You Only Live Twice

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/12/you-only-live-twice.html

by bloch • 18 years ago

35 63 18 years ago

tdavis2• 18 years ago

Not signing up for cryonics - what does that say? That you've lost hope in the future. That you've lost your will to live. That you've stopped believing that human life, and your own life, is something of value.

No, it's because I value my life so much that I don't believe in cryonics. If it is your belief that it is possible to live N number of lives, your current life loses some of its meaning. Maybe you don't strive for so much, because there's probably more time later. Maybe you don't try as hard because if you fail, you might get a do-over. Maybe you don't shoot for the whole "regret nothing" thing with as much tenacity.

izaidi• 18 years ago

By that logic, would you rather die in 5 years than in 50?

tdavis2• 18 years ago

Uhhh.. neither? Measuring it changes the outcome. Knowing when I'm going to die is as bad as believing I won't.

Retric• 18 years ago

I think cryonics is about as useful as all those old tombs in Egypt. We could probably clone some of those body's and reviving people from cryonics might be an interesting experiment for our decedents but in both cases much of that dead person will have been lost. And trading resources in this life so that some shadow of me might show up in the future is not worth much time. So yea it's the best hope we have now, like it was their best hope back then, but all they are talking about is imperfect copies.

jongalt2• 18 years ago

Reasons why cryonics is dumb:

- First off, there's a close to zero chance of a successful revival. Pretty much all of the major problems with thawing (like, let's rebuild your severely damaged brain) are pushed off onto future generations to solve. Not to mention curing whatever killed you in the first place. But let's pretend the future is magic, and this can work...

- Who pays for this? And no, I'm not talking about the freezing. The article presumes we can just use life insurance to pay for cryonics (and not say, to support your presently alive loved ones). But who pays for your future miraculous revival? Even in the super advanced future, presumably a complex procedure like reconstructing a human brain won't exactly be a cheap one. Not to mention all the medical care you'd need for recovery (and don't forget about all those people who just froze their heads, they'll need whole new bodies!). Why exactly are the people of the future so eager to resurrect all these frozen corpses of people with no living family or friends to support them? Is the future such a utopia that not only have we solved overpopulation, but we're desperately looking to bring back long frozen bodies with severe medical problems?

- The part that really strikes me as idealistic and naive about the article though, is the idea that death is "not part of the plan". And I thought we were being unrealistic about the future when they could rebuild your brain. So now everyone lives forever? That doesn't seem very sustainable. Not to mention the fact that it is the very finiteness of life that makes it valuable in the first place.

Conclusion: The present is yours to do with what you like, and the future may or may not ever get here. Invest in today.

newt0311• 18 years ago

Lets see...

Value of my life (at least to myself): infinity,

Probability of revival: >0

Expected value = (probability of revival) * (value of my life) = infinity.

So... low odds are not a good excuse to not go for cryonics.

Next, who pays: The person being frozen. Its like a trust fund. Toss in a large one time sum and live off the interest. The interest on 120K at 4% annual compound interest (after inflation) is ~500 dollars/yr which should be enough to maintain what is basically a big freezer for a long time and note that that 4% is a very conservative figure and accumulating 120K is not a big deal for those in the upper middle class and above which is still a lot of people.

What he means by "death is not part of the plan" is that at least they are trying to live longer, even if the chances of success are slim.

Conclusion: Cryonics has the potential to be a valuable investment.

llimllib3• 18 years ago

> Value of my life (at least to myself): infinity,

Really? Have any kids, a wife? Would you die for them? Would you gas people in order to survive? Is there any cause you would fight to the death for, other than pure survival?

jongalt2• 18 years ago

So your argument is that the best possible thing you could do with a large sum of cash upon your demise is to gamble away on the vanishingly small chance that a very distant and almost magically technologically advanced society will "resurrect" you?

It's a matter of opportunity cost. What do you have to give up, in order to have this miniscule chance? Which is most valuable:

- putting your kids through college for sure

- financially assisting your still living loved ones for sure

- paying for expensive life saving surgery for someone who can't afford it for sure

- investing in what amounts to a lottery ticket that pays out only in a tiny percentage of potential future universes

Even if I was completely disinterested in the fate of the rest of humanity, I think I'd still choose to go out with a bang now, for sure, than to throw my hard earned cash into a futile attempt to keep me fresh in the freezer.

yters7• 18 years ago

Pascal's argument is fallacious because it equivocates between actual possibility and logical possibility. You are making the same fallacy, even given your shaky assumptions.

Another issue is that the idea of revival doesn't even make logical sense. What happens when two bodies with the same construction are revived? Which one has my consciousness?

