Jandila comments on More Cryonics Probability Estimates - Less Wrong

20 Post author: jkaufman 17 December 2012 08:59PM

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Comment author: Risto_Saarelma 24 December 2012 08:46:20PM 7 points [-]

(presently apparently physically impossible)

I understood a pretty important element in the cryonics argument is assuming that you stick to things that are feasible given our current understanding of physics, though not necessarily given our current level of technology. Conflating technology and physics here will turn the arguments into hash, so it's kinda important to keep them separate. It's generally assumed that the future superintelligences will obey laws of physics that will be pretty much what we understand them to be now, although they may apply them to invent technologies we have no idea about. "Things will have to continue working with the same laws of physics they're working with now" seems different to me from "any random magical stuff can happen because Singularity", which you seem to be going for here.

I'm not sure if "just don't break the laws of physics" is strong enough though. Few people think it very feasible that there would be any way to reconstruct a human body locked in a box and burnt to ash, but go abstract enough with the physics and it's all just a bunch of particles running on neat and reversible trajectories, and maybe some sort of Laplace's demon contraption could track enough of them and trace them back far enough to get the human persona information back. (Or does this run into Heisenberg uncertainty?)

The "possible physically but not technologically" seems like a rather tricky type of reasoning. Imagine trying to explain that you should be able to build a nuclear reactor or a moon rocket to someone who has never heard of physics, in 1920 when you don't have the tech to do either yet. But it seems like the key to this argument, and I rarely see people engaging with it. The counterarguments seem to be mostly about either the technology not being there or philosophical arguments about the continuity of the self.

Comment author: [deleted] 04 February 2013 07:39:21PM 5 points [-]

Imagine trying to explain that you should be able to build a nuclear reactor or a moon rocket to someone who has never heard of physics, in 1920 when you don't have the tech to do either yet.

H. G. Wells did it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_in_the_Air http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Men_In_The_Moon

Also, people can sometimes do it themselves:

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/For-40-Years-This-Russian-Family-Was-Cut-Off-From-Human-Contact-Unaware-of-World-War-II-188843001.html

Relevant quote:

"As the Soviet geologists got to know the Lykov family, they realized that they had underestimated their abilities and intelligence. Each family member had a distinct personality; Old Karp was usually delighted by the latest innovations that the scientists brought up from their camp, and though he steadfastly refused to believe that man had set foot on the moon, he adapted swiftly to the idea of satellites. The Lykovs had noticed them as early as the 1950s, when "the stars began to go quickly across the sky," and Karp himself conceived a theory to explain this: "People have thought something up and are sending out fires that are very like stars."