[extropy-chat] Re: cryonics (was: Science and Fools)

[Eugen Leitl]

On Wed, Mar 23, 2005 at 12:55:52PM -0600, damien wrote:

> Precisely. I know Eugen and others are equally adamant that the contrary is 
> true and self-evident, which I find incomprehensible. It keeps coming back 

I'm not adamant. I have a set of cases which are self-consistent if followed
through. I realize the conclusions fly in the face of intuition, but there
they are.

> to this: if someone persuades me that in a trillion years or so, random 
> recurrence will generate an exact equivalent to me as I am at the moment, 

It can't happen by random chance. In fact, you'll need invasive
medical nanotechnology or destructive scanning (which means you're dead and
vitrified) to generate a sufficiently accurate equivalent.

The latter is default for cryonics -- where you have relatively little to
lose, considering the alternative outcomes. The former isn't yet here, so the
whole issue is for now academic.

> should I feel okay about someone blowing my head off right now? After all, 

1) is there a need to for that? 
2) do you trust the system to resume you downstream?
3) how much is this going to cost?

If there's no need, I wouldn't do it. If there's a need, I would do it if
I can trust I can be resumed. The issue of cost is also there. How much
resource drain can you take now, especially if the outcome probability error
range is high?

> "I'll" be alive again (or still alive, or something) in the remote future. 
> Bullshit, sez I. Blow your own damn head off.
> 
> Given this assessment, how could *any* gathering of judges convince me 
> otherwise?
> 
> This rejection is not necessarily to be conflated with a cryonics procedure 
> that recovers me from vitrification, perhaps even by making cell-by-cell 
> copies in situ. I do see the slippery slope here, which is why I'm not 

In absence of magic, these are your only options.

> altogether persuaded of the merits of most cryonics-style programs. True, 

I'm not entirely persuaded by current cryonics, but only because the average
case suspension quality sucks so much. Oh, and the absence of validation, of
course, which makes it largely faith-based -- but we'll get that validation
within the next decades.

> it will be wonderful for everyone *else* to have a copy of me around, :) 
> but what's in it for *me*?

It is possible to be instantiated multiply, if tightly synchronized, but
that's a carefully maintained state, and easily destroyed (causing a
split-brain condition -- this is something occuring in spatially distributed
HA clusters (keywords: split-brain, heartbeat, stonith).

You can of course run an introspective AI in above configuration, and ask it
questions. The outcome is 100% predictable.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
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