Or think about it like this: an exact replicant of my body has been revived while I'm still alive. Obviously, the revived body does not have the same consciousness, since I didn't suddenly become conscious of living in two bodies or a different body. Why would this change by delaying revival until after I'm dead? And if it doesn't, why should I care?

So, I don't really see the case for cryonics. It seems to be flawed on both practical and logical grounds.

mdakin2• 18 years ago

I understand your point but bringing ∞ or א-numbers into a non-mathematical discussion in a such hand-wavy fashion is really a form of fallacious argument (albeit unnamed as far as I know) and will almost certainly lead to even lower-quality discussion.

byrneseyeview3• 18 years ago

Value of my life (at least to myself): infinity,

I seriously doubt this. There are numerous activities -- smoking, eating delicious food, having risky sex, crossing the street -- that people routinely do despite the incremental risk of mortality. I've read that when you divide the extra money by the increased death risk (e.g. a $10K lump sum payment for a 1% chance of dying, as you'd get if, for example, you switch to higher-risk duties in a mining or lumber job), the average person values his own life at between $1 million and $10 million.

If you do spend all of your time on maximizing your probability of survival -- making money for medical care, reading medical journals in your free time, not doing anything that's really fun and slightly fatal -- I'd believe you. Otherwise, you suffer from cognitive dissonance.

sgibat• 18 years ago

Sounds a lot like believing in Christ because it might be true, and good God what if it is?

Also, what if the revival process works but not perfectly, and you come out on the other end severely disabled? (Maybe they've gotten it to work on some people but not everybody, and they don't know which is which until they try). Factor that into the equation.. I don't know. I think I'm just going to try to make it to the singularity or at least to when this tech is more feasible.

shabda2• 18 years ago

Please see counterpoint to Pascal's Wager. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_Wager

bprater• 18 years ago

And computers only need how much RAM? Come now. Let the future folk figure out how to deal with my head on a platter. I'm just happy that I can finally get the internet on my cell phone.

Nobody says that future folk will raise the dead in 50 years or 100 years or 1000 years or 5000 years. If we haven't nuked the planet in 5000 years, don't you think it's possible that thawing a head might be as inexpensive as buying a cellphone?

Heck, kids on the street might come into the cryro-units, pick out a head and have it unfrozen for $5 just to watch the expression on our faces. Cheap thrills. But hey, if it means I'm alive again, I'll give the kids an expression to remember.

Just because we don't have the answers today, doesn't mean the answers won't arrive tomorrow.

Your conclusion is correct, however. Live for today.

mhartl2• 18 years ago

This is like religious people who independently re-derive fallacious arguments for the existence of God (or the necessity to believe in him), and then present them to skeptics as if they were incontrovertible---things like the First Mover argument, the argument from design, or Pascal's Wager. Any agnostic/atheist worth his salt has heard every one of those arguments ad nauseam, and has definitive rebuttals to counter them.

And so it goes; your arguments are as old as cryonics. Here are the answers offered by the Alcor FAQ, in order:

- http://www.alcor.org/FAQs/faq01.html#evidence

- http://www.alcor.org/FAQs/faq05.html#met

- http://www.alcor.org/FAQs/faq07.html#overpopulation

To those interested in more detail, I recommend the Alcor FAQ (http://www.alcor.org/FAQs/), Chapter 9 of Engines of Creation (http://e-drexler.com/d/06/00/EOC/EOC_Chapter_9.html), and the World Transhumanist Association FAQ (http://www.transhumanism.org/resources/faq.html; search for the question "What is cryonics? Isn’t the probability of success too small?").

N.B. I am one of the signatories of the "Scientists' Open Letter on Cryonics" (http://www.imminst.org/cryonics_letter/) mentioned by Eliezer in the post.

jodrellblank6• 18 years ago

  Even in the super advanced future, presumably a complex procedure like reconstructing a human brain won't exactly be a cheap one.

So wait another thousand years. You're undead, you wont notice. If it ever becomes possible, it will one day become cheap.

  Is the future such a utopia that [x,y,z]

It might be. Why not stick around to find out? Why not help make it be such a place?

  The part that really strikes me as idealistic

Oh no, someone being idealistic!

  Not to mention the fact that it is the very finiteness of life that makes it valuable in the first place.

Well you'll probably die in the heat death of the universe or the big crunch, so whatever you do life is finite and therefore valuable. I disagree that its finiteness makes it valuable, however. Life isn't a market commodity where scarcity increases value, it's a personal one-off once-in-a-lifetime offer.

mechanical_fish• 18 years ago

Why exactly are the people of the future so eager to resurrect all these frozen corpses of people with no living family or friends to support them?

