Cryonics

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Robin:
Today I suggested we talk about cryonics in part because I just went to a several day event in Miami where many cryonics people were discussing the subject. So it's fresh in my mind. So we often just pick a topic and see where we can go with it. And I guess we'll find out where we can go with this one. I guess, should I review the concept for people then?
Agnes:
Yes, and also maybe say what's a question we might be asking about it.
Robin:
Okay. So the concept is that medical science, say, improves over time, and we might expect the future to have better medical technology than today, and that people often die today in the sense that medical technology gives up on them and says, we've done the best we can. And that one possible solution to that predicament might be to pause someone. So take someone in a difficult medical situation now and put them on a pause. and let them wait a long time, perhaps centuries, until medical technology would be improved and then able to fix the problem they had and whatever else goes wrong in the process of trying to pause them. And so the usual way to pause is to put them in a very cold temperature. And so it's well known that chemical reactions of the sort that make our bodies work but also cause us to die when things are going wrong, those reactions basically go to zero at very low temperatures. So you may do damage in the process of lowering someone to a low temperature. But then once you get them there, they will just not change as long as you can maintain those low temperatures. And then later on, you might come back. So then the idea is that this could help many people to not die. That's the concept of cryonics. But compared to other medical technology, it has some complications. One is this long period of pause after which when you come back, if you did, many other people that you know and love might not be around unless they also had similar pauses. Second, it's hard to prove that it works. It's based on this belief that, plausibly, future medical technology would be much better than today. But of course, you can't prove that now. So we can't do experiments to prove that this works now, because we have to make judgments about what kinds of problems and damage and freezing could be undone by a distant future. And it's related to my book, The Age of M, Work, Love, and Life on Robots Rule the Earth, because that's describing a future world of brain emulations. And one possible way to be revived through cryonics would be to just save the information in your brain structure that would be required to make a brain emulation, and then you would come back as a brain emulation. And arguably that requires that you save less, like there are people whose heads or even only brains are saved in cryonics. And then those brains, we need to save only the structure in that brain that would be required to make a computer model that function the same as that brain. That's what, so I am a cryonics patient customer and I, that's the route I would hope to come back as, because I think that would be the first feasible way to come back and I'm worried about waiting too long because the organization assigned to keep me going could fail and we may never get, say, to the very advanced levels of technology that might be required to bring back my body once it's been sick and damaged by freezing. That could just be a much more difficult technological thing. So the interesting questions to discuss about this, first of all, might be, Are you interested? Does possibility of coming back in a later time appeal to you? Even if maybe not all of your friends and relatives might be there. There's the phenomena that many people are hostile to cryonics, i.e. spouses of people who choose cryonics are often quite hostile to it. There's a phenomena that many are skeptical that it will work and treat it as a scam or pseudoscience or something. And I find it, just after being at this meeting, sort of fascinating the degree to which there is hostility to it. That is, basically you ask surveys of people after these descriptions and some basic information about who says what about it. Are you interested? Do you think this would work? It's not a majority of the population, but it's well over 1% of people sound like they think this could work for them and be sensible. But in fact, maybe 4,000 people have ever signed up for this product and it's gotten free international publicity for at least a half a century. Regular publications, I just looked up and publications in top places like the New York Times regularly. describe this product and its concept. So lots of people know about it, but still only a tiny fraction of people choose it. And then a lot of their associates are quite hostile. So there is a New York times magazine article from a decade or 15 years ago or so, where myself and my wife are profiled disagreeing about cryonics, and that presents her hostility to my doing it. So these are some of the interesting features about cryonics. It's plausible but not obvious. Many people, but not most, think it might work for them. Almost no one actually does it. And around them, there are other people who are quite hostile to it. And an interesting analogy to make is a similar number of people pay a similar price to have their ashes thrown into space when they die. Which of course, no one believes will actually bring them back. It's more of a symbolic aspirational gesture. And spouses aren't hostile to that. But they are hostile to people trying to not die. Anyway, that's my long intro. Any of that interesting to you?
Agnes:
So it seems to me that when you initially, there was a bit of a like, no, if I want to say, a bit of a bait and switch in how you presented it. So you first gave the softer side of cryonics. Hey, we do a lot of different kinds of interventions to cure diseases, but sometimes the intervention isn't available yet. We can just pause the person until we can cure their disease. And I have heard cryonics presented that way. In fact, I've heard cryonics presented that way by people who don't even want to call it cryonics, they want to call it cryopreservation, where the idea is it's a way of dealing with diseases we can't yet cure, potentially in young people, for example. Young people might be the ideal candidates for this, young people who have incurable diseases. And then the other possibility is like, what if you didn't have to die and you could live forever? Or rather, you're gonna die, but we can bring you back from death in some form. The form isn't gonna be that similar to the form you are now. Maybe you'll be a... computer program, but it's kind of like coming back to life after death. And those are two, I mean, I think of them as, maybe they're similar in some ways, and maybe there's a kind of continuity in terms of the science that underlies them, but they elicit very different emotional responses.
Robin:
I never said forever.
Agnes:
You don't need to say forever the idea of, okay, you're going to die, which is what's going to happen to you, right? That is if cryonics happens for you, you're first going to die, and then just your brain will be frozen, and then there'll be some attempt to reconstitute you in another form that doesn't involve your body, where you will then go on to live for a very long period. It's not forever, but it's the kind of you will live for a long time where we don't have to have the end in sight.
Robin:
So I'd like to paint a continuum here and then invite you to show where along the continuum you see the discrete difference that you're trying to highlight here. So we might take the young person who is going to die unless something is fixed, but they can't fix it now and they're going to pause.
Agnes:
And we might only need to pause them for six months or something like that.
Robin:
For example, right.
