POLL: Cryonics - do you want to be frozen when you die?

[Joaz Banbeck]

...the certainty that most of you are expressing along all relevant fronts (
that living forever is a worthy goal,
that eventually technology will be able to thaw and resurrect dead, frozen bodies,
that the resurrected person would still be you,
that you would be happy living in the future, and so on)
suggests that by continuing to live your humdrum, 21st century life, you are taking some very grave risks...
Given your incorruptible faith, why are you still here? Why aren't you frozen in a vault somewhere?

I'll take those points one by one, and then discuss the one that you did not mention:
1) Living forever is a worthy goal. Yep, 100%. Not really a debatable issue, more a matter of faith.
2) Eventually technology will be able to thaw and resurrect dead, frozen bodies. Yes, eventually, 90+%
3) The resurrected person would still be you - As mentioned, memory = identity - 100%
4) Happy living in the future - throughout history, mankind seems to be improving his situation ( minor dips here and there, but the overall trend is upward ) 100%
5) There will be sufficient and continual political/economic stability so that the frozen will not be disturbed. This is the sticky point. Probably less than 50%. It is hard to estimate, because we don't know the value for #2, even to an order of magnitude.

On this last item, 'continual' is the operative word. It means that we have to expect a society that always respects property rights, and always has electrical power. Continuously. For hundreds or even thousands of years.
Historically, property rights are seldom enforced for the powerless. We in the US and Europe live in a rather unique time and place in which they are enforced(mostly). All it takes is a period of time when they are not, then one bunch of vandals observing that they could steal and sell all that plumbing, or one religious zealot preaching against the sin of pride and looking for victims, and the frozen are screwed.

I'm hanging around because of my faith that people are corruptible.

[jts]

I believe I expressed earlier that I think it has < 5% chance of working. I'd be astonished to see a sane person setting the odds much higher than that.

Probably less than 45%

No personal attacks, daniel

More seriously, to both of you: whether you put your shot at immortality at 4% or 40%, isn't it crazy to seriously damage your chances of waking up in the far future by waiting until after a major bodily trauma to freeze yourself?

Consider this thought experiment. You are quite ill. Doctors doubt you'll make it through the week. There is a radical invasive procedure that could restore you to health, but given your physical frailty it's more likely you'll die on the operating table. Specifically, you have a {4%, 40%} chance of surviving and being restored to perfect health and living the rest of your natural lifespan if they wheel you into the OR now, but if you wait even a few days to do the procedure, the odds get abysmal: perhaps only {1%, 10%} chance of surviving.

There are three alternatives here. You could place a relatively low value on quantity of life and decline the procedure in favor of having a week to spend with your family. You could take an extra few days, and then get the surgery; this suggests that you do value quantitatively more life, but that d²U/dL² is rather low. Or you could rush into surgery immediately, which is consistent with the views on life, personal identity, etc. that you, joaz, and you, daniel, have been defending. ---- Except neither of you has opted for surgery yet!

[hyperpape]

3) The resurrected person would still be you - As mentioned, memory = identity - 100%

100%, eh? viewtopic.php?p=70633#p70633

[Suji]

The question becomes, Is aging really a problem? And if so, is it moral and/or ethical to stop it?

[daniel_the_smith]

More seriously, to both of you: whether you put your shot at immortality at 4% or 40%, isn't it crazy to seriously damage your chances of waking up in the far future by waiting until after a major bodily trauma to freeze yourself?

I have a lot more years to live before a 1-5% chance is higher than my chance of surviving the year naturally. According to the table here, this will be true for many decades: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_table

In fact, if I recall correctly, even people 110+ still have something like a 30% chance of surviving the year.

And anyway, your objection is a feature, not a bug. For example, I think Alzheimer's patients should--if the disease is caught while they're still lucid enough to make an informed decision--be given the opportunity to freeze themselves. A 1-5% chance of resuscitation is vastly preferable to a 100% chance that the disease will slowly destroy your very personhood. That society would currently consider this to be suicide speaks ill of society--in my book, anyway. (The same goes for any disease with sufficiently bad survival rates. I just find Alzheimer's and other dementias to be particularly horrifying. Most cancers at least give some small chance of surviving.)

