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DPR Is Now A Full-Fledged Cryonicist
13 years ago
General
"Does aₘᵢₙ=2c²/Θ ? I don't know, but wouldn't it be fascinating if it were?"
How much is your life worth to you?
If you suffered from a disease which might strike you down at any time; and a treatment was available, which cost six thousand dollars per year... would you be willing to scrape together that much cash for it? If the best available treatment only had a fifty percent chance of success... would you be willing to pay three thousand a year it? If the best available treatment only had a five percent chance of success... would you be willing to pay three hundred a year for it?
My own answers to all three questions are 'yes'.
After reading and researching about cryonic preservation, my best estimate of its success - that is, eventual revival - is somewhere in the neighbourhood of five percent. I have also learned that arrangements can be made for one's own cryonic preservation for around three hundred dollars per year. I have filled out the forms, signed the paperwork, sent in my first installment. (If you want to know how to sign up yourself, feel free to ask.) Put simply - I'm putting my money where my mouth is.
Medically, the procedure I have signed up for isn't "freezing", which involves ice; instead, it's "vitrification", which lowers the body's temperature in a way that avoids the creation of tissue-damaging ice crystals.
Legally, according to the "Uniform Anatomical Gift Act" of my cryonic provider's location, and the "Trillium Gift of Life Act" of my home province, what I've actually signed up to do is donate my whole body for scientific research. There's no actual guarantee that, if vitrified, I will ever be revived - though that is the goal being aimed for.
Philosophically, I have not encountered any significant evidence in support of the idea of an immortal soul. The best conclusion I've been able to reach is that minds are processes created by brains, and when the brain is sufficiently damaged, the mind ceases to exist, like a candle blown out. If it's possible to avoid dying, I'd rather avoid it; and for a number of causes of death, like getting hit by a car, there aren't really any ways to avoid them, and only a few possible ways to even potentially survive such lethal levels of damage to the body... but people keep coming up with new tricks all the time, and it's possible that whatever does end up killing me will be curable at some point in the future - and it's also possible that the vitrification process will be reversible at some point in the future. I've already mentioned my estimate of that possibility.
So... if I don't manage to live long enough for a technological Fountain of Youth to be discovered, then, if all goes well (or at least as well as possible, given that I'll be dead), my body will be transformed into a glass statue - and, like Sleeping Beauty, like Rip Van Winkle, like the various Kings Sleeping Under the Mountain... like Han Solo in carbonite, like Dave Lister, like Khan Noonien Sing, like Ellen Ripley, like Philip J. Fry, like Captain America in the iceberg, like Buck Rogers... like Rana sylvatica... I will await the possibility of my eventual awakening.
And if it doesn't work, then, worst-case scenario is that I just stay dead. Which is what would happen if I never signed up for cryo in the first place.
If you suffered from a disease which might strike you down at any time; and a treatment was available, which cost six thousand dollars per year... would you be willing to scrape together that much cash for it? If the best available treatment only had a fifty percent chance of success... would you be willing to pay three thousand a year it? If the best available treatment only had a five percent chance of success... would you be willing to pay three hundred a year for it?
My own answers to all three questions are 'yes'.
After reading and researching about cryonic preservation, my best estimate of its success - that is, eventual revival - is somewhere in the neighbourhood of five percent. I have also learned that arrangements can be made for one's own cryonic preservation for around three hundred dollars per year. I have filled out the forms, signed the paperwork, sent in my first installment. (If you want to know how to sign up yourself, feel free to ask.) Put simply - I'm putting my money where my mouth is.
Medically, the procedure I have signed up for isn't "freezing", which involves ice; instead, it's "vitrification", which lowers the body's temperature in a way that avoids the creation of tissue-damaging ice crystals.
Legally, according to the "Uniform Anatomical Gift Act" of my cryonic provider's location, and the "Trillium Gift of Life Act" of my home province, what I've actually signed up to do is donate my whole body for scientific research. There's no actual guarantee that, if vitrified, I will ever be revived - though that is the goal being aimed for.
Philosophically, I have not encountered any significant evidence in support of the idea of an immortal soul. The best conclusion I've been able to reach is that minds are processes created by brains, and when the brain is sufficiently damaged, the mind ceases to exist, like a candle blown out. If it's possible to avoid dying, I'd rather avoid it; and for a number of causes of death, like getting hit by a car, there aren't really any ways to avoid them, and only a few possible ways to even potentially survive such lethal levels of damage to the body... but people keep coming up with new tricks all the time, and it's possible that whatever does end up killing me will be curable at some point in the future - and it's also possible that the vitrification process will be reversible at some point in the future. I've already mentioned my estimate of that possibility.
So... if I don't manage to live long enough for a technological Fountain of Youth to be discovered, then, if all goes well (or at least as well as possible, given that I'll be dead), my body will be transformed into a glass statue - and, like Sleeping Beauty, like Rip Van Winkle, like the various Kings Sleeping Under the Mountain... like Han Solo in carbonite, like Dave Lister, like Khan Noonien Sing, like Ellen Ripley, like Philip J. Fry, like Captain America in the iceberg, like Buck Rogers... like Rana sylvatica... I will await the possibility of my eventual awakening.
