A survey of anti-cryonics writing - LessWrong

A survey of anti-cryonics writing

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 10:26:52 +1100

Submitted by ciphergoth • 68 votes • 309 comments

(This was originally a link to a post on my blog, A survey of anti-cryonics writing. Eliezer asked me to include the entire text of the article here.)

For its advocates, cryonics offers almost eternal life. To its critics, cryonics is pseudoscience; the idea that we could freeze someone today in such a way that future technology might be able to re-animate them is nothing more than wishful thinking on the desire to avoid death. Many who battle nonsense dressed as science have spoken out against it: see for example Nano Nonsense and Cryonics, a 2001 article by celebrated skeptic Michael Shermer; or check the Skeptic's Dictionary or Quackwatch entries on the subject, or for more detail read the essay Cryonics–A futile desire for everlasting life by "Invisible Flan".

That it seems so makes me sad, because to my naive eyes it seems like it might work and I would quite like to live forever, but I know that I don't know enough to judge. The celebrated Nobel prize winning physicist Richard Feynman tells a story of a US general who spoke to him at a party and explained that one big challenge in desert warfare is keeping the tanks fuelled given the huge distances the fuel has to travel. What would really help, the general said, would be if boffins like Feynman could invent a sort of engine that was powered by sand. On this issue, I'm in the same position as the general; in the same way as a tank fuelled by sand seems plausible enough to him, it makes sense to me to imagine that however your brain stores information it probably has something to do with morphology and chemistry, so there's a good chance it might not evaporate right away at the instant of legal death, and that freezing might be a way to keep the information there long enough for future societies to extract it with their future-technology scanning equipment.

And of course the pro-cryonics people have written reams and reams of material such as Ben Best's Scientific Justification of Cryonics Practice on why they think this is exactly as plausible as I might think, and going into tremendous technical detail setting out arguments for its plausibility and addressing particular difficulties. It's almost enough to make you want to sign up on the spot.

Except, of course, that plenty of totally unscientific ideas are backed by reams of scientific-sounding documents good enough to fool non-experts like me. Backed by the deep pockets of the oil industry, global warming denialism has produced thousands of convincing-sounding arguments against the scientific consensus on CO2 and AGW. Thankfully in that instance we have blogs like Tim Lambert's Deltoid, RealClimate, and many others tracking the various ways that the denialists mislead, whether through cherry-picking evidence, misleading quotes from climate scientists, or outright lies. Their hard work means that denialists can barely move or speak without someone out there checking what they have to say against science's best understanding and pointing out the misrepresentations and discrepancies. So before I pony up my £25 a month to sign up to cryonics life insurance, I want to read the Deltoid of cryonics - the articles that take apart what cryonics advocates write about what they do and really go into the scientific detail on why it doesn't hang together.

Here's my report on what I've found so far.

Nano Nonsense and Cryonics goes for the nitty-gritty right away in the opening paragraph:

To see the flaw in this system, thaw out a can of frozen strawberries. During freezing, the water within each cell expands, crystallizes, and ruptures the cell membranes. When defrosted, all the intracellular goo oozes out, turning your strawberries into runny mush. This is your brain on cryonics.

This sounds convincing, but doesn't address what cryonicists actually claim. Ben Best, President and CEO of the Cryonics Institute, replies in the comments:

Strawberries (and mammalian tissues) are not turned to mush by freezing because water expands and crystallizes inside the cells. Water crystallizes in the extracellular space because more nucleators are found extracellularly. As water crystallizes in the extracellular space, the extracellular salt concentration increases causing cells to lose water osmotically and shrink. Ultimately the cell membranes are broken by crushing from extracellular ice and/or high extracellular salt concentration. [...] Cryonics organizations use vitrification perfusion before cooling to cryogenic temperatures. With good brain perfusion, vitrification can reduce ice formation to negligible amounts.

Best goes on to point out that the paragraph I quote is Shermer's sole attempt to directly address the scientific claims of cryonics; once the opening paragraph has dispensed with the technical nitty gritty, the rest of the piece argues in very general terms about "[blind] optimistic faith in the illimitable power of science" and other such arguments. Shermer received many other responses from cryonics advocates; here's one that he considered "very well reasoned and properly nuanced".

