Against cryonics advocacy

[Arepo]

Every now and again I get into discussion with transhumanists about why I don't think anyone should advocate cryonics. The latest is the most extensive such discussion, so I thought I'd post the relevant parts here in case anyone else is interested, and for my future reference.

For context, this began as a discussion of Massimo Pigliucci's remark at the very end of this post that transhumanist's idea of uploading was 'a form of dualism', segued into a criticism of Less Wrongers' apparent views on personal identity, then into the conversation below:

As to the 'preoccupation' that LWers have with uploading and cryonics, you may as well talk about the 'preoccupation' a cancer patient might have with a potential cure.

Re the cryonic vs cancer treatment comparison, I agree there’s little difference in principle (though that could show that people seeking cancer treatment are irrational rather than the reverse), but there’s are *huge* practical differences:

* Cancer treatment may be an inefficient use of resources all things being equal, but if you’re an active utilitarian who’d go on to do a lot of good, it could easily be worthwhile. Cryonics uses up far more resources, probably for less expected gain.
* If cancer treatment works, it potentially saves a lot of grief for family and friends. If cryonics works, they still suffer the same.
* Cancer treatment is already socially accepted and integrated into developed world healthcare, so there’s no desperate need to change the status quo (assuming we do think it’s a good thing). Cryonics is not, and trying to integrate it better into society uses up time and resources that could have been spent on higher expectation activities (eg Givewell/GWWC charities, wild animal suffering, SIAI, longevity research or whatever you think is the best current use of resources)
* If you, qua the motivated and intelligent utilitarian, are thinking about cancer treatment, you’re thinking about using up resources to maintain a world with a relatively intelligent and benign person. If you’re thinking about a future world where technology has progressed to the degree that they can reanimate you, they’re likely to have a lot of eugenic/GM/behavioural/other ways of improving their people, so your expected impact on the mean intelligence/altruism of the population is much lower – potentially negative.

[Arepo]

I was speaking more in terms of *Person seeking to avoid death* rather than any utilitarian calculation about what does the most good. Everyone I've spoken to/read on this issue agrees that, say, donating the money to an efficient and effective charity would *much* better maximize utility (ignoring considerations about the possibility of a cryopreserved person living much longer and other specialized arguments, anyway.)

[Arepo]

Right, but that's what my third bullet is about. I'm not going to condemn someone for doing what they can to stave off something they fear (even if the only way in which is makes sense is the emotional satisfaction they get before they die).

On the other hand I have no time at all for people who think the desperate scrabble their selfish irrationality leads to is such a noble pursuit that *they* should condemn anyone who doesn't support it. See eg essays on the ‘hostile wife phenomenon’ http://www.evidencebasedcryonics.org/is ... -cryonics/ or Robin Hanson’s ‘Philosophy Kills’ http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/11/p ... kills.html

[Arepo]

On the other hand I have no time at all for people who think the desperate scrabble their selfish irrationality

Selfish? Perhaps, although it's not exactly in the normal use of the word - again, is a cancer patient searching for a cure selfish?
But irrational? How?

...

with the hostile wife example - are you criticizing the 'husband' or the 'wife'?

Cancer treatment is already socially accepted and integrated into developed world healthcare, so there’s no desperate need to change the status quo

Are you saying that if it wasn't, we shouldn't try to change the status quo? Are you saying that a cancer patient in a society where this is not true is wrong to seek treatment?

[Arepo]

Are you saying that if it wasn't, we shouldn't try to change the status quo? Are you saying that a cancer patient in a society where this is not true is wrong to seek treatment?

You’ll never catch me using the word ‘wrong’* (for much the reasons Eliezer writes that we should ‘taboo our words’). But in in a society otherwise like this one it would clearly be counter to utilitarian goals to advocate such a change, yes.

*Forgot at the time to add the caveat 'in careful ethical discussion', before anyone gotchas me

with the hostile wife example - are you criticizing the 'husband' or the 'wife'?

The people who criticise the wife. Ie the authors of those two pieces, and the LWers/cryonics advocates who support them.

Selfish? Perhaps, although it's not exactly in the normal use of the word - again, is a cancer patient searching for a cure selfish?

Why not? It’s a question of scale. Someone who’s willing to trade huge amounts of overall utility for small amounts of personal gain (eg a tyrant) is generally called selfish. Someone who trades unfavourably but significantly less so – eg someone who buys an ice-cream rather than donating the money to charity - normally isn’t. Both of them are clearly doing something un-utilitarian, so the only relevant issue for us is whether it’s worth the cost of trying to get them to improve their behaviour. In the ice-cream case it obviously isn’t, not least because it would make us all visibly hypocritical (which in turn would reduce our expected influence), in the dictator case it might sometimes be.

In the case of cryonics it might also be, not so much because it’s on the same scale as being a tyrant but because such people are in greater contact with and more likely to care about the opinion and argument of the rest of us.

But it’s clearly a terrible idea to pay an opportunity cost of trying to persuade people to change their behaviour for the worse - which is exactly what cryonic advocacy is.

But irrational? How?

Once one accepts the deflationary view of personal identity you claim LWers hold, any attempt to ‘prolong your lifespan’ is incoherent. Who is this ‘you’ who’s lifespan you’re prolonging? The only gain ‘you’ get from it – even if it works – is reduced fear of death in this lifetime. Once you’re frozen, the risk of such negative feelings is gone, so it would harm no-one if your brain was quietly tipped into local landfill.

