"I pay $180/year for more insurance than I need - it'd be enough for Alcor too." Sorry, mind rephrasing? I've read that statement several times, and I just don't follow it.

Also, CI doesn't do neuro, just whole body preservation, right? And Alcor's membership fees are independent of whether one's signed up as a neuro or whole body patient? (Near as I can tell from looking over their site, that's sadly the case.) (Just trying to decode all the relevant things to see if I actually can sign up right now after all. I want to.)

I have $250K of life insurance of which only $50K is needed for CI, and only $120K (I think) would be needed for Alcor.

Oooh, okay, thanks.

I agree that a future world with currently-existing people still living in it is more valuable than one with an equal number of newly-created people living in it after the currently-existing people died, but to show that cryonics is a utilitarian duty you'd need to show not just that this is a factor but that it's an important enough factor to outweigh whatever people are sacrificing for cryonics (normalcy capital!). Lots of people are dead already so whether any single person lives to see the future can constitute at most a tiny part of the future's value.

By signing up for cryonics, do I increase the probability that I am a simulation of history by a post-singularity entity?

I have a sever inability to make big choices such as this, and I have cryocrastinated for quite some time. This year, I became a vegetarian after a lot of difficult reflection, and I doing the same with cryonics.

I feel that there just isn't that much to lose by not signing up, since non-existence does not scare me. Signing up, at that point, becomes a choice between the Precautionary Principle vs Proactionary Principle. Even a small chance that the world I wake up in will be horrible is enough to not want to sign up at all, even despite the potential gain.... (read more)

But if the drive falls into the hands of a specialist with a scanning tunneling microscope, they can tell the difference between "this was a 0, overwritten by a 0" and "this was a 1, overwritten by a 0".

Not really true.

They can tell that there were various 1s and 0s - but telling what order they were in is impossible ("data written to the disk prior to the data whose recovery is sought will interfere with recovery just as must as data written after - the STM microscope can't tell the order in which which magnetic moments are create... (read more)

I'm confused. What is the relationship between Alcor and the Cryonics Institute? Is it either-or? What is the purpose of yearly fees to them if you can just take out insurance which will cover all the costs in the event of your death?

Eliezer, although you and Robin agree on the general principle, Robin has signed up with Alcor, while you have signed up with CI. (Despite the fact that you say you could afford Alcor also.) How much of a disagreement is this, and what does it reflect?

More generally, how should one rationally approach this decision?

I'm curious about a couple of things.

If this is a rational choice, why does Robin jeopardize his future driving around a convertible and if you cannot be frozen and also donate organs, how do you justify it morally?

Call me back when a creature has been cyropreserved and then fully restored, and we can use the language of certainty, and talk in terms of "believing in the future".

You can do better than that, for example, what if you die and after a X years, people are routinely reanimated and live healthy lives at whatever age they wish? You would feel like Mr Silly then, if you were alive at least you would.

If you wait for being able to talk about something "in the language of certainty" then you also advocate ignoring existential risks, as when th... (read more)

Steve,

A life insurance policy for 50k-120k could be used to save dozens to hundreds of lives funding medical services in Africa (http://www.givewell.net/PSI), or to reduce existential risk.

Carl, why say that about cryonics funding in particular rather than money spent on going to the movies? Also, anything to do with Africa has to be extremely carefully targeted or it ends up being worse than useless - actively harmful - this should always be mentioned in the same sentence, since Africa has been actively harmed by most aid money spent there.

Sufficient popularity of cryonics, if the world lasts that long, would benefit a very large number of people. African aid couldn't compete, only existential risk mitigation could.

I'm willing to accept such a reply from people who (a) don't go to the movies and (b) spend a large fraction of their disposable income on existential risk mitigation, but not otherwise.

burger flipper, making one decision that increases your average statistical lifespan (signing up for cryonics) does not compel you to trade off every other joy of living in favor of further increases. and, if the hospital or government or whoever can't be bothered to wait for my organs until i am done with them, that's their problem not mine.

Even though the decision is overdetermined, I've been cryocrastinating. I'll schedule it with more urgency.

I'd like to sincerely thank Eliezer and Robin for their encouragement to sign up for cryonics. Although I haven't finalized my life insurance arrangements, I'm in that process. It took me well under a year from hearing a serious argument for cryonics for me to apply, so I find it pretty disheartening when I hear stories about people taking far longer to decide. I'm only 18 and don't have a lot of good sources of income, but cryonics is cheap and one of the best decisions I've ever made.