The Quackwatch entry takes us little further; it quotes the debunked Shermer argument above, talks about the cost (they all talk about the cost and a variety of other issues, but here I'm focussing specifically on the issue of technical plausibility), and links to someone else making the same already-answered assertions about freezing damage.

The Skeptic's Dictionary entry is no advance. Again, it refers erroneously to a "mushy brain". It points out that the technology to reanimate those in storage does not already exist, but provides no help for us non-experts in assessing whether it is a plausible future technology, like super-fast computers or fusion power, or whether it is as crazy as the sand-powered tank; it simply asserts baldly and to me counterintuitively that it is the latter. Again, perhaps cryonic reanimation is a sand-powered tank, but I can explain to you why a sand-powered tank is implausible if you don't already know, and if cryonics is in the same league I'd appreciate hearing the explanation.

It does link to the one article I can find that really tries to go into the detail: Cryonics–A futile desire for everlasting life by "Invisible Flan". It opens on a curious note:

If you would like my cited sources, please ask me and I will give them to you.

This seems a very odd practice to me. How can it make sense to write "(Stroh)" in the text without telling us what publication that refers to? Two comments below ask for the references list; no reply is forthcoming.

And again, there seems to be no effort to engage with what cryonicists actually say. The article assets

it is very likely that a human would suffer brain damage from being preserved for a century or two (Stroh).

This bald claim backed by a dangling reference is, to say the least, a little less convincing than the argument set out in Alcor's How Cold is Cold Enough? which explains that even with pessimistic assumptions, one second of chemical activity at body temperature is roughly equivalent to 24 million years at the temperature of liquid nitrogen. Ben Best quotes eminent cryobiologist and anti-cryonics advocate Peter Mazur:

...viscosity is so high (>1013 Poise) that diffusion is insignificant over less than geological time spans.

Another part of the article points out the well-known difficulties with whole-body freezing - because the focus is on achieving the best possible preservation of the brain, other parts suffer more. But the reason why the brain is the focus is that you can afford to be a lot bolder in repairing other parts of the body - unlike the brain, if my liver doesn't survive the freezing, it can be replaced altogether. Further, the article ignores one of the most promising possibilities for reanimation, that of scanning and whole-brain emulation, a route that requires some big advances in computer and scanning technology as well as our understanding of the lowest levels of the brain's function, but which completely sidesteps any problems with repairing either damage from the freezing process or whatever it was that led to legal death.

Contrast these articles to a blog like Deltoid. In post after painstaking post, Lambert addresses specific public claims from global warming denialists - sometimes this takes just one graph, sometimes a devastating point-by-point rebuttal.

Well, if there is a Tim Lambert of cryonics out there, I have yet to find them, and I've looked as best I can. I've tried various Google searches, like "anti-cryonics" or "cryonics skeptic", but nearly all the hits are pro-cryonics. I've asked my LiveJournal friends list, my Twitter feed, and LessWrong.com, and found no real meat. I've searched PubMed and Google Scholar, and again found only pro-cryonics articles, with the exception of this 1981 BMJ article which is I think more meant for humour value than serious argument.

I've also emailed every expert I can find an email address for that has publically spoken against cryonics. Sadly I don't have email addresses for either Arthur W. Rowe or Peter Mazur, two giants of the cryobiology field who both have strongly anti-cryonics positions; I can only hope that blog posts like these might spur them into writing about the subject in depth rather than restricting themselves to rather brief and unsatisfactory remarks in interviews. (If they were to have a change of heart on the subject, they would have to choose between staying silent on their true opinions or being ejected from the Society for Cryobiology under a 1982 by-law.) I mailed Michael Shermer, Steve Jones, Quackwatch, and Professor David Pegg. I told them (quite truthfully) that I had recently started talking to some people who were cryonics advocates, that they seemed persuasive but I wasn't an expert and didn't want to fall for a scam, and asked if there was anything they'd recommend I'd read on the subject to see the other side.

The only one of these to reply was Michael Shermer. He recommended I read David Brin, Steve Harris and Gregory Benford. This is a pretty surprising reply. The latter two are cryonics advocates, and while Brin talks about a lot of possible problems, he agrees with cryonics advocates that it is technically feasable.