So rational cryonics advocates would gain as much by advocating (or rather trying to effect) instead the illusion of cryonics without the opportunity cost of actually preserving someone for a decade. But they’d probably do far better by looking for other techniques to reduce our fear of death – and better still to accept that a few people will suffer a bit from it for the time being and entirely redirect their efforts to effective altruism.

[Arepo]

Why not? It’s a question of scale. Someone who’s willing to trade huge amounts of overall utility for small amounts of personal gain (eg a tyrant) is generally called selfish. Someone who trades unfavourably but significantly less so – eg someone who buys an ice-cream rather than donating the money to charity - normally isn’t. Both of them are clearly doing something un-utilitarian, so the only relevant issue for us is whether it’s worth the cost of trying to get them to improve their behaviour. In the ice-cream case it obviously isn’t, not least because it would make us all visibly hypocritical (which in turn would reduce our expected influence), in the dictator case it might sometimes be.

In the case of cryonics it might also be, not so much because it’s on the same scale as being a tyrant but because such people are in greater contact with and more likely to care about the opinion and argument of the rest of us.

OK, I don't really have a problem with that so long as you're willing to extend that same label to cancer patients, which obviously you are. Consider that objection retracted.

But it’s clearly a terrible idea to pay an opportunity cost of trying to persuade people to change their behaviour for the worse - which is exactly what cryonic advocacy is

I would disagree with you on that. I'm not entirely sure why you think signing up for cryonics is a change for the worse. Could you state that explicitly?

Once one accepts the deflationary view of personal identity you claim LWers hold, any attempt to ‘prolong your lifespan’ is incoherent. Who is this ‘you’ who’s lifespan you’re prolonging? The only gain ‘you’ get from it – even if it works – is reduced fear of death in this lifetime. Once you’re frozen, the risk of such negative feelings is gone, so it would harm no-one if your brain was quietly tipped into local landfill.

You mistake my word, I think. The 'you' of 10 minutes ago and of 10 minutes in the future is still you. Cryonics advocates maintain that the difference between Time of preservation{You{ and Post-revival{You} is small (in the same sense that the difference between Present{You} and ~10min{You} is small, though to different degrees perhaps), therefore, you *are* the same person.

You’ll never catch me using the word ‘wrong’* (for much the reasons Eliezer writes that we should ‘taboo our words’). But in in a society otherwise like this one it would clearly be counter to utilitarian goals to advocate such a change, yes.

Which utilitarian goals?

If you think otherwise, then I don't think you fully understand utilitarian reasoning.

Or perhaps you don't fully understand the subject. As I said before, please state this part explicitly.

[Arepo]

I would disagree with you on that. I'm not entirely sure why you think signing up for cryonics is a change for the worse. Could you state that explicitly?

Let me weaken this claim, since it obviously depends on the counterfactual. An average person does so little good with their money that it’s conceivable that their mean spending will be worse than the happiness they’d gain from cryonics. (I don’t actually think that it is, given that the people we’re talking about are people who someone’s trying to talk *into* cryonics, therefore people who don’t a priori expect to gain much serenity from it – but for the sake of argument I’ll assume it could well be)

An average consequentialist, one hopes, achieves far more with their time and money than an average person, an average utilitarian even more so. Even if – say – 95% of their efforts are basically selfish, or at least self-directed, the good they can do by carefully redirecting that 5% is potentially enormous. Since signing up for cryonics is going to reduce the total of which that 5% is a proportion, it’s going to be detrimental. Unless the utility they gain from signing up is both higher than the detriment of that reduction and higher than anything which they might have done instead, that signup was a change for the worse.

Since most LWers are consequentialists, and a fair proportion utilitarians, the latter group is the relevant one.

‘You mistake my word, I think. The 'you' of 10 minutes ago and of 10 minutes in the future is still you.’

This is a bizarre claim, that only derives any sense it might have from fudging the language. Is 10cm from here also ‘here’, simply because there exist many greater distances from here which an arbitrary point might be?

Sure for some purposes it’s a passable heuristic to answer ‘yes’, but when speaking philosophically, given that we can easily answer more accurately, we might as well do so. So 10 cm from here is not here – it’s 10cm away. And the person who had my name and existed 10 minutes ago is not me - it's the person who had my name and existed 10 minutes ago.

Clearly [person who had my name and existed 10 minutes minutes ago] can’t be preserved or prolonged by cryonic suspension, since he’s already vanished. The closest thing to bringing him back and prolonging him would be a precise simulation of him that runs forever that state, but what was so special about the properties he had that he’s worth doing that for?

Which utilitarian goals?

Maximizing utility. *The* utilitarian goal, I should say.

Or perhaps you don't fully understand the subject. As I said before, please state this part explicitly.

A pure utilitarian, qua one who seeks to maximise utility, has the choice of behaving in any way that (s)he expects to maximise utility. Given the unbounded amount of expectation space, that’s probably a ‘choice’ of precisely one path. Doing anything else, however briefly, carries the opportunity cost of not having taken that path, for as long as the ‘anything else’ takes.

