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This is like religious people who independently re-derive fallacious arguments for the existence of God (or the necessity to believe in him), and then present them to skeptics as if they were incontrovertible---things like the First Mover argument, the argument from design, or Pascal's Wager. Any agnostic/atheist worth his salt has heard every one of those arguments ad nauseam, and has definitive rebuttals to counter them.

And so it goes; your arguments are as old as cryonics. Here are the answers offered by the Alcor FAQ, in order:

- http://www.alcor.org/FAQs/faq01.html#evidence

- http://www.alcor.org/FAQs/faq05.html#met

- http://www.alcor.org/FAQs/faq07.html#overpopulation

To those interested in more detail, I recommend the Alcor FAQ (http://www.alcor.org/FAQs/), Chapter 9 of Engines of Creation (http://e-drexler.com/d/06/00/EOC/EOC_Chapter_9.html), and the World Transhumanist Association FAQ (http://www.transhumanism.org/resources/faq.html; search for the question "What is cryonics? Isn’t the probability of success too small?").

N.B. I am one of the signatories of the "Scientists' Open Letter on Cryonics" (http://www.imminst.org/cryonics_letter/) mentioned by Eliezer in the post.

Why exactly are the people of the future so eager to resurrect all these frozen corpses of people with no living family or friends to support them?

For some inexplicable reason, I have thus far only read two issues of Warren Ellis' Transmetropolitan: Issue #1, which is available free on the web, and an issue that talks about this.

Here's a description from Wikipedia, which I touched up a bit:

In the comic book Transmetropolitan, Revivals are people whose head was preserved in cryogenic stasis, only to be revived years later by a government program and given a cloned body. They are overwhelmed by the dystopian future in which they have awoken and distraught by the complete loss of every one of their friends and loved ones, and they often break down; they are generally ignored by society and are left to fend for themselves.

You should read this -- though probably not when you're feeling lonely -- because IMHO Ellis totally nails the likely emotional state of a person revived from cryonics. If you want to experience the thrill of being the only survivor of a tremendous holocaust that has claimed the life of every single person you've ever met, combined with the thrill of having your entire life experience rendered obsolete, get yourself cryogenically frozen and hope for revival. I, on the other hand, am either getting cremated or am donating my body to science.

> You should read this

Thats a good place to stop the sentence. Transmetropolitan is one of those things that everyone should try at least once.

That's really not much different than the situation a typical very old person lives in now. My grandmother is 95 and has found the world bewildering for decades now. She's a widow, and all of her formerly numerous friends are dead or senile. Her old neighborhood is gone, modern entertainment reflects attitudes that are alien to her, etc. She has descendants she sees sometimes, but some other people her age don't even have that. Yet we don't see them hurling themselves off of cliffs very often.

And computers only need how much RAM? Come now. Let the future folk figure out how to deal with my head on a platter. I'm just happy that I can finally get the internet on my cell phone.

Nobody says that future folk will raise the dead in 50 years or 100 years or 1000 years or 5000 years. If we haven't nuked the planet in 5000 years, don't you think it's possible that thawing a head might be as inexpensive as buying a cellphone?

Heck, kids on the street might come into the cryro-units, pick out a head and have it unfrozen for $5 just to watch the expression on our faces. Cheap thrills. But hey, if it means I'm alive again, I'll give the kids an expression to remember.

Just because we don't have the answers today, doesn't mean the answers won't arrive tomorrow.

Your conclusion is correct, however. Live for today.

The fact that it is the very finiteness of life that makes it valuable in the first place.

Just because Steve Jobs said it doesn't mean it's a fact, you know.

>> "eager to resurrect all these frozen corpses of people with no living family or friends to support them? Is the future such a utopia that not only have we solved overpopulation, but we're desperately looking to bring back long frozen bodies with severe medical problems?"

What if I am a cobol programmer, and they need me to fix the Year9999 bug?

Not to speak of history grad students looking for a thesis subject.

  Even in the super advanced future, presumably a complex procedure like reconstructing a human brain won't exactly be a cheap one.

So wait another thousand years. You're undead, you wont notice. If it ever becomes possible, it will one day become cheap.

  Is the future such a utopia that [x,y,z]

It might be. Why not stick around to find out? Why not help make it be such a place?

  The part that really strikes me as idealistic

Oh no, someone being idealistic!

  Not to mention the fact that it is the very finiteness of life that makes it valuable in the first place.

Well you'll probably die in the heat death of the universe or the big crunch, so whatever you do life is finite and therefore valuable. I disagree that its finiteness makes it valuable, however. Life isn't a market commodity where scarcity increases value, it's a personal one-off once-in-a-lifetime offer.

Lets see...

Value of my life (at least to myself): infinity,

Probability of revival: >0

Expected value = (probability of revival) * (value of my life) = infinity.

So... low odds are not a good excuse to not go for cryonics.

Next, who pays: The person being frozen. Its like a trust fund. Toss in a large one time sum and live off the interest. The interest on 120K at 4% annual compound interest (after inflation) is ~500 dollars/yr which should be enough to maintain what is basically a big freezer for a long time and note that that 4% is a very conservative figure and accumulating 120K is not a big deal for those in the upper middle class and above which is still a lot of people.

What he means by "death is not part of the plan" is that at least they are trying to live longer, even if the chances of success are slim.

Conclusion: Cryonics has the potential to be a valuable investment.

> Value of my life (at least to myself): infinity,

Really? Have any kids, a wife? Would you die for them? Would you gas people in order to survive? Is there any cause you would fight to the death for, other than pure survival?