I expanded my search to others who might be knowledgable: Society of Cryobiology fellows Professor Barry Fuller and Dr John G Baust, and computational neuroscience Professor Peter Dayan. I received one reply: Dayan was kind enough to reply very rapidly, sounding a cautionary note on how much we still don't know about the structure of memory and referring me to the literature on the subject, but was unable to help in my specific quest for technical anti-cryonics articles.

In his 1994 paper The Molecular Repair of the Brain, cryptology pioneer Professor Ralph Merkle remarks

Interestingly (and somewhat to the author's surprise) there are no published technical articles on cryonics that claim it won't work.

Sixteen years later, it seems that hasn't changed; in fact, as far as the issue of technical feasability goes it is starting to look as if on all the Earth, or at least all the Internet, there is not one person who has ever taken the time to read and understand cryonics claims in any detail, still considers it pseudoscience, and has written a paper, article or even a blog post to rebut anything that cryonics advocates actually say. In fact, the best of the comments on my first blog post on the subject are already a higher standard than anything my searches have turned up.

If you can find any articles that I've missed, please link to them in the comments. If you have any expertise in any relevant area, and you don't think that cryonics has scientific merit - or if you can find any claim made by prominent cryonics advocates that doesn't hold up - any paragraph in Ben Best's Scientific Justification of Cryonics Practice, anything in the Alcor Scientists’ Cryonics FAQ or the Cryonics Institute FAQ, or anything in Whole Brain Emulation: A Roadmap (which isn't directly about cryonics but is closely related) - then please, don't comment here to say so. Instead, write a paper or a blog post about it. If you don't have somewhere you're happy to post it, and if it's better than what's already out there, I'll be happy to host it here.

Because as far as I can tell, if you want to write the best anti-cryonics article in the world, you have a very low bar to clear.

Related articles: Carl Schulman links to Robin Hanson's What Evidence in Silence or Confusion? on Overcoming Bias, which discusses what conclusions one can draw from this.

309 comments

Earendil on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T07:52:13.051812+11:00

This is the best anti-cryonics argument I've heard so far. I largely agree with the replies about why it's wrong, but at least it's an argument rather than a gut "ewww..." or "blasphemy!" or "crazy talk!" reaction.

http://forums.unicornjelly.com/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=2090#p21074

ciphergoth on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T19:34:43.745999+11:00

Your reply really is excellent!

Still - and I've been noting this a lot - not to do with technical feasibility. A word I have finally been learning to spell what with writing it so much.

It may seem weird to be so focussed on this one thing what with all the other ways that cryonics can fail, but feasibility is what creates the seriousness barrier. As soon as you think that it stands a really good chance of working, you're over the line with us wacky people, and you're arguing about economics or whether the future wants us or suchlike with real skin in the game.

whpearson on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-10T00:07:21.760079+11:00

I'm surprised. I'd have though the biggest barrier to it being taken seriously is the comfort of normality barrier. That is most people are comfortable with the narrative of birth-life-death and anything that takes them outside that makes them uncomfortable and is ignored.

ciphergoth on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-10T00:17:54.048111+11:00

Yes, that's what motivates people to come to a negative conclusion, but I think it's the plausibility issue that allows them not to worry about the conclusions. Not many people say "if my heart stops, don't resuscitate me".

whpearson on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-10T01:41:45.369495+11:00

I don't think it is the coming back from the dead that makes people uncomfortable so much the world and technology that is supposed in the future to enable it. The eternal life from that point on also drastically changes the narrative.

Eliezer_Yudkowsky on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T09:18:23.006658+11:00

Earendil wins so hard it makes my ears bleed.

Eliezer_Yudkowsky on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T09:43:11.063458+11:00

Whoops, I just sent off a "you should join LW" message to Earendil on the board without noting that Earendil was the one who posted the link here!

UnholySmoke on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-10T09:56:46.683254+11:00

+1 rationality point for reading comments without checking the author. -1 social point for the faux pas.

MatthewB on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T18:06:24.383659+11:00

I find this to be a silly argument, as it assumes that not much will change about the methods of teaching, or of rejuvenation by the time that these people (who have been frozen) are re-constituted in one manner or another.