Agnes:
I mean, in fact, they might have a condition, only pause them for 10 years, otherwise can't read because I don't want to live without them.
Robin:
So we can stretch out some of the continuum here. One could be how long is the pause? Right. There's some point at which a long pause becomes a discontinuous other change. There's also the idea that later on they might find a way to just fix aging as one of our many conditions, at which point they could just have much longer lives. Then that's a condition we all share. And so we might all be tempted by a pause to a future where ordinary aging could be fixed. And then there's the possibility of prosthetics or other changes that we might be fixed through changes. So of course today we might get fixed with an artificial heart or an artificial limb or eye. And all of those will change us substantially, but plausibly that's all part of the continuum of how severe or large a medical intervention is being done here. So I agree that you could point to very extreme scenarios. But I invite the continuum and ask, but isn't it all on a continuum from, you know, short term modest medical interventions to these largest longer term more chain, more... Absolutely.
Agnes:
I was granting that there is a technological continuum between these two things. It still could be true that we ought to have wildly different responses to things at different points on the continuum. And so the question, for instance, about hostility, the reason I brought up the continuum is that you're like, people have hostility. And I just, I predict that they're going to have more hostility if it looks like what you're trying to do is fix aging or deny aging in some sense, saying that maybe human beings don't have to age. If the prosthetic is going to be your entire body. And if you're going to, if the pause is going to last so long that nobody who you know who wasn't frozen is going to be around, that people will respond in a wildly different way to that than to maybe if somebody has a terminal illness at a pretty young age, we could freeze them for a couple of years until we find the cure, if we think it's reasonable to think that we'll find the cure. So I think people are just going to have really different responses to those two possibilities. And so in a way, cryonics is just more than one thing, even if there's some technological continuum between those two options. But I want to say something about, so I think if we're talking about the hostility, it makes more sense to talk about things more on the you end of that continuum, namely the sort of, in the sense in which you're a cryonics patient, that kind of cryonics is the kind to which people have hostility. That's pretty far at one end of the spectrum.
Robin:
I'm not sure that I believe that in fact the hostility is concentrated at my end of the spectrum. So just to be clear, most cryonet organizations, the products and arrangements they set up are trying to move as close as possible to the other end of the spectrum. So for example, mostly they freeze whole bodies and with the intention of bringing that body back later. And they of course want to bring you back as soon as possible. They're not going to delay on purpose. And I think most cryonics customers, in fact, are imagining coming back as a familiar human body with whatever the then current medical upgrades would be, whether that's fixing aging or not. And yet those people still get enormous amounts of hostility. I don't think actually, I mean, I might admit that I am more willing to go farther on that spectrum, but I think most of the hostility kicks in way before my point of
Agnes:
But it may not be where I was specifying. That's why I'm saying it's easier to just think of it as two extremes. I've picked out one where I think there would be very little hostility. I can add a little bit if you want. There already, I think, are medical treatments that involve fooling someone for some period of time while they recover from something or whatever. I was quickly trying to Google, and I don't have anything more specific than that, but I think I saw it on a bunch of TV shows. So either that exists or it'll probably exist pretty soon, and I don't think that people would be that opposed to that, like cooling someone for a few hours. So there's a point at which people are not going to be opposed to it.
Robin:
That's what we're trying to figure out. That's what I propose we think about. which dimensions and at what point along the spectrum is where the hostilities come from.
Agnes:
There isn't a point. So I think that's not how it works. I don't think we'll find a point. I think it's useful to just find two extremes where one of them people are like totally not going to be very opposed, even if they're a little bit opposed. Namely, if the treatment were reserved for people under 30 who had terminal illnesses, where there was some reason that the illness was going to be, to believe the illness would be cured within five years, and they would only be cooled for five years. I'm putting forward to you that the people you know are not in that position, but that people who, if we had that, people wouldn't be crazy opposed to that.
Robin:
And so, I think- I'm accepting your claim there.
Agnes:
Okay, good. So let's just have that be one case and lump everything else together with you so that you'd be like, okay, there's this big number of stuff that they're opposed to. And now, I think we've had a bunch of conversations and I always have different guesses about why people are hostile. I too am a bit hostile to it, so I should be able to introspect.
Robin:
And we have a number of these different factors that are changing. We could ask which of them put most of the weight or as the rising hostility here. It could be the time delay, the prosthetics, the aging, the age of the person who is preserved.
Agnes:
They all seem relevant to me, but when I pull them... So here's like a hypothesis. It's really hard to deal with the fact that you're going to die.
Robin:
That's also true for the 30-year-old who might die for the short-term thing, right?
Agnes:
You haven't yet heard what I'm going to say. Okay, sorry. It's really hard in general to deal with the thought that death is inevitable and that you're going to grow old and die. And we've somehow It's a little bit like, I think a good analogy would be, say a loved one of yours went missing, and you spent maybe a year of your life looking for them, but finally you were reconciled to the thought, they're gone, they're dead. We never found their body, but they're dead. And you might, if somebody is like, well, maybe we could still find them or, you know, maybe here's a place we haven't looked, you might be hostile to that suggestion. You might say, don't, don't tempt me into those waters again. Don't let me get emotionally attached to that possibility. And so that's one thought about all of this cryonic stuff, is that we work hard to reconcile ourselves to the inevitability of death. Now, we don't think that death at the age of 30 is inevitable. That is, we think, no, if you have an illness at the age of 30, we should probably be able to cure that. But I think we think, yeah, but, you know, at the age of 70, 80, 90, your time's up. And I had to reconcile myself to the thought. My whole life, I had to spend myself reconciling myself to the thought, 78 or 90, my time would be up. And now you're tempting me with the thought that maybe that's not true, but you better be able to prove it to me, to prove it's gonna work for sure, 100%, before I let myself walk down that road.
