Essentially, the problem is that these voluntary relationships become not-so-voluntary as the privacy-compromising tools become more necessary to participate in society.
What does lead you to believe that cryonics give you a second chance? It simply doesn't add up. It needs so many breakthroughs that you'd better get mummified; at least you'd have a reasonable chance for your corpse to stay available for some significant length of time.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
And how do you believe you'll accomplish this? The second, third, etc. companies are not going to sign up for this responsibility for free. Nor is there any guarantee that they won't also fail, or be merged into one conglomerate that fails.
> 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.
I don't understand how this is at all relevant. I see no compelling reason to believe that the US will not experience natural disasters, wars, failed companies, or any number of other incidents that could cause cryo-failure. The fact that the population is fairly educated is almost completely irrelevant.
> Cryonicists certainly have more motive than the average person to promote stability, literacy, and nonviolence.
Frozen people are not in a position to promote anything. And the people keeping them frozen don't have an incentive to do anything except collect paychecks.
> And how do you believe you'll accomplish this? The second, third, etc. companies are not going to sign up for this responsibility for free.
Yes it costs more money and it has to be done in advance.
> Nor is there any guarantee that they won't also fail, or be merged into one conglomerate that fails.
You could put it in the bylaws that they cannot merge into a conglomerate, or mandate that they split every so often.
> I don't understand how this is at all relevant. I see no compelling reason to believe that the US will not experience natural disasters, wars, failed companies, or any number of other incidents that could cause cryo-failure.
Sure those are a constant risk. The solution is to put money and resources towards reducing the risks, starting with the worst ones and/or the cheapest to fix. This likely has enormous positive externalities for the population as a whole.
> The fact that the population is fairly educated is almost completely irrelevant.
Are you sure? Education is an important element of what sustains civilization.
> Frozen people are not in a position to promote anything.
They are now when they aren't frozen yet.
> And the people keeping them frozen don't have an incentive to do anything except collect paychecks.
They do if they a) expect to be frozen themselves, b) see the patients as fellow humans, or c) see the patients as priceless historical artifacts. But yes they are also motivated by whatever keeps getting them their paychecks -- obviously it is best to stack things so that the paychecks are dependent on things that are desirable for the patients.
> Yes it costs more money and it has to be done in advance. ... You could put it in the bylaws that they cannot merge into a conglomerate, or mandate that they split every so often. ... Sure those are a constant risk. The solution is to put money and resources towards reducing the risks, starting with the worst ones and/or the cheapest to fix. This likely has enormous positive externalities for the population as a whole.
This is a whole lot of ifs. If you could institute enough failovers (how many is enough, when we don't know the average lifespan of a cryo-company?), and if you could stop them from merging, and if you could avoid natural disasters, and if, if, if. There are so many ifs here it's ridiculous, especially given that you haven't provided any hows. This is just hand-waving. Yes, if you could solve all the problems, then there would be no problems. How, though?
> Are you sure? Education is an important element of what sustains civilization.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that an educated population has little or nothing to do with natural disasters, or company failures, or even war.
> They are now when they aren't frozen yet.
Um, okay. This doesn't have much to do with the viability of cryonics. Let's assume that all the cryonists campaign for peace and are then frozen. So now they're in a peaceful world with no way to thaw them and no change in the overall risks except perhaps with regards to war.
I'm saying that cryonics implies taking a certain degree of responsibility for the future. That's not an argument in favor of it working. It is an argument in favor of it being a positive thing overall, irrespective of it working. It provides selfish incentive for caring about the fate of future generations. Since we are trying to establish betting odds and what is a fair price for cryonics, all the externalities need to be taken into account. A world with cryonics is better off than a world without it.
I disagree that company failures or war are unrelated to education levels (or quality). A well educated populace should be more resistant to and capable of avoiding war, and more capable of solving and preventing financial problems. One specific thing for cryonics trusts to do is offer scholarships to those pursuing peace and financial stability as educational specialties.
Natural disasters can be avoided to some degree by careful selection of location. Alcor is based in Arizona partly because of the lack of earthquakes. Hurricanes and tornadoes be protected against by using a monolithic dome. LN2 shortages can be protected against by having a large bulk storage tank on site, and using efficient insulation.
That said, the most desirable solution (because it addresses all the different sources of risk simultaneously) is to accelerate the development of revival technology to whatever degree is possible. Maintaining high education levels is critical to this, as is spending money on brain and body repair research. This produces a very large positive externality.
The strategy that works best is to make sure that multiple things have to go wrong in order for a critical failure at each critical point. That is how disasters are prevented in e.g. nuclear facilities. It's expensive and painstaking, but it is a case where throwing money and competent engineers at the problem actually works.
Your argument for cryonics having a low probability of working apparently assumes no one has done or will have done this, despite the obvious fact that they have an extremely strong interest in so doing. And you accuse accuse me of hand-waving?
I'm saying you're making an arbitrary link without substance that suits your purposes. Cryonics does not imply or require actually caring about the future in any significant way. All cryonics implies is a desperate desire for self-prolonging. The process of maintaining someone in a frozen state definitely has negative consequences for the environment. This is not the act of someone trying to help the future. It's the act of someone who puts his own desires over the well-being of the future.
