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A Dying Young Woman’s Hope in Cryonics and a Future

nytimes.com

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Re: A Dying Young Woman’s Hope in Cryonics and a Future

#81

Post by WalterBright »

amalcon wrote: post #33

Cryonics is one of those things that's hard to evaluate. On the face of it, it seems insane. You're essentially making a bet that someone will find something useful to do with a frozen brain -- and that your estate will be able to afford the procedure -- before the company you've entrusted your brain to either makes a mistake or collapses. Given the near-total lack of progress on the former front (there's been consid…

Isn't it still the Star Trek Transporter problem? The future may be able to revive a copy of you, that thinks it is you, but you'd still be dead.

Re: A Dying Young Woman’s Hope in Cryonics and a Future

#82

Post by WalterBright »

a8da6b0c91d wrote: post #70
ryandvm wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cryonics is another version of Pascal's Wager. Logic and reason assures that it almost certainly is not going to work, but the value of the potential upside is effectively infinite to that individual, so it still may be a rational investment.

> upside is effectively infinite Shambling about like some lonely museum piece come to life sounds pretty worthless to me, personally. The value of a human life is in its context of family and society.

If I came back to life 500 years from now, I suspect I might become hopelessly homesick and depressed for the vanished past. Everyone I knew would be dust, and all my knowledge useless.

Re: A Dying Young Woman’s Hope in Cryonics and a Future

#83

Post by staunch »

Old_Thrashbarg wrote: post #12
dominotw wrote: post #2

Why are we so scared of death, to be nothing. Why do we have to cling on to someone's memories,is it because it gives some sense of security? It is just bizarre to reduce the beauty of life to some some little affair of holding on to someone's memories. Death is as beautiful as birth. We should break past the ridiculous taboos surrounding death and discuss it openly as to what it means to die. Edit: Jiddu K on death,…

Your response is what Aubrey de Grey calls the pro-aging trance. And he offers a lot of possible explanations about the psychology behind why many people pretend death is a good thing.

> "Grey believes that defeating aging is feasible and that the pro-aging trance represents a huge barrier to combating aging."

Had not heard that term before. I'm glad someone gave it a name. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_de_Grey#Pro-aging_tranc...

Re: A Dying Young Woman’s Hope in Cryonics and a Future

#84

Post by loup-vaillant »

cbr wrote: post #74
loup-vaillant wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're essentially making a bet that someone will find something useful to do with a frozen brain Something is deeply wrong with this way of thinking: it doesn't value human life at all. Here's another version. Someone comes to you seeking for help. He's dying. He could be saved by some recently devised miraculous medical procedure, which would return him to full health. The catch is, that procedure is relatively e…

"In what kind of bleak world would no one be willing to pay for a probable return to full health?" This one. People are dying now because of diseases we have basically eradicated in rich countries. The choice you're talking about making, saving a life for a few weeks worth of your own salary, is one that is already available to you and many others. What are you doing about it? Now, I think you're right that it's horr…

In our world, we also save many people, even when they can't pay for it. And when we don't, we at least admit that it's a problem. (At least in public. In private, I can totally imagine many people having no problem whatsoever with people dying by the millions.)

You're living proof of this. (Me… less so. I don't donate much.)

Amalcom on the other hand formulated things in such a way that it would be normal, expected to receive no outside help from the future. I disagree with that assumption. Expecting from the outset that the future will not help us is ludicrous. It's not guaranteed, but come on, we still have people like you, philanthropists, governments, and mutual funds —there's some things to say about the effectiveness of collective action vs individual choice: it's easier to donate or pay up when you know you're not alone.

So I ask again: in what kind of bleak world would NO ONE be willing to pay?

Re: A Dying Young Woman’s Hope in Cryonics and a Future

#85

Post by loup-vaillant »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #64
loup-vaillant wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like, living long enough to benefit from other life-extension procedures? I'm not sure how a few hundred dollars a years are going to hasten those processes. (I'm assuming that losing this money wouldn't prevent someone to live a healthy life in the first place.) Now if you would divert all cryonics resources towards existential risk mitigations, AI or rejuvenation research, that would be a different story. But prett…

>Now if you would divert all cryonics resources towards existential risk mitigations, AI or rejuvenation research, that would be a different story. But pretty soon we'd have to discuss how other resources are allocated right now, and next thing we know, we're talking politics. You say "talking politics" like it's a bad thing! >If you ask me, the world can probably finance cryonics for everyone and AI research and ant…

> You say "talking politics" like it's a bad thing!

That was unintended. But it is difficult: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Politics_is_the_Mind-Killer

Re: A Dying Young Woman’s Hope in Cryonics and a Future

#86

Post by aperrien »

WalterBright wrote: post #82
a8da6b0c91d wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> upside is effectively infinite Shambling about like some lonely museum piece come to life sounds pretty worthless to me, personally. The value of a human life is in its context of family and society.

If I came back to life 500 years from now, I suspect I might become hopelessly homesick and depressed for the vanished past. Everyone I knew would be dust, and all my knowledge useless.

Can't you learn new knowledge?

Re: A Dying Young Woman’s Hope in Cryonics and a Future

#87

Post by loup-vaillant »

WalterBright wrote: post #81
amalcon wrote: post #33

Cryonics is one of those things that's hard to evaluate. On the face of it, it seems insane. You're essentially making a bet that someone will find something useful to do with a frozen brain -- and that your estate will be able to afford the procedure -- before the company you've entrusted your brain to either makes a mistake or collapses. Given the near-total lack of progress on the former front (there's been consid…

Isn't it still the Star Trek Transporter problem? The future may be able to revive a copy of you, that thinks it is you, but you'd still be dead.

Oh, that one's easy. At the state of current science, we're pretty much sure that the Star Trek transporter doesn't kill the traveller. The "copy" is the original, in fact. Basically, this is because we're kinda made of particles, and the origin of the quarks you're made up of doesn't matter. As in, current physics don't even have a notion of the identity of a particle.

The part where it gets weird is, if you don't destroy the "original", you end up with two originals.

More (much more) details here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/r9/quantum_mechanics_and_personal_id...

Re: A Dying Young Woman’s Hope in Cryonics and a Future

#88

Post by loup-vaillant »

WalterBright wrote: post #82
a8da6b0c91d wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> upside is effectively infinite Shambling about like some lonely museum piece come to life sounds pretty worthless to me, personally. The value of a human life is in its context of family and society.

If I came back to life 500 years from now, I suspect I might become hopelessly homesick and depressed for the vanished past. Everyone I knew would be dust, and all my knowledge useless.

> Everyone I knew would be dust

Have them sign up with you!

Seriously, do have them sign up with you. You don't have to be alone.

Re: A Dying Young Woman’s Hope in Cryonics and a Future

#89

Post by loup-vaillant »

eloff wrote: post #21

The implications of your identity being copied into a new, improved body and what that means when the original you is dead, or what happens when you get copied more than once, etc are explored in depth in Jasper Scott's excellent Dark Space series: http://www.jaspertscott.com/p/dark-space-v-avilon.html

The social problems from multiple instances, I can understand. The original being dead however, doesn't make much sense. As far as current science goes, it doesn't even have a physical meaning. All that matters is the result: if there is an instance of you, no one died, period.

(Well, not quite "period", actually. If you let one instance run for a while (a second, a minute, a day?), then destroy it, that certainly looks like murder.)

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