47 replies to this topic

[thefirstimmortal]

Cicero’s words, written centuries ago, express a regret common to all men. He went on to say that we ought to be content, nonetheless, with whatever life is allotted us. Yet we cannot be content. The hope for immortality is as old as thinking man himself. The most primitive religions promised something beyond this life, beyond this world. But even the promise of heaven is not enough for most human beings. We here struggle against our mortality, unable to rest easily with the knowledge that this is the only turn we will take in this world. We long for a second chance to live again in the same body we possess now.

[thefirstimmortal]

Today we refuse to agree that a man is forever dead because his heart has stopped beating and his brain no longer functions. Such death, we claim, is but a temporary thing. We believe that cold holds a promise of physical immortality here on earth.

[thefirstimmortal]

Our Faith is disarmingly simple: the way to seek immortal­ity starts in the freezer. A man dies. His body is frozen at once and is then stored at the temperature of liquid nitrogen, or better yet, liquid helium. We are not in a state of suspended animation, but rather in suspended life. The years go by, the centuries, while we will lie undisturbed in an icy bed. Then at last the moment for our second chance is at hand. Our bodies lifted from the container, thawed, revived, repaired, and our life resumes again.

What a resurrection.

[thefirstimmortal]

[huh] Ummm, when someone get's a chance, could you correct my spelling in the topic heading, cyonics to cryonics. [8)]

[Lazarus Long]

Done )

[Utnapishtim]

I don't actually see Cryonics as an act of faith. I simply see it as the most rational course of action at the moment given the lack of other available options. I have no certainty that it will be effective at bringing me back. But I am very certain that rotting in a box under the ground won't allow me to come back.

[MichaelAnissimov]

I agree with Uth... cryonics is worthwhile because it's aligned with cognitive science evidence and the historical regularity of accelerating technological change. Of all the ways to "die", cryonics is choice that demands the least faith of them all!

[Bruce Klein]

Ummm, when someone get's a chance, could you correct my spelling in the topic heading, cyonics to cryonics. 

By the way, you should be able to edit the topic, by clicking 'Edit' at top. Teach a man to fish.. teach a man to farm...

[thefirstimmortal]

Done )

Thank You Laz

[thefirstimmortal]

I don't actually see Cryonics as an act of faith.  I have no certainty that it will be effective at bringing me back. But I am very certain that rotting in a box under the ground won't allow me to come back.

Your very own comment " I have no certainty that it will be effective at bringing me back." supports my contention that it is an act of faith. Faith is the confident belief in the truth or trustworthiness of an idea.
...and I share that Faith with you.

[thefirstimmortal]

... cryonics is choice that demands the least faith of them all!

Right, but again, by your own admission, it "demands" "Faith".

[David]

"I have no certainty that it will be effective at bringing me back. But I am very certain that rotting in a box under the ground won't allow me to come back."

Interesting point, however, I prefer to think that all things are possible in an infinite universe with no beginning and no end. Who knows what some inconceivable future intellect will conconct? I think I'd like to maximize my chances though, some kind of stasis seems to me to just be logical thinking, if one has to die that is. Not dying in the first place would be preferable!

Dave

[thefirstimmortal]

Interesting point, however, I prefer to think that all things are possible in an infinite universe with no beginning and no end.
Dave

And when it comes to life ending, can we, in heaven’s name, call anything long?

Nothing That Has an End Is Long

[thefirstimmortal]

"I have no certainty that it will be effective at bringing me back. But I am very certain that rotting in a box under the ground won't allow me to come back."
Dave

Old age, it is said, is a disease that only death can cure. But not to us, not in the future. We are the hopeful, we who imagine being thawed out when science has learned not only to arrest, but even reverse the aging process. The wrinkles will disappear, the spine straighten, the hair grow luxuriant and lose its gray, the spring return to the step, and the gleam to the eye. Youth is so wonderful, remarked George Bernard Shaw, that it is too bad to waste it on the young. In that golden age of the future, the face and form of twenty would be combined with the wisdom and experience of many decades or centuries.

[thefirstimmortal]

Ettinger, the man who focused national attention on cryonics, had been thinking about cryonics for many years. While lying in a hospital bed in 1947 receiving treat­ment for World War II wounds, he first read about experi­ments being done by French biologist Jean Rostand. In these, frog sperm was protected from freezing injury with glycerol. Rostand’s discovery of the preservative was for the most part ignored, glycerol did not gain general acceptance until it was rediscovered in 1949 by Smith and her associates. But young Ettinger grasped the significance at once. In Rostand’s dry report he saw possibilities of the most incredible wonder. He rapidly made the jump from frog sperm to human beings. It appeared clear, he said later, that “even if suspended anima­tion techniques were not perfected, one could freeze the newly dead, accepting whatever degree of freezing damage was unavoidable, and still have a chance of eventual revival.”

