The youngest person to be cryogenically preserved • Hacker News Board

Re: The youngest person to be cryogenically preserved

#51

Post by rl3 » Mon, Nov 23, 2015, 12:34 AM UTC

martin-adams wrote: post #47

rl3 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's assuming humans would be performing the resuscitation, which I doubt. If general intelligence has been solved, it will probably be an AI doing the work.

Well there's a scary thought. Sending your loved ones into the future full of machine whose motives may not exactly be the same as ours.

Not saying machines will be running the show, just that they'd likely be handling the logistics of the resuscitation itself.

If general intelligence goes sideways and takes over, the probability it'd care about resuscitating preserved humans is extremely low.

That said, waking up into some sort of Roko's Basilisk-esque eternal torment would kind of suck.

Re: The youngest person to be cryogenically preserved

#52

Post by spyder » Mon, Nov 23, 2015, 12:49 AM UTC

csn wrote: post #44

martin-adams wrote: post #37

I find cryogenics such a thought provoking field. If you're going to be frozen after death, you would probably want the restoration process to be fully mature before you are restored. But yet, someone has to go first (outside of shorter frozen trials). But then again, who is to say that the restoration process will take the form of thawing out the brain. An advanced digital scanning technique could imprint the brain…

Is there any name for this puzzle? I've been thinking about this for a while now. Cloning the particles (and their states) that make you up would most likely produce a separate mind, as I think would teleporting where v1 is destroyed and v2 consisting of different particles, although in the same configuration. But what about separating said configuration, transporting them somewhere else and putting them back togethe…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletransportation_paradox

Re: The youngest person to be cryogenically preserved

#53

Post by lewisl9029 » Mon, Nov 23, 2015, 3:32 AM UTC

fsloth wrote: post #4

How much does this cost?

I hope this doesn't count as feeding the trolls, but I found it slightly amusing that some of the replies to your post claiming it costs them $x were marked as [dead] by HN. =)

Re: The youngest person to be cryogenically preserved

#54

Post by keeperofdakeys » Mon, Nov 23, 2015, 10:25 AM UTC

martin-adams wrote: post #37

I find cryogenics such a thought provoking field. If you're going to be frozen after death, you would probably want the restoration process to be fully mature before you are restored. But yet, someone has to go first (outside of shorter frozen trials). But then again, who is to say that the restoration process will take the form of thawing out the brain. An advanced digital scanning technique could imprint the brain…

http://existentialcomics.com/comic/1

A long (but relevant) web comic.

Re: The youngest person to be cryogenically preserved

#55

Post by TazeTSchnitzel » Mon, Nov 23, 2015, 10:48 AM UTC

pen2l wrote: post #32

tptacek wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No.

Which question was that a 'no' to? (there were two questions in the post you're replying to)

Presumably the first.

Re: The youngest person to be cryogenically preserved

#56

Post by wutbrodo » Mon, Nov 23, 2015, 7:12 PM UTC

notahacker wrote: post #30

wutbrodo wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> foreseeable future revival attempts. I don't fully disagree with you, but this is sort of begging the question, since cryonics seems to rely heavily on the chance of unforeseeable advantages. On top of that, you seem to be committing the common fallacy of equating every minute of life as the same, whether you're suffering terminally in a hospital bed or watching the sunset with friends (this is also why people choo…

When the only certainty is killing people, I'd question whether the incalculably remote possibility of "unforeseeable advantages" undoing that killing counts for anything at all. The last thing advocates of euthanasia and DNR for the heavily-suffering should want to see is their ethical arguments muddied by cryogenics salespeople hanging round hospitals persuading people that they'd be better off dying shortly after…

> When the only certainty is killing people, I'd question whether the incalculably remote possibility of "unforeseeable advantages" undoing that killing counts for anything at all.

I'm somewhat inclined to agree with you but I don't think misrepresenting the arguments made by proponents is the same thing as rebutting them, like you did in this second comment.

> The last thing advocates of euthanasia and DNR for the heavily-suffering should want to see is their ethical arguments muddied by cryogenics salespeople hanging round hospitals persuading people that they'd be better off dying shortly after diagnosis...

Uh, that's great and everything but it's not even remotely relevant to the point of whether QALYs are a more appropriate measure than raw years of life for measuring the effectiveness of cryogenics. Sorry if that sounded a little caustic, but I find enormously tiresome the cynical tactic of appealing to "that argument is dangerous, what if someone down the road abuses it?" when one is unwilling or unable to address a point. Particularly because you could come up with some scenario in which pretty much every assertion could be used for ill.

Re: The youngest person to be cryogenically preserved

#57

Post by notahacker » Tue, Nov 24, 2015, 7:28 PM UTC

wutbrodo wrote: post #56

notahacker wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the only certainty is killing people, I'd question whether the incalculably remote possibility of "unforeseeable advantages" undoing that killing counts for anything at all. The last thing advocates of euthanasia and DNR for the heavily-suffering should want to see is their ethical arguments muddied by cryogenics salespeople hanging round hospitals persuading people that they'd be better off dying shortly after…

> When the only certainty is killing people, I'd question whether the incalculably remote possibility of "unforeseeable advantages" undoing that killing counts for anything at all. I'm somewhat inclined to agree with you but I don't think misrepresenting the arguments made by proponents is the same thing as rebutting them, like you did in this second comment. > The last thing advocates of euthanasia and DNR for the h…

As you seemed to acknowledge yourself, QALYs don't really affect my original argument because unless you're ascribing negative utility to the remainder of the patient's lifespan, hastening a patient's death in the hope that it might have some effect on an incalculably small probability of future resuscitation still has a negative impact on QALYs. A fantasy of massively expanded future lifespan in perfect health multiplied by a probability best estimated at zero is still zero, to the best knowledge of all medics involved in the process.

If patients are making decisions to shorten their lifespan it should be on the basis of suffering less pain rather than subscribing to pseudoscientific twaddle about unforeseeable sufficiently advanced technological magic. The OP seemed to think the latter should have been prioritised if legal.

Its rather tiresome when people accuse me of being "unwilling or unable to address a point" after they've already parenthetically acknowledged it doesn't really change anything.