Cryonics

[ciphergoth]

I'm considering signing up with the Cryonics Institute. Are you signed up? I'd be interested to hear your reasons why or why not. It does of course sound crazy, but when you press past that initial reaction to find out why it's crazy, I haven't heard a really satisfactory argument yet, and I'm interested to hear what people think. There are many reasons it might not work, but are there reasons to think it's really unlikely to work? How likely does recovery need to be for it to be worth it?

Comments

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

I think this may be The Logical Fallacy of Generalization from Fictional Evidence

[zwol.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Maybe I should unpack a little more.

First off (having read more of the comments) I should say that I think scan-and-upload will never become possible, regardless of technical advances. (I'd go into more detail, but it's tangential here.) Thus, if cryopreservation is to work at all, it has to be by repairing the damage to the preserved body and brain. I think this might be technically feasible in the distant future, although I put a pretty large weight on the possibility of irreversible damage due to freezing that zotz pointed out. Now, we're talking the distant future here - order of 1000 years, not 100. It is my estimation of human character that, given the time span, the most plausible outcome is that nobody cares anymore, so the preserved corpses are not revived. For the preserved people, this is of course no worse than being dead but not preserved.

However, I think the second most plausible outcome is that the revivers care much more about proving the technology than they do about the quality of life of the people they revive, and therefore they do a shitty job of arranging for these people to reenter society. I don't think it will be a question of culture shock -- more like, we regret to say that your investments have been worthless since 2142, we don't have the budget to give you any money, you have no useful skills anymore, and there are no unskilled jobs because we have robots for that now. Have fun sleeping under that bridge!

That's what "the scenario outlined in Transmetropolitan" was shorthand for.

[ergotia.livejournal.com]

That is a very patronising response, and a very patronising article. When imagining the future why not think about what others have put forward, whether in the form of science fiction or just general speculation? Of course it is only one factor to take into account, but when speculating about human/silicon hybrid beings, using "Borg" as a handy point of reference for one possibility seems absolutely fine to me, and a way of making such discussions accessible to more people.

In the present context, referring to the Transmet vision of CI simply seems to me to be a way of referring to some of the more awful possibilities, without assuming that it will be exactly that way. Why not?