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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?
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no worries. The human emulator uses just 1% of a 2050 EC2 mini compute instance.
So, if the distributed hardware infrastructure cluster supporting 10,000 EC2 mini compute instances is packed with 1,000,000 emulations of humans, how important are the physical data centers that encompass all their backups, master copies and live instances?
The emulation of a human is a human.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
[deleted]
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not that insane when compared to the alternative.
Yes it is. Sane people are comfortable with death. It takes a weird sort of narcissism to pursue cryonics. Dying in the jungle in pursuit of the fountain of youth or bathing in the blood of the young rightfully comes off as bonkers to healthy people.
Check your arrogance levels, they're way off.
Sane people are actually very much afraid of death. Anyone would have a much easier time proving that it is insanity not to be afraid of death, than the opposite.
> It takes a weird sort of narcissism to pursue cryonics.
It takes a much nastier sort of narcissism to be judgemental about how people decide their bodies will be handled after death.
> Dying in the jungle in pursuit of the fountain of youth or bathing in the blood of the young rightfully comes off as bonkers to healthy people.
Nobody is bathing in blood. If this is what you are actually reading in this topic, I recommend therapy.
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…
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Surprisingly, the financial aspect of it is pretty manageable as explained by Max More (head of Alcor) [0]. Apparently if you have signed up for some kind of life-insurance, you simply pay your regular insurance fee, and direct them to give it to Alcor for your preservation if you die. Or if you wish to pay in total, I've heard it's ~$80K for head only. And ~$200K for whole body. Once I can afford any of the above op…
Just because that's what Alcor is asking for does not mean that they can actually deliver the service they promise for that amount. Frankly, I don't think any fixed amount is sufficient for a reasonable chance of a positive outcome. A lot can happen in a few hundred years. If you believe they are honest and competent (which I do), there are factors to consider entirely beyond their control. Even if we assume that the…
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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.
The original wager is more extreme than that. Paradise is eternal Fun, while hell is eternal Not Cool. Cryonics, assuming you don't believe in the afterlife, only gives a hope of life in our world, instead of certain oblivion. Life does not have infinite value. People, including atheists, sometimes give their own life for some higher purpose (another life, freedom, a better standard of living for their village…). Of…
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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?
Your brain might contain nothing of value to that society, except as a store of archaic knowledge, or maybe as a substrate for computing. They may never even bother reviving someone as a conscious, self-aware being, or if they do, it may be for a zoo or a lifetime of slavery for the machines which I assume for no particular reason will have taken over.