Robin:
So that sounds a priori plausible, but it just doesn't seem to me at all to fit with our modern medical practice. I mean, in fact, we have people near the end of their usual lifetimes that we spend enormous amounts of money in medicine on trying to prevent their life size. And in fact, typically believed, and I think it's true that the marginal value of that medicine spent on 80-year-olds is much less than the marginal value of medicine spent on younger people. So it's not a case that we just say, we can't think about people over 80, so we're just going to like not do anything for them. We, in fact, do a lots more for people who are older than expected. older than we might have thought we could live that long. And our reaction to whatever our emotional difficulties are there are to throw in all the more amounts of medicine and medical effort. So you might have thought that that would extend to chronics. This is another way you could just throw in more effort into denying the problem, if you like. You might say, instead of accepting the fact that some people, you know, most people will die at 80 or 85, we deny that. And for anyone, 80 year old, who seems to have trouble, we are quite willing to put enormous medical resources into usually failing and pointless efforts to extend their life a little bit further.
Agnes:
Right, so I guess I can think of a couple of different ways to, that doesn't actually seem very strange to me given my hypothesis. That is, I think my hypothesis would actually predict that sort of behavior. Imagine that the person who had long given up hope of seeing their loved one, they might still have like, I don't know, rituals that they do about their loved one Um, not like to bring them back, but like rituals to remember them or, you know, um, uh, lots of time they spend memorializing men. Um, and, um, uh,
Robin:
Once a year on their birthday, they might have a power.
Agnes:
What a great expense to do these things. So I think that just like the spending money to throw the ashes out into space, right? That is, our coping mechanisms might be expensive and ineffective. We have a bunch of coping mechanisms for this fact that we can't quite deal with. But it feels very different if somebody were to say, no, maybe this problem could be solved. And I think that, for instance, when it comes to an old person, suppose an 80-year-old has cancer. And, you know, I mean, my guess is that, in fact, whether or not they get treatment for their cancer is going to actually be sensitive to, I mean, my mom's an oncologist, so I know this is true, to the question of, is that a reasonable thing to do? It's not just like, oh, automatically we'll definitely give them the treatment because the treatment might kill them. But we might very well offer them treatment for the cancer. And because there, all that we have to tell ourselves is maybe the cancer, this cancer could be cured, right? It's not, we're not saying maybe we can stop aging. That is, they still have to accept that they are going to die. But it needn't be from this thing. And so that's why there's just a big difference between, and there's also a big difference between the scenario in which you say, this person is dying from a specific disease, maybe we can revive them and then cure them from that disease, versus the problem with aging might just go away.
Robin:
But chronics isn't tied to the idea that aging will go away, nor to the specific versus general. So, you know, if somebody were to collapse at a wedding or something, we would typically, you know, call for an ambulance or get them to care without having to know specifically what's wrong with them. We are quite willing to have general medical responses. We don't need a specific diagnosis to do that. So I don't think we necessarily need to know specifically how a pause would help them in order to be willing to do a pause. And we don't have to believe that all aging will be cured after a pause either in order to be interested in a pause. It seems like you're trying to tie some other things to this pause strategy that don't have to be tied to it.
Agnes:
Well, I think that if we look at the two extremes, and which cases we feel emotional revulsion to, and which cases do we clearly feel emotional revulsion, and which cases do we clearly feel no emotional revulsion, I'm telling you, it tracks the thing I just said. Namely, how specific of a problem is being dealt with. If somebody collapses at a wedding, we think there's something specific that's wrong with them.
Robin:
Well, we don't know what it is.
Agnes:
It's not necessarily the case that you need to know what it is, but if the thought is,
Robin:
The pause will cure something specific later. You don't know what that is either. What's the difference?
Agnes:
Well, I think, for instance, suppose that there's someone who's young and they've become very ill suddenly. And we don't know what's wrong with them, but they're clearly dying. And we can say, well, look, whatever this thing is that's killing them, we have a good reason to believe that within five years we will be able to diagnose it and cure it. Yeah, that goes exactly like the case that I just described. What I'm saying is that Medical science is, we accept it as being directed at fighting specific diseases and illnesses. We don't always know what they are.
Robin:
Okay, but in the whole scenario here, when you pause someone, you do know they have a specific thing that's killing them, and you're going to pause them because of that. It isn't an abstract, all possible things that could be wrong with them. Under the usual scenario here, something specific is going to be going wrong.
Agnes:
You might think many people just die from growing old. When you grow old, lots of things fail in your body, but that's a real thing that happens to human beings, is that they grow old, and medical science isn't designed to cure that, but cryonics is. Cryonics- That's a projection. ... denial that human beings, that it's natural to human beings to grow old.
Robin:
I mean, you might be right, but I want to point out that what you're doing is you're taking various ideological projections onto cryonics and objecting to that rather than the thing that it actually is. It's just a way to pause. It doesn't make a commitment to how specific are the conditions, or whether aging will be cured, or even how long it will last. the specifics of cryonics is just to start the pause and to hope that eventually that could be useful. So it doesn't require you make any commitment again, to curing aging or the nature of, of the soul or religion or, uh, the nature of your, you know, how much you care about this person. I feel like you're trying to project other claims about the future onto this particular choice.
Agnes:
Well, I'm trying to explain the hostility. And so the hostility involves associating a bunch of ideas. And those associations are predicated on the assumption that we're at a certain point in the spectrum. So it's not just a pause. Remember, that's why I raised the two extremes in the beginning and I specified we're not talking about a pause. We're talking about something that's over on the side of the spectrum that people object to. And so there are many kinds of pauses that people would be fine with. This is the kind that they're not fine with. Why are they not fine with it? Well, because some details of the way the pause is happening, which are going to involve, first, the thought that, like, the person is just going into generalized failure because they're just old. Second, that the pause could be indefinitely long. Third, that the prosthetic could be their whole body. All of these things together are the grounds for associating the goal of this particular kind of pause with something like a denial of aging.
