Neslit

Are there Bayesian interpretations of these results?

I don't know if you were including me, but either way I'm sorry and I'll stop now (just saw this).

For the record: I sincerely am not trying to annoy or provoke anyone; I've been concerned about derailing the thread, but a discussion of other emotions around death didn't seem too inappropriate. I sincerely think death is painful and difficult to think about, but that it is worth thinking about sanely, and that death is obviously a bad thing in this world. I am sincerely angry when conscious human minds are prevented by Death from exploring, creating, and loving as much as they want.

The point there is that, say humans were largely the same but instead we naturally lived a very long time, e.g. a thousand years. Then someone comes to you and says, "Hey I have this great idea with lots of societal benefits: Why not kill each person before they reach 100 years?"

We would say no, that is insane and pointless, why would we sacrifice hundreds of beautiful years off of everyone's life? Indeed, consider that environmental improvements and medical technology have more than doubled the human lifespan. Would you voluntarily choose for your children to live until they're at most 35, rather than their current "natural" lifespan?

Whether or not death is "natural" doesn't seem like it ought to have much bearing on whether or not we want it. If life is good, then loss of life is bad. A beautiful mind that ceases to shine, is something I'd just as soon untruncate.

“I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don't want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment.” --Woody Allen

Some small parts of a person can be transmitted to the outside world, but this leaves out the vast, rich internal world each mind carries with it. If I picture a loved one dying, I feel pretty concerned with the part where they don't keep being alive, keep pursuing their goals and having rich experiences and exploring and loving and being loved and creating and etc. How does this compare with your thoughts?

This may be painful to think about in detail. But I think it is actually important to think about anyway, because there are actual important decisions we have to make (whether to do research in to life extension, whether to sign up for cryonics, etc.), and we seem to be making the wrong decisions when we don't have everything in view; including the most painful parts, which happen to be the most important!

I'm also pretty confused why people bring up supposed benefits of society; to be frank, it sounds to me like people are suggesting "we should kill (let die) all the old and sick people to free up floor space" or "we should kill (let die) all the old and sick people so we don't have to spend any time dealing with their backwards ideas".

Except we're not machines.

I only mean that we're machines enough so that medical techniques work. We are made of parts that break and can be fixed. This is on extremely solid empirical footing.

Some might say the next logical step isn't to wish to live forever, but to die, and hope your genes and ideas live on. We're not the eternal ones in this universe, no matter how big our capacity to wish for that.

Do you say that? I wish to live a very long time, and I wish the same for my loved ones and anyone who wants. I would keep wishing this even if it were an impossible wish. Also, it happens to probably not be impossible.

Life and death are complementary

Hm, I hear people say this a lot, but I genuinely can't empathize with where they are coming from. This is a blank spot in my map. Could you say more about the intuition behind this statement, and why this makes death seems desirable or less bad?

To illustrate how I emotionally parse the statement "Life and death are complementary", I want to make a possibly distressing analogy, so apologies in advance, and:

TRIGGER WARNING...

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TRIGGER WARNING: abstract discussion of rape

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That statement reads to me like:

"Being raped and not being raped are complementary. Members of higher animal species rape each other in the natural course of life, and humans have committed rape throughout history. Rape is a part of nature, so it is foolish to think that we humans could or should eliminate rape forever."

This is an obviously abhorrent position, and I genuinely don't see much of a difference talking about death instead. Clearly horrible thing is clearly horrible.

Again, I am absolutely not trying to imply you are evil, or thinking inside my head that you are evil, or anything remotely like that; I am just trying to convey how I kneejerk-emotionally react to your statement about life and death, in case it helps you say things to me that will cause me to understand where you are coming from.

filled with a total dread of death

I'm not sure I've successfully communicated my feeling about this. It's less like a total dread of death and more like a total dread of losing life, if that makes any sense.

Do you have any close loved ones---a younger brother, a daughter, a close friend? Anyone for whom you might consider sacrificing yourself; anyone who you believe to be a shining light unto the world. Say that person is eaten by cancer. Once they are dead, they feel no pain; this is clear to me, and is not central in my judgement.

What is central is the lost blossoming of a mind. A rich internal experience, a reflective world with joy, dreams, and curiosity, is not a thing that should be destroyed. A mind that wishes to continue seeing the world and its people, and other minds wishing that mind to continue shining its light, annihilated---don't look away from the pain! If you look away from the pain, you lose your already slim opportunity to fight back.

