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For me, cryonics is yet another attempt to fill the God-shaped hole in society. You need to learn to accept your mortality; even if cryonics worked freezing yourself wouldn't save you from a bullet or a skydiving accident or anything else.
That said, I'd put your chances at far, far less than 1%. Most cryogenic places have trouble simply avoiding going bankrupt, and even those that stay afloat seem wildly mismanaged and/or incompetent. Best case your head will be frozen to a bunch of tuna cans like Ted Williams.
I will "accept" my inevitable mortality at Heat Death, assuming we can't find a solution for that minor problem.
I genuinely cannot understand the drive to "accept" what might well be the worst possible thing to happen to you, personally, or the people you love. Death sucks, we should be doing everything possible to avoid it. If it's "inevitable", we should first begin by trying even harder to actually check if that's actually the case.
Is cryonics the optimal arrangement? Probably not. But we're not spending the majority of global GDP on curing aging, which is what a sensible civilization would be doing.
You can do quite a bit to reduce your risk of being shot or dying in a physical misadventure.
But the correct solution, in my humble opinion, is to push back even harder against death. We need to figure out a way to scan and upload human brains, alongside means of running our minds in-silico. Once that's an option, we can trivially ensure that nothing short of vacuum decay or the end of the universe poses a meaningful risk. That might not be the platonic ideal of immortality, but I'll take living so long that I need scientific notation as a decent consolation prize.
Only if you assume a priori that there is no afterlife, or even if there isn't, you assume that there are actual ways to significantly extend life or outright prevent death.
That's not cheating death, that's making a shitty copy of yourself but it isn't even you. How does that avoid death whatsoever?
Again, this is all madness caused by people who have rejected God and are trying to replace Him with themselves (or technology, or any number of substitutions). It is the destiny of all men to die, kings and vagabonds alike, and you cannot and will not escape it. Run from it, cry about it, rage against the dying of the light, squander your children's inheritance trying to defeat it, but you will always fail. And even worse, you'll make the life you do get to live worse by worrying needlessly about what you cannot change.
In your post a few weeks ago you talked about how you oneshotted yourself with an AI image of what your children could have looked like. Even from a purely secular point of view, children are the preferred method of achieving immortality for most of history. If you want immortality, have a big family. That option is closed off to me due to infertility, but I've made peace with that. But instead of chasing useless pipedreams of immortality, do something that will leave your indelible mark on the future of the world.
These are pretty reasonable assumptions to make. Besides, as a doctor, my job usually involves extending life or preventing death. We could do better at it, but that's an engineering challenge, not a logical impossibility.
It's not that I "assume" such things, but rather that no life after death is the null hypothesis, and religious thinking to the contrary is hardly convincing. We might all reincarnate as Boltzmann Brains after eons, but I still prefer concrete, present-day solutions.
And why exactly would it have to be a "shitty" copy? The human body, including the human brain, runs on the laws of physics. The laws of physics can be simulated on a computer to arbitrary accuracy. A game of chess is still a game of chess, all relevant parameters are conserved whether using wood, plastic or bits. No reason we can't say the same for human brains.
My conception of personal identity is pretty flexible, but it is in no way stretched beyond breaking point by the notion that a digital copy of me is - for my purposes - interchangeable with me. In many aspects, it's nothing but a straight upgrade. If I want to be stronger, faster, more durable, more intelligent, it helps to be an entity in-silico rather than a meat computer.
I mean, all well and good, but your attempt to convince me that I'm making unreasonable assumptions is rather undercut by the fact that you're making far bigger ones. God is a really poor candidate for ontological simplicity, and even worse as health insurance.
Like, the reasons to believe in your God are not very convincing, and even I concede that we might be unavoidably hard-capped by ever diminishing supply of negentropy in the universe. If he's real, and also timeless, I'm sure he won't mind if he was to wait a few quadrillion years for my immortal soul as opposed to this century. Since Christians believe in medical care and extending healthy lifespan, there are no downsides I can see.
