= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Risto_Saarelma comments on Plastination is maturing and needs funding, says Hanson - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (46)
How big is the "must keep the original atoms" crowd in cryonics? At least Robert Ettinger seemed to think uploading is nonsense because atoms. I'd assume they would not get behind plastination, since it basically assumes viable uploading as a way to get the plastinated brick of a brain into doing anything ever again. Given how many unknowns there are in both approaches though, what people actually get behind might be motivated more by tribal thinking than philosophical first principles.
This is a good point. Ettinger and a few other cryonicists I've talked to are against uploading. My non-serious estimate is that this is perhaps half of cryonicists (who take a side), I'd guess more than half of CI and less than half of Alcor. On the other hand, many others like Mike Darwin seem to be more agnostic on the topic than anti-uploading or the reverse.
It's worth considering that keeping (significant numbers of) the original atoms is not necessarily impossible with fixation techniques, assuming the fundamental ceiling on nanotech isn't too low. Plastination might be disfavored on the grounds that it replaces lipids (old atoms) with plastics (new atoms), but assuming the philosophical attachment is mostly to the proteins you could consider this a viable form of survival as long as the process can be reversed by some kind of sufficiently high grade nanotech.
Fixation in Osmium Tetroxide or something similar could preserve the lipids directly, and might be more along the lines of what the prize competition is doing since plastination is actually something used for art shows, not for electron scanning.
And that the idea even means anything.
At least uploading actually does use different atoms. They are still made of the same nucleons, though. A more reasonable complaint would be that it's nonsense because neurons/chips.
Is this an actual argument that people who take cryonics seriously seem to be making regularly though? Sounds like something like Searle's stance, but my unfounded initial assumption is that the crowd that takes Searle seriously and the crowd that takes cryonics seriously don't overlap much.
It's common enough that if you go to one of the Reddit pages for Hanson's post, you'll find someone objecting to plastination over cryonics on the grounds that uploads are about all that one can do with such a brain. Well, yes.
I'll admit, I personally find the anti-upload area in cryonics to be absurd - seriously, you're into cryonics, whose entire rationale is information-theoretic, and you're objecting to uploads? But I have no hard statistics on, say, how many signed up Alcor or CI members are anti-uploading besides Ettinger.
I don't think this is the case. Self-identification with your own body can be a strong part of this. I for example personally have a deep emotional connection to my body to the point where I'm much more inclined to do something that has a chance of keeping my brain intact in roughly the same form than an uploaded scan.
Was asking about DanielLC's alternative "neurons/chips" argument, though I'm still not quite sure what its exact content is. Most of the anti-uploading arguments I've seen look like they're either explicitly or implicitly on the "different atoms" grounds. Don't recall many that argue for a fundamental unworkability based on some more sophisticated isomorphism failure.