This is genuinely not obvious to me. What convinced you of this? Or, what do you think the world would look like if there were people who actually had a strong, reasonable, non-insane suspicion that they could do the things that cryonics people claim to be able to? To me, it looks like we are living in that world. Have you e.g. looked through the information, studies, and arguments on the Alcor website?

Uh, there's a whole lot of mass in the universe; this isn't really a limiting factor, and won't be for quite a long time.

we would be better off if no one died

(Clarification: I think we'd obviously be better off if no one involuntarily died.)

I don't think I've been hasty in my thinking. What is the most central concern that you have about life as a good thing?

There are deep unsolved problems around long life. E.g., how do you grow as a mind that has existed for 4,000 years? A normal human mind would probably not be able to handle this, so we'd need some way to expand without losing the parts of ourselves that we value. Similarly, I don't know how to grow as a community of huge, ancient minds.

But, as the saying goes, those are very difficult problems, and I intend to work on solving them for as many centuries as it takes! Of course I can't literally claim to possess an absolute truth, but I think there is a very strong argument---or rather, I think most people would simply agree if they thought longer and more sanely about the question---that life can be awesome given some work, and it is precious, and we don't want to just give up on our vast adventure because, like, medicine is hard to figure out, or cryonics seems like something weird people do, or whatever.

But, do you agree that the part where the whole human mind (not just some cells) has to die---a soul annihilated permanently---is not really a good thing, even if it happens to be the state we find nature in?

Ha :/ Too real.

we're all screwed and you were born a few hundred years too early.

It's not a great option, but cryonics seems way better than nothing. (Under the assumptions that the preservation is reasonably high-quality, the storage facilities stay operational, humanity doesn't destroy itself, and advanced medical technology gets developed; see waitbutwhy.com/2016/03/cryonics.html )

An example of someone who wanted to live a long time but was genuinely screwed and was born a couple hundred years too early:

The rapid Progress true Science now makes, occasions my regretting sometimes that I was born so soon. It is impossible to imagine the Height to which may be carried, in a thousand years, the Power of Man over Matter. We may perhaps learn to deprive large Masses of their Gravity, and give them absolute Levity, for the sake of easy Transport. Agriculture may diminish its Labor and double its Produce; all Diseases may by sure means be prevented or cured, not excepting even that of Old Age, and our Lives lengthened at pleasure even beyond the antediluvian Standard. O that moral Science were in as fair a way of Improvement, that Men would cease to be Wolves to one another, and that human Beings would at length learn what they now improperly call Humanity! -Benjamin Franklin

Um? Sorry for being frank, but: are you saying you would commit suicide if the world were more confusing? In any case, I doubt that our future civilization would be at a total loss to help "anachronisms" transition into a surprising world.

Bring a formerly healthy rat back, then we'll talk.

As the saying goes: That is like a terminal ill patient refusing to get into the ambulance because "I don't want to be in an ambulance here, I want to be in the hospital; call me when the ambulance is at the hospital, then maybe I'll get in."

Yes, I think it is extremely unlikely people will figure out thousand-year lifespans.

Why? Do you think this would withstand a thousand years of human ingenuity? I'm confused where you're getting this very confident prediction.

It also still seems to me that long lifespans are extremely desirable, albeit difficult to obtain, and I'm not sure whether you agree. This is relevant because if we want to decide e.g. where to put research effort, it's useful to know what we want.

The article you linked is kind of long, and looks like it mainly consists of sneering at various people; could you point to the part that's relevant? All I saw was some stuff about Alcor messing up a preservation, which is pretty unfortunate, but not really strong evidence that they have bad motivations.

Well, yeah :P This is a strong argument for trying to prevent fatal accidents!

That seems like a population that would be pretty hard to keep going without having a few extra Earths.

Do you think this problem is merely very difficult, or literally impossible to solve (e.g. because of some physical law)? I think that if a bunch of really smart humans tried really hard to solve this problem, and you predicted very very confidently that they would fail, then I would be pretty skeptical of your confidence. Just as an example, you suggest getting some more Earths. Sounds like one solid approach; expand humanity to other planets!

We are all going to die someday and there is nothing we can do about it. [...] I don't believe anybody will ever find immortality (at least not in this life).

This might literally true, in the sense that we probably can't survive the heat death of the universe in however many bazillions of years. But do you think it is implausible that advanced medical technology could e.g. keep us alive, healthy, and sane for, say, thousands of years? This sounds both plausible and quite desirable to me, and I'm confused by your statements---for instance, I can't tell whether you are making a factual claim or an aesthetic claim.

