nova

Yes. I guess it's a psychological mechanism to cope with the horror, like Stockholm syndrome.

Well, that the most horrible thing I've read in a long time.

So we'll have to agree to disagree that fucking death is a gift.

> We don't know what the mind is

We're pretty sure the mind is what the brain does.

> nor how it works.

We don't need to, for this purpose. This is a low-level dump of all the information stored, to enable (much) later analysis.

As I said, current cryonics is perhaps too crude. But the idea itself is not unsound. IF current procedures are not detailed enough to preserve the details then perhaps throwing a few millions into research to find better cryoprotectants or procedures could solve the problem.

> We've only recently discovered that your unconscious self does stuff before your conscious self decides to do it

I don't see the relevance. Your unconscious self is still made of neurons and other material stuff, not magic.

> As it stands today, cryonics is an act of faith, not science.

Current cryonics is perhaps too crude to work, or you can cast doubt on the long-term sustainability of the organizations, or whatever, but that doesn't make it an act of "faith", at least not any religious sense.

It's an act of decision making under some very big uncertainties, but it's not unscientific. If you accept the physicalist tenet that the brain is a machine, that the mind is the result of information processing, that there is no unmaterial "ghost" an so on then trying to preserve the "state variables" of that meat computer with vitrification is perfectly reasonable, specially compared with the only current alternative, total annihilation.

> Who's to say that an "early" death is not in fact a gift for the living?

You've got to be kidding. (A very dark kind of humor, I guess)

This will only be a problem if technology is monopolised by a few. So another reason to worry about intellectual property.

I recommend Robert Kass' article "Statistical inference: the big picture" for a related point of view on that issue, which should be obvious but it's easily forgotten in practice.

I feel you.

The deathism of this thread, on a site read by technically-oriented people, where problably many agree with the computational theory of mind really makes me lose hope in the human kind.

It's not thinking that cryonics is not worth it. That's a reasonable position. I'm undecided myself. It's that response, that fighting death is somehow unethical or naive. That Death is Good, Part of the Cosmos, Don't You Dare, whatever.

Man, talk about Stockholm syndrome. Well, fuck it:

>>> DEATH IS BAD. <<<<

Yes it is. We die because we don't know how to avoid it, not because is good, natural, right or proper. Our bodies are machines that we don't know how to repair. That's all. We may invent lies to make ourselves feel better and maybe that's a natural strategy to cope with the HORROR that is death, but we are still fooling ourselves, and most likely keeping the problem from being solved.

Well the obvious and well-know difference is that land is naturally scarce, but patents are just artificial scarcity.

But it doesn't really matter. What matters is: Does it work?.

Private land works. Mostly. With a few caveats. There are a few awful stories about this also. Usually "goverments and friend monopolists" are to blame, too.

Do patents work? Not sure. Sometimes maybe. In mathematics (software patents) they don't. In medicine we see this problem, and many others.

Are they the best system we could conceive? Hardly.

No. Research would still be done by private companies. But we would pay them directly with money, instead of with an artificial monopoly. It's not free market anyway.

These companies could focus on pure research, and leave manufacturing to others. Their income would be more predictable too.

Cost could be shared among countries, proportional to their wealth. Research is very expensive, but it's a fixed cost. No reason to reinvent the wheel twice.

No more "convincing" doctors with "gifts" to use their products. No more money wasted on publicity. No more fake studies to boost sales.

Effort could be aimed towards deadly, rare or specially awful diseases, instead of profitable ones.

I guess patent lawyers would lose.

This system is far from perfect, as we know there is a lot of corruption in getting government contracts. But I still think it would be an improvement on what we have today. Medical research is already very difficult. No reason to make things worse with an outdated, inefficient and sometimes just outright evil funding mechanism.

And this is why medical research should be directly funded by goverments, exactly like they fund military research, the cost shared among the developed nations, and directly throw away the patent system.

What kind of capitalism are you talking about?

Patents are government-granted monopolies. Nothing further from free markets.

This is the real, real, real death:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information-theoretic_death

The other "deaths" are just technical shortcomings due to lack of research.

> Under this scenario, I don't see why anyone would develop new plants.

I wonder how anyone does anything at all without receiving a fucking de jure monopoly first. Opening a store? Not without exclusive license from the city first!

This is madness.

More IP craziness.

...

"Death is bad," said Harry, discarding wisdom for the sake of clear communication. "Very bad. Extremely bad. Being scared of death is like being scared of a great big monster with poisonous fangs. It actually makes a great deal of sense, and does not, in fact, indicate that you have a psychological problem."

...