On Joaz's list:

1) Living forever is a worthy goal. --I don't know about forever, but always one more day. I'd like to be the one to say when I've had enough.
2) Eventually technology will be able to thaw and resurrect dead, frozen bodies. --given that humanity survives the century, a virtual certainty. However, I have our survival chances at < 20%.
3) The resurrected person would still be you --I think it's very probable that future humans won't resurrect you unless they're sure they can do it correctly. So, 95%+
4) Happy living in the future --I expect any future willing and able to resurrect us to be one we will find agreeable.
5) There will be sufficient and continual political/economic stability so that the frozen will not be disturbed. --Two issues: humanity must survive (20%), and the cryonics organizations must also survive (25-50%).

[daniel_the_smith]

The question becomes, Is aging really a problem?

Easy: Yes, just ask any old(er) person if they'd like to have the body of a 20 year old.

And if so, is it moral and/or ethical to stop it?

Sorry, you melted my brain. It heard something along the lines of, "Is it moral/ethical to give sick people antibiotics?"

[hyperpape]

Ah, but it's a 4% chance of living indefinitely long, so the calculation still favors immediate freezing.

[jts]

More seriously, to both of you: whether you put your shot at immortality at 4% or 40%, isn't it crazy to seriously damage your chances of waking up in the far future by waiting until after a major bodily trauma to freeze yourself?

I have a lot more years to live before a 1-5% chance is higher than my chance of surviving the year naturally. According to the table here, this will be true for many decades: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_table

In fact, if I recall correctly, even people 110+ still have something like a 30% chance of surviving the year.

Well, this is exactly my point. It's not crucial that you freeze yourself today or tomorrow, but on any given day your chances of dying will be quite low, even well into old age. However, if you keep on opting to live another day, your chances of eventually dying the natural way (major trauma, multiple organ failure, brain utterly non-profused) are extremely high. (Compare: your chances of losing money on a Martingale.) Worse yet, you might die out of the reach of your friends at Cryonics Inc. If you think that x days of life are x times as good as one day of life, this is a reckless decision. Even if you think that the awesomeness of more life is some sort of gentle logarithmic function, if you are expecting to live forever, the risk you are taking is still infinitely bad.

Now, you could look at the actuarial tables and say, "Okay, I think I'll maximize my weighted basket of current life and possible resurrected life if I get myself preemptively frozen at... 63." But the small chance you are taking of dying before then still represents an unbounded number of foregone expected life-years.

(And even if you only expect to live an extremely large, but bounded, number of years after resurrection, the implied risk aversion with respect to life would still look very peculiar if we scaled down all the times and turned this into a "dangerous surgery" problem.)

[daniel_the_smith]

Stop talking about unbounded utilities--this isn't a religion, the universe will experience a heat death.

You guys are making a Pascal's wager, and in general I'm very distrustful of arguments like that.

I should mention that I think my chances of living long enough naturally that I won't have to be frozen at all are at least as good as cryonics working. It really is a back-up plan.

There is also the possibility that I want to have a positive impact on the world now. The sooner you do something, the more of the future it will affect.

It's generally my policy to avoid doing irreversable things without an awful lot of certainty (or if it's the only option). Like, more certainty than the US legal system currently requires to execute people.

There may be some people to whom the above considerations do not apply. I think they ought to have the option to freeze themselves pre-death if they wish.

But, AFAIK, suicides get autopsied, and the only way to get frozen at the moment involves death, so even if I agreed with you guys, I couldn't act on it.

Does any of this convince you that I'm not being inconsistent here?

[hyperpape]

Not really. For me, the key idea is that if you take cryonics seriously, you should value your current (next 30-40-50 years) life quite a bit less than your long future.

My general position is that even if you could freeze yourself and be thawed, the value of a future eternity * is not much compared to the value of a single century life.

Talking about having an effect here and now sounds awfully like a confirmation of that point, though maybe you can come up with a utilitarian argument to the contrary.