True, we would be antiquated and ignorant by the standards of the day, but just going into the process of freezing gives us a mind-set that shows us that we must be ready to abandon just about everything we know when and if we wake again. The Man from 1400 discussed in the article did not have that mindset and it was discussed as if his freezing had been an accident rather than an act of intention.

Plus, there is another reason to thaw the people out who have been frozen: Rule of Law. These people have all signed contracts based upon their conception that when and if we develop the technology to reanimate them, that we will do so. I have not examined a contract from Alcor or another cryonics program, so this may be an implicit assumption of the process.

If that is the Best anti-cryonics argument heard so far, then it is a lousy argument.

Edit: Also, if, when revived, the person is going to have an indefinitely long life, then any re-training would be trivial in terms of cost.

RobinHanson on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T07:27:19.210683+11:00

there is not one person who has ever taken the time to read and understand cryonics claims in any detail, still considers it pseudoscience, and has written a paper, article or even a blog post to rebut anything that cryonics advocates actually say.

This is an implicit appeal to an intuition about a missing dataset. So let me repeat my plea to make this dataset formal! Collect disputes from the past and dig for similar data on them - how many tech arguments by who in their favor, how many against, and so on. And especially - who was eventually right?

ciphergoth on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T21:37:28.976587+11:00

How could we do this? It seems to me that even if you were trying hard to avoid it, you'd have a very hard time not biasing your search in favour of examples that suited what you wanted to prove. Is there some external source of examples you could lean on that would unbias your survey, the way that people publish search terms in public databases when doing surveys of scientific consensus?

RobinHanson on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-10T00:41:15.539977+11:00

This is an issue with data collection on any interesting topic. It doesn't prevent such efforts from being useful. You choose a criteria and collect data that way, others who think your criteria off complain and choose a subset of your data to see if that makes a difference, or go collect more data according to criteria they prefer.

ciphergoth on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-10T00:48:36.885128+11:00

How would you start on a project like this? Serious, not rhetorical question.

BenAlbahari on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T08:26:17.620877+11:00

make this dataset formal!

Hence TakeOnIt, a database of expert opinions. Over the last few hours I've peen entering in all the expert opinions on cryonics that people have been posting links to:

Cryonics debate: http://www.takeonit.com/question/318.aspx

FYI - Robin Hanson's opinions on TakeOnIt: http://www.takeonit.com/expert/656.aspx

RobinHanson on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T08:41:00.799207+11:00

Sorry, that's just not the same thing at all.

BenAlbahari on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T09:17:18.278970+11:00

My point is that the same infrastructure can be used to capture any debate, whether its the current cryonics debate or other various debates in the past. The good thing about having a database of expert opinions is it makes questions like the one you asked easier.

RobinHanson on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T09:35:55.518637+11:00

Infrastructure is really not anything like the limiting factor. I'd donate pencils and paper too if that would help, but it won't. Beware overrating the stone in stone soup.

Eliezer_Yudkowsky on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T09:14:27.649246+11:00

It's a start. If it became popular and scaled up, it would provide that dataset.

Document on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-12-19T22:02:38.873030+11:00

I misread the last line, and briefly imagined you had a page for "Is TakeOnIt a useful resource?".

ata on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-08T13:15:39.038234+11:00

The allegation that cryonics is pseudoscience reminds me of the allegations that Singularitarianism/Transhumanism are "atheist religion", "the rapture for nerds", etc. That confusion, I think, comes when people see the questions we're investigating — "Could we live forever?", "Could we end suffering?", etc. — and assume that we're answering the questions in a way similar to how religion does... or they don't even think to remember why they believe religion is bad, and they assume that it's the questions rather than the answers. Obviously, the problem with religion isn't the questions it asks, nor their motives for asking those questions; the problem is the way religion acquires answers to those questions. The same applies to seeking eternal life. Eternal life as a goal isn't wishful thinking; it's wishful thinking when people mistakenly believe that the goal is easy or has already been reached ("you can live forever if you believe in Jesus", etc.). Yet it's not surprising that many perfectly intelligent people buy into these memes. They are used to hearing completely bullshit answers to these completely legitimate questions, so they get to the point where the questions themselves set off their bullshit alarms, even in the context of attempting to investigate them within a rigorous scientific/rational framework.

