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ciphergoth comments on Martinenaite and Tavenier on cryonics - Less Wrong Discussion
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A brief response: Yes, cryonic preservation causes all sorts of severe damage far beyond our current ability to overcome; all the damage discussed in this paper is well understood and widely discussed by cryonics practitioners. This paper doesn't seem to quite engage with the central contention of cryonics: that so long as the information that makes up memory and personality is preserved, future technology may find a way to repair the damage caused by cryopreservation. Two distinct paths to this end are widely talked about: molecular nanotechnology, and scanning/WBE. As far as I can tell, no argument is made in the paper that human cryopreservation causes information-theoretic death, and neither of these repair options are discussed at all. As a result, this paper, while it is vastly vastly ahead of the arguments made by other critics of cryonics, is some way behind the arguments already considered and answered by cryonics advocates.
This isn't completely related to your comment, but I worry that some cryonicists (not you, as far as I can tell) have a tendency to use "future technology!" as a stopsign which gives them an excuse to not update on evidence like this. Technically, evidence like this should cause us to decrease our confidence in cryonics by some finite amount, but oftentimes such evidence gets hand-waved away with vauge stopsigns like "nanotech!" (I have a similar problem with the "well, it's better than cremation" argument, which seems to be little more than an applause light.)
There is one part of your comment that I do specifically disagree with: Though cryonics advocates have certainly addressed these arguments, I don't think a paper presenting evidence that vitrification causes "severe damage" to cell tissue can be defused by saying "no argument is made in the paper that human cryopreservation causes information-theoretic death", because "severe damage" implies that some cell tissue (and thus, information) is destroyed by the vitrification process. This is why I argued in the paragraph above that we should be updating (however slightly) on this evidence.
I'm sure there are some people out there who use the argument that way. As I've normally heard it, though, it's definitely not merely an applause light. As far as I know, we currently know of no feasible way even in principle to reverse death after cremation or long-term decay. However, we do know some ways that, in principle, we should be able to reverse freezing damage. We might turn out to be totally mistaken about that, but according to our current best information it seems very likely that we can save more of a person with future technology that is already in the pipeline provided the person is cryonically preserved.
Ergo, based on our current understanding, cryonics is better than cremation. Even if it poisons every cell in my body, at least the cells are there and can be examined in principle to reconstruct me. That's very hard to do with dead bones or ashes.
The only serious argument I can see being formed against cryonics is something that demonstrates that the likelihood of it working is so trivially better than cremation or burial that it doesn't justify the increased cost. This would require a very intense array of evidence against any future technology, including ones we haven't thought of yet, ever being able to reverse damage that must be done in order to enact cryonics on a human being. Either that, or show that some likely future technology will make reversing cremation or burial easier than reversing cryonic suspension.
I can see why this can look like an applause light. In this case, though, I think that's a result of summarizing something with a lot of passion behind it in one sentence.
That said, I'm heavily biased in favor of cryonics. If I'm missing some serious reason I should doubt it, I endeavor to be all ears!
I agree, it's not always used this way.
I think you've hit on something very important--trying to summarize something and express your passion for it at the same time can look a lot like an appluse light, especially if you aren't keeping the inferential distance in mind. Sometimes, though, the person doing the summarizing doesn't actually know the sufficient detail and evidence behind the summary, in which case the summary is pretty much always an applause light (and a mysterious answer). Related: Understanding Your Understanding.
In what direction should we update, though? The total absence of decent criticism of cryonics is to a certain extent evidence in its favour, but it doesn't tell us much about how good the criticism would be if our critics would engage properly. Now we know a little more about that. Overall this paper is about as good as I'd expect from sincere, intelligent, knowledgable people who made a real effort to engage properly with the arguments but didn't come away convinced, so my confidence in cryonics is about the same.
Shouldn't that sort of thing make one less confident given that one cryonic meme is that people who grapple with the arguments become convinced?
Interesting point! But is this proof of "at least two bio students grappled with the arguments and weren't convinced" (not surprising) or "two curious (but otherwise random) bio students grappled with the arguments and weren't convinced" (surprising, should lead to a downward revision)?
