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Benja comments on More Cryonics Probability Estimates - Less Wrong
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Comments (89)
I think Robin's reply to that comment (which he left there last week) got to the heart of the issue:
It may be that what the brain uses to store some vital information is utterly destroyed by cryonics, but there is some other feature of the arrangement of atoms in the brain, possibly some side effect that has no function in the living brain, that is sufficiently correlated with the information we care about that we can reverse-engineer what we need from it. This is the "hard drive" argument for cryonics (I got it from the Sequences, but I would suspect it didn't originate there): it's not that hard (I think, though I do not know much about this topic) to erase data from a hard drive so that the normal functionality of the hard drive can't bring it back, but it's rather difficult to erase it in a way that someone sufficiently motivated with enough funding can't get it back.
However, kalla724 did say
This is a clear assertion that there aren't even any correlates of that information preserved, if kalla724 has already thought the correlates argument through. It's not clear to me whether or not they have.
Note useful discussion today by wedrifid and Eliezer, arguing that kalla724's comments clearly suggest that they haven't. I got the same vibe, but my knowledge of the relevant science is so spotty that I didn't want to make a confident prediction myself.
This seems like a good place to inject a related point. One of the failure modes listed is
The contrary of which is: Reviving people in simulation is possible. But there is also this possibility to consider: Reviving people in the flesh is possible. So it would seem that we need to branch here, and then estimate the combined probability after assessing each branch. Maybe P( possible in-flesh | impossible in-simulation) is very small, and this branch can be safely ignored. I haven't looked for other branching points, but I don't feel assured that there aren't more.
Branching points are important and could definitely make the whole thing more probable. So if you or anyone else sees others, please point them out.
This particular branching point is one I've thought about (cell D26) and don't think is likely enough to even show up in the final odds. The chemicals they use as cryoprotectants are toxic at the concentrations they need to be using, and while that's fine if you're going to be uploaded it's potentially a big problem if you're going to be revived. Future medicine would need to be really good to keep these cells from dying immediately on rewarming. Expense issues are also mostly worse for in-flesh revival.
(One branching that would help would be if plastination became possible, because it removes the problem of needing cryonics organizations to stay existant, functional, and legal.)
Hmm, even plastination could have legal problem where I live. I'm not sure we can do anything other than burning or burying the corpse.
Now if one is willing to break the law, this is only a cubic foot to keep hidden around. I would be willing to face the risk if it meant my family.
The advantage of plastination is that once you're preserved you stay that way. Laws keeping you from being preserved hit plastination and cryonics equally.
Low temperature permits a wider range of molecular machinery to function. For example, you could have a burrowing micro-scale machine (it doesn't need to be nano-scale, although components obviously could be) which slowly removes extracellular cryoprotectant and water, replacing it with a nontoxic cryoprotectant. The replacement matter could be laced with other helpful drugs like ischemia blockers and cell membrane fortifiers, which would activate upon warming.