For some inexplicable reason, I have thus far only read two issues of Warren Ellis' Transmetropolitan: Issue #1, which is available free on the web, and an issue that talks about this.

Here's a description from Wikipedia, which I touched up a bit:

In the comic book Transmetropolitan, Revivals are people whose head was preserved in cryogenic stasis, only to be revived years later by a government program and given a cloned body. They are overwhelmed by the dystopian future in which they have awoken and distraught by the complete loss of every one of their friends and loved ones, and they often break down; they are generally ignored by society and are left to fend for themselves.

You should read this -- though probably not when you're feeling lonely -- because IMHO Ellis totally nails the likely emotional state of a person revived from cryonics. If you want to experience the thrill of being the only survivor of a tremendous holocaust that has claimed the life of every single person you've ever met, combined with the thrill of having your entire life experience rendered obsolete, get yourself cryogenically frozen and hope for revival. I, on the other hand, am either getting cremated or am donating my body to science.

jamii• 18 years ago

> You should read this

Thats a good place to stop the sentence. Transmetropolitan is one of those things that everyone should try at least once.

rsheridan62• 18 years ago

That's really not much different than the situation a typical very old person lives in now. My grandmother is 95 and has found the world bewildering for decades now. She's a widow, and all of her formerly numerous friends are dead or senile. Her old neighborhood is gone, modern entertainment reflects attitudes that are alien to her, etc. She has descendants she sees sometimes, but some other people her age don't even have that. Yet we don't see them hurling themselves off of cliffs very often.

shabda2• 18 years ago

>> "eager to resurrect all these frozen corpses of people with no living family or friends to support them? Is the future such a utopia that not only have we solved overpopulation, but we're desperately looking to bring back long frozen bodies with severe medical problems?"

What if I am a cobol programmer, and they need me to fix the Year9999 bug?

MaysonL2• 18 years ago

Not to speak of history grad students looking for a thesis subject.

asdflkj2• 18 years ago

The fact that it is the very finiteness of life that makes it valuable in the first place.

Just because Steve Jobs said it doesn't mean it's a fact, you know.

time_management4• 18 years ago

I find it interesting that there's a not-small class of atheists who, believing they face the horror of annihilation, are driven to believe in things that are just as irrational as traditional religion-- mind uploading, cryonics, singularity, etc.

I don't know if there's an existence after death, though I think there probably is one, and I consider myself lucky to believe this, for if I'm wrong, I'll never know. What's horrible about annihilation/nonexistence isn't any experience of it-- there is none, by definition-- but the rather hideous shadow the prospect, were it true, would cast over life.

yters7• 18 years ago

Yeah, I don't get the "horror" of annihilation. If I won't care once I'm gone, why should I care now?

aaronblohowiak2• 18 years ago

Biology.

time_management4• 18 years ago

Because a human life is so incredibly short that decline and death are rapidly impending, and it's difficult not to think about them constantly. Perhaps I'm unusual, but I think about death-- my death, not just the abstraction-- several times per day. And I'm not a depressed or morbid person, so I think this is pretty normal.

It would suck if the final act of existence were painful decline, followed by eternal oblivion. It could well be the case, but I'm glad that if it is, I'll never know about it.

rw• 18 years ago

In your words, what is not rational about "mind uploading, cryonics, singularity" ?

Even if you don't know for certain that there is or is not "existence after death", are you saying you live your life believing in that possibility?

time_management4• 18 years ago

In your words, what is not rational about "mind uploading, cryonics, singularity" ?

It's all extremely unlikely, and it's irrational to believe in it with the faith that a lot of the singularitarian atheists do.

I wouldn't be surprised to see a 150-year or longer lifespan-- in fact, it's probable that the first 150-year-old will be born before I die-- but mind-uploading makes no sense. How are we going to upload something when we don't know what it, physically, is... or even whether or not it's physical? Cryonics has the same issue, because there's no reason to believe the consciousness "sticks around" waiting to reawaken in that corpse.

yters7• 18 years ago

That's a pretty hopeless point of view. Why not assume that in the future they'll harness the universe's full computational capabilities and emulate every single being that has ever lived? If cryonics is possible, the simulation scenario is just as possible, since it uses the exact same assumptions. Plus, it is a lot cheaper to believe in:)

byrneseyeview3• 18 years ago

Why not assume that in the future they'll harness the universe's full computational capabilities and emulate every single being that has ever lived?