I'm not sure they would be allowed to reach a pro-cryonics position. The acknowledgments say "Finally, we would like to thank our opponent group for their pertinent and helpful comments on our work."
EDIT: OK, apparently not.
They clarify this in their reply.
It's possible that the examiners of the report are termed 'opponents'.
You think this may have been a "two groups discuss the two sides of an issue" assignment? I searched "cryonics" at the site with the full paper and found 2 other results, but they're both in Dutch. Google translates one of the titles as "People technosphere - Transhumanism and naturalness" and is about the ethical issues of uploading, and the other is about freezing stem cells.
Their English is pretty good, so I would be surprised if this were some sort of translation error where the line should be more like 'we thank our peer reviewers/copyeditors/reference-checkers/etc.' Taking it at face value, that's what it sounds like - some sort of adversarial process, likely with the others writing in favor (although it's possible the opponent group was only assigned criticism and maybe made up by criticizing multiple paper-groups?).
Someone really should ask, since apparently some of them are on Facebook.
If you look at medicine over the years, it has strongly tended to be able to cure things it used to not be able to cure. For a long time, we couldn't treat smallpox, and then we could, and now nobody suffers from smallpox. "Future technology!" invokes this trend and calling it a stopsign doesn't explain why this trend doesn't apply to cryonics.
Saying "Out of the top 10 fatal health problems, at least one will become easy to cure in the medium-term future." is quite fair given this trend. "This particular currently fatal problem will become easy to cure.", much less so.
Right, which gives us "This particular currently fatal problem has at least a one in ten chance of becoming easy to cure" unless we have some reason to think it won't be the one.
I agree, and I don't think that "stopsign!" should ever be used as a fully general counterargument; it certainly can't be used as an argument against the feasibility of cryonics. In my comment above, I was protesting against "future technology!" being used to pre-emptively end the discussion. Apologies if this was unclear.
It's not a counterargument in any case, at best it invokes an antiprediction. It's a reminder to not stop thinking where it actually is possible to figure more out, which has a pretty general applicability.
We don't need to explain why this trend doesn't apply to cryonics. The complaint is not with the trend, it is with using "future technology" as an answer to specific problems we do not know how to solve. Its not an answer at all, its like saying "we will solve it by solving it...later".
What puzzles me is why people assume the specific question (how) needs to be answered as opposed to the general question (whether).
Because people want to know if the "how" is even possible. But the fact the "how" will depend on technology that hasn't been invented yet arouses a great deal of skepticism.
Why should it? There's plenty of indirect evidence that this is technology that will be invented eventually, if there's a future at all for it to be invented in. There are already three general research paths we know of that can lead to successful reanimation: nanotech, biotech, and uploading. All three of these, in all their various incarnations, would need to fizzle and uniformly continue to produce no results in this area, for hundreds of years before cryonics will have failed. In short, the predictions we're making pretty much have to somehow contradict the laws of physics. They don't have to simply be optimistic in order to fail to happen for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years of rich scientific progress -- they have to be totally bonkers.
So we should just assume that any future technology we would like to imagine is assured of happening, given enough time?
If that is the case then I don't need to waste my time with cryonics because I am assured I will be resurrected in a Tipler Omega Point.
The argument is not that everything that seems possible is inevitable. Rather it is that this particular area of possibility-space is a generally reasonable one given a reasonably allowable timeframe for cryonics patients to be stored. Current advances in printing organs, scanning connectomes, building nanomachinery, etc. are pretty good indirect evidence of that -- provided the loss of structure isn't excessive.
For values of "later" around the 20 or 30 year mark, this is not a very convincing point. But for values of "later" in the hundreds or thousands of years, it has some weight.
Not if it's already taken into account. No double-counting (see One Argument Against An Army).
Cryonauts probably have enough information to reconstruct them to the point where childhood memories can be recovered. I don't think claiming otherwise would be a sensible critique. IMO, sceptics are better off sticking to looking at the costs.