Morendil comments on Normal Cryonics - Less Wrong

58 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 19 January 2010 07:08PM

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Comment author: Morendil 20 January 2010 06:35:22PM *  5 points [-]

The technology to revive suspendees will likely cost billions to develop, but who cares about development costs? What matters is the cost per procedure, and we already have "magical" technologies which carry only a reasonable cost per use, for instance MRI scanning.

The Future of Humanity Institute has a technological roadmap for Whole Brain Emulation which tantalizingly mentions MRI as a technology which already has close to the required resolution to scan brains at a resolution suitable for emulation.

Freezing is itself a primitive technology, it's only the small scale at which it is currently implemented which keeps the costs high. You don't need to look very far to see how cheap advanced-to-the-point-of-magical technology can get, given economies of scale; it's sitting on your desk, or in your pocket.

If it is feasible at all, and if it is ever done at scale, it will be cheap. This last could be a very big if: current levels of adoption are not encouraging. However, you can expect that as soon as the technical feasibility is proven many more people are going to develop an interest in cryonics.

Even assuming no singularity and no nanotech, a relatively modest extrapolation from current technology would be enough get us to "uploads" from frozen brains. Of course, reaching the tech level is only half the story - you'd still have to prove that in practice the emulated brains are "the same people". Our understanding of how the brain implements consciousness might be flawed, perhaps Penrose turns out to be right after all, etc.

Comment author: CronoDAS 21 January 2010 06:17:19AM 2 points [-]

Yeah, Penrose's position that the human brain is a hypercomputer isn't really supported by known physics, but there's still enough unknown and poorly understood physics that it can't be ruled out. His "proof" that human brains are hypercomputers based on applying Godel's incompleteness theorem to human mathematical reasoning, however, missed the obvious loophole: Godel's theorem only applies to consistent systems, and human reasoning is anything but consistent!

Comment author: pdf23ds 21 January 2010 07:59:45AM 1 point [-]

His "proof" that human brains are hypercomputers based on applying Godel's incompleteness theorem to human mathematical reasoning, however, missed the obvious loophole: Godel's theorem only applies to consistent systems, and human reasoning is anything but consistent!

I thought the obvious loophole was that brains aren't formal systems.

Comment author: CronoDAS 21 January 2010 08:40:22AM 1 point [-]

If you can simulate them in a Turing machine, then they might as well be.