X-Message-Number: 18939
Date: Fri, 19 Apr 2002 11:53:35 -0400 (EDT)
From: Charles Platt <>
Subject: survival calculations

Jeffrey Soreff writes:

"I view the alternative use of the funds as being an extra year retired
(roughly), which I value roughly the same as an extra year added to my
life.  So I'm trading off a possible 100 years vs 1 year, so for revival
probabilities above 1%, cryonics is a good choice."

Thanks for suggesting this interesting calculation. Unfortunately, for
people such as myself who suspect that the revival probability may be less
than 1%, your calculation suggests, "don't bother"!

However, you have made a couple of assumptions that I don't share.
First, why only 100 years of additional life? I would expect that if I am
revived at all, it will be at a time when human mortality is no longer a
problem, either because of advances in anti-aging medicine or (more
likely, I think) because a Moravec-style transition to robotics has
occurred, and we won't have to rely on biology to sustain thought
processes anymore. Therefore I would expect at least 1000 years of revived
life, which would make cryonics a rational bet (by your logic) if I
believe the chance of revival is a mere 0.1 percent.

Unfortunately this still doesn't work for me, because I have always viewed
cryonics as having a success probability around 1 in 10,000, which is 0.01
percent.

However, you are assuming that just because you make $x per year, this is
what a year of future life is worth. This assumption is not reliable. If I
suffer a stroke that eliminates higher brain functions irrevocably, I may
still be revivable but my life will be worth $0 per year. Conversely, if
the future offers greatly enhanced powers and capabilities, as I think it
will, life at that time could be worth considerably more than it is today.

Also when we consider any additional amount of good-quality life, we have
a situation which, as I recall, economists refer to as "marginal utility."
Suppose I have $100,000 saved. Someone comes to me and says, "You are
about to die. You can will your savings to your relatives, or you can
spend it on just SIX MONTHS of life in the future." Obviously from a
strict position of self-interest, I should spend the money on those six
months, since the choice is between life and no life, and the marginal
utility of good-quality life is very high indeed, at least for those of us
who are not suicidally depressed.

Therefore I conclude that cryonics is a rational bet, no matter how low
the odds are, and no matter how much it costs, if you have sufficient
money to pay for it at time of death.

However, if you are considering paying for it by depriving yourself of
some quality of life at the present time, in the hope of buying life in
the future, no rational choice can be made, because future life could turn
out to be a nightmare just as easily as it could turn out to be a
blessing. For instance, I believe a lot of cryopatients have sustained
brain damage that will be irreversible by any means. An extreme case would
be the Alcor patient, whose case I wrote about years ago, who was shot in
the back of the head and then kept relatively warm for a day or two at the
city morgue, after which his brain was removed from the skull and
autopsied. Even the most gung-ho nanotechnologist would surely agree that
this situation will pose an extreme challenge for the "Engines of
Creation."

But of course I won't die like that ... will I?

Here we enter into the subject of denial ("I think I'll probably die in an
optimal manner," when in fact the odds are that you won't). Denial is
probably not a good word to explore on this list, so, I'll stop.

--CP

Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=18939