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vi21maobk9vp comments on Two kinds of cryonics? - Less Wrong
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Comments (16)
For obvious reasons, with cryonics #2 you have to aim at reviving a large mammal and then primate. As for people, for cryonics treatment not to be considered murder the patient has to be beyond the of revivability even without cryonical treatment before (no cryonical treatment can improve the state of health, after all).
The main thing is that cryonical treatment would induce a pain-free, degradation-free state that could last a very long time while they await the outcome of clinical trials and new approaches. However it could also be useful for certain kinds of surgery.
Laser microtomes could be used to separate out chunks of the body, and printed surgical glues to patch things back together with capillary-level precision (given that there is no chance for them to wriggle around). Surgery (or should I label it "anatomical engineering"?) under cryonic conditions would have no time limit, and would be a more predictable system to deal with than a metabolically living body.
Well, once there is an unfrozen primate, this will be a topic for discussion.
Once there is a plausible research programme leading up to one. A string of ever-increasing successes would, my human-simulator tells me, be quite a convincing argument there might be something here.
I meant that you were talking about applications and unfreezing a mammal is an interesting thing on its own. Until someone unfreezes a primate, any talks about cryonics application to humans are quite easy to write off as speculative and trying even on willing living humans without success on primates would still be considered a murder...
Our minds are not alike on this. You've explained and I still don't know what you're saying in enough detail to respond. Please use more explicit language. How cold of a primate are you talking about? With cryoprotectant or without? How do you propose we avoid cryoprotectant toxicity in the primate study you suggest?
I am not proposing any specific path. I agree with the importance of not forgetting cryonics #2.
Original post mentions "bring someone back from low-damage cryo-preservation" and I tried to add a disambiguation that first "someone" would probably have to be a primate, not human (for various reasons).
Common sense suggests that probably "a mammal", "a large mammal" and a "primate" could be turning points: until we reach each one, anything beyond that point (like predicting practical applications for humans) is too uncertain to predict.
I think that treating them as prediction-crushing points is safe, because it seems very likely that to revive a large mammal one would need all the knowledge learned from revivial of a small mammal and some more.
I am not sure what should be threshold for true preservation; probably something like long time (hours? days? duration of 10000 normal heartbeats?) without any blood circulation.
Ok, sounds like you are modeling this a bit different from me, probably because I have had relatively more exposure to cryonics ideas. Cryonics (#1) involves perfusion with high concentrations of cryoprotectant to prevent ice formation, and cooling to either -135 C or cooler. Liquid nitrogen is cheap and abundant, so its boiling point is preferable (-196 C) for long term storage. As much as feasible, damage is avoided, but we can't avoid enough that we can possibly bring people back. So to me cryonics #2 is mainly just an extension of cryonics #1, only the idea is to avoid damage completely -- an unachieved goal thus far.
That said, there are other takes on cooling mammals. Hibernation is seen in mammals in nature, and with less concentrated cryoprotectants you can temporarily lower the temperature of mammals to below the ordinary freezing point of water. Some animals such as wood frogs have high ice tolerance, and while their cells don't freeze there are compartments of their body that do while the cells become concentrated with salts and sugars (and thus relatively dehydrated). But a wood frog cannot handle liquid nitrogen or the glass transition temperature and come back alive.
The chance that cryonics #2 is not achievable by damage reduction (assuming damage reduction is possible) is something I rate rather low, it would require rewriting what we think we know about the brain. Cryonics #1 might be unachievable because of too much damage to be recovered from, but that is uncertain.
I know the pitch and the current practices of cryonics #1. What you said is not new factual information for me, but the way you present it surely helps to understand your point of view.
It is just that with cryonics #2 we can know whether we are succeeding, and with cryonics #1 we can never be sure (and that's why it can only be applied to dead patients without being considered murder). Personally, I would support legalization of cryonics treatment before natural death - on equal ground with all other forms of assisted suicide (with same informed consent requirements - some safeguards are needed).
I think that scientific development of cryonics #2 would benefit from explicitly saying that it doesn't know when (and whether) it will be able to offer a verified way to do what cryonics #1 (blindly) tries to do now (maybe succesfully, maybe not - we have no way to find out it yet).
http://xkcd.com/989/ seems relevant despite the slightly different subject matter. Clinical trials can't happen if all the potential subjects are frozen.
The effect does not seem likely to be very strong to me. What we would need for this to be a problem is serious long-term delays in progress. A few short term delays would actually be acceptable in this context.
Consider that:
There are a lot of hidden benefits and costs to be considered.
Would healthy people use it, like the comic suggests? If so, would it be a net negative or a net positive?
It is not clear to me that even STEM people using this on an individual basis is a bad thing for progress -- e.g. some might use it to get past phases of cultural boredom that would otherwise trigger a counterproductive binge of video gaming or scientific crankery. In fact, it might remove counterproductive cranks at a higher rate than productive rationalists, because they (presumably) have lower satisfaction with their current lives.
The worst hidden costs I see are essentially apathy and inertia related. If you can "fix" the problem by putting it in a freezer, you haven't really fixed it yet. Say we use this on homelessness/joblessness/insurancelessness. Huge potential economic savings there -- but then where's the motive to take people out of the freezer? Perhaps as a sanity measure it should be required that healthy individuals be brought out every 4 years or so to participate in the political process.