The "singularity == religion" and "cryonics == pseudoscience" memes are comparable to someone in the early 1960s comparing the Apollo program to the story of the Tower of Babel, and then dismissing the program on that basis as a technically infeasible religious fantasy.

zero_call on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T11:25:06.930424+11:00

Actually the Apollo program was quite well supported by the advancing missile technologies that were developed from the 1940s and onwards. Those early and ongoing tests made clear demonstrations of the ability to launch man-made objects into orbits around the earth and the moon. There's no such similar testing that has been done for cryonics. That analogy is really exaggerating things.

ciphergoth on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T19:30:36.331900+11:00

If you think that the Apollo program was better supported by missile evidence than cryonics is by the rabbit kidney vitrification, you're going to have to show your workings. You should do so in more than a comment, though, since whatever you post will as I show above be the best anti-cryonics article in the world.

ciphergoth on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-11T10:05:25.364004+11:00

Reading this back, I have to add that the Apollo program was much better supported by missile evidence than cryonics is by the rabbit kidney vitrification. However, I don't think the difference is qualitative.

Bugle on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-08T13:54:34.891347+11:00

I've also encountered people who criticize the predictions surrounding the singularity, which misses the point that the singularity is the point beyond which predictions cannot be made.

edit: Didn't mean that as a comprehensive definition.

ata on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-08T14:32:39.063126+11:00

If that were true about the Singularity, then wouldn't it be correct to criticize the people who make predictions about it?

Bugle on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-10T06:57:56.058307+11:00

Depends on your objectives. If you believe the singularity is something that will happen regardless then it's harmless to spin scenarios. I gather that people like Elizier figure that the Singularity will happen unavoidably but that it can be steered towards optimum outcomes by setting down the initial parameters, in which case I suppose it's good to have an official line about "how things could be/how we want things to be"

Nick_Tarleton on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-08T14:56:57.118216+11:00

That is not the most common usage here. See Three Singularity Schools and the LW wiki page.

EDIT: The parent comment does not deserve to be at -4. This is a reasonable thing for an inexperienced commenter to say.

magfrump on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T05:24:53.598489+11:00

Voted up for niceness.

timtyler on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T10:25:27.908024+11:00

There is no "point beyond which predictions cannot be made". That is a SF fantasy.

Bugle on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-10T06:53:41.443797+11:00

God forbid someone might mistake our hypothetical discussions about future smarter than human artificial intelligences for science fiction.

PhilGoetz on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T01:27:51.338090+11:00

Interestingly (and somewhat to the author's surprise) there are no published technical articles on cryonics that claim it won't work.

Also interestingly, there appear to be no published technical articles that claim that it will.

Last week, I searched for articles on how mammalian cryopreservation is done. I found nothing. Not a single journal article on any of the techniques Alcor uses. There are many articles on cryopreserving sperm, and embryos; there are studies on attempting to preserve other types of tissue samples. But I could not find a single article on methods to attempt to cryopreserve adult mammals. Not even in the journal Cryobiology, which is entirely about cryopreservation.

Go to the current issue of Cryobiology and look at the article titles to see what actually is being done in the field. Also notice that the author names are almost all Asian and (non-English/French/German) European. Cryonics for humans is most popular in nations that don't publish on cryonics. (Don't know if it's popular in the Nordic countries.)

ciphergoth on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T02:26:22.559208+11:00

Not a single journal article on any of the techniques Alcor uses.

That's forbidden by the Society for Cryobiology by-laws.

Psy-Kosh on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T02:54:12.822391+11:00

Why?

ciphergoth on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T03:31:52.896431+11:00

See Alcor's side of the story (also linked in the article).

Morendil on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T04:38:31.018306+11:00

Aha. I hadn't been aware of that conflict between cryonics and cryobiologist. I plan to go and read the Alcor page in full, then the letter in full, but right now one thing comes to mind: whatever document justifies the cryobiologists' decision to outright ban cryonics should lay out the most credible extant arguments against cryonics. They wouldn't take such a serious decision on a whim.

ciphergoth on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T04:44:20.962248+11:00

[EDIT: the below is wrong.]

