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Daniel Eliot Boese's cryonic revival requests
dated Sunday, the 30th of October, 2016 AD.


Greetings from 2016!


I write this letter to a particular audience (though I don't mind anyone else reading it). Specifically, I hope that you are reading this if: 1) I have died, 2) my body has been cryopreserved, 3) new technologies have continued to be developed, and 4) you are considering whether to try using a particular method to revive me. My goal here is to describe some of my preferences about being revived. I'm hoping to go into enough detail, and with enough explanation of my reasoning, that you can extrapolate what choices I would make in circumstances I can't guess about today.


A quick summary of this letter's most important points:
* I want to live into the indefinitely distant future.
* I want to make choices that maximize the odds of doing that.
* Helping me get what I want can help you get what you want.
* I'm volunteering for experimental mind-uploading techniques, as long as they have a reasonable chance.
* I'm weird, but as long as I can read, type, and hike, I'm happy.


To begin, I describe a simple, fundamental fact: there are things that I value. Slightly less simple: nobody else values the same things I do, in quite the same way I value them. Which means that the one person who I can trust the most to work towards fulfilling my values (and any reasonable extrapolations of them) is myself. If I permanently die, I can no longer do that, which is one of the main reasons I've signed up for my body to be cryonically preserved, despite my best estimate being that there is a 96% chance that I will never be revived. That remaining 4% chance of being revived and being able to personally continue to work towards fulfilling my values is more than worth the costs.

If you are reading this, then there is a reasonable chance that whatever technology might be used to revive me will also be what is available to revive you, should you suffer some illness or injury. Most of this letter involves requests that anyone who has values they wish to fulfill would want, including yourself. Thus, I hope that one of the best things you can do to maximize the odds that you can continue to fulfill your values is to work with as many of my listed requests as possible, so that, in turn, your own similar requests will be respected by whoever stands ready to possibly revive you.


Trying to be revived is one example of an "instrumental goal", a method of achieving my "terminal goals". There are a great many different instrumental goals which are worth working for, no matter what your terminal goals are. A rule-of-thumb that I use is to consider the terminal goals of "keeping myself alive into the indefinite future" and "keeping any sapience at all alive into the indefinite future"; anything I can do that would help with both of these goals, one the epitome of selfishness and the other the epitome of altruism, is nearly certainly worth working towards.

While I do value my own life, I don't understand consciousness very well. I at least have a general idea of every level of how a computer works, from electrons through logic gates and memory cells to software, to the level that I could make a reasonable attempt to build a computer from scratch, given sufficient time and resources; but I don't know how the cells of a brain produce the subjective sensation of qualia. Which leads me to want my own consciousness to continue.

I've thought about how much I value my life, and I honestly don't know what I would be willing to trade it for. I'm reasonably confident about some extremes, such as accepting a small increase in the odds of my permanent extinction if that would greatly increase the odds that some sapience would continue to exist; but I have trouble figuring out what trade-offs I find acceptable today, let alone guessing what trade-offs I would find acceptable tomorrow.

Another important instrumental goal is one that my more libertarian friends prize very much: that when I'm working towards my values, and you're working towards yours, it's often possible to come to an agreement that helps both of us achieve our goals. Put another way, we can have "positive sum interactions", even if I happen to be dead at the time. The most obvious thing that you can do for me is bring me back to life, and I've been able to think of three ways that I, specifically, may be able to help you in return.

First, and most generally, my experiences differ from those of the average person today to the degree that, sometimes, I can be the first to start working on a useful idea. Secondly, somewhat more personally, in present-day terms, I prefer being by myself 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. And thirdly, if you are considering experimental methods to create a software emulation of a human brain, I am willing to accept a certain amount of personal risk that I could be permanently killed when I might otherwise be revived, by giving advance permission for my own mind to be the subject of such experiments, as long as certain common-sense preconditions (described below) are met.

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. I am also aware that if you wish to disregard my preferences, there is nothing I can do to stop you. If you wish to revive me in a manner that does not meet the standards I'm about to describe, 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 believe that the "information" theory of identity is a more useful guide than theories of identity which tie selfhood to a physical brain, or to uninterrupted continuity.

I understand that all choices contain risk. My specific goal with these requests, preferences, and standards is simple: to try to maximize the odds that I will be alive at any point in the indefinitely-distant future. If you have data that I don't, and can perform Bayesian updates on Fermi estimates, then you can probably make a better guess than I can today about what choices I would make to maximize my survival odds were I to have access to the same data and analysis techniques.


