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The_Jaded_One comments on The Brain Preservation Foundation's Small Mammalian Brain Prize won - Less Wrong
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Probably not. If you look at the comments on posts about the Prize, you can see how clearly people have already set up their fallback arguments once the soldier of 'possible bad vitrification when scaled up to human brain size' has been knocked down. For example, on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11070528
Even if a human brain is stored, successfully scanned, and emulated, the continued existence - nay, majority - of body-identity theorists ensures that there will always be many people who have a bulletproof argument against: 'yeah, maybe there's a perfect copy, but it'll never really be you, it's only a copy waking up'.
More broadly, we can see that there is probably never going to be any 'Sputnik moment' for cryonics, because the adoption curve of paid-up members or cryopreservations is almost eerily linear over the past 50 years and entirely independent of the evidence. Refutation of 'exploding lysosomes' didn't produce any uptick. Long-term viability of ALCOR has not produced any uptick. Discoveries always pointing towards memory being a durable feature of neuronal connections rather than, as so often postulated, an evanescent dynamic property of electrical patterns, have never produced an uptick. Continued pushbacks of 'death' have not produced upticks. No improvement in scanning technology has produced an uptick. Moore's law proceeding for decades has produced no uptick. Revival of rabbit kidney, demonstration of long-term memory continuity in revived C. elegans, improvements in plastination and vitrification - all have not or are not producing any uptick. Adoption is not about evidence.
Even more broadly, if you could convince anyone, how many do you expect to take action? To make such long-term plans on abstract bases for the sake of the future? We live in a world where most people cannot save for retirement and cannot stop becoming obese and diabetic despite knowing full well the highly negative consequences, and where people who have survived near-fatal heart attacks are generally unable to take their medicines and exercise consistently as their doctors keep begging them. And for what? Life sucks, but at least then you get to die. Even after a revival, I would predict that maybe 5% of the USA population (~16m people) would be meaningfully interested in cryonics, and of that only a fraction would go through with it, so 'millions' is an upper bound.
Does that mean a constant number of new sign ups per year, or an increasing number of new sign ups per year? Also, I'd love to see the data if you can link to it.
I recall looking at the historical data somewhere on the ALCOR site but not where specifically. IIRC, it's a constant number of sign ups but due to age-skews, number of cryopreservations varies over time with an expected hump in coming years from older members dying.
Here's an eerie line showing about 200 new Cryonics Institute members every 3 years.
I think it is safe to say that some process produces the kind of high-rationality person who makes the effort to sign up, and that process (genetics/culture/scifi etc) is relatively slowly changing over the timescale of ~ 1 decade.
In my opinion, there is almost certainly a much larger population of people who are one or two "steps" or "increments" away from signing up. For example, people who are pretty rich, philosophically materialistic, well educated and into the sci-fi scene, but they have only heard a passing mention of cryo, and it "sounds like a scam" to them, because they still think that cryo means literally freezing your head and thawing it out like a freezer bag of strawberries and expecting it to work again. Cryo needs three things to open the floodgates to this crowd in my opinion:
(1) an actual demonstration of extracting real memories and personality from a cryopreserved dog/monkey, so that we conclusively know that the full cryonics process preserves information.
(2) respectable scientific papers in high-status journals describing and analyzing said demonstration. These are the best weapon against naysayers, because if someone is saying that cryo is unscientific, or is a cult or a religion etc etc, they will look pretty silly when you start piling up papers from Nature in front of them that say it ain't so.
(3) publicity in the right channels to get the message across. In a way, this is the easy bit once you have (1) and (2), because the kind of channels that you want to be in to reach your target demographic (e.g. Ars Technica, Scientific American, Slashdot, Reddit, etc etc) will eat this up like candy and report the shit out of it without you even asking.
Do you think those thinks are necessary or sufficient?
I think they're sufficient, assuming there are no major scandals that happen at the same time.
And I think that the size of that demographic is 10,000 - 100,000 people, of which you should be able to get 30% to sign up, especially if the signup process is made smoother.
Basically reanimating a mammal is something that might take 100 years or more to be technically feasible given current cryonic tech and also alternatives such a plastification.
Having extremely advanced techology would change how the world treats cryonics that's largely irrelevant for the fate of cryonics in the next decades.
I didn't say reanimating, I said
for example, demonstrating neural correlates of specific memories or learned skills in sliced & scanned electron microscope images/connectomes. Given that MRI scans can already read people's minds based on blood flow, (extremely crude), it doesn't actually sound that difficult. I reckon we could already do this with enough investment in scaling the scanning and slicing technology using mice.