As for suicides, it should be obvious that jts and I do not want you to freeze yourself here and now. We want to pose a tough question about how, intellectually, you can be in favor of cryonics while thinking that you should not take the opportunity to freeze yourself if it were possible today. Now, if you say "were it possible, the best choice would be for me to freeze myself right now", you'd have dodged one bullet and bitten another.

* eternity as 1000, 2000, 10000 years, whatever. No need to wait around for the heat death of the universe for my point.

P.P.S. What do you mean by a Pascal's wager here? In some places those could be fighting words. In any case, I can't see the similarity.

[jts]

P.P.S. What do you mean by a Pascal's wager here? In some places those could be fighting words. In any case, I can't see the similarity.

A common game theoretic specification of Pascal's wager involves a very low probability event with an extremely large payoff.

I'm surprised that daniel describes "you guys" (me?) as making a Pascal's wager, since I am not offering anyone eternal life, nor do I think eternal life (or, choose your own large magnitude) is particularly desirable. It is the advocates of getting frozen who have, since the beginning of the thread, been offering the wager... one small payment, and a small probability of an immense reward! I'm just exploring the twisted logic inherent in this particular tangle of beliefs and desires.

Wanting to make a difference in the world is a legitimate reason not to be frozen (yet). It might also be a reason to not want to divert social resources to freezing corpses, though. --- And I agree that being uncertain about your beliefs about the future (as opposed to being confident about a certain range of possibilities,like 1%-5%) is a good reason not to doing anything drastic. But then again... why is getting frozen drastic, and continuing to risk a traumatic and irreversible death not drastic? (Not saying you haven't answered that, daniel. Just suggesting that uncertainty can't be someone's only response.)

[daniel_the_smith]

P.P.S. What do you mean by a Pascal's wager here? In some places those could be fighting words. In any case, I can't see the similarity.

If I can respond out of order, google "pascal's mugging". In general, I see any sort of argument of (tiny probability * huge payoff) as an analog to pascal's wager.

This is a very long thread, and I'm not going to reread it right now. I hope I haven't made the argument for cryonics in those terms (x years of life * y % chance of working = you should do it). But I don't know when my past self realized this, and I can't promise it wasn't since this thread started. At the moment, anyway, I don't think I'm doing that calculation. I just know that I don't want myself or others to have to die.

Not really. For me, the key idea is that if you take cryonics seriously, you should value your current (next 30-40-50 years) life quite a bit less than your long future.

I really don't see how that follows. Maybe I'm just ridiculously tired and should be in bed right now, but... I just don't see how that could be. I do feel very motivated to stay healthy and not do risky things (like, while driving). Thinking that I potentially/hopefully have many hundreds of years to live, and that at this point in our history we can't make good back-ups of humans does have an effect on me. But not the effect you seem to think. The opposite of that effect. It makes me value my life right now more, not less.

As for suicides, it should be obvious that jts and I do not want you to freeze yourself here and now. We want to pose a tough question about how, intellectually, you can be in favor of cryonics while thinking that you should not take the opportunity to freeze yourself if it were possible today. Now, if you say "were it possible, the best choice would be for me to freeze myself right now", you'd have dodged one bullet and bitten another.

Humans are loss-averse, and I'm no exception. I'm not going to gamble my entire life for <5% chance of waking up in the future if I don't have to. To really give me a dilemma, you're going to have to make me feel like I ought to take that gamble, and so far I'm completely unconvinced.

Think of it as, there are two games I can play. Game #1, I roll 1d20, if it comes up 20 I wake up in a wonderful future, otherwise I never wake up. Game #2, I roll 1d100, if it comes up 1 I never wake up, otherwise I don't have to play again for a year. You guys are saying that the future of Game #1 is so awesome that I should play it. I'm saying that I won't play that game unless the odds improve (relative to my other choices). If this were a iterated gamble that we played over and over, then you'd have a point. But it's not; I only get one life, and I'm willing to trade off some expected value for some extra certainty.

I see cryonics as an experimental medical treatment. It is promising, but unproven. It's not a risk I need to take until I need to take it.