Sure an actual utilitarian-leaning human will have human foibles which they’ll satisfice/balance against the dictums of pure utilitarianism, but those are a different question.*

What we’re discussing here is not cryonics per se, it’s the behaviour of cryonics advocacy. But if cryonics is not an extremely utilitarian activity, it’s extremely unlikely that advocating it will be one, when there are numerous other ultra-high-expectation activities out there.

In a world where cancer treatment was looked down upon, if it was otherwise like this one, those alternative activities would still be available, so cancer-treatment advocacy would still look very poor by comparison (and, incidentally, might actually have negative expectation – see http://thehealthcareblog.com/blog/2012/ ... ctors-die/).

If you don’t consider counterfactuals when thinking about whether you’d do something (or rather, to the degree you don’t), you can’t be said to be behaving consistently with utilitarianism.

*Albeit one which can be answered similarly. To the degree that you’re looking out for yourself (in the colloquial sense) and those you love, you might as well follow the optimal way of doing so. Cryonics *advocacy* is unlikely to be that way. As far as I can see, the only substantial benefit it has to oneself is signalling to other LWers/transhumanists.

[Arepo]

Once one accepts the deflationary view of personal identity you claim LWers hold, any attempt to ‘prolong your lifespan’ is incoherent. Who is this ‘you’ who’s lifespan you’re prolonging?

Exactly. Any LW'ers who remain motivated by cryonics for these reasons are exhibiting a weird, unmotivated, anti-utilitarian inconsistency in their views which DOES make me suspicious that they have quasi-dualistic confusions lurking beneath their explicitly stated views. I don't actually think they are dualists, but I do think endorsing cryonics is objectionable on utilitarian grounds.

(The 'you' of 10 minutes ago and of 10 minutes in the future is still you. Cryonics advocates maintain that the difference between Time of preservation{You{ and Post-revival{You} is small (in the same sense that the difference between Present{You} and ~10min{You} is small, though to different degrees perhaps), therefore, you *are* the same person.)

You say that "you *are" the same person"; yes, by this definition you are, but the sense in which you are the "same person" doesn't seem to me to be a reason to act with *special* regard for that person that's "me" at all. What the hell makes future persons that are similar to you so much more important than other future people that aren't you that the former justifies so much investment of resources at the expense of the interests of the latter? There doesn't seem to be to be any motivating sense in which these people that "are the same person as me" should matter.

If aliens were producing exact copies of me on another planet right now, freezing them, and unfreezing them a week from now, a year from now, etc.; those unfrozen me's would be more me now than the future me's causally connected to this particular body. Yet despite being "me", such copies pull no moral weight than any other people on earth. Why should I be particularly concerned with how similar certain people are to me at present? I don't care about those hypothetical copies any more than I care about random people on earth who are in no coherent sense "me", so why should I care about preserving future me's through cryopreservation?

The sense in which it's "still you" shouldn't be remotely motivating to anyone who takes a deflationary view of personal identity seriously. It's still "me" only in the sense that this future person is more similar to the me of the present. Why the HELL should that matter? It's a totally bizarre form of partiality: preference to act in the interests of future persons that incidentally happen to be a lot like me. I can't help but see that as nothing short of irrational narcissism that fails to really appreciate a deflationary view of personal identity.

I suspect essentialist/dualist motivations lurk behind the inclinations people have to pursue cryopreservation. It's a silly, unmotivated activity, and this diluted use of the term "you" strikes me as impotent to motivate me to act with special regard for those future people that are "me". That it nonetheless seems reasonable to people on LW is one of the instances in which I depart from the consensus there.

[Arepo]

Sure for some purposes it’s a passable heuristic to answer ‘yes’, but when speaking philosophically, given that we can easily answer more accurately, we might as well do so. So 10 cm from here is not here – it’s 10cm away. And the person who had my name and existed 10 minutes ago is not me - it's the person who had my name and existed 10 minutes ago.

Clearly [person who had my name and existed 10 minutes minutes ago] can’t be preserved or prolonged by cryonic suspension, since he’s already vanished. The closest thing to bringing him back and prolonging him would be a precise simulation of him that runs forever that state, but what was so special about the properties he had that he’s worth doing that for?"

We're talking about personal identity here. You're being unnecessarily specific. The [person who had my name and existed 10 minutes minutes ago] still exists, to a extremely close approximation. I share the *incredibly vast majority* of my attributes with that person, to the extent that I say that he *is* me, and if you copied him in some way, he would have the same 'weight' (moral and otherwise) that I do.

Now the question of whether or not cryonics (and cryonics advocacy) is 'utilitarian' depends a lot on your utility function. Transhumanists in general, and LWers in particular, generally are not fans of death, whether for themselves or others. Death is a *huge* negative in their utility function. Cryonics is an attempt to prevent death.

If aliens were producing exact copies of me on another planet right now, freezing them, and unfreezing them a week from now, a year from now, etc.; those unfrozen me's would be more me now than the future me's causally connected to this particular body. Yet despite being "me", such copies pull no moral weight than any other people on earth. Why should I be particularly concerned with how similar certain people are to me at present? I don't care about those hypothetical copies any more than I care about random people on earth who are in no coherent sense "me", so why should I care about preserving future me's through cryopreservation?

Do you care more about yourself than you do these random people on earth?