Are you asking which infinity is larger?

If you would give up your life, voluntarily, for any reason at all, then it stands to reason that you do not value it infinitely - you value the thing for which you gave it up more.

I'm not sure if you're putting me on with your response.

A > B does not imply that B is finite. But ericb already said this.

I know about aleph, and I understand cardinalities.

There's no way that you value your life infinitely, while you value, say, your opposition to holocausts uncountably infinitely. Do you or ericb truly believe that this is the case, or are you putting me on?

Just because I know there are cardinalities of infinities doesn't mean that it makes sense to claim that the people use these values in their life calculations.

It's very simple, for example, to use arguments from the amount of money a person will accept for a more dangerous job, as byrneseyeview pointed out, to show that people value their lives as a finite number. If people valued their lives infinitely, they would accept no additional money for any increased risk of anything, ever.

Unless of course, people value money infinitely too, and they're doing some sort transfinite math in their heads. Which I think you'll agree is a bit surreal and total nonsense.

You can avoid this infinity crap by asking the OP how much debt he would saddle his wife and kids, or society in general, with to extend his life by an hour. If the value of his life in infinite, presumably he would leave his family destitute and bankrupt for the slightest increase in his lifespan.

So your argument is that the best possible thing you could do with a large sum of cash upon your demise is to gamble away on the vanishingly small chance that a very distant and almost magically technologically advanced society will "resurrect" you?

It's a matter of opportunity cost. What do you have to give up, in order to have this miniscule chance? Which is most valuable:

- putting your kids through college for sure

- financially assisting your still living loved ones for sure

- paying for expensive life saving surgery for someone who can't afford it for sure

- investing in what amounts to a lottery ticket that pays out only in a tiny percentage of potential future universes

Even if I was completely disinterested in the fate of the rest of humanity, I think I'd still choose to go out with a bang now, for sure, than to throw my hard earned cash into a futile attempt to keep me fresh in the freezer.

How is cryogenics any different than paying for expensive life saving surgery for someone who can't afford it?

(You're paying for expensive life saving surgery for yourself).

As of right now the promise of cryogenics is analogous to snake-oil and various forms of alternative medicine. Surgery is something that works, we know why it works, how it works, how to do it again and again, how to gage the probability of success in particular cases even. In other words surgery is something on par with science and engineering. Comparatively the promise of cryogenics is like science fiction and magic.

I'm all for people engaging in cryogenics, alternative medicine, snake-oils, gods and magic if they have the money and desire but these sort of silly arguments and rationalizations about them I do not understand at all.

Pascal's argument is fallacious because it equivocates between actual possibility and logical possibility. You are making the same fallacy, even given your shaky assumptions.

Another issue is that the idea of revival doesn't even make logical sense. What happens when two bodies with the same construction are revived? Which one has my consciousness?

Or think about it like this: an exact replicant of my body has been revived while I'm still alive. Obviously, the revived body does not have the same consciousness, since I didn't suddenly become conscious of living in two bodies or a different body. Why would this change by delaying revival until after I'm dead? And if it doesn't, why should I care?

So, I don't really see the case for cryonics. It seems to be flawed on both practical and logical grounds.

Your entire counter-argument is based on a Ship Of Theseus quandary about what "I" is, and not about the "practical" grounds.

It is not a ship problem. I'm talking about me being conscious of being alive. If a resurrected body does not contain my consciousness, as my thought experiment shows, then cryonics is pointless since it does not keep me conscious of being alive. If you still think it maps to the ship problem, see if you can exactly demonstrate the mapping.

It's weird that people don't seem capable of distinguishing between their own consciousness and someone else's consciousness.

The practical grounds point is made by others.

A bit more explanation why it doesn't map:

Given another living body constructed exactly the same as mine and in the same state, it still does not have my consciousness. However, physically speaking, both the replicant and my own body are identical, since particles do not have individuality, as Eliezer points out. The ship problem is a question of whether identity obtains, whereas identity is not a question in my thought experiment. Thus, the two do not map.

I understand your point but bringing ∞ or א-numbers into a non-mathematical discussion in a such hand-wavy fashion is really a form of fallacious argument (albeit unnamed as far as I know) and will almost certainly lead to even lower-quality discussion.

Value of my life (at least to myself): infinity,

I seriously doubt this. There are numerous activities -- smoking, eating delicious food, having risky sex, crossing the street -- that people routinely do despite the incremental risk of mortality. I've read that when you divide the extra money by the increased death risk (e.g. a $10K lump sum payment for a 1% chance of dying, as you'd get if, for example, you switch to higher-risk duties in a mining or lumber job), the average person values his own life at between $1 million and $10 million.

If you do spend all of your time on maximizing your probability of survival -- making money for medical care, reading medical journals in your free time, not doing anything that's really fun and slightly fatal -- I'd believe you. Otherwise, you suffer from cognitive dissonance.

That evaluation is taking into account the fact that death is inevitable within 120 years or so regardless of what you do. If you expected to live for 1000 years or more, you'd presumably value your life higher.

It's still a finite number, and unless the marginal utility of life goes up over time, it should be less than eight times the original number. So let's say $5 to $50 million. Still not infinite.

Sounds a lot like believing in Christ because it might be true, and good God what if it is?

Also, what if the revival process works but not perfectly, and you come out on the other end severely disabled? (Maybe they've gotten it to work on some people but not everybody, and they don't know which is which until they try). Factor that into the equation.. I don't know. I think I'm just going to try to make it to the singularity or at least to when this tech is more feasible.

Please see counterpoint to Pascal's Wager. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_Wager