CryoNet #32977 - #32982

CryoNet - Mon 25 Oct 2010

    #32977: realism [Ettinger]
    #32978: Re: Cosmism [Mike Perry]
    #32979: Re: CryoNet #32974 - #32976 [Gerald Monroe]
    #32980: Re: CryoNet #32974 - #32976 [Gary Kline]
    #32981: Re: Platt's article [RAMole]
    #32982: responses [Charles in Arizona]

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Message #32977
From: [email protected]
Date: Sun, 24 Oct 2010 13:12:34 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: realism

Charles Platt has offered his reasons for thinking that cryonicists are  
over-optimistic and that the outlook is bleak. I think he is wrong on several  
counts. Rather than enumerating these, I'll just try very briefly to 
summarize  the  situation and outlook as they appear to me.
 
1. The main reason for rejection is not scientific or practical skepticism, 
 but just cultural inertia. This is clear for several reasons. For one 
thing, the  misimpression that mammals have already been successfully frozen and 
revived did  not result in a wave of sign-ups. Also, a variety of sources 
indicate that, even  with guaranteed success, sign-ups would still be few. 
Also, look at the cases  where reasonably well informed people declined 
cryonics for reasons other than  likelihood of success, e.g. Pohl, Asimov, Clarke, 
Heinlein, and some of my  relatives. 
 
In addition to cultural inertia, there is simple laziness or/and stupidity. 
 Think of smoking. Breaking the habit had little or no social stigma, had 
plenty  of main-line medical backing, and yet it took many years just to 
reduce the  incidence of the habit substantially in the U.S. (In Asia apparently 
just about  everybody still smokes.) 
 
An important element of the cultural inertia, or cultural legacy, is the  
fear factor--fear of betraying one's commitments to a "higher" value, as well 
as  fear of what the  neighbors will think. People mostly don't want  
radical change--just the present, gold plated and chocolate covered. 
 
Does this mean that motivation is hopeless? Far from it. Human stupidity is 
 formidable but not invincible. We are gaining much too slowly still, but 
gaining  none the less.
 
2. Financial viability. At CI, the marginal cost of a new patient is  
(relying on memory) around $20,000 lump sum. Talk of inflation is misleading. We  
are not subject to most of the vagaries of inflation, and some costs have  
decreased. Initially we estimated liquid nitrogen at around $1,000 per year 
per  patient, and this held up for many years. More recently we have seen 
sharp  improvements, with patients in our newest cryostats costing only around 
$100 per  year per patient. Nitrogen was initially considered a major cost, 
but now is a  minor cost. In event of unforeseen emergency I  believe we 
can count on  enough members pitching in with work or money or both.
 
Alcor has made many mistakes in my opinion, and wasted a lot of money, and  
I agree that LEF is unreliable as a source of future donations. But Alcor 
still  has a relatively large number of rich people, including several 
big-rich, and  large donations are still coming. I don't see them going down.
 
Remember that there are millions of millionaires in the U.S.--millions of  
people who could afford cryonics with negligible cost to their estates. Some 
of  these will come around sooner or later. As a gamble--expected value vs. 
 cost--you can't beat it.
 
Robert Ettinger

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Message #32978
Date: Sun, 24 Oct 2010 11:20:34 -0700
From: Mike Perry <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: Cosmism
References: <[email protected]>

 From Eugen Leitl: 
http://transvision2010.wordpress.com/2010/08/19/transvision-2010-presentation-by-eugen-leitl/:

>Thus, the core problem in cryonics is the absence of a philosophical 
>and moral basis for cryonics and the accompanying ethics and dogma 
>required to enforce it.


David Stodolsky comments:

>This overlooks cosmism, which does provide a basis for cryonics:
>
>http://sites.google.com/a/cosmism.info/cosmism/what-is-cosmism
>
>
>Unfortunately, some work on cosmism by transhumanists have distorted 
>the meaning of that worldview.