The people seeing cryogenics are largely snake-oil salesmen.

Eh? They seem pretty sincere; the people who run these organizations (Cryonics Institute, Alcor) are generally themselves signed up for cryonics, and speak passionately about life extension as a desirable goal. Cryonics is not exactly a get-rich-quick scheme.

Does this seem like a desirable state of affairs? I think I'd rather not have anyone die involuntarily. If we put our minds to it, I bet we could figure out how to not have anyone die who didn't want to. There's no physical law that says you can't have billions or trillions of humans live awesome lives for a very long time (though maybe not literally forever).

Personally, I really like living, mainly because there's a lot of awesome stuff to do and see and build, stories to tell, people to be with, etc. The logical next step is that I don't want to die, at least any time soon or involuntarily. Avoiding death may be difficult, but it seems rather sad to just give up; and anyway, say what you will about humans, but we are pretty goddamn clever occasionally.

So it seems quite worth it to fight death. I don't know if avoiding involuntary death should seem so implausible---humans are machines that can be fixed when they start breaking; that's how ordinary medicine works! I think it would actually be surprising if we could extend lifespans from 30 years all the way up to 100+ years, but couldn't possibly go much further, even given massive future advances in our understanding of biology, neurology, and technology.

Do you mean because of limited resources like food and space? Sure, but (1) these look like difficult but quite solvable problems (we are engineers, after all) and (2) the alternative is having every person who has ever lived also be dead, which sounds bad to me.

There might be more clever options, like cryopreserve everyone who dies; this does not consume many resources (the only recurring cost is liquid nitrogen, which is pretty cheap). Then we can wait to revive everyone until we have the medicine and the resources to support everyone, avoiding overpopulation.

Ok, I think I can see why that would be extra frustrating, on top of the already quite sufficient horror of death. Nevertheless, it is probably a good idea to stay civil and try to communicate meaningfully, rather than venting emotions in a forum that is about a specific person's pain and death. I think it's important to have difficult discussions about e.g. death, deathism, etc., but being combatative---even if it makes perfect emotional sense---does not seem likely to have good effects on most people, including yourself.

To put it bluntly, I can think of a number of other cases where

(1) people say things to children because it is more pleasant or convenient, not because it is true, and

(2) these misleading statements have negative effects later.

In this case, it seems potentially worthwhile to keep in view that death is actually not a good thing, and that it would better if there weren't death, and that we want to keep an eye out for opportunities to prevent death. "You do not make peace with darkness!"

I agree that it is confusing and painful (and stupid) that cryopreservation does not get way more attention.

But, your comment seems a little overly barbed, no? It seems like there would be more positive ways to say what you are saying.

That is hilarious. Source, or were you kidding? (I legitimately can't tell.)

we're clear on the fact that for quite a bit of time to come, cryonics is a vulnerable storage facility critically dependent on the infrastructure and benevolent indifference of our civilization

Right, I agree. I was wondering about evaluating the potential business or philanthropic benefits of interventions on cryonics; e.g. funding research on effectiveness of current protocols or on developing better protocols, seeding larger operations and capturing economies of scale, advertising/PR, lobbying for rights, etc. I haven't properly thought this through at all, but I suspect that there might actually be a pretty good philanthropic argument for some kind of preservation.

Society could save big on healthcare (not to mention the disutility of being kept alive to the bitter end) by preserving anyone whose health is in severe decline; anyone who has brain cancer, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, etc.; anyone with imminently terminal diseases; and so on, all voluntarily of course. I believe end-of-life healthcare can typically cost tens of thousands of dollars, which is commensurate with preservation costs.

Further, it seems like I'd much rather save one person to live a long life (at the very least, thousands of years), than save two lives to live a standard life of ~50 more years. Though admittedly this depends on what you think your terminal values are, and also on difficult-to-estimate effects, e.g. the instrumental benefits of having more people alive now to help with morale or with doing stuff. And for obvious reasons this is uncomfortable to have to consider, and even more uncomfortable to actually propose as philanthropic policy.

Thanks for the detailed answer.

If you believe plastination has a decent chance of preserving people's minds, you're operating under the assumption that the connectome itself will yield enough data for an upload.

Ok I think this makes sense. I doubt that the connectome is sufficient.

A lot of their statements seem to focus on future viability...

