I am currently signed up for neuropreservation through Alcor, funded by an indexed universal life insurance policy.
Why
My primary motivation for cryonics is preserving optionality. I find it pretty plausible that the equilibrium of philosophical reflection will conclude what is valuable is consciousness-moments, rather than people. It might turn out that there isn't a meaningful difference between there being experience moments that have continuity of identity with "me", and there being equally meaningful experience-moments that don't, in which case cryonics doesn't buy me anything.
However, I absolutely do not want to make irreversable decisions (like allowing myself to die irretrivably), on the basis of my current, non-equibibrium, philosophical intuitions, generated by my monkey brain, in an infant society. I want to punt questions to the future where (if things go well) I, and society, will be much smarter and much better informed, and we can have much more confidence in our philosophy. Cryonics is the action that preserves options for my future self, while regular death doesn't.
Additionally, signing up for cryonics is a costly shibboleth of being part of a tribe that is defiantly opposed to death, and I like that aesthetic.
Will it work?
I haven't looked into the technology in high detail, but it seems like a pretty good bet that cyronics can work: that there's a greater than 30% chance that cryopreservation preserves what's important about a person's soul such that the technology of the future can bring them back.
However, my best guess is that cryonics will not actually pay off, because humanity will go extinct before revival is possible. Whether or not human civilization survives seems to me to be most of the crux of eventual revival.(I decline to give a specific probability estimate of extinction.)
Neuro vs whole body
It seems pretty likely that important soul-relevant information is stored in parts of the body other than the brain, in neural tissue or in other body systems. However, the clear majority of soul-relevant info is encoded in the brain, in particular, and whole body cryopreservation trades off somewhat, against the quality of preservation of the brain.
My prefered cryopreservation method would be to sever and preserve the head, and then also preserve the body, separately. As far as I know, no cryonics organization currently offers this, but I might look into trying to set that up as a custom arrangement with Alcor, when I'm older and richer.
Charity
When I was younger, I had a rule that for every dollar I spent for myself (which in practice mostly meant purchasing personal development materials), I would donate an equal amount to charity. I dropped this policy when I discovered x-risk, deciding that I should be much more unreserved about investing in my own capabilities. Cryonics is the only major (>$1000 a year) purchase that is clearly just for me: my being cryopreserved does not significantly improve the world or increase my own capability to improve the world.
So, I decided to apply my old policy to my spending on cryonics. I now donate $
A note on my obligations
I don’t think that I am morally obligated to give this amount to charity, to justify my purchasing of cryonics.
Humans are organisms, with their own interests. By my morality , we have duties to our fellow sentient beings and to society. But that doesn’t mean that we are, or ought to be, only vehicles for the public good.
I don’t think that personal property is legitimized only or primarily by arguments about aggregate utility. We are agents, with individual interests, and we are allowed (in some abstract moral sense) to act on those interests. We are each allowed to have things that are ours, to do things that are just for us, so long as we conduct ourselves ethically in doing so .
If you labor to create value in the world, there’s a basic sense of fairness in which the value created properly belongs to you. What you do with those resources is your choice. I regard it as perverse to claim that one doesn’t have the right to them, both for reasons of fairness and reasons of practical incentives.
To be clear, I’ve received many enormous privileges not due to anything in particular that I did, but by accident of when and where I was born. Far and above anything else, I benefit from the opportunities of being born in a relatively free, vastly wealthy, industrialized society, built by the labor of millions of my cultural and genetic forebears. To a lesser but still large extent, I benefit from the arbitrary privileges of being white and growing up in a moderately wealthy family. I consider those benefits, the resources that I control on that basis, to be much less mine by rights, than the value I create with my time and labor. With regard to those resources, I basically do consider myself not to be owner, but custodian. (I also derive enormous benefits from the genetic endowment of my above average intelligence, which is ambiguously “mine”, to do with as a wish, vs a privilege that I’m obligated to employ for the betterment of all life.)
Furthermore, even beyond my assertion that you have the moral right to spend your resources as you choose, I regard “taking action to preserve your own life” as the most easily-legitimated use of personal resources. Desiring to live, and taking action to continue one’s life is fundamental to what it means to be an organism (and except in some edge cases, to be an agent).
We typically excuse the hypothetical starving man who steals a loaf of bread to feed himself for a day. If you think that life is good and valuable in itself and not as a special case, I think you should all the more approve of someone spending their own money, earned through productive positive-sum interactions, to buy themselves much more than one day of additional life in expectation.
Even putting aside that you’re allowed to buy things that are just for you, I regard paying for cryonics as closer to paying for necessities like food and medical treatment, than paying for video games or yachts.
All of this is to say that I think that a person should by no means feel the slightest bit guilty about signing up for cryonics, because of a thought that maybe the resources could be spent better elsewhere. Or to feel like you need to compensate for your “selfishness” somehow. You’re allowed to want things, and especially allowed to want to live. You don’t need to justify that to me, to yourself, or to anyone.
I don’t think that I am obligated to give to charity to justify my “selfish” purchase of cryonics. I wonder if I should make a point to give some different amount, just to signal to others (and to myself) that I reject any claim that I labor under that obligation.
But, for the time being at least, I think I’ll continue the practice, if for no other reason than as a reminder that, while I’m attending to my own basic needs, there are other people in the world that are falling far short of satisfying theirs.
I have the resources, and I’m a free human being that can do what I want with those resources.