* I want to live indefinitely, not just live, die, live again, and die permanently. 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 being ready to preserve me again if necessary.

* If you haven't figured out how brain cells produce minds, then I would prefer to be revived as a living biological being than to have my mind uploaded into software form.

* The possibilities if a hostile agent seizes control of the software and hardware that a human mind is running on are horrifying; one of the simplest is editing minds without their consent. Given what I understand about software development, one of the few effective ways to reduce software vulnerability to such attacks is for it to be made free and open-source, in a manner that allows anyone to inspect it for bugs. I've weighed the options, and if the choice is between uploading my mind into software that runs on non-free, closed-source software, and leaving my body cryopreserved, then I would reluctantly choose to remain frozen, even if doing so increases the risk I'll never be revived at all. However, if the uploaded mind derived from my brain has access to the closed-source software and its documentation, and enough time to inspect it, and the ability to correct any bugs found, then I would choose uploading. 

* 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 fulfilling them.

* As I think about different strategies I could pursue as I seek to fulfill my values, I suspect that there will be certain advantages to be one of the first minds turned into software, and certain disadvantages; and I'm willing to try to gain those advantages, if the risks of those disadvantages can be minimized. With the goal of maximizing the odds that my mind will remain intact enough to continue to pursue the fulfillment of my values, the preconditions I've thought of to have my pre-approval for experimental uploading include:
- 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 degradation), and be made available to other groups using different methods to try to reconstruct my mind.
- Any software used to reconstruct or run the emulated mind is free and open-source, so that at least the uploaded mind (and preferably people in general) can checked for and repair any bugs, malware, and other issues.
- To make sure that the uploading technology meets minimal standards for probably being successful at 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.



Sometimes, people will, with the best of intentions, perform acts that turn out to be morally reprehensible. As one historical example in my home country, with the stated justification of improving their lives, a number of First Nations children were sent to residential schools where the efforts to eliminate their culture ranged from corporal punishment for speaking the wrong language to instilling lessons that led the children to believe that Indians were worthless. While there is little I, as an individual, can do to make up for those actions, I can at least try to learn from them, to try to reduce the odds of more tragedies being done with the claim of "it was for their own good". To that end, I am going to attempt a strategy called "precommitment". Specifically, I am going to do two things: I am going to precommit to work against the interests of anyone who alters my mind without my consent, even if, after the alteration, I agree with it; and I am going to give my consent in advance to certain sharply-limited alterations, in much the way that a doctor can be given permission to do things to a body that would be criminal without that permission.

I value future states of the universe in which I am pursuing things I value more than I value futures in which I pursue other things. I do not want my mind to be altered in ways that would change what I value, and the least hypocritical way to do that is to discourage all forms of non-consensual mind-alteration. I am willing to agree, that I, myself, should be subject to such forms of discouragement, if I were to attempt such an act. I have been able to think of one, single moral justification for such acts - if there is clear evidence that doing so will reduce the odds of all sapience going permanently extinct - but given how easily people are able to fool themselves, if non-consensually altering someone's mind is what is required to do that, then accepting responsibility for doing that, including whatever punishments result, would be a small price to pay, and so I am willing to accept such punishments even in this extreme case, in order to discourage the frivolous use of this justification.

While a rigid stance against non-consensual mind-alteration may be morally required in order to allow a peaceful society, there are also certain benefits in allowing consensual mind-alteration, in certain cases. Most relevantly, it could be argued that scanning a brain and creating a software emulation of it could be counted as altering it, and it is obviously in my own self-interest to allow that as an option to help me be revived to resume pursuing my values. Thus, I am going to give my consent in advance to "alter" my mind to allow me to continue to exist, with the minimal amount of alteration possible, in two specific circumstances: 1) If such alterations are absolutely required to allow my mind to continue to exist at all, and 2) As part of my volunteering to be a subject for experimental mind-uploading procedures.





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, and am very unlikely to say (or even describe) before I die:
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 physical form, and would prefer to be healthy and fit than be shaped exactly as I was at my death.
- I greatly enjoy reading, writing with a keyboard, 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 a neuter robot on Mars' moon Phobos as I would a male human on Earth.
- My favourite colours tend to be the blues, greys, and whites of the sky.
- One of my favourite music albums is Jon Anderson's "Olias of Sunhillow", and I wouldn't object to it being played as I wake up after being dead.



Signed,
Daniel Eliot Boese <DataPacRat@DataPacRat.com>

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