Honestly I would be worried of it because of all the crazy distopia sci fi stuff one that always resonated to me as "I could see it happen" is those where bodies are donated / preserved by a private entity which ends up changing hands god knows how many time until you wake up in a nightmare later on.
What has historically happened is just that the company goes bankrupt, the bodies defrost in random warehouses and is finally disposed of in less-than-respectable fashion.
There is pretty much zero chance that a cryopreserved individual would be revived. They're frozen when dying or dead, the process itself causes significant damage (with every mitigation just trading in a different severe form of damage), and even if future technology could undo all that and somehow make this severely damaged body somewhat operational, why in the world would anyone bother?
The person is forgotten, replaced, and has nothing in their name any more. There is no gain for those reviving them.
> What has historically happened is just that the company goes bankrupt, the bodies defrost in random warehouses and is finally disposed of in less-than-respectable fashion.
Source? Based on my research, no cryonic institution has failed in this manner to date.
"... all but one of the documented cryonic preservations prior to 1973 ended in failure, and the thawing out and disposal of the bodies.". There are a decent number of articles and documentaries on the matter.
Even now it's a fringe psuedoscience with little support or even regulation. Expecting a company to be both able and willing to pay the bill to store and freeze your body in perpetuity seems... Naïve. Looking at average company lifetimes might be a useful metric here.
That's actually possible, because you're not resurrecting a specific, dead wooly mammoth, you're growing a new one. Natural reproductive processes are an effective way to create living things, unlike thawing corpses with what are almost certainly irrevocably damaged brains.
Would a dying person be able to set up a trust fund or a bank account/investment that would "live on" when they die. Issue I see here is that the law does not recognize "crypreservation" as continuation of life so all your assets are probably inherited.
I'm sure cryo companies offer this type of safekeeping of money or investment.
it's hard to have faith that such an account could exist long enough to pay for your revival many years in the future. it would be very tempting for the living to raid large funds that are earmarked for reviving dead people. who would stop them?
I know personally, if I had the opportunity, I would gladly spent time bringing someone frozen back to life. I don't gain anything, but I also don't gain anything when I donate to charity either. The simple chance to do something good in the world is all the motivation I need.
They may get lucky. In Heinlein’s The Door into Summer the protagonist only survives the long sleep because he ends up put into storage with the wrong repository, but that happened to be the one that kept the lights on for 30 years.
Cryonics simply assumes the eventual development of molecular nano-technology per Drexler is able to repair both the freezing damage and any medical problems too. Not at all unlikely in a few decades, and almost certain within a century.
As for who would want you back ... your children, hopefully. And if there's no repair before they die ... hopefully their children would want them back. Etc.
That's a solution to staying cold, not a solution to avoid getting severely damaged by the freezing process, already being weak/sick/dead at the time of freezing, and there being no realistic outcome other than being reduced to a sad meat popsicle.
> Why wouldn't you do this if you have the money? :-)
I've had these fantasies, too and then I thought, "Why wouldn't you just leave a few cells and then have someone re-clone you?"
The obvious answer is that your memories/experiences are wiped out and what I _really_ want is to continue on with my pre-existing memories/experiences. It would be more optimal if you could pickle your memories, clone yourself and then (at some appropriate time later in life) "re-implant" the memories into your clone. I think that's what people like Larry King are really hoping for.
But then there's all sorts of problems with this (e.g., your loved ones will presumably be gone, so who's going to give a shit about your memories? etc. etc.).
The prospect of death is frightening to most of us.
> what I _really_ want is to continue on with my pre-existing memories/experiences
This reminds me of an interesting philosophical question.
To state the obvious, even if the clone had an exact copy of your memories/experiences, that clone isn't you, you've died. If I had a teleportation machine that could "teleport" you to work by destroying you painlessly and instantly at the source location, and reconstruct you particle for particle at destination, how many would use it? I wouldn't, however irrational that may be, because "I" would be dead.
This bias is pretty interesting since by that definition we all die multiple times, as the particles that constitute our body are literally interchanging with the environment over time. But we don't feel uncomfortable about that fact.
> This bias is pretty interesting since by that definition we all die multiple times, as the particles that constitute our body are literally interchanging with the environment over time. But we don't feel uncomfortable about that fact.