You say that "you *are" the same person"; yes, by this definition you are, but the sense in which you are the "same person" doesn't seem to me to be a reason to act with *special* regard for that person that's "me" at all. What the hell makes future persons that are similar to you so much more important than other future people that aren't you that the former justifies so much investment of resources at the expense of the interests of the latter? There doesn't seem to be to be any motivating sense in which these people that "are the same person as me" should matter.

This is correct if you care no more about yourself than others.
This is almost certainly false, however. *no-one* cares equally about themselves as others (Some people get pretty close though - if you're one of them, then your position is consistent, just not shared by many others)

There is an argument for cryonics being a very good utilitarian intervention, but that's generally not why people support it. People support it for the same reasons that they're willing to spend money on their medical issues, and on themselves in general.

Now cryonics advocacy is another issue. One point that needs to be made is that I think most people put cryonics advocacy in a *different category* than, say, donation decisions. It's not really a case of "should I convince this person to sign up for cryonics, or should I make some more effective charitable intervention", it's more like "should I convince this person to sign up for cryonics, or should I change the subject and talk about some random thing".

I'm not really sure what you mean by cryonics advocacy, though. I mean, there *are* people (like, say, the people who run Alcor, CI, etc) who support cryonics to a much greater degree, but they're hardly the majority, nor do they form any kind of LW consensus.
I think some explication of what you mean by cryonics advocacy would be helpful here (not in terms of a definition, more like a description of the sort of behavior you're talking about/criticizing. )

[Arepo]

Do you care more about yourself than you do these random people on earth?

Not morally. I don't think it would be ethical, if I had millions of dollars, to spend it on myself, and would probably not be motivated to. I probably would forego expensive end of life care for moral reasons, and feel the same way about cryonics. It's a selfish, unethical way to use additional resources, and I oppose it for that reason.

Furthermore, it's barely motivating at all. I just don't care about ensuring that at some point in the future there is some person who is "me" in a way that strikes me as totally irrelevant. The psychological pull of being concerned about "future me's" that will exist next year is strong, and heavily inclines me to act preferentially towards my "self". Cryonics doesn't do this, it lacks that intuitive pull. It doesn't feel, intuitively, like popping a pill to live forever. It feels more like dying and having a copy of me remade in the future, which isn't any morally different to me. That being said, I'm enslaved to my intuitions in this respect. If I could turn off my partiality towards myself by pushing a button, I would. I think preferring yourself and your friends and family is unethical.

A thought experiment helps illustrate why I don't think cryonics makes any sense as a motivating force and why I don't think people who are for it are really taking a deflationary view of personal identity seriously:

Imagine if you could engage in an extravagantly expensive, resource-heavy process of having a copy of you made 500 years from now. They do an atom-for-atom scan of your body, and, 500 years after you die, a replicator produces a copy of you.

This copy would be the same as me, so it would be me. I'd have been resurrected. Hell, they could make two copies, and I'd be double-resurrected! Why not, if I have enough money, invest in having as many copies of me made as possible?!

This isn't a remotely compelling prospect to me. Why would I care to do that? What would incline me to want to invest so much in ensuring that some time down the road some person exists that's more like me now? Using the definition of sameness given here, they would be the "same person" as me, but so what? WHY should that matter? I honestly don't give a shit about the replicator producing people that are more similar to me than someone else. And I don't think there's any principled difference between a replicator and using cryonics. Honestly, I'd prefer for them to produce people who are happier and healthier than I am. Only a weird, quasi-dualistic sense that somehow the ME right now would somehow survive would this really strike me as emotionally compelling and motivate me to want it.

[Arepo]

dollars, to spend it on myself, and would probably not be motivated to. I probably would forego expensive end of life care for moral reasons, and feel the same way about cryonics. It's a selfish, unethical way to use additional resources, and I oppose it for that reason."

Just clarifying: Even is the treatment literally cured you, and you could look forward to a excellent quality of life for some time?

"Furthermore, it's barely motivating at all. I just don't care about ensuring that at some point in the future there is some person who is "me" in a way that strikes me as totally irrelevant. The psychological pull of being concerned about "future me's" that will exist next year is strong, and heavily inclines me to act preferentially towards my "self".

"Cryonics doesn't do this, it lacks that intuitive pull. It doesn't feel, intuitively, like popping a pill to live forever. It feels more like dying and having a copy of me remade in the future"

Cryonicists maintain that these are functionally identical (although popping a pill to sleep and waking up in the future where you can live forever is a better analogy).

I think preferring yourself and your friends and family is unethical.

Again, there are arguments that buying cryonics is the best intervention *regardless of who it is purchased for*, but I don't want to get into that here - perhaps separately.

A thought experiment helps illustrate why I don't think cryonics makes any sense as a motivating force and why I don't think people who are for it are really taking a deflationary view of personal identity seriously:

Imagine if you could engage in an extravagantly expensive, resource-heavy process of having a copy of you made 500 years from now. They do an atom-for-atom scan of your body, and, 500 years after you die, a replicator produces a copy of you.

This copy would be the same as me, so it would be me. I'd have been resurrected. Hell, they could make two copies, and I'd be double-resurrected! Why not, if I have enough money, invest in having as many copies of me made as possible?!

This isn't a remotely compelling prospect to me.

