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Zaine comments on I Will Pay $500 To Anyone Who Can Convince Me To Cancel My Cryonics Subscription - Less Wrong
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Cryonics success is an highly conjunctive event, depending on a number of different, roughly independent, events to happen.
Consider this list:
Cryocompanies actually implement the cryorpreservation process susbstantially as advertised, without botching or faking it, or generally behaving incompetently. I think there is a significant (>= 50%) probability that they don't: there have been anecdotal allegations of mis-behavior, at least one company (the Cryonics Institute) has policies that betray gross incompetence or disregard for the success of the procedure ( such as keeping certain cryopatients on dry ice for two weeks ), and more generally, since cryocompanies operate without public oversight and without any mean to assess the quality of their work, they have every incentive to hide mistakes, take cost-saving shortcuts, use sub-par materials, equipment, unqualified staff, or even outright defraud you.
Assuming that the process has actually preserved the relevant information, technology for recover it and revive you in some way must be developed. Guessing about future technology is difficult. Historically, predicted technological advances that seemed quite obvious at some point (AGI, nuclear fusion power, space colonization, or even flying cars and jetpacks) failed to materialize, while actual technological improvements were often not widely predicted many years in advance (personal computers, cellphones, the Internet, etc.). The probability that technology many years from now goes along a trajectory we can predict is low.
Assuming that the tech is eventually developed, it must be sufficiently cheap, and future people must have an incentive to use it to revive you. It's unclear what such an incentive could be. Revival of a few people for scientific purposes, even at a considerable cost, seems plausible, but mass revival of >thousands frozen primitives?
Your cryocompany must not suffer financial failure, or some other significant local disruption, before the tech becomes available and economically affordable. Very few organizations survive more than one century, and those which do, often radically alter their mission. Even worse, it is plausible that before revival tech becomes available, radical life extension becomes available, and therefore people stop signing up for cryonics. Cryocompanies might be required to go on for many decades or centuries without new customers. It's unclear that they could remain financially viable and motivated in this condition. The further in the future revival tech becomes available, the lower the chances that your cryocompany will still exist.
Regional or planetary disasters, either natural (earthquake, flood, hurricane, volcanic eruption, asteroid strike, etc.) or human-made (war, economic crisis, demographic crisis due to environmental collapse, etc.) must not disrupt your preservation. Some of these disaster are exceptional, other hit with a certain regularity over the course of a few centuries. Again, the further in the future revival tech becomes available, the lower the chances that a disaster will destroy your frozen remains before.
You can play with assigning probabilities to these events and multiplying them. I don't recommend trusting too much any such estimate due to the fact that it is easy to fool yourself into a sense of false precision while picking numbers that suit whatever you already wanted to believe.
But the takeaway point is that in order to cryonics to succeed, many things have to happen or be true in succession, and the failure of only one of them would make cryonics ultimately fail at reviving you. Therefore, I think, cryonics success is so improbable that it is not worth the cost.
To keep the information all in one place, I'll reply here.
Cryogenic preservation exists in the proof of tardigrades - also called waterbears - which can reanimate from temperatures as low as 0.15 K, and have sufficient neurophysiological complexity to enable analysis of neuronal structural damage.
We don't know if the identity of a given waterbear pre-cyrobiosis is preserved post-reanimation. For that we'd need a more complex organism. However, the waterbear is idiosyncratic in its capacity for preservation; while it proves the possibility for cyrogenic preservation exists, we ourselves do not have the traits of the waterbear that facilitate its capacity for preservation.
In the human brain, there are billions of synapses - to what neurones other neurones connect, we call the connectome: this informs who you are. According to our current theoretical and practical understanding of how memories work, if synapses degrade even the slightest amount your connectome will change dramatically, and will thus represent a different person - perhaps even a lesser human (fewer memories, etcetera).
Now, let's assume uploading becomes commonplace and you mainly care about preserving your genetic self rather than your developed self (you without most of your memories and different thought processes vs. the person you've endeavoured to become), so any synaptic degradation of subsistence brain areas becomes irrelevant. What will the computer upload? Into what kind of person will your synapses reorganise? Even assuming they will reorganise might ask too much of the hypothetical.
Ask yourself who - or what - you would like to cyropreserve; the more particular your answer, the more science needed to accommodate the possibility.
How would you design that experiment? I would think all you'd need is a better understanding of what identity is. But maybe we mean different things by identity.
We'd need to have a means of differentiating the subject waterbear's behaviour from other waterbears; while not exhaustive, classically conditioning a modified reflexive reaction to stimuli (desensitisation, sensitisation) or inducing LTP or LTD on a synapse, then testing whether the adaptations were retained post-reanimation, would be a starting point.
