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newt0311

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.

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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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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

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