It is to us.

Why would I care to do that? What would incline me to want to invest so much in ensuring that some time down the road some person exists that's more like me now? Using the definition of sameness given here, they would be the "same person" as me, but so what? WHY should that matter? I honestly don't give a shit about the replicator producing people that are more similar to me than someone else. And I don't think there's any principled difference between a replicator and using cryonics. Honestly, I'd prefer for them to produce people who are happier and healthier than I am. "

"Only a weird, quasi-dualistic sense that somehow the ME right now would somehow survive would this really strike me as emotionally compelling and motivate me to want it.

This is the claim, yes, but it's not at all quasi-dualistic. The Me of right now *would* survive, at least that is the claim. If such capability existed, it *would* be you surviving.

I'd also point out that cryonics *doesn't have to be* as resource intensive (in terms of money that is) as it is today. If serious economies of scale where in effect, it would be *far*, FAR cheaper.

[somervta]

BTW, I am TSF in the above FB posts.

[Arepo]

(full name is in the first one, then I got lazy)

[Glacian]

Hello! Thanks for moving the discussion. This is Lance from Facebook.

somervta/TSF: Just clarifying: Even is the treatment literally cured you, and you could look forward to a excellent quality of life for some time?

That's a good question - I may be compelled for selfish reasons to act in my own interests under those circumstances. I have no idea how committed I am to my morals when push comes to shove, but if I could push a button now that would force me not to if such circumstances ever arose, I would, which is my way of saying that I think such actions would be wrong and were I to act in that way it would be because I was overwhelmed by my self-preservation instincts. I don't accord them any moral weight, but see them as a problem to be overcome.

Cryonicists are absolutely right I think that getting frozen and unfrozen in the future really would feel just like what happens if you popped a pill to sleep and wake up later. But this continuity of consciousness is precisely what I think is illusory about personal identity. I don't see any difference from this and me being disintegrated 30 seconds from now and a copy of me made in the future. To the extent that I can emotionally divest myself from concern for future selves that are the result of reconstruction (those don't feel like me), I really don't assign more weight to them.

I have no particular interest in ensuring the the existence of copies of myself for precisely the same reason that I don't care about cryopreservation. There's an intuitive difference between acting in the interests of myself next week and myself post-cryo, and this is what allows me to override selfish impulses with respect to the latter. I have zero desire to inject my selfishness into decision making with respect to the latter; on the contrary, I'd rather remove the self-regarding disposition with respect to the former! So I'm stuck acting selfishly, and wrongly, about certain things (investing more in my own medical care, recreational activities, etc.) and not having any motivation to likewise act selfishly with respect to other actions (cryopreservation) because the latter doesn't tug on those processes in my brain compelling me to override my moral motivations with selfish motivations.

In a very real sense, I'm accusing people who are motivated to pursue cryopreservation of having a totally arbitrary interest: they are going out of their way to make sure future people exist who are more like them...for what reason, exactly? Substitute any other arbitrary fixture of your life as a future subject of replication, and it becomes absolutely silly: I live in the United States. It would be ridiculous to invest money in ensuring more people in the future live in the US for no particularly utilitarian-motivated reason at all. I happen to like wearing black clothing - should I ensure people in the future share a similar preference for wearing black? Investing additional resources in ensuring future people who are not me in any meaningful sense, since "me" simply means "similar to me", are simply more similar to me, entirely aside from the impact this has on utility, strikes me as a totally arbitrary, narcissistic motivation that I simply can't square with my views on personal identity. Cryopreservation is a silly, pointless investment that a person has little rational justification for pursuing.

Again, there are arguments that buying cryonics is the best intervention *regardless of who it is purchased for*, but I don't want to get into that here - perhaps separately.

Best in what respect? If it's actually the most economically viable bang for your buck, in terms of cost/benefit, then I'm entirely fine with it. What I don't understand, and one I am questioning, is assigning any special, additional weight to cryopreservation of one's "self", because I think such a motivation is weird and difficult to sustain if one holds the views I do about personal identity, and which the people at LessWrong generally speaking purportedly do as well. I'm fine with treating it like any other medical procedure, like cancer treatment, etc., but I want it evaluated in the same way as other medical interventions, where it should be evaluated in entirely in terms of its impact on promoting utility. There are utilitarian considerations where being the "same person" matters here. You can't just let someone's grandpa die, produce a totally different grandpa, and say "here you go! New grandpa!" Similarity matters in how others are psychologically bonded to that person, among other utilitarian-motivated factors.

It is to us.

I guess I don't understand why. I care about good experiences being experienced and bad experiences not being experienced. I don't care at all how similar the experiencers are to me. I certainly don't think there's any morally defensible rationale for caring about how similar they are to me. Similarity to me strikes me as irrelevant: it's just as psychologically inaccessible for me to have the experiences of a copy of me as it is for me to have the experiences of Barack Obama. Likewise, I will no more have access to the experiences of a cryopreserved "me" 500 years from now as I'll have access to the experiences of Alexander the Great...because that isn't how experience works. I don't assign more weigh to promoting Barack Obama's experiences being good ones, so why should I assign more weigh to promoting the interests of people closer in the "person design space" to the person I happen to be at this moment? This strikes me as one of the most blatantly arbitrary motivations a person could possibly have.

