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Hal Finney being cryopreserved now

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Re: Hal Finney being cryopreserved now

#201

Post by MichaelGG »

jacquesm wrote: post #80
scarmig wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we're going to quibble about terminology, I'd point out that "assisted suicide" would come a lot closer than "murder" to describe that situation. Of course, in the POV of someone who believes in cryopreservation as a way to save lives, preventing it is almost tantamount to murder--probably falling somewhere above negligent homicide, since you'd actively be preventing someone from saving their own life. I say that…

If you kill someone after they paid you a lot of money to preserve your corpse the courts might not agree with the assisted suicide bit if your body was still functional. They'd more than likely call it murder too. I'm a firm believer in the preservation bit, I don't think it will scale and I totally do not believe in the resurrection bit. It's a bit like performing a magical trick where you smash somebody's watch in…

At one point, a court might have ruled that your usage of a cigarette lighter to be witchcraft summoning fire demons.

To use your analogy: You're getting on an airplane and the security guy says "no watches". You're now faced with the assured loss of an heirloom item. So you break it, and the guy lets you board. You figure eventually you may be able to reassemble it in some form. Like the Iranians did to the "destroyed" documents in the US Embassy there.

Re: Hal Finney being cryopreserved now

#202

Post by heed »

pron wrote: post #183
TeMPOraL wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bet against future technology. How it differs from religion is that a/ we know that required technology is possible, b/ we are pretty confident that current cryopreservation methods are good enough for the required technology to be able to reverse the process, and c/ we make a bet that humanity will reach the point a/. Note that we are sure it can be done, we only don't know if it will be .

> Note that we are sure it can be done Although this is not part of the interesting religio-philosophical discussion we're all having here (which, BTW, finally fulfills my own dream of visiting 17th century Europe), that is simply not true. We are not sure it can be done, and we are even less sure it can be done with current preservation technology. There are few things in biology we are sure of, so many things that…

Why are you so adamant to dismiss cryogenics and call it a religion? Should we just throw in the towel and stop researching it? Do you claim that everyone betting on new technologies are religious?

Re: Hal Finney being cryopreserved now

#203

Post by pron »

MichaelGG wrote: post #196
ewoodrich wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I accept that there is evidence that cryonics may become viable for human subjects in the future. My point is merely that freezing one's own body despite a lack of any evidence that present methods would allow revival of a human in the future requires optimism that is not incomparable with religion.

It's not incomparable in a mathematical sense, but the probability of any known religion being correct is not remotely on the same scale of reviving a suspended human mind. Along the lines: http://lesswrong.com/lw/ml/but_theres_still_a_chance_right/

> reviving a suspended human mind

That's not what's being debated. We're debating reviving with a yet unknown technique a human mind frozen with a particular one.

> the probability of any known religion being correct is not remotely on the same scale...

I'm an atheist, but that's totally unknown and presently unknowable. And don't provide as an example a very particular religion that rejects evolution (I don't know about muslims and other religions less known in the west, but most religious Jews and many Catholics don't reject evolution).

Re: Hal Finney being cryopreserved now

#204

Post by ryan-c »

I'm surprised nobody has made the point that "death" is not a binary thing - it is a progression. If we consider a scale where "1" is alive (breathing, heart beating, higher brain functions working, etc) and "0" is when your brain has been unambiguously destroyed, we have a probability distribution of whether a person can be returned to "1".

At one time if someone left "1" (e.g. heart stopped), that was pretty much it. Now we can often recover someone whose heart has been stopped for several minutes with little to no long term damage through medical intervention. A cryonic procedure pushes a person to a place on the scale where the probability distribution provided by current technology is a big fat zero. There is some hope that as technology advances that probability distribution will look favorable to the those frozen. We're pretty much just guessing about that last part though.

Re: Hal Finney being cryopreserved now

#205

Post by MichaelGG »

jacquesm wrote: post #114
simias wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Murder is the unlawful killing, with malice aforethought, of another human, and generally this premeditated state of mind distinguishes murder from other forms of unlawful homicide (such as manslaughter). So not really, no. And you should really know better than replying with such trollbait, that's not contributing to the discussion in the slightest. This is the announcement of the death (?) of someone, not the place…

This is not the announcement of the death of someone. The title clearly reads that he's being cryopreserved. If it was about his death I would expect something that would announce that rather than his so-called preservation. This is the trans-humanist movement claiming this moment as theirs rather than an announcement of a good persons death. It's simply an Alcor advertorial, not a eulogy. Supposedly he's not really…

I get sad when people close to me go on long trips, even though I'm counting on seeing them in a few years. Even if the trip is a great thing for them. I can be happy about their trip, while being that I'm going to be deprived of their company.

And people can be sad that the probability of seeing him alive in close timeframes suddenly dropped from nearly 1 to somewhere closer to zero.

Re: Hal Finney being cryopreserved now

#206

Post by TeMPOraL »

pron wrote: post #185
TeMPOraL wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, those are all valid concerns, but all of them are within the realm of possibility. We don't know if we'll achieve the technology, but we know we can in principle . We don't know if future people will care about reviving us, or that we'd even want to live in that future, but it is possible. Note that there's no religion here anywhere, everything is casual and derived through logic from the current state of reali…

I completely reject your premise of certainty, but won't repeat what I've said here ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8240354 ) except to reiterate the following: > ... chance of not dying, when your only other choice is to die with 100% certainty You see, those aren't the only choices. I won't debate the chances of success, but assuming they are as high as you believe, there's a chance you're trading your certa…

> I see people spending money for a chance at an afterlife they have absolutely no proof of.

