🚀 go-pugleaf

[Moderator's note:  I was hard-pressed to decide whether to post this.
 It is really more suitable for the cryonics mailing list, and is a bit
 off the subject of nanotech per se.  However, volume on this newsgroup
 has been low recently, and similar identity/reconstruction questions
 have been discussed before (e.g. transporters & duplicators).
 I'm hoping for followups along the lines of "a mature cognitive
 science will/won't be able to to reconstruct a person from their diary"
 and not "cryonics is/isn't a ripoff"...]

Recently, I attended a birthday party where there was a cryonicist (actually,
more than one, but one was more vocal than the others).  And when I was
identified as the author of certain postings, I was required to answer
certain questions, along the lines of:

1.  IF YOU ACCEPT THE POSSIBILITY CRYONICS MAY WORK, DOESN'T IT MAKE SENSE
TO SIGN UP FOR CRYONIC SUSPENSION JUST ON THE POSSIBILITY IT MIGHT WORK?
Well, this is just a new form of the old "Should I believe in God?" argument
(I believe this originates with DesCartes).  If you lose, you lose the money
you invested in cryonic suspension.  If it works, it means the difference
between existence and non-existence.  If (in economics lingo) you are infinitely
price-flexible on (using Presidential parlance) the existence thing, any
reasonable dollar amount on cryonics is a sensible investment.  (oh yeah,
the DesCartes thing was "If I believe in God and he doesn't exist, it
doesn't make any difference whether I believed or not" and "if I believe
in God and he DOES exist, I am saved")

2.  IT WILL WORK, IF YOU ACCEPT PRESENT TRENDS OF TECHNOLOGY AS DESCRIBED
IN DREXLER'S BOOK, AND IF NOT WHY NOT?  Okay, I must agree that a significant
amount of information will be recoverable at some future date from frozen
brains.  But I still think it will be an experience like electroshock.
Or worse, possibly much worse.

3.  THE PRICE IS REASONABLE, CONSIDERING WHAT IS BEING OFFERED!	  This is sort
of like (1), above.  If you consider continued conscious thought after death
to be valuable, infinitely valuable, then any price is okay.  The real price
is much lower than I thought, about what I pay for car insurance (I pay a very
low rate).

That gets you a basic insurance policy.  Its some kind of policy where you
can get all your money back if you change your mind.

This argumentative person at the birthday party pulled aside one of the other
guests, who apparently was a known cryonicist, and asked him to tell what
he payed for cryonic insurance.  Apparently this fellow was a poor choice,
because he was paying a high rate--over $1000 per year.

He was some kind of karate expert, and he was signed up for a deluxe service
where they preserved your spinal cord with your brain.  This is believed
to give a better chance for preserving physical skills.  The vocal person
mentioned that arranging for extra money is important if the cryonics people
have big expenses to get your brain.  Like if you're in Brazil when you die,
it would be a good idea to be signed up for extra, so that the cryonics 
people would charter a plane to come get you.

Now all this gets me to thinking of these basic tests of the sincerity of
the cryonicists (though this time I won't be making far-fetched inferences,
which got me a lot of criticism in the past):

1.  DO YOU KEEP A DIARY?  Won't you admit the cryonics process MIGHT not
pass through as much of your personality/self/??? as you might want?  A diary
might help restore your local context (i.e. recover from short-term memory
loss).  It might have uses you might not foresee.  Perhaps a record of
recent thoughts (shortly before cryonic suspension) will be valuable in
recovering your intelligence.

2.  HAVE YOU MADE A DEATH MASK?  Actually, I guess they're called a "life mask"
when made from a person that is still alive.  You can't expect your face to
be reconstructed from photographs, do you?  It really costs not much to make
a mold of your face, wouldn't a true cryonicist do that?  In the case of the
karate expert, I would recommend molds of the whole body, because your reactions
will be tuned to a body with a particular mass distribution which will be
irreproducible if you allow your body to be lost.

3.  DO YOU HAVE VIDEOS OF YOURSELF?  This is sort of like question (1) about
diaries.  There MIGHT be aspects of your life which will be difficult to
reconstruct without video.  Maybe your frozen brain will be used to create
an artificial neural network--video still might be needed to train that
network to your speech and mannerisms, and maybe even your thinking process.
Have you ever sat down and had a good one-on-one discussion with a camcorder?
Doesn't it make sense to carry a video camera through AT LEAST one day of your
life to record the important bits, like how you interact with strangers, friends,
your wife.  In fact, you wouldn't want the experiences of a single day to affect
your recorded persona, do you?  You'll want to record at least a week or two,
24 hours a day, if you want a decent sample of who you are right now.

All of these questions involve simple and cheap things a cryonicist can
do to supplement their cryonic insurance policy.  Do you, cryonicist,
do these things?  If not, why not?