I'm signed up, and I consider it one of my better decisions.

I use ACS, for what it's worth, which hasn't been mentioned here that I've seen.

-Robin

Not signing up for cryonics - what does that say? That you've lost hope in the future. That you've lost your will to live. That you've stopped believing that human life, and your own life, is something of value.

Personally I don't consider it to say anything much - since that's some 99.9% of humanity. What could so many folk possibly have in common - besides their humanity?

For me, signing up for cryonics indicates a bizarre world view - very different from my own - and perhaps suceptability to a particular type of con job.

Bambi, I'll grant you that eating your vegetables and smoking aren't mutually exclusive, but I do wonder about the rationality of a smoker who makes certain to take their vitamins daily.

And as to the organs, I was thinking more of the potential recipients' suffering and not that of the hospitals.

Eliezer, well written! :)

Grant, yes.

Burger I think you overestimate the effect of agreeing to be an organ donor.

with no selection pressure whatsoever, has designed the brain so that that none of its contents are stored in a volatile way?

Well, people exposed to very low temperatures have ended up in states where they were considered clinically dead, and then revived at least up to an hour later, with the cold preserving their brain even at a point where there was no blood circulation. ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/620609.stm for one example.) AFAIK, their brain worked just fine afterwards, even though "volatile" functions had been interrupted (but I'm... (read more)

Tim Walters said: By that logic, one should pay to have prayers said for one's soul.

Even if the probability of cryonics revival is miniscule, I would still bet that it's higher than (a) the existence of a deity, (b) who could be effectively prayed to, (c) who would care about my prayers and answer them, and (d) the existence of a soul separate from material existence.

Bill Mill said: Thought experiment: tomorrow, John Q. Scientist reveals that he can, for the cost of $1 million, revive any person who has been cryogenically frozen. Say 1000 people are frozen... (read more)

"Carl, why say that about cryonics funding in particular rather than money spent on going to the movies? Also, anything to do with Africa has to be extremely carefully targeted or it ends up being worse than useless - actively harmful - this should always be mentioned in the same sentence, since Africa has been actively harmed by most aid money spent there."

Agreed, that's why I linked to GiveWell, an organization that evaluates charities for their demonstrated effectiveness, but it's worth being explicit about it here for those who don't check ou... (read more)

Bill: Alternative scenario: Tomorrow FedExKinkos announce a service through which, for $3.25, you can revive a random victim of the flu epidemic of 1918.

[I accidentally posted this on the previous thread and am shamelessly reposting here in case someone on the fence would have missed it.]

I signed up for cryonics with Alcor last summer after learning of it in the spring and doing extensive research. I am a college student in my early twenties, and the combined fee for my $250,000 level term life insurance policy and cryonics membership is EASILY affordable: $40 monthly.

I don't plan on dying any time soon, but I have peace of mind knowing that I got a good deal on insurance while healthy and that I am not pr... (read more)

Bill Mill: I continue to not understand the economics of reviving people in the future. Your argument here seems to be that reviving frozen heads, no matter the cost, is a moral obligation. That does not make sense to me.

He isn't saying that it will happen "at any cost". Obviously, there will be a time when reviving people will be too expensive. But you're assuming that it will stay too expensive forever, even if people were, say, revived gradually during a period of two thousand years. That seems bizarre, especially considering how much money so... (read more)

I agree with Carl that investing in existential risk mitigation is likely to be much more cost-effective than investing in cryonics. Eliezer, I don’t see movies and I donate most of my income to risk mitigation. Do you agree that donating $10,000 to SIAI is preferable to investing $10,000 in cryonics? If so, why not recommend the former rather than the latter? (And why don’t you donate your cryonics money to SIAI?) If cryonics subscribers come to feel they have a larger stake in the future, and only after subscribing decide to make larger donations to risk mitigation, then I could see your blog appeal being justified. However, I expect this is rarely the case. It seems better to encourage donations to SIAI, FHI, CRN, et al.

I strongly second everyone advocating SIAI over cryonics, especially Carl's last paragraph.

I also suspect that informational reconstruction will make cryonics unnecessary, but not strongly enough that I wouldn't be signed up even without the above concern.

I'd be very interested in hearing Robin's explanation of why he signed up with Alcor rather than CI, and Eliezer's explanation for why he chose CI rather than Alcor.