And if it doesn't work, then, worst-case scenario is that I just stay dead. Which is what would happen if I never signed up for cryo in the first place.
You'd be several decades if not centuries behind the times, most of your skills would be long obsolete, inflation would keep pace with the interest rate on your savings (assuming the bank even lasts that long), and the world would most likely be overpopulated. And I doubt that the world population could crash without taking out the power supplies to most of the world's cryo-facilitites, if not the buildings themselves.
As for overpopulation - there are somewhere under 2,500 cryonics signees alive and stored today, after 40 or so years of the practice. At the world's current population, around 150,000 die every day. Even if every cryonicist was woken on the same day, it wouldn't make a blip on the statistics.
As for why /any/one would revive me - well, my chosen cryonics provider is a co-op, whose management is of the cryonicists, by the cryonicists, and for the cryonicists. As long as there are at least a few people willing to take a shot at non-supernaturally-based immortality, it seems likely they'll be interested in helping earlier cryonauts get revived and settled in, to help maximize their own chances of being revived and settled in when their time for that comes.
Another question, recently I've noticed a number of would-be cryonicists have given up on the idea of being physically revivified and instead want their frozen brains to be uploaded. What is your opinion and do you think your co-op might do that?
30-odd years ago, one of the early cryo operations ran out of money, and all its patients thawed. That was taken /very/ hard by the cryo community, and now neither Alcor nor Cryonics Institute will accept a new client unless they provide proof that they have enough funding both for the initial procedure, and to add to the general fund whose interest pays for general operations. But you're right - that's still not a /guarantee/. Which is one of the possibilities I took into account to end up at my five percent figure.
> Another question, recently I've noticed a number of would-be cryonicists have given up on the idea of being physically revivified and instead want their frozen brains to be uploaded. What is your opinion and do you think your co-op might do that?
I'll start my answer with a few quotes from John K. Clark:
"We don't have thoughts, we are thoughts. Thoughts are not responsible for the machinery that happens to think them."
"But I am not an object. I am not a noun, I am an adjective. I am the way matter behaves when it is organized in a John K Clark-ish way. At the present time only one chunk of matter in the universe behaves that way; someday that could change."
There's a folk belief that every cell in our body is recycled every seven years; that's not strictly true, especially as regards the brain... but upon investigating reality at a more foundational level, it's possible to find out that the fundamental particles aren't just indistinguishable in practice, they're fundamentally identical - it's as meaningless to say "/this/ particle here and /that/ particle there" (as opposed to "/a/ particle here and /a/ particle there") as it is to say that 18 can be factored into "/this/ factor of 3 here and /that/ factor of 3 there". This leads to the interesting thought that it is literally pointless to talk about the particular pieces of matter that make up one's brain; re-creating the patterns that matter makes up one brain in a 'new' brain means that the 'second' brain has exactly as much claim at being the original individual as the 'first'. And once that idea settles in nicely - then the fact that identity arises from those patterns suggests that if those patterns can be re-implemented on a new substrate, such as neuron-imitating nano-machines or even in virtual, software form, then the person's identity will still continue.
Or, put another way, I'll be happy to be resurrected in whatever form it becomes possible to do so.
And another thing, the human brain almost never "shuts down" before death, even while asleep it's still doing something. What does that mean for the possibility of cryonics?
At least once in my life, I experienced an episode of 'transient global amnesia' - for a few hours, even though I was walking and talking, I wasn't gaining any new memories; I couldn't remember anything after the episode started. I still can't remember anything between when it started and when I woke up in the hospital with my family around me, and was told I'd been repeatedly asking "What time is it?". In several senses, my continuity of identity had a good break there. And yet - I'm still here. I can work with a life with further gaps of continuity, should they happen.
> "shuts down"
From a FAQ, at http://www.benbest.com/cryonics/CryoFAQ.html#_VI_ :
Would cessation of brain electrical activity mean loss of identity ?
Although brain electrical activity ceases when metabolism stops at low temperature, this should not cause loss of brain structure or functional capabilities. People on barbiturates or in low-temperature surgery have shown no electrical activity in their brains, but have not lost their personalities or memories. Although immediate (short-term) memories can be lost, there is ample reason to believe that identity and long-term memory is encoded in synapses and in the connections between neurons − which would be cryopreserved.
My best estimate is that, barring surprising levels of medical advancements, I'll die fairly normally in around 40 years, hopefully in a fashion that will allow cryo-preservation. However, according to the numbers, there is roughly a 30/1,000,000 chance that I'll die on any given day - including sometime in the next 24 hours. (In fact, if you reject the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, you can say that out of every million timelines that branch out from any given moment, in around thirty of them I'll die in the next day.)