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shokwave comments on Martinenaite and Tavenier on cryonics - Less Wrong Discussion
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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.