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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

#101

Post by loup-vaillant »

Apofis wrote: post #99
loup-vaillant wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't know about you, but to me my life has infinite value, I only have one after all.

How often do you commute your way to work? Driving has its risks. Now weight this risk against your salary. A cynical calculation may find that your own acts value your life at a few million dollars, maybe even a few dozen millions.

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

#102

Post by geofft »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #101
Apofis wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about you, but to me my life has infinite value, I only have one after all.

How often do you commute your way to work? Driving has its risks. Now weight this risk against your salary. A cynical calculation may find that your own acts value your life at a few million dollars, maybe even a few dozen millions.

"Life" is more than the biological definition. There are things I could do to my life that would make it no longer worth living (and, on the way there, no longer of infinite value), and living in pathological fear of death is basically the broadest category of those things.

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

#103

Post by WalterBright »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #87
WalterBright wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

> pretty much sure

Are you willing to risk your life on "pretty much sure" ? Especially when there's no experiment you can devise to test it?

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

#104

Post by zanny »

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.

If they are able to revive the original brain (and considering the whole point of cryonics is indefinite suspension until your wants are met) at some point in the next five billion years, assuming we don't kill ourselves (which like all those metrics about the odds of Alcor failing is also astronomically high) we should eventually be able to regenerate a brain rather than replace it.

You might lose some memories, but if its at least 51% of the original brains tissue, is that not still "you", even if it is now full of fresh gray matter to replace all that damaged by freezing?

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

#105

Post by hugh4 »

336f5 wrote: post #77
hugh4 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The nonprofit can also collapse, though. Is it likely to happen? Honestly I have a very hard time imagining the probabilities. Financial collapse versus deliberate destruction versus horrible accident versus actually getting revived? They all seem unlikely, but once your brain is in deep freeze, its fate is one of those.

> Is it likely to happen? It's hard to estimate, but nonprofits in the West have OK long-term track records and the cryonics double-organization model has worked well since it was created in the aftermath of Chatsworth (which demonstrated why the commercial side must be separated). Arguably, it only needs to work for another century, and it's not like it's that hard to keep some funds conservatively invested, pay ren…

I guess there's a fifth possibility: that people in the future learn enough about brain function to figure out that it's literally impossible to reboot a dead brain.

I'm no neurologist but wouldn't be surprised if there's information in the brain which is encoded in ways other than which neuron is connected to which. Like, firing patterns.

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

#107

Post by amalcon »

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.

This depends on how you define the self. That's a philosophical question with many, many possible answers. Humanity isn't in any sort of broad agreement about which one is right.

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

#108

Post by salgernon »

So, 10,000 years in the future they can revive you.

Apparently, we've decided that it has a hard problem to guarantee that we can communicate with the future, even about really bad stuff:

http://www.wipp.energy.gov/picsprog/articles/wipp%20exhibit%...

This is about warning the future about nuclear waste, but could be adopted to "vault of frozen heads" (Assuming they haven't failed by then and there was sufficient coolant.)

Sort of flip the opening sentences around: "This is a place of honor!"

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

#109

Post by dennisgorelik »

edanm wrote: post #75
analog31 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... before the company you've entrusted your brain to either makes a mistake or collapses. A vastly more likely scenario is that the company is a scam in the first place, and has no particular interest in preserving your brain, given the complete lack of any possible accountability mechanism.

That's a little pessimistic, and doesn't sound right to me. There aren't that many companies in cryonics, but they've been around for a long time (30 years I think?). And there are things you can do to verify - e.g. visit their preservation rooms, etc. And people have done this.

What exactly would you be able to verify?

That some dead brains are frozen at the moment?

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

#110

Post by developer1 »

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…

Yes, because the fear of death totally makes the decision to have faith in sci-fi a rational thought. I sincerely hope our species never solves the puzzle of immortal life or even prolonging a life past a natural existence. The mere thought disgusts me. Please, hell no.
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