My suspicion is that despite explicitly sharing similar views on personal identity as me, other people retain pretheoretical motivations that existed before adopting a deflationary view of personal identity that in part may result from maintaining the use of the same terms even though they no longer mean the same thing by notions like "me" and being the "same person". I'm also an *eliminativist* about personal identity - I think we should drop discourse that claims that "I" exist in the future if I'm replicated, or that "I" am resurrected by a replication process carried out in the future, and use some new term that captures what deflationary views mean without distorting our intuitions by invoking traditional terms.

In the way you're using these terms, yes, it's obviously true that "I" exist if I have myself preserved, but I think maintaining traditional discourse here may cloud our intuitions about what matters. Every experiential moment is permanently sealed off from access to every other one, regardless of similarity, and for that reason, I see zero reason to assign higher weight to ones similar to mine. I think the LessWrong community is, as a result, maintaining arbitrary, indefensible priorities that can't be justified on ethical grounds and can't be rationally reconciled with their stated views on personal identity.

I'd also point out that cryonics *doesn't have to be* as resource intensive (in terms of money that is) as it is today.

Certainly, and if it becomes cost effective my ethical concerns with it would boil away and my concerns that such motivations were arbitrary and irrational wouldn't be important enough for me to comment on even if I thought they were still true. You're right the economy of scale could bring the price down, but I just don't think there's any pressing ethical reasons to promote increasing cryonics, given the net expense this would likely come at. I don't think it's the worst investment in the world; certainly, there are worse ways to spend your money, but my concern is that as the great enclave of rationality, cryonics shouldn't be given as high of a priority as it does on LessWrong; it just doesn't deserve the status it has there.

[Arepo]

In a desperate effort to reduce the proliferation of venues for a single discussion, and to preserve it here where I'll actually be able to find it in future, I'm going to link (and in next post reply to) the associated Less Wrong thread here.
Thankfully only one person has tried to address anything relevant to the above discussion, so I can easily paste his reply here as well:

You know, "politics is the mindkiller" is not only about the conventional meaning of the word "politics". It is about tribes and belonging. Right now you are conflicted as a member of two tribes, and you may feel pressured to choose your loyalty, and protect your status in the selected tribe. Which is not a good epistemic state.
Now on the topic:

Cryonics uses up far more resources (than cancer treatment)

Do we have any specific numbers here? I think the values for "cancer treatment" would depend on the exact kind of treatment and also how long the patient survives, but I don't have an estimate.

If cryonics works, (family and friends) still suffer the same (grief).

Wrong alief. Despite saying "if cryonics works" the author in the rest of the sentence still expects that it does not. Otherwise, they would also include the happiness of family and friends after the frozen person is cured. That is what "if cryonics works" means.

Expressed this way, it is like saying (for a conventional treatment of a conventional disease) that whether doctors can or cannot cure the disease there is no difference, because either way family and friends suffer grief for having the person taken to the hospital. Yes, they do. But in one case, the person also returns from the hospital. That's the whole point of taking people to hospitals, isn't it?

trying to integrate [cryonics] better into society uses up time and resources that could have been spent on higher expectation activities

Technically, by following this argument, we also should stop curing cancer, because that money could also be used for Givewell charities and animal welfare. Suddenly, this argument does not sound so appealing. Why? I guess because cryonics is far; curing a cancer (your, or in your family) is near; and Givewell charities are also far but less so than cryonics. Removing a near suffering feels more important than removing a far suffering. That's human; but let's not pretend that we did a utilitarian calculation here, if we actually used a completely different decision procedure.

...but you already said that.

I think that this discussion is mostly a waste of time, simply because your opponent's true rejection seems to be "cryonics does not work". And then all is written under this alief. Under this alief the arguments make sense: if the cryonics does not work, of course wasting money on cryonics is stupid. But instead of saying this openly, there is a rationalization about why utilitarians should do this and shouldn't do that, by pretending that we have numbers that prove "utility(cancer cure) > utility(animal welfare) > utility(cryonics)". Also, when discussing cryonics, you are supposed to be a perfect utilitarian and willing to sacrifice your life for someone else's greater benefit, but you are allowed to make a selfish exception from perfect utilitarianism when curing your cancer.

For me, the only interesting argument was the one that a smart human in a pre-Singularity world is more useful than a smart human in a post-Singularity world, therefore curing smart people now is more useful than freezing them and curing them in future.

[Arepo]

Do we have any specific numbers here? I think the values for "cancer treatment" would depend on the exact kind of treatment and also how long the patient survives, but I don't have an estimate.

I tried a while ago to get a sense of the resource costs of cryonics from their websites, but they revealed little on the subject – IIRC they didn’t even reveal the actual charge for it. Now there seems to be a bit more info on the latter at least. The Cryonics Institute suggests an average of about US$80-90K, which it also claims ‘is generally covered by life insurance’. That’s going to depend on the country you’re in though, and presumably comes with heavy caveats – if you’re planning to have yourself frozen assuming you die from a common cause, insurers will have to charge you (slightly more than) the full cost of the suspension over the course of your expected lifespan. So I think we can still assume it’s you paying that cost.

On actual resource use I have no idea, and it’s relevant to how long they’ll be able to suspend you for – if by some future point the technology necessary to revive you hasn’t been invented, they’ll have to pull the plug to avoid/because of bankruptcy. Would be interesting for someone who knows more about the process to run a Fermi calc.