You're crazy to think that a well-educated populace will avoid war. Americans are well-educated and we've been involved in wars nearly non-stop since we were founded. As for companies failing, the last several years have shown us that educated people will happily destroy companies for personal gain (not that we didn't already know this).
Natural disasters can be made less probable by choosing an appropriate location, not avoided entirely. An asteroid can hit Arizona as easily as New York. And earthquakes can basically strike anywhere. They're simply more likely in certain areas.
My argument for cryonics' low probability is based on the fact that so many things can go wrong over such a long time frame (we don't engineer nuclear facilities to last for thousands of years). The fact that some people have pursued cryonics is in no way proof or even evidence of it's feasibility. How many billions of people pursue religion for the same reasons? The desire for self-preservation often results in irrational behaviors.
> 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.
Except that the fraction for reincarnation is likely not nearly enough, given that simple surgeries routinely cost tens of thousands of dollars and building a new body is something we can't even do.
You seem to be assuming that a lot of random things will somehow come together to make cryonics work.
Compound interest? Depends on how the trust is managed. Once you're dead, you're obviously not going to be able to influence that. It also depends on the economy, and we've seen some pretty long runs lately with no cumulative gains.
Overfunding? That doesn't even make sense. We're talking about there no being enough funds, and you pipe in with "what if there's too much!".
External funding? What makes you think someone in the future is going to drop a million to reanimate your head?
Future advances? Sure, but it seems pretty farfetched to say that future advances are going to make body reconstruction affordable. I mean, how long have we been waiting for affordable flying cars?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Eh, I'll give you part of Pascal's Wager. The other part of it is the logical absurdity of thinking that someone who doesn't already believe can be blackmailed into believing. Pascal's Wager can only be used to defend belief, not create. (But every time I've heard someone IRL use it they seem to not understand that). That's a big part of what Pascal's Wager "is" to me.
I think that argument applies to cryonics. :) The people who invoke the wager are trying to defend their belief, not actually convert others. To anyone who doesn't believe in cryonics, the wager is pretty absurd.
Sure, thousands of years of torture are possible for you if you're a cryonicist -- but in such a world the same risk would apply to trillions of other sentients. If you aren't completely selfish, you're better off investing your energy in preventing such a world instead of trying to dodge the bullet personally.
> If you aren't completely selfish, you're better off investing your energy in preventing such a world
How is getting your head frozen investing in preventing such a world? If you want to improve the future, maybe you should invest your $25K in humanitarian efforts instead of a desperate attempt at personal life extension.
> How is getting your head frozen investing in preventing such a world?
It isn't, directly. It is an investment in something else which makes that a more important issue to an individual. That affects the probability of the individual taking actions that favor the given outcome. The main purpose of getting your head frozen is saving the individual's life directly, but it does have this positive externality.
> If you want to improve the future, maybe you should invest your $25K in humanitarian efforts instead of a desperate attempt at personal life extension.
How does passively letting yourself die increase your incentive to plan for a better world in the distant future?
> It isn't, directly. It is an investment in something else which makes that a more important issue to an individual. That affects the probability of the individual taking actions that favor the given outcome. The main purpose of getting your head frozen is saving the individual's life directly, but it does have this positive externality.
No, it doesn't. This is all feel-good silliness. You've said stuff like this in numerous replies, but you've given no reason for anyone to believe that cryonics has any positive impact. A 25K donation for Malaria treatment would probably do a lot more. That provides concrete benefits, rather than intangible hopes that cryonists will somehow work toward a better tomorrow.
> How does passively letting yourself die increase your incentive to plan for a better world in the distant future?
How does spending money on snake oil do more for the world than spending that same money on solving real problems?
For your argument to make any sense, we have to accept that no one cares about the state or fate of the world after their own deaths, which is absurdly cynical.
People usually have a limited amount they will give to charity and will generally spend the rest on something selfish. Cryonics feels selfish, so they will spend money on it that they would not have given to charity anyway.
People who care about the state of the world after their deaths are not in the same position as those who actually expect to experience it. They are not as likely to care as much or to employ rational means to that end, because their concern is a more altruistic and abstract one, the sort of emotion which evolves for signaling/tribal purposes rather than personal survival. Entirely different neural machinery is employed when evaluating the problem differently.
I don't know how you reached the conclusion that my argument relies on no one caring about the future in spite of death. My argument is that you can increase your rational, self-interested incentives to care about the future by planning to be cryopreserved.
So you're saying that people interested in cryonics will not actually give more money to charities? Doesn't that go counter to the assertion that you've repeatedly made that cryonists are more likely to invest in improving the future?
People who care about the state of the world after their deaths are more likely to donate. How much have charities benefited from posthumous donations? A cryonist who does not expect to "die" has no incentive to donate in their will. At least religions say "you can't take it with you". Cryonics says "sure you can; put it in the bank".