Because if you assume it will happen, you have to assume that the mostly likely explanation for your existence is that it did happen.

yters7• 18 years ago

That's a bad reason to assume the opposite. If Eliezer's assumptions are valid, then the scenario I outline is just as valid. You can't have one without the other.

tocomment• 18 years ago

Does the idea of quantum immortality suggest that you would be revived? In that case I guess you're already living in a universe where you WILL freeze yourself (or in one where the singularity gets here soon.)

jodrellblank6• 18 years ago

Reasons why cryonics is dumb:

Life is suffering (Buddha, n B.C.) Death is void. Nothing > suffering.

But there's a wall of pain/fear/effort/risk with suicide that keeps people inside life. Once you're dead, you're forced past the wall and it's a simple choice:

more suffering or no suffering?

Immortality by not dieing isn't quite the same option - avoiding old age suffering or going to old age suffering? Easy, being alive and rejuvenated wins.

patio11• 18 years ago

OK, so maybe I read too many fantasy and sci-fi novels, but I'm less interested in the problems of coming back from the dead. What really interests me is the related problem of how to kill someone securely.

Take, for a prosaic example, vampires. Shooting a vampire will almost certainly NOT kill them -- sources differ but they might not die, might die but revive immediately, might die but revive the next night, etc. So how to kill a vampire definitively?

I think, based on the union of all the vampire lore I've heard, you have to:

* stake him

* stuff his mouth with holy wafers

* cut off his head

* burn the body (both parts, presumably, but better to keep them separate)

* bury the ashes on hallowed ground

* ... at high noon

* drop a nuclear bomb on top of the church

THERE. One vampire, securely disposed of.

I'm sorry if this digression into the fantastic was a waste of time for you. We now return you to your regularly scheduled intellectual discussion of cryogenics.

chris112• 18 years ago

I'm not convinced that medical science is so far behind determining life. Once a person is pronounced dead, I'm convinced they're brain dead. So it's useless to preserve someone when nearly all of their information on the state of their mind has been lost.

aantix• 18 years ago

http://www.newsweek.com/id/35045

"The patient couldn't be revived because the tissues of his brain and heart had suffered irreversible damage from lack of oxygen. This process was understood to begin after just four or five minutes. If the patient doesn't receive cardiopulmonary resuscitation within that time, and if his heart can't be restarted soon thereafter, he is unlikely to recover. That dogma went unquestioned until researchers actually looked at oxygen-starved heart cells under a microscope. What they saw amazed them, according to Dr. Lance Becker, an authority on emergency medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. "After one hour," he says, "we couldn't see evidence the cells had died. We thought we'd done something wrong." In fact, cells cut off from their blood supply died only hours later."

mhartl2• 18 years ago

You're right to be skeptical, but I encourage you to investigate further, since this is a common but erroneous belief: that even a few minutes without oxygen causes irreparable brain damage. In fact, it's the autoimmune response upon revival that causes the damage to the brain, not the hypoxia. And cold prevents the damage; some types of brain surgery require zero blood pressure, and are performed at low temperature (potentially for hours) without harm to the brain.

chris112• 18 years ago

I probably spoke to fast. I could see it being somewhat feasible if the cryonics facility was immediately informed that the patient was dying, and the patient was frozen within hours of clinical death. My main concern is the success of freezing a brain dead person. I also was mainly referring earlier to the loss of information in the brain, not the actual physical brain damage.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theoretical_death. So if the family refuses or delays to inform the organization, I'm skeptical about whether the information in the brain can be preserved. And there have been bitter legal battles fought over cryonics. http://www.depressedmetabolism.com/is-that-what-love-is-the-...

dexter• 18 years ago

"If you want to securely erase a hard drive, it's not as easy as writing it over with zeroes. Sure, an "erased" hard drive like this won't boot up your computer if you just plug it in again. But if the drive falls into the hands of a specialist with a scanning tunneling microscope, they can tell the difference between "this was a 0, overwritten by a 0" and "this was a 1, overwritten by a 0".

There are programs advertised to "securely erase" hard drives using many overwrites of 0s, 1s, and random data. But if you want to keep the secret on your hard drive secure against all possible future technologies that might ever be developed, then cover it with thermite and set it on fire. It's the only way to be sure."

There have been no cases of anyone ever restoring a zeroed hard drive. It's utter bullshit. Especially these days with our precision aligned platters and insane densities.

mattmaroon3• 18 years ago

Maybe, I'm wrong, but I often get the impression that the person who writes this blog is in need of a good grief counselor, but may be too smart for most of them to help.

Eliezer• 18 years ago

My grief is not the problem. This world is the problem.

mattmaroon3• 18 years ago

If this world is the problem, you need to redefine the word problem.

You Only Live Twice

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