Question:
What are your thoughts on cryogenic preservation and the idea of medically treating aging?
His response:
A marvelous way to just convince people to give you money. Offer to freeze them for later. I'd have more confidence if we had previously managed to pull this off with other mammals. Until then I see it as a waste of money. I'd rather enjoy the money, and then be buried, offering my body back to the flora and fauna of which I have dined my whole life.
I was unclear, I didn't mean that there's no information, just that there's potentially no information on specific areas that are critical for a meaningful prediction:
Given that both of these types of events are common when developing new technology, attempting to predict how long it will take and how well it will work is basically a waste of time. Even if you synthesize all of the data you have in a rigorous way and come up with a number, I expect that the number would have error bars so large that it's merely a quantitative expression of the impossibility of accurately predicting such events with the data you have.
I am curious about what are the biggest obstacles you see that cause you to give 20 order of magnitude lower an estimate than I do. If that is accurate, thinking about and working on cryonics is a pointless waste of time.
I agree with you on both points. And also about the error bars - I don't think I can "prove" cryonics to be pointless.
But one has to make decisions based on something. I would rather build a school in Africa than have my body frozen (even though, to reiterate, I'm all for living longer, and I do not believe that death has inherent value).
Biggest obstacles are membrane distortions, solvent replacement and signalling event interruptions. Mind is not so much written into the structure of the brain as into the structure+dynamic activity. In a sense... (read more)