As far as I can tell, there is no such document. This I consider very striking evidence on the credibility of anticryonics.

Of course the by-law is 28 years old, so even if there were such a document it would need updating.

ciphergoth on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-13T10:09:39.711016+11:00

I'm wrong: I found the document and some earlier drafts.

byrnema on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-13T10:38:59.107278+11:00

Very interesting. I like to synthesize and summarize, so this is my synopsis.

I read that they have one mild moral objection, that they were willing to stand behind over several drafts, and one scientific objection, that they were not willing to reiterate.

1st objection: you shouldn't sell a technological service that hasn't been scientifically demonstrated (presumably, even if the buyer is aware that they're only buying a potential technology)

It is interesting that they would like to call this fraud even though they can't quite:

"the implication of ultimate reanimation borders more on fraud than either faith or science."

(This reminds me of the argument I lost as to whether people would be justified in thinking that cryonics was a scam for some weak interpretation of 'scam' .)

2nd objection: that however people are cryo-preserved now, it is unlikely to be un-doable

in light of current scientific understanding of freezing injury in cells and tissues, even in the presence of cryo-preservatives, it is the Board’s scientific judgment that the prospects for re-animation of a frozen human, particularly a legally dead human, are infinitesimally low.

I don't agree with the first objection: if informed people want to pay for the chance of reanimation, I think that's their decision.

The second objection would be strong, if it were true that cryo-preservation causes irreversible damage (information loss), but that appears currently undecided.

ciphergoth on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-13T11:17:29.279121+11:00

The second objection would be strong, if it were true that cryo-preservation causes irreversible damage (information loss), but that appears currently undecided.

All the arguments I've found so far that are in favour of that position are either very vague on details, or fatally flawed on details. Most cryonics critics don't appear to understand the issue of information theoretic death clearly enough to articulate a position on it.

Morendil on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-13T10:28:02.105838+11:00

Thanks. The revision history is particularly interesting.

MBlume on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T10:10:58.738493+11:00

That's one of the most depressing things I've read in a while >.<

JenniferRM on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T17:08:23.852750+11:00

Pretty much agree.

The only thing that gives much comfort is that was written in 1991 so there's theoretically enough time for some of the obstructionist cohort to have retired or run out of steam on the subject. Perhaps the upside of a pessimistic view on scientific progress could be kicking in by now?

I tried to verify the actual current state of the Society for Cryobiology's bylaws to see if they even contain the provisions banning cryonicists or their research any longer. With 20 years for them to have realized that such censorship is at the very least in poor taste, maybe things have settled down? When I tried looking for an online version of the document with the it didn't appear to be something they have on display.

Does anyone else have stronger google-fu than I? It would be neat to track down the document so we could see for ourselves :-)

MBlume on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T19:09:33.819954+11:00

Wow, I'm actually having a very hard time finding any information on relations between the two more current than the '91 article

BenAlbahari on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T04:23:04.181488+11:00

Nice link - I added Alcor's side of the story to the question "Is cryonics worthwhile?":

http://www.takeonit.com/question/318.aspx

Thanks to everyone's suggestions, there's now 5 sub-debates for cryonics:

Is information-theoretic death the most real interpretation of death?
Is cryonic restoration technically feasible in the future?
Is living forever or having a greatly extended lifespan desirable?
Is there life after death?
Does cryonic preservation with today's best technology cause information-theoretic death?

Psy-Kosh on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T03:45:19.758412+11:00

Thanks for the link, and eeew.

Jordan on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T20:33:18.926982+11:00

Wow, that really stirs up the rebel in me.

I'm curious now to look more into the state of the art in cryopreservation. How close are we to successfully cryopreserving an organ?

PhilGoetz on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-10T06:44:37.144780+11:00

I think most cryobiologists are going about it the wrong way, trying to get incrementally better at cryopreserving tissue. The work I'm aware of that seems most promising (I say, having almost no familiarity with the field) is Ken Storey's work with wood frogs. They can freeze and thaw naturally.

