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BuzzFeed on Cryonics
BuzzFeed just posted a fairly comprehensive and positive article on cryonics; Hacker News discussion here. It does a good job of raising and addressing the common objections, and goes into a lot of detail for a general-audience article. Excerpt:
One thing that kept tripping me up about the feasibility of cryonics is that it hinges on the notion that we can just put the brain to sleep, like a laptop, then turn it back on and have the screen appear exactly the way we left it. I can get behind the idea that we could freeze a collection of tissue and organs, and bring them back someday (it’s possible on small organisms already), but the idea that Josh Dean, guy who detests beets and goes irrationally bananas about sporting events, would just magically still be there — after however many years — seemed impossible. Where would that person (or soul or collection of electrons or whatever) go in the intervening years/decades?
This scenario — of the brain turning back on once a person warms up — happens all the time, Aubrey de Grey told me. “That’s exactly what occurs when someone falls through ice in a frozen lake and is unconscious for a half-hour.” When the body temperature drops below 18 degrees Celsius, he said, electrical activity stops completely. There are many cases of people falling into frigid water, lapsing into unconsciousness, and being reawakened when warmed up. And if that’s true for two hours, it should in theory also be true for two years (or 200) — if we can just find a way to reach the temperatures needed to forestall decay, without causing damage. The crux, de Grey said, is determining whether or not cryonics preserves the molecular structure of the brain without inflicting irreparable damage to the data that makes us who we are.
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Comments (5)
I work for Dave Pizer, who gets the last word in Josh Dean's article. When Dean came out to interview Dave last year, he said he wanted to publish his article in GQ magazine; but apparently that deal fell through. Too bad, because I suspect GQ has more readers that BuzzFeed.
I'd like to see the framing of the cryonics idea move away from the traditional "becoming immortal" confusions dating from the 1960's over to something along the lines of: Cryonicists, and brain preservationists in general, want to turn death from a permanent off-state into a temporary and reversible off-state through advanced applied biotechnology and neuroscience.
And I'd also like to see cryonics advocates answer the dumb-asses' question about new bodies for revived head- or brain-only cryonauts by referring to the emerging medical technology of organ printing as a plausible solution which has more going for it than hand-waving about clones, uploads or robotic bodies: Just print a new, functional human body from the neck down.
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Eh, Ken Hayworth's not handwaving when he talks about uploading - he's actively working on the problem. My impression is that the tech you'd need for full repair (handwavy nanotech) is less plausible than the tech you'd need for uploading (slightly-less-handwavy slice/scan/run). Given that there are already active credible projects working on uploading c elegans, it seems more-likely (though probably less intuitive) than physical repair.
My purpose in commenting here is only to address what I see as a creeping fallacy, one that's apparently becoming a prevalent touchstone in the dissemination of cryonics on the internet, ie the thoughtful consideration (rather than thoughtless dismissal) by individuals of the kind who would have an interest in something like Less Wrong, those of whom typically have computer science backgrounds.
This is a fallacy akin to the idea of cryopreserved patients as "messages in a bottle" sent adrift, with fingers-crossed, to be found by our benevolent "Friends in the Future."
The reality is that if any cryopreserved individual actually exists at all by the time of the advent of technology capable of facilitating his or her resuscitation, it means that people are and always have been actively expending energy to care and maintain that individual. The question isn't whether anyone would care to revive someone, it's whether or not anyone would care to prevent that person from becoming organic waste at the bottom of a giant thermos bottle or long ago buried and forgotten.
The fallacy inadvertently perpetuated by people like Ken Hayworth, Randal Koene, Robin Hanson, and others reflects a similar failure of perspective regarding the foreseeable conditions that would actually facilitate the first resuscitation(s) of the cryopreserved.
I would humbly suggest the following:
There is obviously a threshold beyond which some (most?) patients lie. It may be even likely that no person cryopreserved today can be "revived" without some form of "uploading."
But the point is that that will not be the case for the people cryopreserved in the decades to come, and that will certainly not be the case for the first persons to be revived.
Speaking from the point of view of someone who wasn't previously completely sold on cryonics, this is a very thought provoking read.
As a brief tangent, I'm a little dismayed at the number of comments on that article that basically boiled down to 'it was too long to read'.
You'd think BuzzFeed was primarily a source of Internet brain candy with the readership that attracts or something.