The problem comes when you try to extrapolate success in the above experiment to mean potential for more complex organisms to survive the same procedure given x. Ideally you would image all of the subjects synapses pre-freeze or pre-cryobiosis (depending on what x turns out to be), then image them again post-reanimation, and have a program search for discrepancies. Unfortunately, the closest we are to whole-brain imaging is neuronal fluorescence imaging, which doesn't light up every synapse. Perhaps it might if we use transcranial DC or magnetic stimulation to activate every cell in the brain; doing so may explode a bunch of cells, too. I've just about bent over the conjecture tree by this point.
Does the waterbear experience verification and then wake up again after being thawed, or does subjective experience terminate with vitrification - subjective experience of death / oblivion - and a new waterbear with identical memories begin living?
We need to stop and (biologically) define life and death for a moment. A human can be cryogenically frozen before or after their brain shuts down; in either case, their metabolism will cease all function. This is typically a criterion of death. However if, when reanimated, the human carries on as they would from a wee kip, does this mean they have begun a new life? resumed their old life after a sojourn to the Underworld?
You see the quandary our scenario puts to this definition of life, for the waterbear does the exact above. They will suspend their metabolism, which can be considered death, reanimate when harsh environmental conditions subside, and go about their waterbearing ways. Again, do the waterbears live a subset of multiple lives within the set of one life? Quite confusing to think about, yes?
Now let's redefine life.
A waterbear ceases all metabolic activity, resumes it, then lumbers away. In sleep, one's state pre- and post-sleep will differ; one wakes up with changed neuronal connections, yet considers themselves the same person - or not, but let's presume they do. Take, then, the scenario in which one's state pre- and post-sleep does not differ; indeed, neurophysiologically speaking, it appears they've merely paused then recommenced their brain's processes, just as the time 1:31:00 follows 1:30:59.
This suggests that biological life depends not on metabolic function, but on the presence of an organised system of (metabolic) processes. If the system maintains a pristine state, then it matters not how much time has passed since it last operated; the life of the system's organism will end only when when that system becomes so corrupted as to lose the capacity for function. Sufficient corruption might amount to one specalated synapse; it might amount to a missing ganglion. Thus cyrogenics' knottiness.
As to whether they experience verification, you'll have to query a waterbear yourself. More seriously, for any questions on waterbear experience I refer you to a waterbear, or a waterbear philosopher. As to whether and to what degree they experience sensation when undergoing cryptobiosis, we can test to find out, but any results will be interpreted through layers of extrapolation: "Ganglion A was observed inhibiting Ganglion B via neurotransmitter D binding postsynaptic alpha receptors upon tickling the watebear's belly; based on the conclusions of Researchers et. al., this suggests the waterbear experienced either mildly positive or extremely negative sensation."
I think the question was a practical one and "verification" should have been "vitrification."
I considered that, but the words seemed too different to result from a typo; I'm interested to learn the fact of the matter.
I've edited the grandparent to accommodate your interpretation.
Going under anesthesia is a similar discontinuity in subjective experience, along with sleep, situations where people are technically dead for a few moments and then brought back to life, coma patients, and so on.
I don't personally regard any of these as the death of one person followed by the resurrection of a new person with identical memories, so I also reject the sort of reasoning that says cryogenic resurrection, mind uploading, and Star Trek-style transportation is death.
Eliezer has a post here about similar concerns. It's perhaps of interest to note that the PhilPapers survey revealed a fairly even split on the teletransporter problem among philosophers, with the breakdown being 36.2%/32.7%/31.1% as survive/other/die respectively.
ETA: Ah, nevermind, I see you've already considered this.
Yes, that post still reflects my views. I should point out again that sleep and many forms of anesthesia don't stop operation of the brain, they just halt the creation of new memories so people don't remember. That's why, for example, some surgery patients end up with PTSD from waking up on the table, even if they don't remember.
Other cases like temporary (clinical) death and revival also aren't useful comparisons. Even if the body is dying, the heart and breathing stops, etc., there are still neural computations going on from which identity is derived. The irrecoverable disassociation of the particle interactions underlying consciousness probably takes a while - hours or more, unless there is violent physical damage to the brain. Eventually the brain state fully reverts to random interactions and identity is destroyed, but clinical revival becomes impossible well before then.
Cryonics is more of a weird edge case ... we don't know enough now to say with any certainty whether cryonics patients have crossed that red line or not with respect to destruction of identity.