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The_Jaded_One comments on The Brain Preservation Foundation's Small Mammalian Brain Prize won - Less Wrong Discussion

43 Post author: gwern 09 February 2016 09:02PM

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Comment author: gwern 10 February 2016 09:25:05PM *  24 points [-]

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

  • 'you may have preserved all the ultrastructure but despite the mechanism of crosslinking, I'm going to argue that all the real important information has been lost'
  • 'we already knew that glutaraldehyde does a good job of fixating, this isn't news, it's just a con job looking for some free money'
  • 'it irreversibly kills cells by fixing them in place so this is irrelevant'
  • 'regardless of how good the scans look, this is just a con job'
  • 'what's the big deal, we already know frogs can do this, but what does it have to do with humans; anyway, it's a quack science which we know will never work'

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.

Comment author: The_Jaded_One 22 February 2016 03:09:26PM 0 points [-]

'yeah, maybe there's a perfect copy, but it'll never really be you, it's only a copy waking up'.

Not everyone buys into this philosophical point of view, and if continuity of identity were the only technical objection left, I think that hundreds of thousands of rich, well-educated people with a scientific mindset would sign up.

I think that lingering doubts about whether preservation actually works are still a significant barrier in the "filter funnel" of cryonics.