreme suffering scenarios?
Against s-risk concern: Hostile low-quality resurrection is almost inevitable (think about AI scammers who clone voices), so better to have high-quality resurrection by non-hostile agent who may also ensure that resurrected you have higher measure than your low-quality copies.
1Why is hostile low-quality resurrection almost inevitable? If you want to clone someone into an em, why not pick a living human?
Frozen people have potential brain damage and an outdated understanding of the world.
Low-quality resurrections are already proliferating by bad actors. Two examples are voice cloning by scammers and recommendation systems by social networks. Also AI generated revenge porn in South Korea.
The main question is what level of similarity is enough for me to ensure personal identity. The bad variant here would be if only identity token is enough, that is, a short string of data that identifies me and includes my name, profession, location and a few kilobytes of some other properties. This is the list of things I remember in the morning when I am trying to recognize who am I. In that case producing low quality, but identically important copies will be easy.
[epistemic status: low confidence. I've noodled on this subject more than once recently (courtesy of Planecrash), but not all that seriously]
The idea of resurrectors optimizing the measure of resurrect-ees isn't one I'd considered, but I'm not sure it helps. I think the Future is much more likely to be dominated by unfriendly agents than friendly ones. Friendly ones seem more likely to try to revive cryo patients, but it's still not obvious to me that rolling those dice is a good idea. Allowing permadeath amounts to giving up a low probability of a very good outcome to eliminate a high(...er) probability of a very bad outcome.
Adding quantum measure doesn't change that much, I don't think; hypothetical friendly agents can try to optimize my measure, but if they're a tiny fraction of my Future then it won't make much difference.
Adding the infinite MUH is more complicated; it implies that permadeath is probably impossible (which is frightening enough on its own), and it's not clear to me what cryo does in that case. Suppose my signing up for cryo is 5% likely to "work", and independently suppose that humanity is 1% likely to solve the aging problem before anyone I care about dies; does signing up under those conditions shift my long-run measure away from futures where I and my loved ones simply got the cure and survived, and towards futures where I'm preserved alone and go senile first? I'm not sure, but if I take MUH as given then that's the sort of choice I'm making.
I think low-quality resurrections by bad agents are almost inevitable – voice cloning by scammers is happening now. But such low-quality resurrections will lack almost all my childhood memories and all fine details. But from pain-view (can I say it?) it will be almost like me, as in the moment of pain fine-grained childhood memories are not important.
Friendly AIs may literally till light cones with my copies to reach measure domination, so even if they are 0.01 per cent of total AIs, they can still succeed (they may need to use some acausal trade between themselves to do it better as I described here).
i don't think killing yourself before entering the cryotank vs after is qualitatively different, but the latter maintains option value (in that specific regard re MUH) 🤷♂️
Can I really trust an organization to preserve my brain that can't manage a working SSL certificate?
1I mean, you can trust it to preserve your brain more than you can trust a crematorium to preserve your brain.
And if you do chemical preservation, the operational complexity of maintaining a brain in storage is fairly simple. LN2 isn't that complex either, but does have higher risks.
That said, I would generally suggest using Tomorrow Biostasis for Europe residents if you can afford it.
I would generally expect that an organization's ability to execute on things unrelated on their core competency would be only weakly correlated to their ability to execute on their actual core competency.
I'm not sure if that weak correlation would persist at the extremes, though; when there are basic failures of execution, such as having an apparently abandoned website, I think there is some reason for concern, if only because it might indicate a shortage of resources or inactivity. An organisation's longevity and funding security are obviously of the utmost importance here, and the website doesn't fill me with confidence in that regard.
Is this unfounded? I don't know much about the company and couldn't see anything about this on the site.
In this recent podcast interview, Jordan Sparks, the founder and executive director of Oregon Brain Preservation (OBP), gives more information about the low-cost services OBP provides https://londonfuturists.buzzsprout.com/2028982/episodes/15517037-the-low-cost-future-of-preserving-brains-with-jordan-sparks
I tried to sign up for Cryonics Germany and it turned out they are no longer active. Tomorrow.bio is active, but I do not know if they have a free option.
1Oh wow! Damn ☹️ Well, I'm super grateful for the time it was active. If you don't mind sending me a copy of your exchanges, I'd be interested.
Oh, based on your DM, they will still preserve and transport your brain to OregonCryo for indefinite storage for free if you can't afford it. So I wouldn't say they're no longer active. But it's still good info to know they aren't doing the storage locally anymore. Thanks for sharing.
Kriorus in its best years used to allow post-mortem payment. That is, most of its clients were signed after death by the relatives. So it was technically free for the person who was cryopreserved.
Not weighing on whether to do cryonics, but what's your guarantee that they will still be around x years in the future? Maybe they don't have to make money, but they need money to survive long-term...
To be clear, it's subsidized. So it's not like there's no money to maintain you in preservation. As far as I know, Oregon Brain Preservation has a trust similar to Alcor in terms of money per volume preserved for it's cryonics patients. Which seems more than enough to maintain in storage just with the interests. Of course, there could be major economic disruptions that change that. I'm not sure about how much Cryonics Germany is putting aside though.
Plus, Oregon Brain Preservation's approach seems to work at fridge temperature rather than requiring PB2 temperature.
What would a guarantee mean here? Like they give money to your heirs if they accidentally thaw you? I'm not sure what you're asking.
Alternatives to that are paid versions of cryonics or otherwise burial and cremation.
These organizations just need a few volunteers for research or demonstrations. Once a lot of people sign up, cryonics will not be free again. It will cost tens of thousands as it normally does.
Even if they are nonprofit, they may behave as businesses because:
- They need your money.
- They compete with each other.
- Winning customers by any means might increase their competitiveness.