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whpearson comments on A survey of anti-cryonics writing - Less Wrong
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Cryonics is hard to argue against as it partially involves magic (in the sufficiently advanced technology sense) and it involves something we don't fully understand, how information is stored in the brain. So the lack of technical criticism might be a rare instance of people shutting up about things they don't understand.
BTW, I've been bugging people for being off-topic all thread, so I thought I should say somewhere: this is exactly on-topic, this objection is as specific to my argument as can be. Thank you.
This is off topic too, but kudos to you for splitting off two comments from one when you're making two unrelated points. It keeps the discussions much clearer.
Cryonics advocates make lots of specific claims - see the articles linked at the end. Is there no claim on any of those articles that could be countered?
I don't know. The thing is the concrete claims do not add up to water tight case for cryonics doing what people want, that is preserving identity over the long term. The Alcor Scientist's article says as much.
There is space for later understanding of the way that the brain stores memories or just some chemical state important for identity to not be preserved by cryonics as it is currently practised.
There is space for that. It could turn out, say, that memories depend on some chemical or other being in one of two isomeric states, and that vitrification fluids will flip all the isomers the same way, leading to immediate information theoretic death.
However, I think that the case that Alcor and others present is enough to shift the burden of proof. At the moment there seems no reason to think that homeopathy or sand-powered tanks will work, and the burden is on proponents to come up with such a reason. By contrast, while we're a long way from being able to say with confidence that cryonics will work, we are at the stage where we can say that we should expect that it is likely to work until someone can come up with a reason why it shouldn't work.
Scenarios like the one in my first paragraph above would be quite a surprise; as far as I know they don't form any part of our current understanding of how memory is stored. It's not enough to throw out a bunch of "maybes": if you accept that there's no part of the evidence presented above that can be taken apart and shown to be flawed, then it is sufficient that it's a mistake to have low confidence in the technical plausibility of cryonics until someone presents a biologically plausible way for it not to work.
I'd say It depends how complete you think modern neuroscience is. If you think neuroscience is fairly complete and there won't be many gotcha's about how things work then I would adopt your view.
The less complete it is, and the more known unknowns and unknown unknowns there might be before we get a full understanding the more chance that one of those unknowns will interact with the vitrification fluid or how quickly we manage to get people vitrified at the moment (we might not be being quick enough to preserve some chemical structures).
I half jokingly compared it to alchemy in the pre-chemistry days, they had so many unknown unknowns people couldn't find convincing arguments against it. Should they have expected it to work? That is an extreme example though, I think we have a better handle of the brain than the alchemists did of the possibilities of transmuting lead to gold.
I'd just like to point out that the people who don't believe in cryonics aren't the ones asking for money. The burden of proof should be on the organizations like Alcor because they are the ones trying to sell you an actual product. Without a stringent burden of proof they are just snake-oil salesmen.
From a starting point of ignorance, this would be a reasonable stance. However, as a response to ciphergoth's claim that Alcor's case "is enough to shift the burden of proof" (that is, Alcor has met their burden of proof, and it is now up to the detractors to provide a rebuttal), it does not make sense.
You've misread my wording. I'm saying that the burden of proof should stay on Alcor because they are the ones trying to make money. They should do more than just show something "might work" if they are trying to charge you for services which they claim "will work".
Alcor and CI are non-profits.
Epistemological conclusions shouldn't be based on fear of being scammed. Alcor's motivation should be taken into account Bayesianically, but argument screens off motivation (limited of course by dependence on unchecked facts).
From the Alcor FAQ: "Is cryonics guaranteed to work? No."
So no matter what Alcor or CI write or what evidence they produce, the burden of proof is still on them and their critics need not say or write a word to justify being dismissive of what they do?
If the cryonics organizations (or the scientific community) found strong evidence, then the critics would certainly have to justify themselves strongly. The current state of the evidence I would not call strong -- but others on LW seem to disagree. After discussing this semi-extensively on prior Less Wrong threads, the confusion seems to arise due to a blog philosophy of evidence as a "Bayesian entity" (I quote this because I haven't studied Bayesian statistics so I'm not quite sure what it's all about) whereas the general scientific community views evidence most strongly as a physical entity (i.e., established through direct tests, polls, experiments, theoretical results, and so on) -- I tend to take the latter viewpoint more seriously.
Then you should learn. Start here, or if you already have some experience applying Bayes' Theorem, start here.
They make no such claim, so they do not bear that burden.