The article David refers to is an encouraging, cryonics-friendly 
summary of cosmism. Cosmism got started in Russia, its principal 
founder being Nikolai Fedorov (name variously spelled), who d.1903. 
So cosmism has ostensibly been going for more than a century in its 
homeland, however conditions were tough there for a long time, which 
no doubt impeded its growth. In the U.S. and elsewhere similar 
philosophies and movements have arisen and are growing. Some websites 
of other groups that attempt to address the idea of a "philosophical 
and moral basis" for transhumanist ideas and projects including cryonics are:

Society for Universal Immortalism: http://www.universalimmortalism.org
Terasem Movement Transreligion: http://www.terasemfaith.org/html/faqs.html
Turing Church [very recent, don't think it has its own website yet 
but try this]: http://www.slideshare.net/giulioprisco/transpirit2010
Society for Venturism: http://www.venturist.org

MP

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Message #32979
References: <[email protected]>
From: Gerald Monroe <[email protected]>
Date: Sun, 24 Oct 2010 13:27:26 -0500
Subject: Re: CryoNet #32974 - #32976

--20cf3001b83f4b8fa904936108e8

To Charles in Arizona : most of your points are probably factually correct.
 But the question is : what are the alternatives?  It is estimated that a
touch over 100 billion people have ever lived.  Out of those, at least 95
billion have already died, with less than 100 people ever cryopreserved.
 Unless you propose to found a new cryonics organization, it looks like your
fate might be the same as nearly all of humanity.  I'm sure many of those 95
billion people feared their deaths, even before human language existed.
 Many of those humans probably lived rich, memorable lives the memories of
which are gone forever from this realm.

Also, your attitude is wrong.  Death is not a mild, far off event.  It's a
terrible storm driven backed up by the unavoidable laws of thermodynamics
and entropy, with minions that do include "regulators, legislators, judges,
police, hospital administrators, coroners".  The handful of cryonics
organizations are comparable to the few human survivors of the last ice age
huddling together in a cave sharing warmth against this awful storm outside.
 Even if Alcor and CI and the others had bigger budgets this would not
change the problems much.

Anyways, your attitude is that those who bring more stuff with them when
they enter the cave should receive preferential treatment and we should
throw out some of the poorer individuals out into the cold, because it isn't
'profitable' to care for them.  Even if the resources are there to preserve
them, and they paid enough to cover most of the costs.  In a desperate
enough situation, perhaps your attitude would be pragmatic, but it strikes
me as simply wrong.

Your attitude also ignores the real costs of cryonics.  With any luck, they
are significantly lower than the sticker price of the fees charged.  I don't
know what these are, but they are the costs of transport, the preservation
team, the chemicals, and the cost of adding a small amount of liquid
nitrogen to a tank for at least a century.  Rudi Hoffman that the latest
chemicals are very expensive, which is why Alcor has raised the cost of a
neuropreservation to $85k. However, hopefully, these fees that Alcor charges
and has had to raise over the years leave an adequate buffer that will keep
them afloat until something better comes along.

There is reason for optimism.  Alcor has kept patients frozen for nearly 40
years.  A reasonable guess is that within another 100 years, either the
technology to do revivals will exist or we will be close enough to such
technology that the society of the future will see preserving cryonics
patients as a much higher priority.  Sure, a few scientists know the tools
are physically possible today, but the majority of the population does not.


A good example that some here will remember : how many people were
interested in space travel before the Mercury spacecraft and the moon
landings?  An educated person could have predicted manned spaceflight in the
1930s, all the precursor technology was there and the mathematics all lined
up.

Even in this less than ideal world, if you do everything right you probably
have a better than even chance of getting your frozen memories into a future
that can appreciate them.  You are correct that paying $2 a day isn't enough
to maximize your odds.  Just do that and your odds are probably lower. You
have to keep yourself in good shape to lessen the chance that you die
suddenly from heart failure.  Pay for lots of medical tests, including
probably those 'unnecessary' MRIs and imaging tests to spot possible
aneurysms and tumors and other nasty surprises.  Make as much money as you
can, and save as much as you can without unduly compromising your lifestyle.
 When you become older or sicker, move to a place as close as possible to
the preservation lab of the cryonics organization you are a member of.  Have
a means to call for help, and try to work somewhere or surround yourself
with relatives or people who can call for help if your body fails suddenly
and unexpectedly.  Once you develop a terminal illness, move into a nursing
home or hospice that has a relationship with the cryonics folks.

And have more money remaining after death than the minimum fee.  Donate a
chunk to the organization keeping you suspended, and set up one of those
lichenstein trusts to provide for your reanimation.  If you don't have a ton
of money, maybe going to work for one of the cryonics organizations directly
just might improve your chances.

