On Sunday night, after the lights were off, my girlfriend Nora asked whether I would still love her if she were a worm. I asked which worm. She said a normal one, and that the point was to say yes without thinking. I told her I could do that, but then it wouldn’t be an answer, so I thought about it and gave her my actual position: “No. I love human women, and Caenorhabditis elegans is a self-fertilizing hermaphrodite with 302 neurons.” She has been staying at her sister’s in Medford since Tuesday. She said I could explain it to anyone but her, so I’m explaining it here.
“A normal worm” makes the question unanswerable. Nobody has published a connectome for an earthworm, so asking whether Nora would survive conversion into Lumbricus terrestris is like asking whether a document will survive being saved in a file format with no specification. The question only becomes well posed for a worm whose wiring we know, and the canonical one is C. elegans. In 1986, after about fifteen years of electron microscopy, John White, Sydney Brenner and their colleagues in Cambridge published its complete wiring diagram, the first for any animal. The journal’s editors ran it under the running head “The Mind of a Worm.” If Nora is going to be a worm, it should at least be one whose mind we have read.
From there it’s a question about personal identity, and I hold the view most readers here share: a person is a pattern, not a particular lump of tissue. That’s why I expect uploading to preserve me, and why I’ve never minded that most of my atoms have turned over since college. But a pattern still needs enough substrate to run on. Nora’s brain has about 86 billion neurons and something like a hundred trillion synapses; the worm has 302 neurons and around seven thousand synapses. You cannot fit a woman who does the Saturday crossword in pen and has kept up a two-year grudge against the upstairs neighbor’s Peloton into a network that small, and anything that does fit is a worm with her name on it.
Even in the best case, the worm keeps very little. What C. elegans mostly learns is associations: pair a smell with food and it will crawl toward the smell; pair it with something bad and it learns to stay away. At best, worm Nora would keep one learned association, and I tried to be generous about which. I asked her what she thought it would be. She said that, at that point in the conversation, probably avoiding me. I told her that was a reasonable estimate, since aversive learning in C. elegans is well documented.
Her sister has texted me twice to say it wasn’t a real question. It was a bid for reassurance, and the right response was to say yes and go to sleep. I understand the function, but look at what the yes commits me to. A love that would survive her becoming a worm survives the loss of everything that is specifically her, and a love that doesn’t depend on anything about her isn’t about her. It’s a constant function, and Nora deserves better than a function that returns yes no matter what you pass it. I told her she deserves to be loved conditionally, on the right conditions, and I meant it as a compliment.
Her strongest point, which she made on Tuesday from the hallway with her bag already packed, was that I have a neuropreservation contract with Alcor. When I die, a standby team is supposed to cool my body and get it to Scottsdale, where my head will wait in liquid nitrogen until someone can repair it, and I’ve asked Nora to be the person who makes sure the hospital calls them. She isn’t signed up herself. I’ve never pushed; the neuro minimum is $80,000, and a decision like that should be hers. She wanted to know why she is expected to love a head in a dewar in Arizona when I won’t love her as a worm.
The cases aren’t symmetrical. A vitrified brain keeps its structure, and under the information-theoretic criterion of death I’m not gone as long as the information that makes me me can, in principle, be read back out. Freezing me is lossless storage. Turning Nora into a worm is lossy compression at roughly three hundred million to one, and what survives is an opinion about a smell. Cryonicists have a name for partners who react the way Nora did, the hostile wife phenomenon, and they have been documenting it since the 1960s. The best-known essay on it is titled “Is That What Love Is?” I sent it to her Tuesday night with a note saying I thought she’d find it clarifying.
On Thursday she came back for her laptop charger and asked, from the doorway, who the beneficiary of my life insurance was. It’s Alcor, which is how the neuro option is funded, and the $61 monthly premium has come out of our joint account since we moved in together. She said she had always assumed it was her. I told her that in every sense that matters it is, since the policy pays for the only version of me that could ever come back to her.
We freeze C. elegans in liquid nitrogen and thaw them alive every week. It's how strain collections are kept. As a worm, she'd be the only one in the relationship with a revival protocol that has actually been tested.
Revival was never the bottleneck. You'd be thawing 302 neurons.
She's on my couch. For what it's worth she would have taken "probably." That's a calibrated answer, and of everyone involved you should have been the one able to give it.
"Probably" implies a probability, and she would have asked me for it.
Alcor member since 2011, so I'm sympathetic, but I'd push on the asymmetry. Nobody serious claims vitrification is lossless. There's ice-free cryoprotection, there's still ischemic damage, there's fracturing during cooldown. We sign up because we think enough structure survives. If "enough survives" is your criterion for yourself, you owe her the same criterion for the worm, and then it's a question of where the threshold sits. You've put it somewhere very convenient.
The threshold isn't convenient. The two cases are about eight orders of magnitude apart, and the threshold is anywhere in between.
Life insurance agent here, I write a fair number of cryonics policies. You can split beneficiaries. Alcor can be primary for the amount the neuro option needs and she can be secondary on anything above it. Most of my clients with partners set it up that way.
There's nothing above it. The policy is sized to the minimum.
On the compression ratio. 86 billion over 302 is about 285 million, so "three hundred million to one" is fine for neurons. But the information is mostly in the synapses, and 10^14 over 7,000 is about 1.4 × 10^10. You're understating the loss by a factor of fifty.
Thank you. I used neurons because I thought it was the more generous figure for her.
As a four-dimensionalist I'd have said yes, and not to be nice. If she becomes a worm, the worm is a temporal part of the same perdurant as the woman doing the crossword, so you'd be loving a stage of her. Nobody loves every stage of a person equally (my wife would say the same about my 2019).
Small correction: a segmented annelid now has a whole-body connectome too, the three-day-old Platynereis larva. That's much closer to what she meant, and at 966 neurons she'd have three times the headroom.
Three times the headroom is still about eight orders of magnitude short. I'd also note it's a larva, so you'd be asking her to love me as an adolescent sea worm, which I don't think helps her side.
My wife asked me the worm question in 2021. I said yes immediately, without thinking, exactly as instructed. We're divorced now. I'm not saying your answer was right, I'm saying the "just say yes" strategy is less dominant than her sister thinks.
Sending her "Is That What Love Is?" was a mistake even by the essay's own lights. Everyone I know in cryonics who agrees with that essay also knows you don't send it to the person it's about.
It describes her reaction more precisely than I could. That seemed like a reason to send it.
Lab tech here, just a note on the hermaphrodite point. C. elegans males exist, about one in a thousand in a normal population. So technically she could be a male worm. "Self-fertilizing hermaphrodite" is true of almost all of them, just not every one.
302 neurons is still more than op