13 KiB
[D] Is anyone considering setting up an organisation to make cryonics simpler a la The Amazing Peter Parker?
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Author: u/MadScientist14159 WIP: Sodium Hypochlorite (Rational Bleach) Eventually. Maybe.*
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/2mdrmr/d_is_anyone_considering_setting_up_an/
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Score: 10
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Created: 2014-11-15T14:56:25
Post:
If I wasn't planning (currently at uni) to research gerontology and try to find life extension treatments, this would be pretty high up on my To Do list.
Comments:
u/eaglejarl [+9] (22 minutes later)
If I knew there was a significant market I might.
Picking a number completely out of thin air, would you pay $1,000 USD to have someone make cryonics trivial for you?
u/embrodski [+4] (2 hours later)
It is actually fairly trivial. It's like doing your taxes. Sounds intimidating, but after you do them the first time you realize it's not a big deal. Getting paid $1000 to do that level of work for someone else would be an amazing deal. Enough so that I'd feel bad taking the money.
u/Arandur [+3] (58 minutes later)
I think I would.
u/fljared [+3] United Federation of Planets (an hour later)
Yeah, although I don't know enough to say whether that's really a good deal or not.
... And that's why it IS a good deal.
u/MadScientist14159 [+1] WIP: Sodium Hypochlorite (Rational Bleach) Eventually. Maybe. (3 hours later)
Probably not, but that's only because, being a student, I don't have that kind of spare money.
Once I have a decently paying job I think I would probably agree to that.
u/None [+7] (7 hours later)
Have you considered setting up an organization to make cryonics work, with rigorous trials and all that? And I don't mean "probabilistically work", where an ideal Bayesian assigns a nontrivial, much-larger-than-Solomonoff-prior objective-informational probability to the concept that the partial animal trials done so far imply a human could be reanimated or, God help him/her, brain-uploaded, provided the assistance of a Friendly superintelligence...
I just mean rigorous trials showing that after killing a bunch of rats and putting them through the cryonics treatment, successful resuscitations can actually be performed.
u/drageuth2 [+2] (a day later)
Full body cryopreservation that would even hypothetically allow full resuscitation is really rare, really expensive, and mostly just impractical. Most cryopreservation is just done on the head, with the eventual goal of copying the brain structure into a new brain, or uploading it.
Frankly, I think even if you do go whole-body preservation, you're prolly gonna get good brain scanning tech before you get the kinda full-body-reconstruction tech that it'd take to undo all the damage anyway
u/None [+3] (a day later)
Full body cryopreservation that would even hypothetically allow full resuscitation is really rare, really expensive, and mostly just impractical.
Well, I guess someone had better get on fixing that, hadn't they?
Frankly, I think even if you do go whole-body preservation, you're prolly gonna get good brain scanning tech before you get the kinda full-body-reconstruction tech that it'd take to undo all the damage anyway
In which case, why are people being advised to sign up for existing preservation? It doesn't actually sound like a very good idea.
u/drageuth2 [+3] (a day later)
What exactly is wrong with getting your brain's structure copied to a fresh substrate? You still wake up as you, all the memories and personality intact. Hell, might even have a bitchin' built-to-order bionic body to go with it.
u/None [+1] (a day later)
Because I totally trust people not to modify my brain-state, nor to even look at it in any kind of precision sufficient to extract valuable or embarrassing information.
u/drageuth2 [+3] (a day later)
shrug That's a problem no matter which way you cut it. Anybody with the knowhow to undo all the damage from long-term cryopreservation (not to mention the damage from whatever ended your life in the first place, since the barbaric laws we have in place right now require you to be dead before you can be preserved) is gonna have the knowledge to mess around with yer brainmeats in whatever way they like.
In the end, you just gotta trust that the people doing this honestly care about preserving people, that they'd value your honest point of view and personality, and that they'll pull through on all their agreements as best they can.
u/None [+1] (a day later)
There's absolutely no evidence in favor of any such trust at this time, even less than there is for existing preservation preserving the meat sufficiently to get a person out of it when your purported hyperbenevolent trustworthy cryonics businessmen work out how to pull a person out of living meat.
u/drageuth2 [+1] (a day later)
I don't think you need to be hyperbenevolent to want to save someone from death and to keep them whole and intact. Not being a psychopath is pretty much all you need. The trust fund that a cryo patient sets up to pay for their maintenance and eventual retrieval is hopefully enough to provide incentive for the business side of things, anyway. Just gotta wait til the tech is cheap enough that they can profit off of it. Maybe a little sooner than that if they do just happen to be 'hyper' benevolent :P
It's true, the chances at cryo working at all are fuzzy at best, and probably not all that good. But it beats the pants off being dead for sure. And right now, I think it's the best that's out there. If something better pops up, if a new place comes by with a better business plan, by all means switch. But for now, a place like alcor or the cryonics institute is the best you're gonna get if you suffer a heart attack or a car crash or otherwise just up and stop living for whatever reason.