It doesn't help that most research papers are behind paywalls, or in forgotten books long out of print but still in copyright (and owned by the publisher, not the author), buried and not scanned theses, or technically published in patents but then also unusable by anyone interested.

About the first ones: Unless you are a libertarian transhumanist, I guess.

> Civil Disobedience means accepting that what you are doing is illegal and dealing with the consequences. Period.

Why? So they can thoroughly stomp you and nobody else get the idea?

So many moral demands for the little guy and not for the huge all-powerful blind mad machine that crushed him.

Exactly.

Acknowledgement of authorship and perhaps some very limited temporal monopoly on commercial use only, perhaps 10 or 15 years since publication.

That's the difference between encouraging creativity and protecting parasitical monopolies like that of paywalls' owners.

I don't understand this.

Big companies are good at finding loopholes. They have the size advantage. Taxes and regulations may slow big companies, but they completely kill small businesses. It's the old proposal to tax the rich and powerful, which doesn't work for the obvious reasons.

I wonder how many people have died because of inefficiencies caused by the patent system, or just the whole healthcare thing. I don't know if the medical patent landscape is a wasteland like the software one, but probably it's not the best we could do.

Just a thought: abolish the patent system. Pay the pharmaceutical research companies directly, by the State, like we do with military research or civil works. I prefer free markets but anything touched by patents is not a free market either.

The cost could be shared by the rich countries. Research is expensive but is a fixed cost. Manufacturing could be done by the free market, because all drugs would be generic. Rare diseases could be researched instead of just profitable ones. We would avoid all the "convincing" doctors to buy expensive patented drugs. Some companies would be specialized in research, others in manufacturing. Developing countries wouldn't have to be worried about patent fees they can't afford.

IP lawyers would lose, I guess.

> When these stop, you're dead.

Assuming as hypothesis that cryonics or some other technology manage to preserve all the information about your mind processes and that we can reinstantiate them in a new substrate, what is exactly the difference?

Exactly what property of these processes is lost when they stop, if hypothetically cryonics stores all the information? There is nothing else!

I think that we have an intuition of having some kind of "ineffable essence", but that's an illusion.

(I could accept that current cryonics is insufficient and that some information is lost in the process, but that is a completely different argument.)

The point is that "you" are already a slightly modified clone of "you" one hour ago. Personal identity is in the causal continuity, not in being made of the "same" atoms, which doesn't even make physical sense.

So the true death is the information-theoretic death. Does current cryonics technology prevent that? I don't know, but it's a better shot than the alternative.

> Death is not a failure of the design. It's an integral part of it.

And that's Stockholm syndrome at its maximum expression.

People also die because of late or never materialized medical technology. We just prefer that people die from inaction (because is "normal") than from mistakes. This may be psychologically attractive because we avoid SEEING all the blood and dead bodies, but probably not the best way to minimize death and suffering.

Of course this is nothing new (Economic version: "That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen"). Just another cognitive bias.

There is some more-or-less optimal middle ground between too little and too much regulation, but I don't think we're on it now. In fact, maybe it would be worthwhile to have a two-tier system, one for ordinary medical devices, another for experimental "this will probably kill you but perhaps you have nothing to lose" situations.

> Based on inflation, these books should be about $80-90 per volume now (if we assume that $22 in 1977 was a reasonable price).

And based on the fact that books and other "intellectual" goods may be expensive to create, but only as a one-time investment, and all the years that have passed they should be dirt cheap by now.

In fact, they should be in the public domain, if we had something resembling a fair copyright law.

It's funny, because intellectual "property" is actually the opposite of real property: a state-mandated monopoly, long ago useful because it only was for a few years (and it only mattered to publishers who owned presses), but now a hindrance after decades of lobbying for extensions.

I wouldn't call that communist, but it's not a free economy either.

Who's the biggest state-run-economy advocate, I wonder?

Funny, because Hal didn't had a bug. It did what it did interpreting the orders that humans gave it. Just unintended consequences.

Which is kinda the point about AI safety. We don't really know what we want, we sure as hell don't know how to formalize it, and we're lucky that we don't know how to create a real AI because otherwise it could surprise us in a very ugly way, just lawfully following the plan we gave it.

And that's exactly the reason why intellectual "property" is actually the opposite of real property. It's a restriction on the ways you can use your things, a limitation of your freedoms. Every patent granted, one more thing you can't do even if you rediscovered by yourself, one bit of liberty chipped away.

Maybe one can be OK with this, but it's time to call things by their name or we'll never sort out this mess.

So maybe after all there isn't so much difference between software and hardware patents. I think it's just that few people have a factory to get bitten by hardware patents, but everyone has a computer so it's much easier both to churn out soft patents and to feel the pain from them.