And so it goes; your arguments are as old as cryonics. Here are the answers offered by the Alcor FAQ, in order:

- http://www.alcor.org/FAQs/faq01.html#evidence

- http://www.alcor.org/FAQs/faq05.html#met

- http://www.alcor.org/FAQs/faq07.html#overpopulation

To those interested in more detail, I recommend the Alcor FAQ (http://www.alcor.org/FAQs/), Chapter 9 of Engines of Creation (http://e-drexler.com/d/06/00/EOC/EOC_Chapter_9.html), and the World Transhumanist Association FAQ (http://www.transhumanism.org/resources/faq.html; search for the question "What is cryonics? Isn’t the probability of success too small?").

N.B. I am one of the signatories of the "Scientists' Open Letter on Cryonics" (http://www.imminst.org/cryonics_letter/) mentioned by Eliezer in the post.

For some inexplicable reason, I have thus far only read two issues of Warren Ellis' Transmetropolitan: Issue #1, which is available free on the web, and an issue that talks about this.

Here's a description from Wikipedia, which I touched up a bit:

In the comic book Transmetropolitan, Revivals are people whose head was preserved in cryogenic stasis, only to be revived years later by a government program and given a cloned body. They are overwhelmed by the dystopian future in which they have awoken and distraught by the complete loss of every one of their friends and loved ones, and they often break down; they are generally ignored by society and are left to fend for themselves.

You should read this -- though probably not when you're feeling lonely -- because IMHO Ellis totally nails the likely emotional state of a person revived from cryonics. If you want to experience the thrill of being the only survivor of a tremendous holocaust that has claimed the life of every single person you've ever met, combined with the thrill of having your entire life experience rendered obsolete, get yourself cryogenically frozen and hope for revival. I, on the other hand, am either getting cremated or am donating my body to science.

Thats a good place to stop the sentence. Transmetropolitan is one of those things that everyone should try at least once.

Nobody says that future folk will raise the dead in 50 years or 100 years or 1000 years or 5000 years. If we haven't nuked the planet in 5000 years, don't you think it's possible that thawing a head might be as inexpensive as buying a cellphone?

Heck, kids on the street might come into the cryro-units, pick out a head and have it unfrozen for $5 just to watch the expression on our faces. Cheap thrills. But hey, if it means I'm alive again, I'll give the kids an expression to remember.

Just because we don't have the answers today, doesn't mean the answers won't arrive tomorrow.

Your conclusion is correct, however. Live for today.

Just because Steve Jobs said it doesn't mean it's a fact, you know.

What if I am a cobol programmer, and they need me to fix the Year9999 bug?

  Even in the super advanced future, presumably a complex procedure like reconstructing a human brain won't exactly be a cheap one.

  Is the future such a utopia that [x,y,z]

  The part that really strikes me as idealistic

  Not to mention the fact that it is the very finiteness of life that makes it valuable in the first place.

Value of my life (at least to myself): infinity,

Probability of revival: >0

Expected value = (probability of revival) * (value of my life) = infinity.

So... low odds are not a good excuse to not go for cryonics.

Next, who pays: The person being frozen. Its like a trust fund. Toss in a large one time sum and live off the interest. The interest on 120K at 4% annual compound interest (after inflation) is ~500 dollars/yr which should be enough to maintain what is basically a big freezer for a long time and note that that 4% is a very conservative figure and accumulating 120K is not a big deal for those in the upper middle class and above which is still a lot of people.

What he means by "death is not part of the plan" is that at least they are trying to live longer, even if the chances of success are slim.

Conclusion: Cryonics has the potential to be a valuable investment.

I seriously doubt this. There are numerous activities -- smoking, eating delicious food, having risky sex, crossing the street -- that people routinely do despite the incremental risk of mortality. I've read that when you divide the extra money by the increased death risk (e.g. a $10K lump sum payment for a 1% chance of dying, as you'd get if, for example, you switch to higher-risk duties in a mining or lumber job), the average person values his own life at between $1 million and $10 million.

If you do spend all of your time on maximizing your probability of survival -- making money for medical care, reading medical journals in your free time, not doing anything that's really fun and slightly fatal -- I'd believe you. Otherwise, you suffer from cognitive dissonance.

It's a matter of opportunity cost. What do you have to give up, in order to have this miniscule chance? Which is most valuable:

- putting your kids through college for sure

- financially assisting your still living loved ones for sure

- paying for expensive life saving surgery for someone who can't afford it for sure

- investing in what amounts to a lottery ticket that pays out only in a tiny percentage of potential future universes

Even if I was completely disinterested in the fate of the rest of humanity, I think I'd still choose to go out with a bang now, for sure, than to throw my hard earned cash into a futile attempt to keep me fresh in the freezer.

(You're paying for expensive life saving surgery for yourself).

I'm all for people engaging in cryogenics, alternative medicine, snake-oils, gods and magic if they have the money and desire but these sort of silly arguments and rationalizations about them I do not understand at all.

Really? Have any kids, a wife? Would you die for them? Would you gas people in order to survive? Is there any cause you would fight to the death for, other than pure survival?

I'm not sure if you're putting me on with your response.

There's no way that you value your life infinitely, while you value, say, your opposition to holocausts uncountably infinitely. Do you or ericb truly believe that this is the case, or are you putting me on?

Just because I know there are cardinalities of infinities doesn't mean that it makes sense to claim that the people use these values in their life calculations.

It's very simple, for example, to use arguments from the amount of money a person will accept for a more dangerous job, as byrneseyeview pointed out, to show that people value their lives as a finite number. If people valued their lives infinitely, they would accept no additional money for any increased risk of anything, ever.

Unless of course, people value money infinitely too, and they're doing some sort transfinite math in their heads. Which I think you'll agree is a bit surreal and total nonsense.

Another issue is that the idea of revival doesn't even make logical sense. What happens when two bodies with the same construction are revived? Which one has my consciousness?

Or think about it like this: an exact replicant of my body has been revived while I'm still alive. Obviously, the revived body does not have the same consciousness, since I didn't suddenly become conscious of living in two bodies or a different body. Why would this change by delaying revival until after I'm dead? And if it doesn't, why should I care?

So, I don't really see the case for cryonics. It seems to be flawed on both practical and logical grounds.

It's weird that people don't seem capable of distinguishing between their own consciousness and someone else's consciousness.

The practical grounds point is made by others.

Given another living body constructed exactly the same as mine and in the same state, it still does not have my consciousness. However, physically speaking, both the replicant and my own body are identical, since particles do not have individuality, as Eliezer points out. The ship problem is a question of whether identity obtains, whereas identity is not a question in my thought experiment. Thus, the two do not map.

Also, what if the revival process works but not perfectly, and you come out on the other end severely disabled? (Maybe they've gotten it to work on some people but not everybody, and they don't know which is which until they try). Factor that into the equation.. I don't know. I think I'm just going to try to make it to the singularity or at least to when this tech is more feasible.