[Joaz Banbeck]

...
Consider this thought experiment. You are quite ill. Doctors doubt you'll make it through the week. There is a radical invasive procedure that could restore you to health, but given your physical frailty it's more likely you'll die on the operating table. Specifically, you have a {4%, 40%} chance of surviving and being restored to perfect health and living the rest of your natural lifespan if they wheel you into the OR now, but if you wait even a few days to do the procedure, the odds get abysmal: perhaps only {1%, 10%} chance of surviving.

There are three alternatives here. You could place a relatively low value on quantity of life and decline the procedure in favor of having a week to spend with your family. You could take an extra few days, and then get the surgery; this suggests that you do value quantitatively more life, but that d²U/dL² is rather low. Or you could rush into surgery immediately, which is consistent with the views on life, personal identity, etc. that you, joaz, and you, daniel, have been defending. ---- Except neither of you has opted for surgery yet!

Your analogy is missing one thing. The proceesses of freezing are becoming better with every decade. ( Use of anti-crystal-formation compounds, etc ) Doing a better job of freezing makes it easier for the future physician to thaw you, and thus improves your odds in that process. Furthermore, it lowers the probable level of the technology needed to revive you, which means you don't need to be frozen as long, which decreases your exposure to the vicissitudes of civilization failure.
So waiting a decade or two at this end may improve your eventual odds by a bunch.

To make the analogy fit, we have to add the existence of a stellar physician, whose success rate is five times that of your current intended surgeon. Unfortunately, he is golfing in Barbados and won't be back for several days. It makes sense to wait for him.

[Suji]

The question becomes, Is aging really a problem?

Easy: Yes, just ask any old(er) person if they'd like to have the body of a 20 year old.

Granted. That wasn't the question, though. Since I personally think that if you keep yourself in shape as you get older, you won't have to want the younger body, you'll have one that can keep up with the 20-ish year old people. I will give you that the body degrades as you get older, but I don't think there is a drastic difference between a 20 year old body and a 30 year old body. (I'm only 23, so I wouldn't know.)

And if so, is it moral and/or ethical to stop it?

Sorry, you melted my brain. It heard something along the lines of, "Is it moral/ethical to give sick people antibiotics?"

Antibiotics do a lot of good, however, if one just has strep throat or the flu, yes, since the quality of life after the illness is more or less the same before and after the illness. Some forms of cancer, aids, and other diseases, I'm really not sure, since the quality of life before and after are so drastically different. Some we can't even cure, so in those cases, maybe not.

If the person wants to have the antibiotic, in the case that they have let's say <5% of living for the sake of argument, the doctor is morally and ethically obligated to give them one.

[daniel_the_smith]

Easy: Yes, just ask any old(er) person if they'd like to have the body of a 20 year old.

Granted. That wasn't the question, though. Since I personally think that if you keep yourself in shape as you get older, you won't have to want the younger body, you'll have one that can keep up with the 20-ish year old people. I will give you that the body degrades as you get older, but I don't think there is a drastic difference between a 20 year old body and a 30 year old body. (I'm only 23, so I wouldn't know.)

OK, if 30 is old to you, then substitute "ancient"...

Sorry, you melted my brain. It heard something along the lines of, "Is it moral/ethical to give sick people antibiotics?"

... if one just has strep throat or the flu, yes, since the quality of life after the illness is more or less the same before and after the illness. Some forms of cancer, aids, and other diseases, I'm really not sure, since the quality of life before and after are so drastically different.

I think I may have said it before on this thread, but this is a problem with our current level of technology. With more technology we get cures without side-effects; with less technology we don't get cures at all. It's not that it might be immoral to cure someone's disease/aging/etc, it's that the side effects might (currently) be worse than the disease.

Some we can't even cure, so in those cases, maybe not.

And in those cases, people are currently given the choice of a usually-painful attempt at a partial cure or near-certain death in x months. I think people ought to have another option, to be frozen. Even < 5% odds look pretty good compared to either of those choices. And cryogenic freezing is cheaper than many medical procedures people in such situations might choose to have...