The idea seemed so obvious to him that he was sure it must be equally apparent to everyone else. He assumed that it would be seized upon and promoted by influential and promi­nent scientists. During the next many years, while following his profession as a professor of physics at Michigan’s High­land Park College, he eagerly watched for news. But nothing much happened. And even today for the most part suspended animation or suspended death re­mians what it has been for over a century, a subject for fiction only.

[thefirstimmortal]

When it came to serious science, rather than ro­mantic fiction, not even Rostand went as far as Ettinger would have liked. Rostand predicted that someday a way would be found of freezing the old or incurably sick until their conditions could be corrected, but he did not take the next step and urge freezing them or the dead with the imper­fect methods of the present.

[thefirstimmortal]

I agree with Uth... cryonics is worthwhile because it's aligned with cognitive science evidence and the historical regularity of accelerating technological change.  Of all the ways to "die", cryonics is choice that demands the least faith of them all!

While I agree with you Micheal, I still assert that optimism is the key to the entire philosophy. It is the very old dream of eternal life, it's just that we have enough scientific truth in it to be much more probable than any other Faith.

Edited by thefirstimmortal, 28 November 2003 - 03:30 AM.

[thefirstimmortal]

People who are being frozen before the technique of cryonics is per­fected are taking a shot in the dark,
but the chance is worth it. I believe there’s no chance any other way.

[chubtoad]

Our Faith is disarmingly simple: the way to seek immortal­ity starts in the freezer. A man dies. His body is frozen at once and is then stored at the temperature of liquid nitrogen, or better yet, liquid helium. We are not in a state of suspended animation, but rather in suspended life. 

I agree, your not anymore dead than someone who's heart stopped beating then started up again.
I wouldn't call it faith in the same way religous people have faith though. This is faith that humanity will make the right choices to exist long enough to have the technology to unfreeze and fix you, and that they will even bother too if they do. It is faith in people, like a general has in his troops, not faith in a in an abstract entity with little evidence to back it up.

[thefirstimmortal]

I wouldn't call it faith in the same way religous people have faith though. 

Faith is set of principles or beliefs. We have ours, they have theirs. Ours is grounded in logic. Faith is Belief, the assent of the mind to the truth of what is declared. In that sense our faith is really not all the different.

[thefirstimmortal]

As a member of one of the first and soon to be the largest Immortal Society in the world, we have a unique opportunity to work for the attainment of the most profound objective imaginable-the indefinite ex­tension of our lives. Cryonics challenges the assumption that senescence and death are the inevitable consequences of life a life of youthful vigor untempered by physical limitations.

[thefirstimmortal]

The first American to “experiment” with reduced metabolism was Benjamin Franklin. In a letter dated April, 1773, he noted how some flies had apparently been drowned in a bottle of Madeira wine bottled in Virginia and sent to London. Upon arrival, when the bottle was opened, three drowned flies fell into the first glass that was poured and they re­turned to life shortly after when the glass was placed in the sunlight. In fact, in less than three hours, two of the flies recovered and subsequently flew away. The third one never recovered. Franklin opined that, upon death, he wished to be immersed in a cask of Madeira until recalled later to life by solar warmth.

[MichaelAnissimov]

William, everything demands a small amount of faith. It's possible that you're just a brain in a jar being fed information by mad scientists. "Just because everything's shades of grey, doesn't mean that everything is the same shade." The incremental differences in confidence and levels of evidence matter a lot.

[thefirstimmortal]

William, everything demands a small amount of faith.  It's possible that you're just a brain in a jar being fed information by mad scientists.

Possible, I thought I was just a brain in a jar being fed information by mad scientists. [:o]

[Lazarus Long]

William, everything demands a small amount of faith.

Show me an algorithm for faith Michael, and then explain how such an algorithm pertains to "friendliness" please.

It isn't that you are wrong, or right; what matters is whether or not your assumption leads to a better understanding of what constitutes cognizance and how your perspective is subtly shifting with time my friend. )

[Omnido]

Faith is the confident belief in the truth or trustworthiness of an idea.

It is too bad beliefs are not substantial beyond speculation, conjecture, or bias and opinion.
I have no belief in gravity, I know it is a form of causality.

Physical immortality it not a belief, and it is not an act of faith.
It will only exist as an act of will, effort, and action.
Attributing aspects of faith or belief as the circumstantial cause behind any effect, is the same as one getting mad at the hammer when one drops it on ones own foot.

I possess affirmations and ideals; and hope.
Although even I must subject myself to my own judgement; that hope itself is uselss without a means to make its aspiration a reality.

[MichaelAnissimov]

Laz - sure, I can explain a sort of algorithm for faith, if it helps.