Robin:
Medical technology in general is denying aging in the sense that it's making you live a little longer than you otherwise would, right?
Agnes:
Well, I don't think that
Robin:
You would die earlier if not for medicine. That's almost always the particular pitch of medicine. And you are willing to deny aging, even for your 90-year-old parent. If medicine says we can keep your 90-year-old parental alive for another few years, people are typically quite okay with that, even if that is literally denying aging, right?
Agnes:
I don't think it is denying aging. So I think that whether something counts as denying, it's like,
Robin:
It's like saying that if you go to college, you're committed to the idea that you're going to be all knowing and know everything, and that's just terrible, arrogant, terrible. Therefore, you shouldn't go to college and learn anything. because you might be one of these arrogant people who think you know everything and will know everything, right? I think it's jumping, picking some step and then projecting it off to some infinite line and saying you object to that infinite point and therefore you object to this point seems typically a mistake.
Agnes:
I agree, but what I'm trying to do is to diagnose where the emotions are coming from. I'm not right now trying to justify those emotions or say that they're Um, and it is striking to me that this is a plausible source for the emotion and that it involves associating a bunch of ideas. But like, so we might imagine, say, um, um, okay, I've been trying to think about how to use the analogy of your missing relative. It's like saying that, um, you feel like your friends are taking you to certain places in the hopes that maybe you might see the relative there and And you start to refuse to go to those places. And you're just like, look, I know what you're after. And they're like, no, no, we just hope to go to a new country, see some new things or whatever. And look, we might run into them. And you might be quite defensive about that. And you might associate the very act of going to new places and looking around with this person that you've long been searching for. And then they might discover ways of going on trips that feel safe to you, where it feels clear to you that you're not doing that thing. It might take a long time and a lot of culture to figure that out. And in fact, you go on all these trips where you're tiptoeing around even the suggestion that you're going to find them. And so what I'm saying to you is that medicine has found ways to tiptoe around that. Our culture, our practice of medicine, in many ways, as you pointed out, inefficient, is good at this. It's good at not making the suggestion, um, we found the thing you were always looking for. And I think cryonics just steps right into that trap, right into that associative metaphorical trap. It's like you found the way to take the trip that would most elicit the anxiety of that. Or rather, cryonics on that sign.
Robin:
So certainly for the purpose of the discussion, I'm happy to embrace your hypothesis here that the hostility to chronics is based on some sort of symbolic projection from the particular procedure in front of them to some outcomes or choices or goals that they are especially hostile about or, you know, sensitive about.
Agnes:
They're sensitive. They're not hostile to. They deeply desire those goals. They're sensitive to them because they've been burned and they've told themselves they're not allowed to pursue those goals.
Robin:
So for example, take the recent drug, the anti-obesity drugs recently, right? You might've said that people were very sensitive about weight, and part of the way to cope with that is to tell themselves that there just really isn't much you could do about weight, that it's just a trade-off of exercise and diet, and then that's the way it is. And therefore, if you offered people a drug that would seem to take away the need for that trade-off, i.e. giving you, you know, let you eat whatever you feel like, but still not be obese, that people would be very hostile to that. option because it would seem to go too far. That is, they might be okay with maybe a 1% reduction in weight or something as a modest sort of change that's like letting the nine-year-old live another three years, but they certainly wouldn't allow or embrace a drug that would dramatically reduce obesity without very many apparent moral costs because we've moralized obesity as a key moral choice, whether you're willing to do the exercise and dieting. And your theory would project a lot of hostility to these recent... Yes, there has been.
Agnes:
I know people who sort of desperately wanted to believe that it was true and spent a year having the drugs available to them, but not taking them because they couldn't believe that this could actually be it and be the miracle drug. But the big difference is, Those things work, and they've been shown to work. And so it would be like, if you're like, no, look, your friend is in the other room, and you see glimpses through the thing, and it's your friend that's been missing, versus they keep taking you to a room and being like, they're there, but you can't see them, or whatever, right? So I think that if cryonics So my prediction is that if actually it worked, if actually we brought someone back and they were fine, people would flip like this, just as they would initially be resistant, but some people would do it, they see enough people doing it, and it would turn around. It's that you don't have any proof, and so that's the sweet spot of desperation and self-protection.
Robin:
Then I guess if we're going to look for other more apt comparisons, we should look for surprisingly successful things you could do, which it's harder to verify in the short term that in fact are going to be successful. And I would pick education as an example of that. in the sense that if we sell education to you on the grounds of how you will be able to understand things much better later and have your curiosity satisfied and find engagement in the life of the mind, that's not something you can show people that it works for them at a young age. They have to accept it and believe it. And you might even think they would find that implausibly arrogant, that someone would sell that, try to sell that to them. That is, they might think we should accept the fact that we are ignorant and can't understand very much and that we'll need to find interest in, you know, pleasures of the world because these sorts of highfalutin grand goals are just implausible to be achievable. And yet we sell them on this.
Agnes:
Yeah, but we just don't think any of those things about the highfalutin grand goals. That is, everyone just thinks, yeah, it's possible to become educated. Many people do. There's lots of knowledge. The world is full of knowledge. I happen as a Socratic to roughly agree with that picture, but it's a wildly outlier view. So as a Socratic, it should actually be a big challenge to sell people on education. And that's exactly what you find in the dialogues is that Socrates thinks the whole process is protracted, which is to say, every minute that you're philosophizing with someone, you're also like, trying to convince them to philosophize with you. You're never on safe ground where you're like, okay, they believe this is worthwhile. You're always proving it to them. You're constantly selling. So that's what you would expect with this unproven thing, especially if you sort of had bits of doubt about the end product, as we have doubt about the weight loss case and the anti-aging case. But we simply don't have those doubts about education. foolishly, perhaps, but we don't. And so it's actually not hard to sell people on it, even though it's a long-term benefit.