Cancer treatment costs are again non-trivial to find and will obviously depend on type of cancer, location etc. The best I could find from a quick Google is an abstract claiming US breast cancer treatments cost $US20 000 to $US100 000 over a person’s lifetime (which sounds like a funny statistic if ever I heard one – presumably there’s a strong positive correlation between the cost you pay over your lifetime for treatment and how much longer it makes your lifetime.

Anyway, at first glance, ‘cancer treatment’ in the US looks to be in the order of US$25,000, or 30 dead children cheaper than cryonics. Happy to be corrected on this.

But that may all be less relevant than resource use (or rather, the cost in diverted utilons), which I don’t know how to begin guesstimating, since the financial cost of a given resource is attached far more to its current availability than to how many utilons better management of that resource would have gained.

What makes me think cryonics would cost more in this sense is the ongoing power drain for running the freezers, whereas the cost of cancer treatment mainly comes from the human resources needed to develop and apply it, and while human resources are just as easily divertable as any other, we’re not about to hit peak HR, so the financialcost:utiloncost ratio of HR isn’t likely to get significantly worse in the next few decades.

Wrong alief.

‘Alief’? It’s like being back in the school playground…

Despite saying "if cryonics works" the author in the rest of the sentence still expects that it does not. Otherwise, they would also include the happiness of family and friends after the frozen person is cured. That is what "if cryonics works" means.

As Daniel said on LW, this reasoning only holds if all the relevant family and friends are also suspended and revived (and then the same reasoning applies to all them, and all their family and friends – ie all the socially networked people in the world).

We can still assume whatever proportion of grief from those who aren’t will still be felt - that is, (socially networked people who’re cryonically frozen)/(people in their social network), ie approximately 1, since the numerator drags the denominator up with it.

(It might actually be greater than 1 given that revivees now also get to feel grief for loved ones who weren’t suspended with them)

Technically, by following this argument, we also should stop curing cancer, because that money could also be used for Givewell charities and animal welfare. Suddenly, this argument does not sound so appealing.

It still sounds very appealing to me. This was actually raised by somervta/TSF above, and he dropped the criticism on the grounds that I was happy to follow the argument to this extent.

Am I really claiming that I’d turn down cancer treatment? No (well, maybe, for self-interested reasons – re-see this account of the unpleasant death it entails. And at some stage if the costs mounted up, maybe I'd have the conviction to put my philosophy over my instincts. But I’m happy to assume I wouldn’t for this discussion)

I might need to if we were discussing the merits of cryonics itself - and for the record, if we were, I would no more condemn someone who sought solace in being frozen than I would someone who’d seek cancer treatment for the same reason - but we’re actually discussing cryonics advocacy*. So the appropriate analogy would be ‘in a world where most people didn’t bother seeking cancer treatment, we should spend our efforts persuading them to do so, rather than putting them into Givewell charities and animal welfare (or AI research, come to that)’.

I don’t normally like reductio ad absurdum arguments for precisely the reason that they instafail if the person you’re discussing them with doesn’t think your conclusion is absurd, but I hope we can agree that that wouldn’t be advisable. After all, some people in this world don’t seek scientifically proven cancer treatment, and none of us think that doing so is a good use of our time.

And, because it’s not about personal cryonics but cryonics advocacy, it’s not about self-interest – it’s about trying to persuade people who don’t currently suffer enough from the thought of death to want to go for cryonics that they should do something highly non-optimal (from an ethical perspective) with their money that on a sensible (ie deflationary) view personal of personal identity gains them nothing.

I think that this discussion is mostly a waste of time, simply because your opponent's true rejection seems to be "cryonics does not work".

Given that nothing I've argued hinges on the success or failure of cryonics, this is a fanciful - and IMO revealing - effort to poison the well.

[somervta]

Some other relevant things said over at LessWrong:
ChristianKi points out that the number of LWers who have actually signed up for cryonics is comparatively small (source:http://lesswrong.com/lw/fp5/2012_survey_results/), However, JoshuaZ responds that LWers tend to be young and healthy, so might not sign up (now). Also, assigning high probability to a near singularity means some might not expect to die (or expect to be wiped out)

Gwern points out Yvains writing on this issue, and reccommends his and 'unnamed comments (http://squid314.livejournal.com/349656.html)

Eliezer Yudkowsky notes that he feels no grief when somebody is cryosuspended (really: "Seriously, I don't, so far as I can tell. I feel awful when I read about someone who wasn't cryosuspended." elaboration at http://lesswrong.com/lw/gbt/discussion_ ... cifia/8ald)

DaFranker also points out the dependency on "whether IsFrozen() is closer to IsDead() or to IsSleeping() (or IsOnATrip() or something similar implying prolonged period of no-contact) in the synaptic thought infrastructure {Caveat about his neurological knowledge} and experience processing of any person's brain."

DanielLC also says that the pain of grief isn't comparable to death, a note on which I would like to expand. It is my experience that LWers place considerable negative utility on death itself. An individuals death has negative terminal utility for them/us. (Remember that the utilitarianism being use is not strict act, rule or preference utilitarianism). Cryonics proposes a potential end to death itself (or at least a massive postponement), and this is a huge thing from their (our? I'm not really sure what pronouns I should be using here) viewpoint.


