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GeraldMonroe comments on Cryonics: Can I Take Door No. 3? - Less Wrong
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The original dichotomy is correct if you think about the consequences of cryonic success.
IF and only if cryonics succeeds, the world had developed the technology to restore you from a cracked, solid mass of brain tissue. (the liquid nitrogen will fracture your brain because it cools it below the glass transition point)
Also, as sort of a secondary thing, it has figured out a way to give you a new body or a quality substitute. (it's secondary because growing a new body is technically possible, if unethical, today)
Anyways, this technical capacity means that almost certainly the technology exists to make backup copies of you. If this is possible, it would be also possible to keep you alive for billions of years, or some huge multiple of your original lifespan that it could be approximated as infinite.
You might consider these technical capabilities to be absurd, and lower that 5% chance to some vanishingly small number like many cryonics skeptics. However, one conclusion naturally falls from the other.
We don't know how to reliably clone a human being, and we definitely don't know how to transplant your brain into it or attach your head to it.
We've done body transplants in primates in the past. Hooking up the nerves is still tricky, but we could probably figure it out. Also, cloning one mammal is basically like cloning another. There's really no doubt we could clone a human being if we really wanted to. The trick is that current cloning mechanisms have a very high failure rate, and nobody wants to deal with the pile of dead babies and fetuses that would come out of such a process.
Realistically, though, 3d tissue printing is probably the way to go. We can already do several organs that way, and resolution is essentially the only limit to being able to fabricate most of the rest.
One team did one head transplant with one monkey in the 1960s (it is said to have survived a day and a half). Reattaching a completely severed spinal cord is still impossible, not "tricky" -- all attempts at head transplants have produced quadriplegics.
Wouldn't this be tantamount to regrowing a transected spine? I'm not up-to-date on that area, but I don't think we can do that yet.
I meant in the future. I think severe spinal cord damage is still a little beyond us right now. Though with the progress we're making with stem cells, I'd guess we're likely to take some steps on that front in the near-ish future.
Perhaps, but I don't think it's so easy.
During embryonic development, the nervous system begins as a single strip of specialized ectoderm, the neural plate, which folds on itself to form the neural tube that later becomes the spinal chord and the brain, while nerves grow out of it towards the other parts of the body. It never happens that two separate pieces of neural tissues become attached.
AFAIK, If you inject stem cells in the severed spine of a rat and play with growth chemical signals, you may get the formation of new neural tissue that makes more or less random connections with the existing tissue which may recover some function (if it doesn't cause cancer), but that doesn't seem to be a precise process.
I wonder whether the lizard tail regeneration involves the extension of a functional spinal chord.
We can and we can't. Here's an 11 year old article where rats successfully regained function : http://www.jneurosci.org/content/21/23/9334.abstract
That's just an example. I think that if society were far more tolerant of risks, and there was more funding, and the teams working on the problem were organized and led properly, then human patient successes would be seen in the near future.
Isn't that the funny thing? We'll take a certain loss over a risk of the same exact loss. Sigh.
This is not quite right. The justification is that an action leading to certain negative consequences is not equivalent to inaction leading to the same consequences. Inaction is almost always acceptable, morally and legally. There are many obvious and non-obvious pitfalls in changing this attitude.
True when comparing one actions with a non-conjugate declining-to-act (e.g. throwing someone off a building vs not saving someone from falling off a building)
In this case, we're looking at a fear of ineffectiveness - the case where acting could produce the same effect as not doing that exact same thing.
And yet, from a consequentialist standpoint, there shouldn't be. Regardless of potential pitfalls, this is unlikely to change: I suspect it's "hardwired" into our psychology. But there is also a reverse tendency, especially on the part of the public attitude towards leaders, where it is better to be seen to be doing something rather than nothing. Even if it is not clear what action should be taken.
Only if your reasoning is extremely reliable in estimating the consequences of your action or inaction. Otherwise you may end up doing more harm by acting than you would by inacting (happens all the time). I am guessing that this is a part of what keeps people from acting.
Isn't it closer to "take a certain loss over a risk of the same exact loss, plus a whole lot of money"?
Yes, that is part of it. I don't think that the flat financial loss is the killer issue in many cases where an unproven method could work, or not. When doing nothing is acceptable, trying something becomes fraught with the risk of being blamed for the failure.
That's a Pascal's wager argument.
What? No. Pascal's wager is when you apply the rules of instrumental rationality to epistemic rationality.
Simply being willing to take risks to possibly get a better outcome, without warping your beliefs, is not the same thing at all.