Anyway, it sounds like you're looking for something more along the lines of suspended animation rather than cryo. I haven't heard of anything like that, sadly. Even if the tech was available, I fear the politics of it would be untenable, and there'd be no reputable places to get yourself preserved. And the politics are prolly gonna be a tougher thing to fix than the tech, anyway.
u/None [+2] (a day later)
I don't think you need to be hyperbenevolent to want to save someone from death and to keep them whole and intact. Not being a psychopath is pretty much all you need.
Really? To prevent someone from taking a peek at the client's memories when it's late one night around the lab and they've been on the drink a bit and are looking for a laugh?
It's true, the chances at cryo working at all are fuzzy at best, and probably not all that good. But it beats the pants off being dead for sure.
No. It is being dead. Reality doesn't roll a die to determine if it works or not, it either works or not when you're "preserved". Your subjective probability does not correspond to a real randomness in the world.
If something better pops up, if a new place comes by with a better business plan, by all means switch.
Why am I hearing a passive attitude like this from anyone in this community? If there's a problem: "you found it, you fix it."
(And yes, there is an actual reason I'm not fixing this problem, which is that I have most of my professional training in computer science, biased towards the theoretical side, and none at all in medical biology, mortuary biology, or neuroscience. I've got other things to do.)
u/drageuth2 [+3] (a day later)
If they've got the tech to pick your brain that casually, then they've got the tech to revive you. With any hope at all, you'd get brought back well before that kind of thing became a problem.
Here's what I mean about it being chancy: We've got tons of ways of preserving structure that look good. But we don't know enough about neurology yet to really know for sure whether they are good, whether they do preserve the structure of the brain enough or not. Further, we don't really know what the tech to read the brain is gonna look like. It could be that the chemicals used in modern vitrification processes completely make brain scanning impossible for one reason or another.
And we won't know these things until the research advances, until the brain scanning tech starts to come out on at least a theoretical level. Until that point, you really are taking a chance at preserving the structure as best you can and hoping that's enough. But like I said, it's the best chance you have.
And I think there's nothing passive about encouraging people to shop around, to always demand the best service and the best technology. Very very few people have the capability to impact the field directly, so being an active consumer of the field is the best you can do there. Well, and petitioning governments and helping with advertising, donating money to research institutes, and so on, but all that goes without saying.
u/Law_Student [+1] (28 days later)
It's not all that different from the trust we extend to doctors to perform medicine properly, or to lawyers or therapists to keep our affairs secret, I think.
u/cryonaut [+1] (a month later)
Alcor is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization governed by an unpaid Board that donates its time.
u/None [+1] (a month later)
Which, while it's actually a bunch better than creepy for-profit organizations, still isn't an actual study showing the treatment works to make even rat models preservable enough that we can bring them back afterwards.
u/cryonaut [+1] (a month later)
To paraphrase from the Alcor web site:
What is Cryonics?
Cryonics is an experiment in the most literal sense of the word. The question you have to ask yourself is this: would you rather be in the experimental group, or the control group?
u/None [+1] (a month later)
In this case: the control group. I don't believe the experiment is going to work, and I'm not at all sure I'll like the results if it does.
u/cryonaut [+1] (2 months later)
By definition, if cryonics works, you will awaken in the future in good health with memory intact.
Much to my surprise, most people want to die. We'll miss you.
u/Law_Student [+1] (28 days later)
Well, I suppose you could destroy all their hardware and kill them all after you were uploaded, but that'd be a psychopath's solution.
u/drageuth2 [+1] (28 days later)
I think if they're gonna mess with your brain, they're gonna do it while you're... well... dead
u/Law_Student [+1] (28 days later)
I mean if the concern was them keeping data to blackmail you with or whatever.
u/drageuth2 [+1] (28 days later)
Well, if you can destroy them immediately after being uploaded, then you can destroy them (or figure out a suitable legal action to make them regret it in some other way) after they attempt to blackmail you.
I don't think they'd really try much unless you immediately won the lottery or something. You're probably not gonna have many assets to your name after being dead for (presumably) at least a medium-amount of time. Not to mention how different economics is prolly gonna be by that point.
Beats being dead either way.
u/andor3333 [+1] (5 days later)
I agree with a lot of your points here, but not this one. Which is a bigger change, errors in copying you to a new body, or utter nonexistence? Personally I would take a close copy over nonbeing even with quite a few errors.
u/TheStevenZubinator [+3] Chaos Legion (13 hours later)
It's actually a very smooth and strait forward process. Basically just print off an application and send it in.
If you live in the US, contact Rudi Hoffman (a life insurance agent operating out of Florida) and he'll do all the work for you, except sign your signature.
I think the main focus for Crionics right now ought to be marketing. In my experience, so few people know about Crionics and the rest think it's science fiction.