*Note: I don't think the OP wants this to turn into a discussion about the merits of the different moral theories, so if my language seems unclear, i can taboo and reduce.

[Arepo]

I'm a big fan of Yvain's stuff, so read that with interest, but I think the piece he links to in that blog post is more relevant still:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/bg0/cryonics_wi ... urrection/

Re your last comment I've laid out my main argument, so feel free to take this thread anywhere you're interested in it going.

It is my experience that LWers place considerable negative utility on death itself.

Yeah, it seems like a significant proportion do. And I think doing so necessarily entails poorly thought out ethics/metaphysics.

[somervta]

Cryonicists are absolutely right I think that getting frozen and unfrozen in the future really would feel just like what happens if you popped a pill to sleep and wake up later. But this continuity of consciousness is precisely what I think is illusory about personal identity. I don't see any difference from this and me being disintegrated 30 seconds from now and a copy of me made in the future. To the extent that I can emotionally divest myself from concern for future selves that are the result of reconstruction (those don't feel like me), I really don't assign more weight to them.

We agree - we just think there is something meaningful about the 'copy', that the copy is you in the same way you are now.
You should have interest in the copies of yourself for the same reason you should have interest in the cryosuspended fversion of yourself for the same reason you have interest in yourself now. You seem to think personal identity doesn't exist (we disagree), but I doubt you act this way, and this is partially what Villiam was talking about when he mentioned belief-alief divergence.

There's an intuitive difference between acting in the interests of myself next week and myself post-cryo

We maintain that this intuition is a false one, that there is no relevant difference between a perfectly preserved you that is revived and the you that will exist a few moments in the future. (this consideration is mitigated by your desire to remove the selfishness you have for yourself in the present or in the future.

I'd rather remove the self-regarding disposition with respect to the former! So I'm stuck acting selfishly, and wrongly, about certain things (investing more in my own medical care, recreational activities, etc.)

again, +1 for consistency. The practice of cryonics exists because of the lack of this desire in others.

In a very real sense, I'm accusing people who are motivated to pursue cryopreservation of having a totally arbitrary interest: they are going out of their way to make sure future people exist who are more like them...for what reason, exactly?

It isn't arbitrary, it's the same reason that they care about their present selves, as I hope I've shown. the reduction of identity to similarity of brain-states does not mean that identity itself disappears! I think that it is this:

if one holds the views I do about personal identity, and which the people at LessWrong generally speaking purportedly do as we

that is false, and creates the confusion.

There are utilitarian considerations where being the "same person" matters here. You can't just let someone's grandpa die, produce a totally different grandpa, and say "here you go! New grandpa!" Similarity matters in how others are psychologically bonded to that person, among other utilitarian-motivated factors.

Again, the argument is that it wouldn't be a totally different grandpa.

I care about good experiences being experienced and bad experiences not being experienced.

This is not all there is to LW metaethics.

I'm also an *eliminativist* about personal identity - I think we should drop discourse that claims that "I" exist in the future if I'm replicated, or that "I" am resurrected by a replication process carried out in the future, and use some new term that captures what deflationary views mean without distorting our intuitions by invoking traditional terms.

I am not, and I don't think many LWers are. I begin to think that this use of the term 'deflationary' is not useful - I don't think you mean what I thought you did by it.

Your Second post:


I have no reason to quibble with your cancer numbers. Background on cryonics: neuropresevation is generally <$100,000, although it goes as low as 30K for some organizations. Full-body is ~$200,000, but my understanding is that it's rare and I've seen the response "What's the point?" several times.


Are you unaware of the use and meaning of 'alief', or just objecting to it's application to you?

As Daniel said on LW, this reasoning only holds if all the relevant family and friends are also suspended and revived (and then the same reasoning applies to all them, and all their family and friends – ie all the socially networked people in the world).

Not necessarily - see Eliezer's (and other's) point about the difference between death and going away to a far-off land - cryonics is like this, even to unfrozen loved ones (assuming the same views on personal identity - a nontrivial assumption)

Again - the grief felt isn't the only consideration - the fact that someone doesn't have to die is incredibly important. I can't stress that enough.

Am I really claiming that I’d turn down cancer treatment?

I think the point was more like "are you really claiming people should turn down cancer treatment (and give the money to Givewell charities)

Your point is taken about cryonics advocacy, and as I'm not a cryonics advocate exactly, there's not much I can do other than to point out two things:
1. The death aspect I've already mentioned,
and 2. when people advocate cryonics (and this also applies to signing up), it's not about "cryonics V optimal charities" it's about "cryonics V relative waste". Cryonics is generally paid for through life insurance, which would generally not be anywhere near optimally used except if the deceased was an optimal charity person already. the cryonics money comes out of a different "box" than donation money - it's seen as money spent on oneself, or the time spent talking to someone is seen as time spent for something else (not this though - this is considered (by me) to be fun discussion/sharingviews/elucidating time)

[somervta]

also notice the view of identity Yvain lays out in the post you linked to (he calls it a consequentialist view of identity. It seems obviously distinct from your own, and is probably a lot closer to 'mainstream' LW views than anything you (or I for that matter - he's a much better writer than I) have said.