Robin:
You might also take, say, the analogy of religion. People, I mean, you might think a priori that the things that religion offers you are also implausibly grand, you know, high-achievement outcomes and demand evidence of that. But there's a case where we Many have accepted those grand claims without immediate evidence or proof that it works, but they aren't hostile to... There aren't so many people hostile to the idea of religion, hostile to the very idea someone would make such a dramatic claim.
Agnes:
So once again, that's a case where many, many people just accept the end state as non-hybristic. And we can ask, why did certain end states get accepted and why others not? That's a legitimate question, but I'm just saying that it fits. However, I actually do think that there are Quite a few people who are hostile to religion for exactly this reason. That is, they're like, oh, you're telling me I just pray to God and then I get what I want? Deep down, they're like, that's exactly what I've always dreamed of, is that there would be somebody out there looking out for me, where I could just ask them for stuff, and then they would just make things go well for me. I desperately want that in my heart of hearts, and I had to tell myself it's not there and it's not possible. And you're taunting me with the thought that it really is possible. All I have to do is believe. So, I actually really do think that this is not the generalized view by religion, it's not the view among believers, and it's not the view among most non-believers, but it is the view among a not insignificant portion of non-believers. I do think this shows up with religion. Another good example is wealth, right?
Robin:
People might have not thought it was possible to be rich, and you might have...
Agnes:
I think the idea of like that like anyone can become extremely rich. It's like it's not easy to become extremely rich. Most people can't become extremely rich. Even the lottery. Right. It's like it's dangling before you this prospect of becoming incredibly wealthy. And it's really really likely that that's going to happen. But we don't view that as prohibited because We put wealth in the same category as education and as the religious stuff, and in the other category, you have things like being thin and living forever, or not aging or whatever. But as I said, the losing weight one has switched because we just found something that appears to work.
Robin:
Okay, so you were postulating a proximate cause, which is the idea that we categorize many kinds of hopes and dreams. into either hopes and dreams that it's acceptable to believe. So these are all things that you might have just a deep passion and desire for at some level, right? And then for some of the things you have a deep passion and desire for, society tells you that's feasible, like true love. True love is probably another one to throw in this bucket here. Okay. For some kinds of things, we will tell you that's possible. You should keep hoping for it. Then people do go for it and then take high risk actions, long shot actions that have a shot at least at achieving these acceptable goals. And then there are these other similar goals in the sense that you deeply would desire them. But for these, we have a story that these are just not possible. And this is the way that you steal yourself against the hope that you might, the problem that you might get sucked into hoping too easily for something that's not possible. We tell you, don't get sucked into that dangerous territory of thinking you could achieve one of these things, because it's just not possible. And then you steal yourself against that. And then if somebody tells you, oh, no, but I do have a way to get that, then we are going to pounce on them and call them pseudoscientists and charlatans or whatever for misleading people into the false hope that one of these things could be achieved. And then if they can offer pretty solid evidence that in fact such things are achievable, we may switch from the category of this just can't be done to I guess it can. But some of the things are already in that category of things we believe can be done even if we don't have such solid evidence. Right.
Agnes:
And I wanted to say actually on reflection, I think actually there's a lot of a similar response to get rich quick schemes as to cryonics, namely like maybe the lottery is okay. A lot of people are kind of not happy with the lottery. And, you know, we do tend to think of a get rich quick scheme, it's probably a scheme, it's probably, you know, and like, don't tap me to buying your stock or whatever, because, you know, your land in Florida or whatever, because it's like probably gonna be another one of these things where I don't actually get rich. And so actually there is some analogy there. And so, like we have the idea, well, you can get rich by, by extremely wild chance or through maybe or through inheriting it or through incredible work and then a lot more luck. But you can't just, you know, decide to be rich and then get rich. I think we believe that.
Robin:
So it seems to be that for most of these things, even if there's a norm that you shouldn't believe in get rich quick schemes, there's still going to be a lot of deviants who nevertheless buy into it and go for it. I guess we could probably even throw ecstasy via drugs into a category like this.
Agnes:
Uh-huh.
Robin:
Recreational drugs, say.
Agnes:
Buy happiness in a bottle or something.
Robin:
Right. But then some people say you can. And then some people testify that they've, in fact, achieved that. Now, for some of these, like religion or drugs or true love, There is a lot of evidence around, but it's ambiguous evidence. It's hard for any one person to judge, well, did they get the true love or did they get inner peace or ecstasy? Basically, religion often sells inner peace or some sense of alignment with the universe. The problem is even though many people claim to have these things, we sort of lack a consensus evidence about whether in fact they are achieving these things. And so that means we can't, it can't just switch over until we all believe it on the basis of this shared evidence. Then we have to decide, do we have this, do we share this hostile attitude toward it or not? So cryotics, the key point is, cryotics is just an extreme compared to these other ones in terms of the very tiny fraction of people who choose it. It's not illegal. And you know, it's not like you'll necessarily be fired even for doing it, although your spouse might divorce you. So it's just interesting to ask, well, if we have these effects you're talking about, somehow they are cranked up to a max here in this case.