Do all this, and the odds are probably 'better than even'. (greater than
50%) Looking at a cause of death table for the U.S. population, most of the
causes are ones that would not result in a sudden, totally unexpected death.
 Also, most causes of death do not destroy the brain.  Since no-one in a
reasonably well funded cryonics organization has ever thawed in ~40 years,
the odds on the back end of surviving a century are probably pretty good.
 Even if your preservation is not perfectly performed, with perhaps a delay
of a few hours, so long as the synapses are still mostly present it is
plausible that a revival could be done.  We do know that information is
stored in a manner in the brain that involves massive duplication of data,
and degradation of memories is usually fairly graceful.  (neurological
disease often damages the areas of the brain needed to access memory data,
not necessarily the memories themselves, which is why Alzheimer's patients
near death can still have a 'lucid day'  where they apparently recall
significant amounts of information)  A molecular scan of even a heavily
damaged brain should recover a tremendous amount of information.

Note I haven't formally calculated the probability because a small change in
assumptions would greatly affect the final result.  Also, these events are
not independent of each other.  For example, for several reasons the
probabilities of different causes of death for the general population are
not the same as the odds for the average person who is a signed up for
cryonics.

--20cf3001b83f4b8fa904936108e8

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Message #32980
Date: Sun, 24 Oct 2010 11:26:25 -0700
From: Gary Kline <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: CryoNet #32974 - #32976
References: <[email protected]>

On Sun, Oct 24, 2010 at 09:00:02AM -0000, CryoNet wrote:
> Message #32975
> Date: Sat, 23 Oct 2010 20:55:47 -0700
> Subject: A feature that won't appear in Cryonics magazine-1
> From: Charles in Arizona <[email protected]>
> 
	[[ ... ]]
> 
> Does this sound unduly pessimistic? I think you would have to be
> unduly optimistic to think so.
> 
> ================
> 
> End of "A feature that won't appear in Cryonics magazine."
> 

	Neither optimistic nor pessimistic to me.  Rather, pragmatic.
> 

-- 
 Gary Kline  [email protected]  http://www.thought.org  Public Service Unix
    The 7.90a release of Jottings: http://jottings.thought.org/index.php
                           http://journey.thought.org

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Message #32981
From: [email protected]
Date: Sun, 24 Oct 2010 16:40:15 EDT
Subject: Re: Platt's article

Charles Platt raises funding questions that are disturbing. In partial  
answer I suggest:
 
Cost Cutting. Alcor charges $150,000 and CI only $28,000. Perhaps there are 
 ways Alcor costs could approach CI's. My impression is that Alcor enjoys  
generous funding from LEF and concentrates on improving its services instead 
of  cutting their costs. Possibly a group examining cost/benefit and 
efficiencies  could bring cost down without harming quality. Of course an Alcor 
contract may  include standby or other services CI does not provide, but the 
five-times  difference in cost does seem to offer room for trimming the 
higher number. But  I'm a CI member so I really don't know about Alcor.
 
Getting more rich businessmen into cryonics by lecturing at Rotary and  
Kiwanis groups. They meet weekly and need speakers, and they are composed of  
mostly-older businessmen. (Have *I* tried? Yes. The local Rotary said no. A  
Kiwanis group said yes, but called two weeks later to say they had 
discovered  they had too few members and therefore dissolved! Maybe I should take the 
hint,  but I'll try again.)
 
Alan Mole
 
 
 
 


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Message #32982
Date: Sun, 24 Oct 2010 18:46:36 -0700
Subject: responses
From: Charles in Arizona <[email protected]>

Bob Ettinger writes:

"Remember that there are millions of millionaires in the U.S.--millions of
people who could afford cryonics with negligible cost to their estates. Some
of  these will come around sooner or later."

Thank you Bob. This is perfect. Now everyone can see that I was not
just making this stuff up. Many people in cryonics really do think
this way.

Gerald Monroe writes:

"your attitude is that those who bring more stuff with them when
they enter the cave should receive preferential treatment and we should
throw out some of the poorer individuals out into the cold, because it isn't
'profitable' to care for them."

Well, uh, yes, that is my attitude. And at the end of the article I
applied this principle to myself. I do think my cryonics arrangements
should be paid for by me, not partly by some other people, now or in
the future.

Gerald also asks, "What's the alternative?" to the current situation.
Well, Alcor could double its dues and fees and lose half its
membership. I think this would be a good thing for the organization.
It survived perfectly well at a smaller size, and could continue to do
so, on a more fiscally prudent basis. Those who leave Alcor can always
join CI, and they would save money even at current rates. Moreover if
Alcor became more clearly fiscally prudent, it might attract more
wealthy members. There is certainly room for an expensive organization
providing genuinely first-class service, and a cheaper organization
providing no-frills service.

--Charles Platt

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