passive_fist comments on Looking for opinions of people like Nick Bostrom or Anders Sandberg on current cryo techniques - Less Wrong

7 Post author: ChrisHallquist 17 October 2013 08:36PM

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Comment author: V_V 18 October 2013 01:50:33PM *  17 points [-]

Eliezer's hard drive analogy convinced me the chances of revival (at least conditionalizing on no existential catastrophe) are good

Why did you find the analogy convincing? It doesn't look like a good analogy:

  • It's cherry picked: erasing information from hard drives is hard, because they are very stable information storage devices. A powered down hard drive can retain its content for at least decades, probably centuries if the environmental conditions are good. Consider a modern DRAM chip instead: power it down and its content will disappear within seconds. Retention time can be increased to days or perhaps weeks by cooling to cryogenic temperatures before power down, and after the data has become unreadable by normal means, specialized probes and microscopy techniques could in some cases still retrieve it for some time, but ultimately the data will fade. It's unlikely than any future technology will be ever able to recover data from a RAM chip that has been powered down for months, even if cryogenically stored. Of course brains are neither RAM chips nor hard drives, but the point is that having high data remanence is specific to certain technologies and not some general property of all practical information storage systems.

  • It suggests an Argument from Ignorance: "Pumping someone full of cryoprotectant and gradually lowering their temperature until they can be stored in liquid nitrogen is not a secure way to erase a person." The implicit argument here is that since you can't be sure that cryopreservation destroys a person, you should infer that it doesn't. That's obviously a fallacy.

Furthermore the referenced post introduces spurious motives (signalling) for signing up for cryonics, committing the fallacy of Social Conformance: "Not signing up for cryonics - what does that say? That you've lost hope in the future. That you've lost your will to live. That you've stopped believing that human life, and your own life, is something of value."

Nick Bostrom or Anders Sandberg

Why do you particularly care about their opinion? They are not domain experts, and being futurists/transhumanists there is a non-negligible chance that their opinion on the subject is biased.

Comment author: passive_fist 20 October 2013 04:04:40AM 0 points [-]

Retention time can be increased to days or perhaps weeks by cooling to cryogenic temperatures before power down

Actually no, modern DRAM loses information in milliseconds, even assuming you could cool it down to liquid helium temperatures. After a few seconds the data is almost entirely random.

Comment author: pengvado 20 October 2013 05:20:42AM 3 points [-]

Here's a citation for the claim of DRAM persisting with >99% accuracy for seconds at operating temperature or hours at LN2. (The latest hardware tested there is from 2007. Did something drastically change in the last 6 years?)

Comment author: passive_fist 20 October 2013 08:18:09PM 2 points [-]