I have a few questions on the more practical side of brain preservation. Are there any organisations working on this problem with more room for funding? I know about the Brain Preservation Foundation and Nectome, but as an outsider it is hard to tell how active they are and what they could do with extra money.
In my opinion, it is very difficult for a company offering brain preservation to hit the market. At the beginning, there are possibly only a few customers scattered throughout the world. You will probably need a standby team at the bed of the terminally ill patient to ensure high quality preservation. This will make the costs skyrocket. The optimal solution would be if a hospital offers brain preservation as a part of their service. However, this seems to be unlikely since the topic is rather controversial. Do you have thoughts about this problems?
I agree with you that it is hard as an outsider to tell what the current scope of the situation is regarding the need for more funding. This post was more of a high-level overview of the problem to see whether people agreed with me that this was a reasonable cause area for effective altruism.
Since it seems that a good number of people do agree (please tell me if you don’t!), I am hoping to work on the practical area more in the future. For now, I don’t think I know enough to publically say with any confidence whether I think that any particular organization could benefit from more EA-level funding. If pressed, my guess is that the most important thing would be to get more researchers and people in general interested in the field.
I also agree with you about the chicken-and-egg problem of lack of interest and lack of quality of the service. One approach is to start locally, rather than trying to achieve high-quality preservation all over the world. This makes things much cheaper. An obvious problem with the local approach is that any local area may not have enough people interested to get the level of practical feedback needed, although this also can be addressed.
I forgot to mention that you should be careful about how brain preservation increases or decreases the probability for suffering or existential risks. On the one hand, many patients waiting for whole brain emulation (WBE) could be a reason to push forward WBE without thinking about the possible negative effects deeply enough. On the other hand, if there are reasons to believe that some people alive today could live for millenia, this may ecourage longterm thinking. Since I cannot determine the sign of the risk, I am cautiously for brain preservation because of the positive nearterm effects.
I don’t disagree with you. Although I think that existential and global catastrophic risks are the most important cause area, there are good project ideas in the life extension community without easy access to venture capital. Since biological aging is a major source of suffering, life extension and brain preservation are worthwhile cause areas.
I have a few questions on the more practical side of brain preservation. Are there any organisations working on this problem with more room for funding? I know about the Brain Preservation Foundation and Nectome, but as an outsider it is hard to tell how active they are and what they could do with extra money.
In my opinion, it is very difficult for a company offering brain preservation to hit the market. At the beginning, there are possibly only a few customers scattered throughout the world. You will probably need a standby team at the bed of the terminally ill patient to ensure high quality preservation. This will make the costs skyrocket. The optimal solution would be if a hospital offers brain preservation as a part of their service. However, this seems to be unlikely since the topic is rather controversial. Do you have thoughts about this problems?
Thanks for your interest in this topic!
I agree with you that it is hard as an outsider to tell what the current scope of the situation is regarding the need for more funding. This post was more of a high-level overview of the problem to see whether people agreed with me that this was a reasonable cause area for effective altruism.
Since it seems that a good number of people do agree (please tell me if you don’t!), I am hoping to work on the practical area more in the future. For now, I don’t think I know enough to publically say with any confidence whether I think that any particular organization could benefit from more EA-level funding. If pressed, my guess is that the most important thing would be to get more researchers and people in general interested in the field.
I also agree with you about the chicken-and-egg problem of lack of interest and lack of quality of the service. One approach is to start locally, rather than trying to achieve high-quality preservation all over the world. This makes things much cheaper. An obvious problem with the local approach is that any local area may not have enough people interested to get the level of practical feedback needed, although this also can be addressed.
I forgot to mention that you should be careful about how brain preservation increases or decreases the probability for suffering or existential risks. On the one hand, many patients waiting for whole brain emulation (WBE) could be a reason to push forward WBE without thinking about the possible negative effects deeply enough. On the other hand, if there are reasons to believe that some people alive today could live for millenia, this may ecourage longterm thinking. Since I cannot determine the sign of the risk, I am cautiously for brain preservation because of the positive nearterm effects.
I don’t disagree with you. Although I think that existential and global catastrophic risks are the most important cause area, there are good project ideas in the life extension community without easy access to venture capital. Since biological aging is a major source of suffering, life extension and brain preservation are worthwhile cause areas.