Agnes:
I think it's because there's literally not one person who can say, it worked for me. If you ask in all these other cases, true love, getting rich, education, there's people who will raise their hand and say, it worked for me. When you have zero people who can say that, that's very powerful. Oh, by the way, I wanted to add something, which is that you made me have an epiphany about my aversion to meditation. So I've tried it on a few occasions, but my aversion to it is stronger than the amount of trying that I've done. I really haven't given it much of a shot. And I'm like, and I think it's because it promises you inner peace. And I'm like, you know, I've, you know, 48 years, I've reconciled myself to the fact that I'm just one of those people who's not going to have inner peace. I just have a constant, constant turbulence of my emotions and my mental life and my thoughts. And I've just reconciled myself with that. And that's my life. And that's who I am. And don't promise me this, this calm that would just somehow magically come to me if I sat there and did nothing. I think that that, you're making me realize that my overblown aversion to meditation is really a version of this phenomenon which should have a name, being hyper averse to something because you super want it but don't want to be let down. Does it have a name?
Robin:
I mean, in some sense, I was thinking of this as the enemies of aspiration. You have your book on aspiration. What we're talking about here is deep, strong hopes that people have that they could naturally aspire to, and culture and themselves have chosen to crush that aspiration, to say, you dare not have such aspiration, you dare not have such hope, because we think that'll just go so terribly wrong.
Agnes:
Right. Well, I think that that's right. It's an anti-aspirational move. I think that You know, it might be that we do actually have to crush some aspirations in order to make room for other aspirations. That is, if we were going off in too many directions, we might not get anywhere. So it may be that we have an overall economy. It may also be that we have theories about which kinds of aspiration are like pro-social. That occurred to me about cryonics. that it doesn't seem like a very pro-social form of aspiration. It might become one in a slightly different world, but in the world we live in, it doesn't seem that way. And I think we're especially hostile towards such aspirations, especially when they're on, you know, shaky ground.
Robin:
Well, that would be another of the dimensions we didn't highlight before, which is that I do think cryonics would be more acceptable if there was more of the standard scenario of families together planning to get it so that they could go together and come back together.
Agnes:
I actually don't think so.
Robin:
That would be pro-social. That would be much more pro-social.
Agnes:
No, it wouldn't. It's like if you had a little tyrannical family, ruling family that had ruled a given country for many centuries and they made sure to keep the ruling in the family, that that's pro-social. The rest of the country would be like, that's not prosocial. They've been oppressing us for hundreds of years. I think the idea like, oh, this family just wants to survive and they don't care about the rest of us. They just want to keep their tiny little family going and we're the outsiders, would have exactly the same response.
Robin:
You could make the same criticism of true love. True love is just two people trying to be happy together and ignoring the rest of the world. If only they didn't have true love, they might pay attention to other people. You could say true love is an antisocial drive and we should disapprove of true love.
Agnes:
So I think that, first of all, the idea that true love is antisocial is right. And it's often depicted that way. It's not disapproved of that way. It is, it's a classic trope that an instance of true love will be disapproved of by the community around the lovers for being not pro-social. So there are, Romeo and Juliet, there are many such stories where the community doesn't want this love because the community views the love as anti-social. The lovers will be like, screw this community. And then the overarching story is like, this love is good, but the community is rejecting.
Robin:
But we don't have an analogy with, say, chronics, where if a community disapproves of it, that can't be explained as an analogy of true love, because clearly our communities approve of true love for the most part. In our world today, we celebrate and we idealize it.
Agnes:
Maybe we do both. Love has been around a lot longer than cryonics. And so we've developed a very complicated repertoire of emotions when it comes to love. And I say this from the vantage point of somebody who's been taxonomizing Taylor Swift's love songs for the past week. And, you know, there's a whole genre of her love songs that is, um, let's run away because our society will never understand us and we'll try to crush our love. There's a set of love songs about that. And that is just the phenomenon of the society views that love as not being pro-social and therefore wants to destroy it. We're then able to have the meta response, but isn't this love beautiful? As long as we're not in the society, right? We're standing outside the whole thing. Maybe we would be able to get that with cryonics if you gave us a couple thousand years to develop our emotional palette for cryonics. But that took a while to get that with love.
Robin:
I'm not so sure it took a while. That is, it's just fluctuated over a long time. Within the wide range of possible attitudes toward love, I'm not sure our positive attitude toward love is the only example in history of positive attitudes toward love. I mean, I think there were many other times and types of places where there was also... We have both positive and negative attitudes.
Agnes:
We've found really innovative and complex ways of combining positive and negative attitudes towards love. And that's what all these songs are about. They're about how we have to have both of those attitudes at the same time. And I think we haven't done that yet with Freonics.
Robin:
So another example, perhaps, is entertainment. You might think that we have a deep desire to be entertained. And once upon a time, it was hard to fulfill that desire for entertainment. You know, maybe even if you could say, for example, if you couldn't read and there weren't musical instruments around, you would have to be entertained with the sunset or listening to the birds sing or something, but you literally It would be hard to generate much very engaging entertainment. That would be the typical case among people until recently. And then the world today has been able to generate vast amounts of entertainment, but you might have think we would have developed this hostility and wariness of entertainment. that we would have steeled ourselves against the threat of being overly sucked into entertainment and then not getting anything done and being productive and valuable to our families and associates. And therefore, even when more entertainment became possible, we would have said, no, no. We don't want that. Or even now when we believe it is possible, the question is, well, how pro-social is entertainment? It doesn't sound very pro-social. It sounds like you're going to be lazy and rely more on everybody else to do the work if you're getting very entertained. And yet we are pretty embracing of entertainment in our world. There's very little hostility toward the highly entertained.