You're also making a false connection between the desire for self-preservation and rational behavior. People do all kinds of stupid crap because they think it will keep them alive. They go to faith healers, they take dangerous or useless substances, they engage in pointless rituals, etc. I would say "pursuing cryonics" belongs to that list.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
Check
it costs less than 200k and
Check
there are no obvious people who are profiting from this then
Check
This is at least as true for religion (which you can practice for free) as it is for cryonics (which is a business venture).
I want to be >99% sure about it not being viable before giving up on it.
In what way can you be >99% sure that religion is not viable? What logic allows you to believe in cryonics but not religion, given that each have basically the same scientific underpinnings (which is to say, none at all).
EDIT: Unless you meant that the logic you described was not yours, but just mmaro's, in which case fair enough.
The logic he described belonged to no one. Neither he nor mmaro actually claimed it. It was an entirely hypothetical scenario in which some people might see mmaro's statements as something other than selling snake oil (I certainly wouldn't, it still wouldn't amount to "evidence" of any sort, just more fuzzy hope).
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.
(BTW, if you save everything you find interesting, you realize just how much disappears from the Internet. The half-life of the average link is about 4.5 years.)
It's been a while since I've watched it, but I didn't get the impression that Blank lost it. As I remember, Andrew just made a big deal out of his minor misstep and focused on the misstep rather than getting the interview back on track. I think most interviewees, not just Blank, would find this annoying.
Thanks - I will watch the entire clip later (looks interesting) but a quick scan and I would say what appears to be the part of the interview that was referred to seems to be somewhat ambiguous. And I think you're right I wouldn't characterize it as "lost it" either. Although he
does appear irritated and says he was "blindsided" I don't think this is really representative of the Steve that I remember and commented about (no clips of that sorry..)
It starts at about 20:10 and Steve says he was "blindsided" at about 21:00 approx. as if he was misled or something by Andrew. I thought the question Andrew asked was a good question.
If you don't trust Apple's FDE solution to not have a backdoor, you probably shouldn't use their operating system at all, as it has access to all of your data.
People usually aren't trying to protect their drive contents with encryption while the drive is mounted and the computer is running. If the drive is encrypted, anyone trying to gain access won't care if OSX has a backdoor because it will all be encrypted in the volume. The only thing that will matter is a backdoor allowing decryption of the volume.
You could use your argument to state that someone paranoid enough to use encryption just shouldn't use a computer at all.
My understanding is that it's not considered "true" open source by many people, because of the license that it's released under, but their website gives easy access to all the source code.
I do not think it would offer anything over Lion's encryption. The real hope would be support, I think, for hidden OS. The TrueCrypt Boot Loader has been absent from the Mac versions because the full disk encryption has been. I do not know why.
I suppose, then, a reason to use it over Lion's encryption would be to gain the boot loader and hidden OS feature.
I wasn't under the impression this was 1> Pre-boot or 2> Actually the whole disk or 3> Functional and TRIMtastic with SSDs 4> Allowing central, on site management of backup keys
Do you have anything to show that it's comparable to say, PGP's offering?
Yes, for when you want portable virtual disks to put in places like DropBox. We don't trust drop box for sensitive/important stuff and we trust Truecrypt more.
Great for shuffling stuff to your accountant actually! And heck of a lot faster and cheaper than FedEx.
Answer in haste on a small screen and realize mmaro's question isn't on the top level. Bugger!
So, no is the answer and thanks for graciously pointing my mistake out and allowing me to correct. Truecrypt really is a great transport for smallish disks on an untrusted network. Whole disks on Dropbox probably = insane.
I don't understand. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=life+expectancy+at+21 says that my life expectancy is 76.62 years and my probability of dying is 0.001329. That's a really low probability of dying already and I haven't even weighted in statistics like being healthy, high income, and taking the bus instead of car or bike. I can't believe that my probability of dying before I'm thirty is any higher than 0.1%.
0.001329 is 0.13%, and that's just for the next year of your life. On Wolfram Alpha, look under survival probability and you'll see that your chance of dying before age 30 is 0.93%.
I'm well aware that 0.13% is for the next year. The survival probability on Wolfram Alpha, however, doesn't take more specific statistics into account. The only things the data have are race, age, and sex. My supposition is if it took more interesting things into account (socioeconomic class, general health, commute patterns, drug use, etc) my actual probability of death before age 30 is no more than 0.1%. I'm not worried.
The CDC data just shows causes of death. The first most common is "Unintentional injury," which I assume covers things like car accidents and risky sports. Neither affect me because I don't drive (take the bus) and don't participate in dangerous sports.
I shouldn't have to address homicide. I'm from the Baltimore area -- I know exactly who that age group is weighted by and I'm not concerned about dying by homicide.
I'm not going to commit suicide.
Malignant neoplasm (cancer) is unlikely. I'm low on risk factors and don't have a high genetic propensity. I'm also in the fortunate position of having a better knowledge of my medical risk factors than most people because I'm from a family of doctors.
Your second example isn't even a real example. You have no data, you're just making a claim. As far as life insurance goes, I doubt they collect extremely accurate statistical data. It's not in their best interests to lower their premiums so I would expect any life insurance policy to be heavily weighted in their favor.