Cryonics or why freezing your body could be a good idea

by stevedomin • 12 years ago

12 4 12 years ago

There's a great Penn & Teller "Bullshit" segment about Cryonics (mildly NSFW; it's Penn & Teller): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHEWKkLzALQ#t=20m2s

Is it possible? Certainly - the Wood Frog evolved to freeze itself every winter[1] and successfully unthaw itself. It floods its blood with sugars so it doesn't form ice crystals, solving the problem of tissue destruction, then unthaws in the Spring from the outside in and restarts its biological systems.

How does modern cryonics solve this problem? Antifreeze. The fluid that poisons you if it enters your system[2].

For you to be revived, then, we'd have to figure out:

* how to unthaw your body in a way that won't destroy essential parts of it

* how to cure you of Ethylene glycol poisoning

* how to cure you of the thing you died from

* how to bring you back to life

Perhaps a clever solution will be thought up that will just do a quick scan of your connectome[3] and upload it to a simulation. But why would anyone go through the trouble? Presumably this would be many years in the future. Would anyone even care enough in an overpopulated future-Earth to start bringing back their ancestors? When's the last time you called your grandparents?

The bottom line is that if you're truly desperate for an "afterlife" (or, perhaps more accurately, extra-life), cryonics is probably your best bet presently. That bet, however, is rationally just an incredible waste of money that would more effectively prolong your effect on the world if instead it was used to support the people and ideals you believed in when you were alive.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fjr3A_kfspM

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethylene_glycol_poisoning

3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HA7GwKXfJB0

jcrawfordor• 12 years ago

"If the above is correct, it is rational to not sign up for cryonics only if:

1. You believe that P = 0, i.e. cryonics will never work; 2. You prefer being dead to being alive."

This kind of argument only discredits cryonics supporters. The "it might work" argument of cryonics is isomorphic to the "I might win the big one" argument of the Powerball. And while I think it's reasonable that the chances of cryonics working out are much higher than the chances of my state lottery investment scheme working out, that's at least partially negated out by the fact that one of them costs your whole life insurance policy to play (todo: see if I can set the beneficiary on my life insurance to Powerball numbers).

nqureshi• 12 years ago

This is a fair objection. I should have been more rigorous, i.e. I've assumed a very high value-of-life, which still leaves me prone to Pascal's-mugging type objections (http://lesswrong.com/lw/kd/pascals_mugging_tiny_probabilitie...).

I think my argument can be modified to be defensible, but agree that the post does not reflect this as it stands.

DanBC• 12 years ago

Cryonics possibly working in future means nothig about how the freezing process is done now. Maybe in X years we'll have a bunch of corpses and we'll be asking why they were so poorly frozen and how there is no possible chance of defrosting them.

If yu valie life you may want to spend the considerable amount of money needed by cryonics on living your actual life, rather than on gambling on a few more years at some point in the future.

Cryonics would be more convincing if they could show me a strawberry that can be frozen, defrosted, and eaten and that still looks like a strawberry when it is eaten.

Cryonics or why freezing your body could be a good idea

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