Agnes:
I don't think, I think there is some, but I think that, so first of all, entertainment has the feature that cryonics lacks, that all these other things have, namely people who can be like, I was entertained, it worked. So that's important. Entertainment in fact works and we in fact get the enjoyment from it. So it's not just always promised to us, we actually get it. Um, and, um, we moralize entertainment quite a lot, so we think there are better and worse ways to be entertained, and we push people towards the higher forms of entertainment. Um, but I also think that, like, um, entertainment has kind of snuck up on us, in that you're right, that in, like, older worlds, the idea that there could be so much entertainment and that it could just fill your life, Nobody worried about that because it wasn't on offer. And I feel like that's just happened over the past 10 years that we have gotten so much better at entertainment. And so we didn't know that we were supposed to be scared about it, and we weren't scared. My husband, who's been reading a bunch of ancient Greek poetry, and he was telling me about these ancient games, like, what did children play? And one of them was, if the sun would go behind a cloud, the children would sing together, come back, sun, we love you. And there's like a little song that they would sing over and over until the sun came back. That was one of their games, okay? That's what they had. So now those kids are playing video games. And people in the ancient world did not anticipate that that game would be replaced by video games. And so they didn't know they were supposed to be scared. They should have been scared, but they had no reason to develop the fear. By contrast, with the desire to avoid death, like there was a reason to develop this fear because it was like our fondest and deepest wish from early on. And so we had to squash it.
Robin:
Just note that in the early days of television, many people were lamenting how many hours so many people were spending on television. And apparently even in the early day of novels, many people were complaining about how much time was wasted reading novels. I guess some of this goes a long way back.
Agnes:
There were a few profits, maybe. The problem with those profits, I think, is just that they were a little, they were dumping the gut of it. Like, arguably, it wasn't novels, and it wasn't television. It's the kind of television we have now, where it's, like, on-demand, and, you know, there are all these hit series, and Blacklist, and maybe that's not it either. Maybe I'm just like those people, and it's, like, the next thing that's gonna be even more addictive.
Robin:
So I guess it's interesting that people can convince us that they are entertained in ways they can't convince us they found true love or inner peace or enlightenment, I guess, insight. So those are the closer analogies to cryonics. If we say, you know, cryonics is this claim about what you will eventually achieve, but you can't demonstrate it now, we should make analogies with other kinds of aspirations where It's hard to verify that you will be able to achieve this aspiration even though there's that claim and that is a deep hope. So I think there are these other examples though that are more instructive things to compare with cryonics.
Agnes:
I think that the true love example is not an example. That is, I think that we whether or not we ought to be convinced, it's actually a common thing to put forward a couple, especially like an old couple that's been together for a long time, be like, as an example of like, of true love. We tell a lot of stories. I mean, historical stories, not just fictional stories of it. So we think we have examples of it. And I think the same thing is true about education actually. I think that's like part of the, role of many public intellectuals, probably not me or you, but like science educators, their role is to make manifest a certain kind of learnedness and to be like, look, this learnedness is possible and real and you could have it. So it may be that we're not getting the exact perfect version, but we're getting something pretty close to the ideal. And with cryonics, we're just nowhere within a million miles of
Robin:
Hey. Well, I might say that what you're getting there is signs of social recognition of or acceptance or respect for these things, if not the things themselves. So if you say, I would like everybody to think of me as learned, then it's enough to know that if I go get educated, I will have this be accepted as being learned. And then if I don't care so much about whether I'm actually learned, that might be enough for me, perhaps the same for love. I might just be enough to know that the community celebrated my marriage after 50 years or something, and I don't care that much about what the marriage is actually like.
Agnes:
That might be your view, but not the consensus view. That is, the consensus view is we have instances of real education and true love, and we can observe them and recognize that that's what they are. You may think, no, no, no, you're self-deceived. What's really going on is something else. But the point is, that's what people think.
Robin:
Right. But then that would be possible. But it would be possible with cryonics. That is, if we can just socially declare that somebody is learned and accept that without actually having evidence of it, we could do the same for cryonics. We could say, this person will be revived, even though we can't see it yet. So the fact that we could do that doesn't explain the difference, I guess. If it's the same across these areas, we could declare them success.
Agnes:
Like, so I think when we say this person is educated, like the science educators, they actually explain science stuff to you. Where before they explained it, you didn't understand it. Then they explain it, at least you feel like you understand it.
Robin:
Well, if your aspiration were to be an explainer, then that could be a trough, as opposed to gaining insight or to gaining satisfaction from your insight. If that's the claim, then you don't see that as easily.
Agnes:
It's a reasonable thing to think that, say, education and the ability to explain complicated things are going to be at least correlated, or it's at least a sign of it. And so I think if you could come up with something where it's like, look, here are social signs that this person has come back after cryonics and we can recognize them as such, that would make a big difference. But the problem is like, we actually can't do it. And so there's nothing that's correlated with it. And I think just they're going to is not good enough any more than they're going to fall in love or they're going to become educated. We need to see the end result, not just that they're going to become rich, but they are rich. They are educated.
Robin:
I guess the best other example would be religion then, to the degree that religion is selling you on an afterlife or inner peace. Those are harder for people to verify.
Agnes:
I think some people think they can verify it. Inner peace is not a good example. There are many people who claim to have inner peace and there are many people who believe those people. So inner peace is like true love. We think we have, many people think they have signs of it. Nobody thinks they have signs of the cracks, right? But I think that the salvation is an example. And so maybe this is why cryonics seems sort of hubristic. It's like, so you're asking us to adopt the mindset that we have learned to use for only one other case, right? Which is the religious case of salvation in the afterlife. Look, maybe we can do it, but you're gonna have to put in the kind of effort that religion put in over thousands of years to construct an institution, an edifice that supports this belief.
Robin:
So I want to go back and challenge this idea that for most areas of life, we can verify that the things that experts say that we're getting out of them are things that we're actually getting.