Say you are being taken hostage by a madman with a gun, and there are two baskets in front of you, with colored balls in them. The madman demands that you blindly pick a ball from one of the baskets - if it is red, he kills you, if it is blue, he turns himself into the cops. You know from previous observations that you should assign 90% confidence to the possibility that you will draw a blue ball from the left basket if you stick your hand in and pick randomly, but only 60% if you pick from the right basket. So, you can never be 100% sure which basket is *actually* the best to pick from, but you might as well choose the left one because you have a better chance. Switch the situation "you're a hostage" with "the whole world is in dire danger", and switch the various baskets with a collection of proposed Singularity strategies, and viola, it pertains to Friendliness!

This is also good to read: http://yudkowsky.net/bayes/bayes.html

Degrees of wrongness and rightness matter a heck of a lot - the assumptions likely to lead to a "better understanding of what constitutes cognizance", or a better understanding of any feature of the world, are, of course, the true ones. When did my perspective shift..? I haven't said anything in the above thread that I didn't believe when I was still a freshman in high school.

PS. Laz, I'm not sure we're on the same page when we discuss "friendliness" sometimes - it still seems like you aren't seeing a huge difference between Friendliness and friendliness, and I think that's a pretty major thing. Have you read CFAI yet, or are you interested in doing so?

[Lazarus Long]

Say you are being taken hostage by a madman with a gun, and there are two baskets in front of you, with colored balls in them. The madman demands that you blindly pick a ball from one of the baskets - if it is red, he kills you, if it is blue, he turns himself into the cops. You know from previous observations that you should assign 90% confidence to the possibility that you will draw a blue ball from the left basket if you stick your hand in and pick randomly, but only 60% if you pick from the right basket. So, you can never be 100% sure which basket is *actually* the best to pick from, but you might as well choose the left one because you have a better chance. Switch the situation "you're a hostage" with "the whole world is in dire danger", and switch the various baskets with a collection of proposed Singularity strategies, and viola, it pertains to Friendliness!

Michael will AI operate with a degree of faith or will it be determined by pure logic not tarnished by faith in its own database?

When did my perspective shift..? I haven't said anything in the above thread that I didn't believe when I was still a freshman in high school.

Your position seems to be shifting in that it appears now you are depending on faith when prior to this you have denied this to be the case. I am uninterested in faith and prefer a discussion of fact.

You are dealing with belief as a determiner of choice for examining complex probability not as an a priori determinant of conviction in the first place. Cognizance utilizes faith to break the stalemate often presented by assessing only probabilities and the consciousness does so by applying "desire" as a determinant factor, desire that is predicated on faith to begin with, hence you are describing what is not only tautological but for a pure logical construct trapped in a circuitous conundrum when limited to non emotional criteria.

Faith is not merely a probability assessment based on the most likely outcomes; it is a belief system in the very essence of self that permits cognizance to be self aware as a construct of the will. You describe a very fickle faith.

Fact: your probability is not predicated on faith; faith is the ability to choose regardless of the odds.

Degrees of wrongness and rightness matter a heck of a lot - the assumptions likely to lead to a "better understanding of what constitutes cognizance", or a better understanding of any feature of the world, are, of course, the true ones.

You appear to be trying to rationalize conviction when in fact, faith is a "conviction" with a "non rational relation" to probability. It is the conviction that seeks a rational support but does not depend upon it a priori. You have described the cognitive relationship backward.

So if AI possesses faith; what is it in?

BTW, I have no problem with your religious fervor in what you believe in. I am simply trying to get you to acknowledge such faith in your ideas as the basis of your search for concrete data to support the faith you have to begin with.

I have no such faith and simply ask for you to prove your conclusions on a more fundamental level of criteria. Probability is insufficient, as I do not think you have examined all the possible probabilities, nor for that matter have I.

I have however observed after many years of experience that whenever someone has a priori told me that I faced a limited set of options they determined to be "X", I was always able to discover { X+1 } and even {X + n} options, since my perspective of limits were not predicated on the madman's.

[acrid]

(from older post) Scientist and Religious faith is the same? Would be, execpt that their faith is tied in with morals and delusions. Perhaps "delusion" is a better word for most religions "faith", not to offend anyone here who actually beliefs in a religion, I've been there. I guess the faith of most scientist is being athiest. Cryo-faith though, thats new. I wouldn't call that faith, as much as I would call it hope and logical deduction. I think faith is a false assurance that we make up in our minds, like when your little you may think that your parents are really smart and nomatter what the problem is they'll handle it, and that is having faith. Or a girl who has faith her boyfreind will protect her. I suppose if you have faith in cryonics then you must really think much of it and be somwhat optimistic.

[foolishmortal]

What is the physical differnece between someone the moment before they die and the moment after they die? Im not an expert but as far as I know the electricity is still there as is the exact structure of the brain, so why are they dead? How is it possible to bring someone back from this state? Freezing a live person and re-awakening them is possible but bringing them back from the dead?