There is a casual, down-to-Earth, no-supernatural-powers-required, fully constrained to known laws of physics and mechanisms of biology chain of reasoning that this could work. There's a huge qualitative difference between this and believing in God.

Sure, we can argue whether or not it's worth spending money on right now; if you start including things like "burden on your relatives" or "probability of undesirable future" or "probability that current preservation techniques destroy too much information" in your calculations you might end up deciding it's not worth the cost yet, but it doesn't change that the idea is sound in principle.

> I see vast exaggeration of some anecdotal observations (miracles?) as "knowledge" of life.

Are you calling modern molecular biology, chemistry and information theory a bunch of "anecdotal observations"? Sure, whatever. But even if, it's still the best thing we have to reason from.

> I see people finding comfort in an unknown future predicated on the powers of some super-human entity (at least super-human compared to the present) and on the optimistic belief in the benevolence of that entity.

You're bundling two different concepts together (which might be excusable, because people who believe in cryonics also often believe in superhuman AIs). Still, cryonics does not depend on any super-human entity or its values, it only depends on whether or not we crack nanotech (or some other technology we don't know yet).

> In short I see religious texts and religious arguments, hence: religion.

Where you see religion, I see reasonable assumptions based on current scientific knowledge, extrapolated by applying cold, hard rationality.

Re: Hal Finney being cryopreserved now

#207

Post by MichaelGG »

jacquesm wrote: post #158
teraflop wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A reasonable definition of death is "loss of consciousness and vital functions in a way that is impossible to reverse". By that definition, Hal Finney might be dead now but nobody really knows for sure, because the reversibility of current cryopreservation techniques is unknown. Just as in the case of someone who falls into a coma from which they'll probably never wake up, both mourning and hope are reasonable respon…

I think it's perfectly fair to call someone whose head has just been cut off and frozen dead. If not there are going to be an awful lot of killers who froze their victims heads exonerated and those that pulled the plugs on the freezers will be in the docket. It's the world on its head. Mourning is a reasonable response. Advertising is not and this article does not contain a whole lot of mourning (I can't detect any,…

Why are you so intent on conflating legal definitions with the truth?

Re: Hal Finney being cryopreserved now

#208

Post by MichaelGG »

danielweber wrote: post #129
meepmorp wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People spend ages carefully preserving forks and other trinkets from the 1700s. Surely an entire person would be worth equal care, and a group of people more so. Trinkets from a bygone era don't require medical care, housing, and feeding. Note, too, that historical preservation goes only so far - there's plenty of places where old buildings are torn down to make way for new ones. I have trouble seeing where frozen…

Trinkets also don't have agency. What if someone wouldn't want to be brought back to life? Trying another way, let's say the technology is created to bring Finney back, but it would only keep him alive for 4 hours, and after that there would be no chance of him ever returning. Would it be violating his beliefs for future-folk to bring him back for those 4 hours just because they want to hear what he has to say?

Depends - is there some magical event that means this is the only shot? Like, he's on a collision course with a sun and is going to impact in 4 hours, but we can remotely activate for those hours?

Otherwise, I think the proper response is "keep working on this technology until we've gotten that 4 hour window up to something useful."

Re: Hal Finney being cryopreserved now

#209

Post by TeMPOraL »

pron wrote: post #203
MichaelGG wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not incomparable in a mathematical sense, but the probability of any known religion being correct is not remotely on the same scale of reviving a suspended human mind. Along the lines: http://lesswrong.com/lw/ml/but_theres_still_a_chance_right/

> reviving a suspended human mind That's not what's being debated. We're debating reviving with a yet unknown technique a human mind frozen with a particular one. > the probability of any known religion being correct is not remotely on the same scale... I'm an atheist, but that's totally unknown and presently unknowable. And don't provide as an example a very particular religion that rejects evolution (I don't know a…

> That's not what's being debated. We're debating reviving with a yet unknown technique a human mind frozen with a particular one.

I know I'm repeating myself in every comment I make in this thread, but to reiterate. We know one possible technique that will work. We know that it exists, it is possible and that it can do the job in principle. We just don't know how to use it, because we didn't build that particular piece of technology.

There may be other ways we don't know about yet, but if there are none, then there's always the nanotech.

Re: Hal Finney being cryopreserved now

#210

Post by nsxwolf »

bellerocky wrote: post #141
Retric wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it interesting that cryonics and the singularity are both 'modern' religions with that are vary similar in tone to many past religions. They both seems reasonable on the surface, but don't really work if you dig down into the details. Much like all that new age QM BS uses a few of the right words without much substance.

> but don't really work if you dig down into the details. Don't really work? There is no evidence that you can be brought back from cryopreservation, but assuming that it might one day be possible doesn't require throwing out all the known physical laws of the universe so it's hardly a religion. Cryopreservation is not based on faith, it's based on a little bit of optimism. It's not a religion. Edit: qualified on the…

There's a false dichotomy here. It is possible for religions to be true, and for an afterlife to exist at the same time that the possibility of revival after cryopreservation exists.

The cryopreserved person simply wasn't truly dead yet in such a scenario. An afterlife can still commence after whatever cosmic rules that indicate true death are satisfied.

Certainly everyone will die, no matter what. There is no materialist vision of immortality that can work in a universe with a finite life span.

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