IIRC they talk about uploading issues under the code word "information-theoretic criterion of death", meaning that a preserved brain could be totally non-viable while still containing enough information to be uploaded; you're only dead if that information is destroyed, i.e. irretrievable "in principle" to an observer with full knowledge of human neurobiology and perfect scanning technology.

future viability of the tissue, and options for biological reanimation - but these are things I have no interest in

Agree, I'm not particularly worried about viability. Side note: it is a lot easier to pitch reanimation than uploading to most people (not that it's easy either way).

One can only imagine the public outcry involving bringing conserved brains back to life will be magnitudes larger than whatever will happen in respect to AGI soon

This being mildly hilarious, because the risks from non-human strong AGI are way way larger than those from reanimated humans or even uploads...

But even if they were as stable as, say a major bank: well, those fail, too.

This isn't clear to me. Cryonics companies have a totally different business plan from banks. Each customer pays a large fixed cost up front before services are rendered, creating an endowment thing that should pay for them indefinitely. Specifically, they could make very conservative investments, such that it would take a world collapse to drive them under. In theory.

hundreds of years until our nano tech is sufficiently advanced.

Hmmm... I think I would be pretty surprised if it took an unregulated nanotech industry more than 50--100 years to develop near-arbitrary capabilities. The roadblock to biological reanimation would be knowing what to specify to build, not the building part. (I agree that intuitively, scanning, if not actual uploading, should be much easier.)

And that's too long for two fragile companies to keep afloat in the face of economic crises, religious and cultural disapproval, incompetence and malice, accidents, disasters, and world events - any single one of which can wipe everything out.

This is a pretty complicated question, but how do you think each of these risk factors would respond to broader adoption of cryonics? My guesses:

economic crises: significantly mitigated, because of economies of scale making it cheaper and overall scale making companies less vulnerable to variance. E.g. cryonics companies could build their own liquid nitrogen condensation plants, which are not that expensive at scale, I believe.

incompetence and malice: similar---at scale, companies could afford to defend against these

religious and cultural disapproval: unclear to me; how much of a threat would this be, and how hard would it be to get people to come around?

accidents: not much to do about this. Hypothetically, with extremely wide adoption of cryonics, there could be safety policy decisions made based on the calculation "How many accidents leading to non-cryopreservable brains will this lead to?".

disasters and world events: no help here. At scale, could slightly defend against tamer disasters with underground bunkers or something.

cryonics [has] much fewer doubts about the preservation of the necessary information

Could you say why you think this? Were you convinced by the experiments done by the Cryonics Institute or Alcor? I haven't been able to contact a disinterested neuroscientist willing to take a serious look at that research.

just a few days of political, economical, or technological instability can easily wipe out every cryo-preserved brain in existence

Political, maybe, if the the legal status of patients changes so that they are required to be thawed. But why economical or technological? I think I read somewhere that it would take like a month or something for the liquid nitrogen to evaporate enough for the patients to thaw.

What the heck? Sorry, I didn't understand any of this. Are you saying that with real moral issues, it always trivially wrong to torture? This seems simply false.

If I capture person X and X's laptop Y, and X tells me under no duress that Y contains the location of a nuclear bomb that X has placed in a major city, and I have other strong evidence that this is true, but X refuses to give me the password to Y; then it is moral (but rightly illegal) for me to torture X for the password to Y.

Torture is not literally incommensurate with any other bad thing. Then the question arises, how do we, in full generality, determine which is the greater of two evils (or the better of two goods)? The torture vs. dust specks thing is supposed to disabuse people of the unhelpful notion that some things are somehow incomparable in terms of goodness and badness.

At least the part where it's implied that "Someone from organization X used the basilisk to convince innocent bystanders to donate to X" is false, for any value of X that I know of. Pascal's Wager is/was (I imagine?) used to get people to subscribe to various churches and give them money.

I notice you didn't actually say at which point you would prefer torturing (10^100)*X people for Y years each, over torturing X people for Y+0.0000001 years each, for X and Y at least 0.0000001.

(You may assume you don't know anything in particular about these people, other than that they are adult humans.)

Ah sorry... I was just being sloppy, what I wrote doesn't make sense. What I meant was "order of magnitude", but I'm not sure how to write that; Big Theta says two functions grow within a constant factor of each other, which is vaguely similar to the notion of order of magnitude. Maybe it should have been "$~10^9$" or just "$10^9$".

(By the way, my reasoning was 10^4 for current cryonics prices, times 10^7 or 10^8 people, times 10^-2 or 10^-3 assuming a fee of 1% to 0.1%.)