I would really like a full poll of this blog listing how many people are signed up for cryonics. Personally, I'm not, but I would consider it if existential risk was significantly lower OR my income was >$70K and would definitely do it if both were the case AND SIAI had $15M of pledged endowment.

I'd like to be a little more clear on this, I've heard a few different things.

Are there arrangements I can make which will ensure that a week after my death, my head will be full of cryopreserving fluid and my heart will be beating in someone else's chest?

If we could revive frozen people from the 1800's, why wouldn't we?

If you could revive a frozen Genghis Khan, would you? What kind of life would he be able to live, if he were revived today?

Someone from the 1800s would suffer severe culture shock if he or she were revived today. Just think of what they'd have to deal with, from their perspective:

1) A nigger President 2) Sodomites and faggots embracing publicly and actually getting married to each other 3) Parents and teachers forbidden from properly disciplining their children when they aren't respectful. Which they never are. 4) Ordinary young women dressing - and acting - like whores! Obscenity and shamelessness everywhere! 5) Heathen superstition and atheism replacing good, honest faith in God and the Bible

Chances are, it would look like most of what they found good and righteous in the world is gone. Would you inflict that on someone?

I'm almost certain that if most of these people found out they had cancer and would die unless they got a treatment and (1) with the treatment they would have only a 20% chance of survival, (2) the treatment would be very painful, (3) the treatment would be very expensive, and (4) if the treatment w... (read more)

HughRistik:

Of course, we could have a scenario where museums pay to revive us, and then keep us as an exhibit....

Die a free man, wake up a slave. Sounds like a winning plan.

Back to the main article:

Eliezer, Maybe I'm a lousy Bayesian, but I don't see how the "if you don't choose to buy into a cryonics package, you must not value human life" argument holds any water. That's salesman talk. Can't one demonstrate one's valuing of human life simply by using one's time carefully? A finite life well-lived is not a life wasted.

Equating the current fa... (read more)

Of course, we could have a scenario where museums pay to revive us, and then keep us as an exhibit....

Chances are, it would look like most of what they found good and righteous in the world is gone. Would you inflict that on someone?

"The 'wild man' caught the imagination and attention of thousands of onlookers and curiosity seekers. He was then moved to the Museum of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley where he lived the remainder of his life in evident contentment...."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishi

I want you to live.

Fascinating. When most people say that in support of cryonics they are expressing naive future optimism. When Eleizer says it, he says it as the guy actually attempting the one impossible thing that could make cryonic preservation have greater than negligible utility!

Thanks, Noah. Sign me up. Shall I bring a pair of Kangaroos with me?

Exactly. What are the chances that typical information that is [not securely] deleted today will be even tried to be restored? The chances are close to zero. The chances that average frozen body would be tried to be restored are close to zero too.

I give you my personal guarantee that post-singularity, I will do all in my power to revive everyone.

"to live" or "to be frozen to death"?

People in coma's even if completely unresponsive, still can be healed with a small amount of technological assistance and a huge amount of biological self re... (read more)

@Dennis

"The chances that average frozen body would be tried to be restored are close to zero too."

Hmm. There is still great interest in Oetzi, yes?

EY, I'm not following your comment about CI versus Alcor. What do you see as the benefits of choosing Alcor, and what does your age have to do with choosing to forego them?

Chances are, it would look like most of what they found good and righteous in the world is gone. Would you inflict that on someone?

How about you let him quickly experience the last 200 years for himself. As quickly or as slowly as necessary, maybe even actually living through each subjective day, or maybe doing the whole thing in five years. Allow his mind to reconfigure itself to our newer (improved) understanding of morality by the same process by which ours did.

"Burger I think you overestimate the effect of agreeing to be an organ donor."

That's disappointing. I assumed with all the calls to allow payments to increase organ donations that the ones I'm giving gratis would get used and provide benefit.

And since there is the possibility of eternal life with cryonics why isn't there a Pascal's wager type situation? Not saying you should don a bubble wrap suit, but I'd think you would avoid convertibles, motorcycles, and other potential brain-liquefiers.

The process that improved our morality involved the hard-core bigots dying off. I suspect that it's not a coincidence that the civil rights movement didn't gain any traction until after all the Civil War veterans were dead.

Morality advances one funeral at a time.

On behalf of the Future, then - please ask for a little more for yourself. More than death. It really... isn't being selfish. I want you to live. I think that the Future will want you to live. That if you let yourself die, people who aren't even born yet will be sad for the irreplaceable thing that was lost.