I've wondered about that, is it strictly true? Aren't there heavy metals and other elements that are accumulated in the body over time? Or at least, they are eliminated so slowly that you'd never rid yourself of them completely before dying. I guess bones replace themselves every 10 years so any incorporated metals would have a chance to be eliminated on that timescale. But what's to stop a few of those elements making their way back into another structure after being ejected into the blood stream? Maybe we've all got a few persistent cadmium or lead atoms hanging out in our bodies from birth to death. Ship of Theseus crisis averted!
It's not really the Ship of Theseus. The question OP was referring to is about the self and the continuity of consciousness specifically. Derek Parfit first proposed it in his book Reasons and Persons.[1][2]
Question though: when that thought experiment is applied to the physical body of a person, aren’t our cells dying and being replaced constantly? Does that mean our identity changes over time and with new experiences? (Mind blown)
Agreed, but by that definition my consciousness in 15 years isn't me either, since most of the cells in my body will have been regenerated with different particles.
Here you have to choose a single company to freeze your head. If you choose the right company you get an afterlife, so you might as well choose one, even if they all seem like total bullshit. It is exactly Pascal's wager.
1. Choose the wrong religion or no religion and you may suffer a fate worse than simple nonexistence. Not so with cryopreservation.
2. Many religions logically exclude other religions, i.e. if they are correct then other religions are not. This is not the case with cryopreservation, where there is a nonzero chance that more than one company may successfully resurrect you.
3. Various monotheistic religions don't accept "I think it's total bullshit but I'm going to act as if I believe it anyway" as belief (opinions vary on what exactly is required), whereas cryopreservation companies are happy to take your money regardless of what you privately think.
1. You're comparing death to death here but the correct comparison is room-temperature death to Hell. Dead-but-cryopreserved is the pre-afterlife state equivalent to death in traditional religions.
2. How do you revive the frozen heads from companies that couldn't pay their freezer bills three decades ago? You don't. Those heads picked the wrong company. Expecting a just god from some other religion to let you into the afterlife anyway is a common response to Pascal's wager.
3. Is the word you're looking for here "faith"? I don't think that word helps your argument. I will concede that there's probably no condition where the company unfreezes you and then kills you because you're not up to their standards. Well, unless they find those old bad reviews you left...
Cryonics (I'm signed up with Alcor) can reduce the measure of you being tortured. Assume a multiverse where some versions of you are going to be tortured for a long time. If you sign up for cryonics, if you get brought back most likely you won't get tortured and so this might reduce the percent of you across the multiverse that is not being tortured.
Let's say that across the multiverse all versions of you are going to collectively live for 1 billion years. Unfortunately, some versions of you will be tortured and let's assume that collectively you will be tortured for 10,000 years meaning that the measure your torture is 10,000 / 1 billion. But if you sign up for cryonics you most likely only get brought back in a world that has cured death and isn't evil. If many versions of you do sign up for cryonics say you live collectively for 2 billion years and are only tortured for 11,000 of these years so the measure of you being tortured is 11,000/ 2 billion.
Ah, it was the “probably a non-torturous society will bring you back, since they are more likely to be altruistic” assumption that I was missing. Of course, it only takes one entity to bring you back for an eternity of torture to ruin this logic, as is the case in IHNMAIMS.
Infinity makes decision making really weird since infinity + 1 is the same as infinity so if you are going to be tortured for infinity years it wouldn't be irrational to volunteer to be tortured for an extra year.
If your don't want to be frozen and want to do something useful with your money.
If you care about preserving yourself, spread your genes or memes is a more effective way
Spreading your memes for money is known as advertising. Not particularly cheap or effective. Didn't hear about anything similar for genes. These two are much better done by investing your own time and your own effort.
Of the remaining important things that money can buy, I think cryogenics is a very decent gamble.
I believe the chance that anyone who is cryopreserved today will ever be revived is exceedingly small, so I look at the whole venture as futile and in the same way I might look at an overly expensive funeral. Personally, I would spend my money to enjoy my life more while I'm alive, or else to help others in some tangible way.
Actually it is important tech for living people as well. The technology De Greg Fahy is working on can be used to freeze and unfreeze organs. It may save your (living) life if you get an organ just at the right time.
Because it's profoundly selfish--you _might_ buy yourself more life in some unspecified future, or the same money today could definitely save and/or improve many, many lives now.