Having children is better than nothing, when it comes to leaving your mark on the world. But it is still a pale imitation of actually staying alive and healthy to tell people about it. I do intend to have kids, and I'm sorry to hear about your fertility issues. But doesn't change the fact that my kids would also like to have me around too. When I talk about life extension, it's not just me being selfish, but thinking about my parents, and my grandfather, and all the other humans alive who would like to keep on being with their loved ones.
I am rather familiar with the technical challenges of human life extension. When I claim that it is possible, I can only hope it is a semi-informed claim. This is not at odds with it being incredibly difficult, which it is. Difficult isn't insurmountable, we went to the moon and will be back. That was as much of a "pipe dream" for almost as much of recorded human history.
It was the destiny of all men to experience half of their children dying before adulthood. You couldn't save them, whether you were a king or a pauper. And yet, look at us today. Soon, any death might well be the same kind of tragedy that is the passing of a child. We can all live for so much.
Okay, thought experiment time. Let's say some friendly aliens drop by and they can do this. They produce a digital copy that is 100% identical to your brain state at the time they created it. Total fidelity. "Look!" they say, "this is you! Now step into the disintegration chamber, we'll just dispose of this meat body and leave digital you the only existing entity".
Would you do it? Would you really think "well sure, fine, me in this body being killed isn't any big deal, digital copy me is just as good" or would you go "hang on, that's going to kill me! That copy exists alongside me but isn't me!"
Third option:
Object, on the grounds that I see no good reason for the biological me to be killed right away.
Both the copy of myself and the original are just as valid. Killing even one of them for no good reason is murder, and I would be just as pissed about it if my perfect clone was going in the bin, and since he's also a perfect clone of me, he would object vociferously to my death.
I can only presume that super advanced aliens are a stand-in for something like destructive mind uploading, where the brain is... destroyed in the process of mind uploading. Like digitizing a shitty paperback without caring too hard about keeping the spine of the original intact. At that point, the "murder" is no longer murder, because there was simply no choice - bio-SMH (unless biologically immortal) will die without undergoing the procedure, and likely soon, which is why he'd sign up for that process. That would be a sad fact about engineering limitations, rather than sadistic aliens trying to make a point about personal identity.
As a matter of fact, I might even prefer that my perfect digital clone be the one saved in my place. He can copy himself on a hard-drive a few times to make up for the loss. Bio me just isn't that lucky or as durable, and is already limited by the tyranny of biology.
The point about the perfect copy and you both existing, before you are at the point of death, is that the perfect copy is a copy and not you. It is not the continuation of personality and experience of the biological you, as there is continuity between the sleeping you of last night and the waking you of today and the you of tomorrow. So if it is murder to kill you once the copy is made, then even if the copy is made when you are on the point of biological death and can no longer continue to be kept alive because you are too sick, injured, or aged to remain alive, then that copy is not continuation of you, the dying person. It's still a copy. Real you dies when your body and brain (and mind) dies, even if the copy thinks "okay, this is Me".
But I think there's little agreement between those who think a perfect copy is the same as them, and those who think the biological entity is them and a copy is only a copy.
This is begging the question. I mean, I'll grant that once the copy is made, the digital version and the biological version are not the same person, but that doesn't mean they can't have been the same person. From the perspective of the a-week-before-the-procedure SMH, he anticipates waking up to both sets of experiences.
Counter-thought-experiment: the aliens need to actually open up the skull, remove the brain, and do some very detailed but non-destructive inspections to make aforesaid digital copy, but they don't quite have enough mastery of human biological processes to put it back in. Instead they keep the brain in a life-support tank, feeding it exactly the sense data the digital copy would have received and treating the output the same way the digital copy's output would be. They also put the digital copy in a small computer that they put in the vacant brainspace, hook up to the body's nervous system, and seal the skull back up before waking the person. They don't tell people that they do this because they expect humans to act weird about it and don't think the distinction is relevant.
Which is the real person, the brain-in-a-jar that thinks it's a digital copy, or the computer-piloting-a-meat-body that thinks it's been scanned but otherwise unaffected?
I see you have watched the famous animePuella Magi Madoka Magica .
(Not quite! But surprisingly close.)
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