So please, live.

standing ovation

Cryonics Institute, if you don't pay for standby from a separate agency, is the cheap form of cryonics - they're driven by the consideration of keeping the cost as low as possible to get as many people as possible on board. Alcor seems to me to be higher quality, and has a higher annual cost of membership. Which provider you go with should be determined by your age and probability of death, and by your financial situation. I'm younger than Robin and I expect poorer. So while I can't speak for Robin, it makes sense that he would be with Alcor and I would be with CI.

"You Only Live Twice" is a beautiful, moving post, Eliezer.

Two sentences that stand out:

"If you've been hurt enough, you can no longer imagine healing."

and

"And it [the capital "F" Future] may have a concept of sentient dignity that values your life more than you dare to value yourself."

Eliezer's not stupid. He's innovating a competitive mythology to promote increasing the base of cryonics users. Carl, it's hard to catch you making asinine comments but I think you slipped in this thread. So if a new blogger pops up quoting scripture to encourage christians to donate their brains to brain banks, are you going to debunk their arguments that scripture supports such donations? It's a subtraction from our commons for status points we're not even going to award you, in my opinion.

We will likely be unimaginably stupid and poor compare to people the of the future. I'm trying to understand why they'd want to revive us, but in doing so I'm trying to understand why our world has as much compassion in it as it does.

Somewhat off-topic, but have there been any OB posts on this issue? Economic inequality continues to increase on Earth, yet we seem to be treating each other better than we have in the past. Rich nations could more easily enslave poorer ones than ever before in history, but beyond some wealth redistribution (from the rich, no ... (read more)

My feelings are mixed on this. The community seems pretty naive, but hopefully naive.

One scenario that seems likely to me is that the frozen folk are mostly considered too boring to revive. Even luminaries like Merkle - what could he offer? By the time technology is available to scan brains for historical information, such information will have already been scanned from the minds of still living, much smarter, people who are standing on the shoulders of those who stood on the shoulders of Merkle. The value of the historical information might result in a re... (read more)

Hopefully,

I didn't intend to attack the self-interested case, and I'll say clearly that people who would spend thousands of dollars on medical care to extend their lives from 70 to 75 for self-interested reasons, would almost all do better to sign up.

The equilibrium where we pay $50k less on end-of-life medical care, that might provide six months of life in pain, in favor of cryonics would be greatly superior to the current arrangement. I would be happy to buy a health/life insurance policy that cut back on end-of-life care in favor of cryonics, and this would also reduce the financial incentive for heirs to oppose cryonics.

In Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, there's an ongoing subplot about the golems, which are immortal beings controlled by the words in their head. Through some chain of events, one golem ends up having the words removed from his head and becomes an autonomous individual. He then sets up a Golem Foundation that works to locate or purchase golems and liberate them.

Thus, I see singularity mailing lists and OB as, in part, efforts to replace the racial fellow-feeling of the golems with an artificial sense of community. When Eliezer says he wants you to live, it's important.

Dennis (and others) argue: The chances that average frozen body would be tried to be restored are close to zero.

I keep seeing variations of this argument, and it strikes me over and over as a ridiculous argument because it utilizes a number of faulty premises in creating its conclusion: mainly, that an economic or utilitarian model is or will be the driving force behind such a choice; and more deeply flawed, that humans' choices are or will be some set of monolithic guidelines to which all and sundry do or will subscribe.

That is, the claim arises, "I ... (read more)

I'm a member of Alcor. When I was looking into whether to sign up for Alcor or CI, I was comforted by Alcor's very open communication of financial status, internal research status, legal conflicts, and easy access via phone, etc. They struck me as being a highly transparent organization.

Someone from the 1800s would suffer severe culture shock if he or she were revived today. Just think of what they'd have to deal with, from their perspective:

But cryonics isn't about bringing back random people from the past whether they like it or not. Cryonics is about bringing back people who have explicitly consented for being brought back in the future, and who are prepared for awakening in a radically altered world.

@Sigivald: You're right. A sufficiently severe economic downturn will kill Alcor and CI dead, along with all those currently in cryostasis. Economic/political/infrastructure instability is the biggest "existential risk" for cryonicists, but nobody can be arsed to prepare contingency plans for it because I guess it's doesn't have the sexy science-fictiony cachet of asteroid hits or grey goo.

