1% chance of survival
Posted: Fri Mar 29, 2019 10:15 am
I see 1% getting thrown around a lot in various contexts. The usual claim is that a 1% chance of revival if cryopreserved is better than the 0% chance if cremated. This is sometimes bolstered by a claim that the payoff is billions of years of additional life, so the 1% translates to millions of years. But it's not quite that simple.
First of all, we need to separate the preservation phase (phase I) from the revival phase (phase II). In phase I, the only risk issue is preservation quality. In other words, what percentage of the memories were preserved well enough that they could, in theory, be recoverable. This is never binary. It has nothing to do with survival of the person, but only with how much of the person has survived through the first phase. So 1% survival really means that 1% of the memories survived. This does not, in my mind, meet the definition of survival. If my acceptable threshold for amnesia damage is 50%, then it's really not worth pursuing cryonics at all unless I think I can hit 50% memory survival during phase I.
In contrast, phase II is completely binary. Either those memories get recovered or they do not. Nobody's going to do a mediocre job of memory recovery. Either they will wait until they can do it well, or else something will go wrong and the brain will get destroyed. For phase II, 1% truly does translate to an all-or-nothing risk assessment. There is virtually nothing we can do to change the risk of phase II. We are depending on others, and we do not have enough information to be able to make any sort of accurate predictions about chances of revival.
Since phase I is the only phase under our control, and since we can't get to phase II without surviving through phase I, all of our efforts should be focused exclusively on phase I and on improving quality. Above all, we must remember that small percentages in phase I are next to useless rituals. Phase I always requires large percentages to be worthwhile.
First of all, we need to separate the preservation phase (phase I) from the revival phase (phase II). In phase I, the only risk issue is preservation quality. In other words, what percentage of the memories were preserved well enough that they could, in theory, be recoverable. This is never binary. It has nothing to do with survival of the person, but only with how much of the person has survived through the first phase. So 1% survival really means that 1% of the memories survived. This does not, in my mind, meet the definition of survival. If my acceptable threshold for amnesia damage is 50%, then it's really not worth pursuing cryonics at all unless I think I can hit 50% memory survival during phase I.
In contrast, phase II is completely binary. Either those memories get recovered or they do not. Nobody's going to do a mediocre job of memory recovery. Either they will wait until they can do it well, or else something will go wrong and the brain will get destroyed. For phase II, 1% truly does translate to an all-or-nothing risk assessment. There is virtually nothing we can do to change the risk of phase II. We are depending on others, and we do not have enough information to be able to make any sort of accurate predictions about chances of revival.
Since phase I is the only phase under our control, and since we can't get to phase II without surviving through phase I, all of our efforts should be focused exclusively on phase I and on improving quality. Above all, we must remember that small percentages in phase I are next to useless rituals. Phase I always requires large percentages to be worthwhile.