Cry­on­ics: the low-temperature preser­va­tion of humans and ani­mals that can no longer be sus­tained by con­tem­po­rary med­i­cine until resus­ci­ta­tion may be pos­si­ble in the future.

When one dis­cusses cryonics, topics as diverse as futur­ol­ogy, med­i­cine, tech­nol­ogy and phi­los­o­phy are debated. A few weeks ago a num­ber of high–profile blog­gers, headed by the excel­lent Over­com­ing Bias, have been doing just that. Here are a few posts in the conversation:

We Agree: Get Froze (Robin Hanson, Overcoming Bias)

Even with mod­ern anti-freezes, freez­ing does lots of dam­age, per­haps more than what­ever else was going to kill you. But bod­ies frozen that cold basi­cally won’t change for mil­len­nia. […] Since most folks who die today have an intact brain until the rest of their body fails them, more likely than not most death vic­tims today could live on as (one or more) future ems. And if future folks learn to repair freez­ing dam­age plus what­ever was killing vic­tims, vic­tims might live on as ordi­nary humans.

Cold Spouses (Bryan Caplan, Library of Eco­nom­ics and Liberty)

One unpleas­ant issue in cry­on­ics is the “hos­tile wife” phe­nom­e­non. The authors of this arti­cle know of a num­ber of high pro­file cry­oni­cists who need to hide their cry­on­ics activ­i­ties from their wives and ex-high pro­file cry­oni­cists who had to choose between cry­on­ics and their rela­tion­ship. We also know of men who would like to make cry­on­ics arrange­ments but have not been able to do so because of resis­tance from their wives or girl­friends… As a result, these men face cer­tain death as a con­se­quence of their partner’s hostility.

You Only Live Twice (Eliezer Yudkowsky, Overcoming Bias)

Hated Because It Might Work (Robin Hanson, Overcoming Bias)

The Best Sen­tence I Read Yes­ter­day (Tyler Cowen, Mar­ginal Revolution)

[On cry­on­ics] my cur­rent view is this: one’s atten­tion is extremely scarce and lim­ited, as are one’s affil­i­a­tions.  Inso­far as you have the lux­ury of think­ing “big­ger thoughts,” those thoughts should be directed at help­ing oth­ers, not at help­ing one­self. […] Fur­ther­more the uni­verse (or mul­ti­verse) may be infi­nite, so in expected value terms it seems my copies and near-copies are already enjoy­ing a kind of col­lec­tive immortality. […] What prob­a­bil­ity of future tor­ture would cause us to wish to die for­ever rather than be res­ur­rected?  And should I there­fore be scared by the idea of an infi­nite uni­verse?  Do Dar­win­ian selec­tion pres­sures — defined in the broad­est pos­si­ble way — sug­gest it is worth spend­ing energy on mak­ing enti­ties happy?  Or do most enti­ties end up as suf­fer­ing slaves?

Tyler on Cry­on­ics (Robin Hanson, Overcoming Bias)