I think Josh pretty much covered everything in his final summary. Like Josh and others, given the technology, I wouldn’t hesitate to freeze myself, especially if my assets would be taken in the estate tax. But I do have two thoughts to add.
First, when do you freeze yourself? Time and timing are both important. In order to maximize your chance at future resurrection, you should probably freeze yourself before you die, as Josh points out. As soon as you die, your brain cells are deprived of oxygen, and start a rapid cascade into death. In a more compelling example, if you’re shot in the face, chances are future scientists won’t bring you back, cryogenics or no. This means that you basically have to decide at some point before death that you want to go into a deep freeze. There’s a chance that you won’t ever be brought back, in which case you’re basically exchanging a few hours, days, or perhaps months/years of life for the possibility of a presumably longer period of time later. I’d probably have to calculate the expected value of the cryogenically extended life vs. the probably amount of life I’d be potentially giving up by freezing myself before death. I’d be far more worried about that sacrifice than the specific monetary cost, i.e. I don’t know if I’d want to “die early.”
Second, in response to Tom’s idea of downloading a digital copy of your brain, I’m not sure that I’d benefit from that. Josh might blog later about how he believes that the idea of a unified consciousness is false, but the fact is that we perceive ourselves as a unified being, a unified self. I am the same person as I was when I was 5 years old, even though my neuronal patterns are very different. More importantly, I’m making decisions right now… right now, n-now… er, now… that will affect me, my future self. So the downloading thing is only valuable IF I think that I, a unified self, will be able to appreciate being alive in the future. One of Josh’s links had a great example of why this might not be the case. So if you (say, David 1) downloaded your exact neuronal signaling, etc. into a computer, and then uploaded it perfectly into a cloned body, the clone (David 2) would think that it was me. It would perceive that it was David 1, the unified self. But what if I were still alive? It’d be clear to me, the true and original David 1, that David 2 was just an imposter, even though he might genuinely believe himself to be the original. So if I died, and my memories were just transplanted into a cloned body, I think that clone (or even several clones) would think himself to be “me” but…. they’d still be imposters. That means that I wouldn’t enjoy the fruits of the process; I’d still fear the eternal death just the same. The difference is being able to replicate oneself, and being able to live forever as a unified self. And if the only advantage to the “digital download” is there’s someone running around with my genetic material thinking that he’s me… well, like Josh, I think I might as well just have natural genetic progeny.