DataPacRat's cryonic revival requests and preferences, preliminary version 0.1.1, dated Monday, the 19th of September, 2016.


To anyone considering attempting to revive me:

Today, few, if any, cryonicists seem to record their preferences about how they would prefer to be revived. I'm writing this guide to serve as a guide as to what my preferences would be, to help anyone who has to make a decision about whether to try to use any particular method to revive me after I've died and been cryonically preserved.

I am fully aware that since I will be dead, these requests and preferences will have no legal force.

That having been said, if you wish to revive me in a manner that does not meet these standards, I urge you to take a significant amount of time to consider whether such a revival truly is the most moral and ethical choice you can make. If you are having trouble determining how to tell whether your choice is ethical, then I suggest that you use the twin standards of wanting to maximize the odds of your own long-term survival, and wanting to maximize the odds that any sapience at all survives into the indefinite future, as your guides.


* I want to live indefinitely, not just twice, so I would prefer to be revived if the technological and economic means are in place so that a second death can be dealt with, such as by preserving me again or through some other means.

* I don't understand how the cells of the brain produce qualia and consciousness, and have a certain concern that an attempt at uploading my mind into digital form may lose important parts of my self. If you haven't solved those fundamental problems of how brains produce minds, I would prefer to be revived as a biological, living being, rather than have my mind uploaded into software form.

* I understand that all choices contain risk. However, I believe that the "information" theory of identity is a more useful guide than theories of identity which tie selfhood to a physical brain. I also suspect that there will be certain advantages to be one of the first minds turned into software, and certain disadvantages. In order to try to gain those advantages, and minimize those disadvantages, I am willing to volunteer to let my cryonically-preserved brain be used for experimental mind-uploading procedures, provided that certain preconditions are met, including:
- To ensure a baseline of ethical behaviour, all the typical institutional ethical standards for human experimentation are met (excluding any that would prevent any human mind-uploading at all);
- I value my privacy, but I value my long-term survival more. To reduce the odds that one uploading group's failure leads to my mind being unrecoverable, at least three separate copies of all the data describing my brain be stored in physically separate locations (including checksums, redundancy, and all the other techniques to deal with bit-rot and other forms of data degredation), and be made available to other groups using different methods to try to reconstruct my mind;
- All the issues which make free and open source software important become even more important when minds live as software. To reduce the odds of software problems, all the software being used to run the uploaded mind should be free and open source, including allowing the uploaded mind access to it to check for and repair bugs, malware, and other issues;
- To make sure that the uploading technology meets minimal standards for successfully creating a human mind, that it has successfully worked on other mammalian brains, including rats and chimpanzees;
- That the data which I request elsewhere to be stored by my cryonic service provider in a perpetual storage drawer to be stored with and made available to the uploaded mind;
- That some neutral third-party, outside the group doing the uploading, be used as an arbitrator to determine whether these requests are being met, and that the uploaded mind receives the benefits of any other moral or legal standards that exist at the time, such as what today are called fundamental human rights.

* If the technology for uploading human minds is well established, and no longer needs experimental subjects, then the previous section about the terms for volunteering for experimental procedures no longer applies, and I'll be quite happy to be uploaded in whatever fashion maximizes the odds of my survival into the indefinite future.



(As this is a preliminary draft for discussion purposes, I will not print or sign it, and am likely to continue to edit various details. Once I have worked out the more obvious flaws, I will use PGP or GPG to make a digitally signed copy, in a fashion that can be verified with a publicly-hosted decryption key, and make a physical copy to be stored with my other papers by my cryonic service provider.)