Reverse absurdity bias anybody?

Disclaimer: I am signed up.

Intrepid cryonauts are making a few assumptions, which may or may not be reasonable.

- That in the future it will be possible to revive or otherwise reconstruct themselves via some as yet unspecified [magic happens here] technology.

- That they will be restored to that status of some type of functioning being, either biological or perhaps simulated, or a combination of the two (cyborgian).

- That intelligent entities living in the future will want to restore the remains of creatures who lived in the distant past. These entities may not share the same views a... (read more)

If you want to securely erase a hard drive, it's not as easy as writing it over with zeroes. Sure, an "erased" hard drive like this won't boot up your computer if you just plug it in again. But if the drive falls into the hands of a specialist with a scanning tunneling microscope, they can tell the difference between "this was a 0, overwritten by a 0" and "this was a 1, overwritten by a 0".

As far as I know this has never been confirmed. See http://www.nber.org/sys-admin/overwritten-data-gutmann.html for more details.

At the point where the current legal and medical system gives up on a patient, they aren't really dead.

A corollary to this is the fact that some people who are clearly considered alive by the medical system might be good candidates for cryonics: Alzheimer's and mad-cow type diseases destroy the most important brain patterns, and at some point a rational person would take a chance on cryonics.

I read somewhere that on average something like 80% of individual's medical expenses get spent in the last year of life. Clearly much of this is futility. Imagine if this money was used to actually put scientific resources into cryonics? Really, really sad.

There are, though, a few blocks...

For one, I'm not financially independent, and my parents so happen to be Catholic-ish, so they think my dreams of immortality are foolishness of young age, and that cryonics wouldn't work because of "souls", whatever they may mean by that.

Also, I happen to live in the southeastern corner of Brazil. I'm... not positively sure that Alcor can reach me, let alone the CI.

I cannot, also, just quit college and teleport to the US and hope for the best. And I will, obviously, sign up as soon as I have the ability to do so and move to the US, and hope that I'm not hit by a car in the meantime.

Still, it's not exactly a dream I can achieve right now. Sadly.

Okay, I'm convinced (actually, I was convinced when I first looked into cryonics but I irrationally put off signing up due to the minor inconvenience). However, I don't really know how to best go about signing up, and a google search didn't really clear it up. I am a 17-year-old male living in Canada, could anyone tell me what the best way would be for me to go about signing up for cryonics? It seems that the cryonics sign-up forms are targeted towards people over 20.

Not signing up for cryonics - what does that say? That you've lost hope in the future. That you've lost your will to live. That you've stopped believing that human life, and your own life, is something of value.

Um... there are lots of other reasons why someone might not sign up for cryonics. For example, my reason. And when I explained my reason to you (Eliezer) in person, you didn't seem to have any strong rebuttal to it, though you did give a personal reason (that didn't reply to me) for why you are signed up for cryonics.

Also, as an aside, of the ... (read more)

Well, that was damn good. All the stuff at the beginning kinda hides the fact that what comes next is really important, though. A bit of a slow start - when I link people to this, I'm worried that they might be turned away by it.

OK, actual comment now ...

But if you want to keep the secret on your hard drive secure against all possible future technologies that might ever be developed, then cover it with thermite and set it on fire. It's the only way to be sure.

I appreciate this kind of takes away from the point, but time travel is a possible future technology that might ever be developed :P

Extrapolation "present is better than Middle Ages" -> "future will be better than present" is rather wrong. Compare paleolithic hunter, neolithic farmer, medieval serf and early industrial age factory worker - and you will get an impression that progress makes life worse. It may be that we just live in short golden age between Malthusian past and Hansonian future.

I wouldn't let one persons powerful writing alone decide such a thing, but for the compassion you show to everyone's' lives, I suppose the least i can do to repay that, would be by learning more about it. I don't happen to care much about what happens after the lights first goes out, and extending the care for my life to beyond my own death isn't really a part of my reasoning. I've never been religious or thought of an afterlife, so I don't even have that practice. The dead don't care

I think cryonics is very promising but the process of bringing people back from frozen state will need a lot of research and practice.

I would like to volunteer to go in as a research subject if someone else will pay and if any data mined from my remains is released as open source historical data under some reasonable license, for example the Perl Artistic License, with myself listed as the author of the raw recovered data. (I wrote it into my memories, no?)

People could then use the mined data, such as it is, for research on personality reconstruction or an... (read more)