Agnes:
I didn't say that. That's not the claim I made. But the claim was that most people believe that we can't.
Robin:
And that's the disanalysis.
Agnes:
But it doesn't matter.
Robin:
Okay, but the Anlet, it's somehow naturally easier to believe that than to believe the analogous claim cryonics wants you to believe.
Agnes:
Yeah, very difficult to believe that people have come back from the dead.
Robin:
So the question is, try to understand, oh, not that they have this, that they will, again, not have or will, so.
Agnes:
No, no, no, that's not the analogous claim, because I think that then the analogous claim would be that people will fall in love or lose weight or become rich, and that's not good enough. We might believe that wouldn't be good enough. We need to believe that they have. So my claim is that the problem with cryonics is that what you would need to believe is that some people have done it and succeeded. That's what we hear the skepticism.
Robin:
I want to point your attention to the fact, the apparent fact that in our world people believe an enormous number of things that they don't have much direct evidence for. So they are not just, you know, having things that are offered them that they can verify that somebody they know has that. We are also believing a lot of other stuff, basically on the, you know, faith of the system we're in wouldn't lie to us sort of thing. About, you know, cosmology and, you know, microscopic organisms and nature of disease and all sorts of things. So people, you know, the idea that we are reluctant to believe anything we can't verify and people near us isn't quite right.
Agnes:
I wasn't claiming that. So I think that if some cases of cryonics succeeded and some people came back and you heard of it third hand and you couldn't verify it necessarily and it was just a rumor or whatever, that would be enough to turn it. So you wouldn't need like the best evidence in the world, but you need to have some reason to believe that this has actually worked. And we have no reason to believe that because it hasn't.
Robin:
But I mean, there are many things we believe where we don't believe that somebody has shown that it actually works. That is, we believe claims about cosmology that you can't make cosmology work. We believe in claims about the origin of life over billions of years. Nobody can prove that that works. There's lots of claims.
Agnes:
I'm making a more specific point about the kind of evidence we're requiring relative to a certain thing, which is one of our fondest wishes where we've been burned in hoping for it. What I'm saying is when you're in that category, then you're gonna require that the thing has shown itself to work. I agree with you that the big counter example is religious salvation. I don't know how many people really feel, really confidently believe in that. And religion doesn't, I don't think necessarily require you even to believe in it. But, But what I'm saying is that even if that is an example, that's just getting people to believe that was a very tall order and required the construction of religious culture, and cryonics hasn't done anything comparable. So I think the choice for cryonics, the path forward, is either relegate yourself to the other end of the spectrum, freezing people for short periods of time when they're young who have curable diseases and show that that works, Or, you know, construct a religious edifice, but that's going to take you a couple thousand years.
Robin:
I mean, most religions didn't actually take several thousand years to get going. There are many several thousand years old religions. And I mean, sadly, there are just many different kinds of religions and religion is a name we give to many different kinds of things. So then you might then ask, what is it about Quranic such that it can't sit in that space? Because lots of other things sit in that space.
Agnes:
Right, but I had a more specific, I'm not talking about religions in general. I was talking about religions where there's salvation in the afterlife. So, like, ancient Greek religion doesn't have that.
Robin:
But most today do, right?
Agnes:
Right, but the most today have been around for thousands of years.
Robin:
But initially- Yeah, instruct that.
Agnes:
Yeah, but initially they weren't big and they hadn't much, initially they were little cults. It takes a long time to get a religion going that's gonna give you that idea. And Judaism, which has been around a very long time, doesn't even exactly have that or it kind of has that with question mark. So even some of the, that's just a hard, it's a hard sell, salvation.
Robin:
What if it would help to think about other actions we might take today based on the idea that the future will be high-tech, that we also can't prove because we can't prove the future will be high-tech, that we also might be reluctant to count on, because this is the argument here, that Now, the key argument of a cryonics, why it should be plausible is that you should believe the future will continue to grow and continue capacity. And that's why they should bring you back. It's like if you took a boat to Antarctica or something that no one had ever gone to, you still might believe you would come back if it's a similar kind of thing to other places people have gone to and come back from. So, you know, this particular medical technology, if you thought it was, you know, if you thought it was really obvious that the future would be pretty high tech and be capable of ending this pause and fixing things, then it wouldn't be such an ask. So then it's about something you care deeply about, then you might think that's going to make you more skeptical. But I just thought maybe, you know, the very idea that, you know, we will continue to grow technologically and that our descendants will say, I don't know, be able to fix global warming or do various things. Maybe there's a similar sort of reluctance to believe in the future as a solution to our deepest hopes. Like, I think one of our deepest hopes is legacy at some level. We would like it not all to end soon and that somehow we are contributing to something that goes on. That's the deepest hope I think we have. And that's something we can't quite prove to ourselves. We certainly can't show anybody near us who's successfully had their legacy gone for a thousand years. you'd have to go back 1,000 years to find someone like that, right? And those people were pretty different than us. So if you might wonder, well, what could you do now that would contribute to a legacy that could last for 1,000 years? Do we either say, no one should hope on that, that's just too dangerous a hope to hope for?
Agnes:
I think mostly the first thing. And remember, you did a poll at one point about how much effort do you put into your long-term influence, and it was not much. So yeah, I think, and a couple of years ago, a philosopher wrote on Twitter, I'm hoping my philosophy lasts for hundreds of years. I can't remember what he, but he was totally slammed for like, how dare you? How dare you even suggest that your work might last for a few hundred years? Which of course, there are philosophers whose work has lasted, so it's not such a crazy thing. It's viewed as unbelievably hubristic. But I'm going to let you have the last word, but we should stop because we're over time.
Robin:
Well, that's the word I was about to tell you is that it's time to stop. All right. Till next time.
Agnes:
Okay. Bye.