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DataPacRat's cryonic revival requests and preferences, preliminary version 0.1.3, dated Wednesday, the 21st 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 under current law, and I do not expect the law to change in a way that will give them legal force by the time they may be referred to.

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.



My overall goal with these specific requests is to try to maximize the odds that I will be alive at some point in the indefinite far future. If you are able to perform an analysis using data I lack, which includes estimates of how likely my cryopreserved body will remain preserved if revival is postponed for a given length of time, the probability that any given revival attempt will be successful, the rate of improvement of potential revival technologies, and so on, then I expect that you will have access to both better data than I'm using to base these requests on, and sufficient mathematical skill to use that data, to the point that I'd do better by allowing you to use your own best estimates. So if you are able to perform Bayesian updating based on Fermi estimations, and you have power over my cryopreserved body, then please do your best to maximize my odds of survival, treating the rest of this document as a list of my preferences rather than requests.

* 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, whether by preserving me again or some other method.

* 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.

* However, if you are performing experiments with human uploading, then I am willing to volunteer to let my cryonically-preserved brain to be used as a subject for such experiments, provided that certain preconditions (which seem to me to be basic common-sense items) are met. While my overall goal with this document is to increase my chances of survival, I understand that all choices contain risk. 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; and I'm writing this section to try to maximize the odds of gaining those advantages while minimizing the odds of significant downsides. The preconditions I've thought of to have my pre-approval for experimental uploading include:
- 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 should 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, it should have successfully worked on other mammalian brains, including rats and chimpanzees;
- The personal data which I have requested in my will to be stored by my cryonic service provider in a "perpetual storage drawer" should also be stored with and made available to the uploaded mind;
- A neutral third-party, outside the group doing the uploading, should 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, with one important caveat.
- There is no such thing as being able to have 100% certainty that a piece of software is without flaws or errors. One of the few methods for detecting a large proportion of any program's is to allow many people, with all their varied perspectives and skills, to examine it, by proclaiming that the program is free and open source and releasing both the source code and binaries for inspection. Without that strategy, not only are bugs much more likely to remain, but when someone does manage to find a bug, it is likely to remain secret and uncorrected. Such uncorrected bugs can be used by unscrupulous people to do just about anything to any data stored on a computer. This is bad enough when that data is merely personal email, or even a bank's financial records; when the data is a sapient mind, the possibilities are horrifying. Given the possible downsides, I find it difficult to trust the motives of anyone who wishes to run an uploaded mind on a computer that uses closed-source software. Therefore, if there is a choice between uploading my mind using uninspectable, closed-source software, and not being revived, I would choose not to be uploaded in that fashion, even if doing so increases the risk of never being revived at all. If there is a choice between being uploading my mind using closed-source software that the uploaded mind can inspect, then if that includes all the documentation that is necessary for the uploaded mind to learn how to understand the software, I would reluctantly agree to the uploading procedure as being preferable to risking never being revived at all.

* If it turns out to be impossible to revive me in any fashion that could be considered a future version of myself, but it is possible to create a new person which shares some portion of my mind, skills, and/or memories, then I'd accept the creation of that person as being preferable to not creating them, to increase the odds that someone who shares my values will continue to exist and work towards them.


In case it may be of use in verifying whether my revived self still has my memories, here is the SHA512 checksum of a passcode I am very likely to remember:
aadc957d0e770b792d40b5532e5dab5f7701faab211b80e9b0179119c01e89d0a6fc5cc3e6dafacd52d334b05b2bf300a75ec683796a464f010de89fbab106d1


The following points are extremely minor compared to the above, and if any of them become relevant at all, then I expect that I will be more than happy even if they are ignored.
- I have relatively little emotional attachment to my current form, and would prefer to be healthy and fit than be shaped exactly as I was when I die.
- I greatly enjoy reading, writing, and hiking. As long as I am still able to do those, then I suspect that I would be as happy experiencing the shape of a female centauroid rodent in virtual reality or an asexual robot on Mars' moon Phobos as I would a male human on Earth.
- I suspect that I have two characteristics which may allow me to provide value to whatever society I might be revived in. One is that I think in ways different enough from other people that I can occasionally be the first to start working on a useful idea. The other is that, in present-day terms, I am introverted to the point that I could be described as having "schizoid personality disorder", which could let me be productive in isolated circumstances that people who desire more, and more direct, social contact than I do would find uncomfortable.
- My favorite colors tend to be the blues, grays, and whites of the sky.



(As this is a preliminary draft for discussion purposes, I won't 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.)

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