I looked into it because I hoped I might be able to move some genes from a wood frog into a mouse, freeze it, thaw it later, and win the Methuselah Mouse prize. But it turns out that the frog has an anti-dessicant response to protect tissue from lack of water, an anti-ischemia response to protect tissue from lack of oxygen, a glucose response to produce glucose as a cryoprotectant, an anti-glucose response to protect cells from the huge amounts of glucose, and a bunch of other mysterious responses. It involves hundreds of genes. It's going to take a large program to import entire gene pathways from one organism to another.

Friendly-HI on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2011-06-14T08:19:15.708731+10:00

Haha. Creative thinking, but I'm not sure if that would count as life extension by the rules of the M-Prize.

It would have been stupendously trivial if all one had to do is to copy-paste some genes into a mouse egg, or do some gene-therapy, in order to become freeze-resistant. Aubrey's beard would go white in an instant.

ciphergoth on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T21:38:36.256421+11:00

Done, though not at LN2 temperatures:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15094092

http://www.cryostasis.com/perspectivesandadvances.pdf

Jordan on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-10T06:52:22.695310+11:00

Awesome. Thanks for the links.

quanticle on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T14:39:43.907934+11:00

I'm having the same problem. All the studies I've looked at have only studied the plausibility of cryonics. None have actually attempted to freeze and thaw a mammal (or any other warm blooded animal). All the examples of "natural" cryonic preservation deal with cold blooded animals (usually frogs or fish).

Can anyone point me to studies showing that cryogenic freezing and thawing in warm blooded creatures is possible? I'd hate to throw down a bunch of money on a cryonics policy, only to end up dead anyway, because the freezing process permanently damaged my tissues.

ciphergoth on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T19:43:22.999590+11:00

Not an entire mammal, but Greg Fahy has cryopreserved a kidney, brought it back and shown a rabbit able to live using it as its sole kidney.

Morendil on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T19:52:34.975045+11:00

Perhaps just as importantly for this whole discussion, nematodes have been shown to survive cryopreservation, with "memories" intact.

ciphergoth on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-10T01:16:55.672602+11:00

Very interesting! Again, not LN2 temperatures though.

EDIT: I'm wrong - thanks for the correction!

Morendil on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-10T02:38:18.422853+11:00

The abstract I linked to does mention LN2. Though I'm not sure how much difference various sub-freezing temperatures make, if our concern is how well the current protocols of cryonics can protect the brain against freezing damage.

I Googled for articles concerning nematodes because they're the standard "simplest organism with a nervous system", and this was among the first hits, filtering to exclude all publications by cryonicists.

What would be the next "higher" organism someone might have tried that on, that also has a nervous system?

PeerInfinity on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2011-03-30T10:31:57.288027+11:00

I recently found this article, that attempts to survey the arguments against cryonics. It only finds two arguments that don't contain any obvious flaws:

Memory and identity are encoded in such a fragile and delicate manner that cerebral ischemia, ice formation or cryoprotectant toxicity irreversibly destroy it.
The cell repair technologies that are required for cryonics are not technically feasible.

Vaniver on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-11-19T16:46:46.878809+11:00

I'm not sure whether or not Melody Maxim should count. She isn't anti-cryonics, but is thoroughly disgusted with the cryonics organizations that exist today- which seems strongly relevant for anyone deciding whether or not to sign up, but not for anyone interested in theoretical probabilities.

ciphergoth on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-11-19T17:48:22.119145+11:00

I certainly don't want to sign up with organisations like Alcor and CI. I want to sign up with Virgin Cryonics. Unfortunately the latter doesn't exist, so I'm signed up with CI. In answer to your question I think there's a huge gulf between "cryonics is a good idea that should be better implemented than it is" and "cryonics is crazy".

wedrifid on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-11-19T19:36:23.970867+11:00

Virgin Cryonics?

ciphergoth on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-11-20T01:14:45.392025+11:00

If anyone was going to turn cryonics into a mass-market product, Richard Branson might...

wedrifid on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-11-20T04:04:12.416625+11:00

Wow. The same 'Virgin' that is known here for the budget airline. I had no idea that he was likely to be into cryonics kinds of ventures too.

David_Gerard on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-11-20T04:33:37.743495+11:00

Having flown on VirginBlue in Australia, presumably this would entail setting up a cryonics operation that buys thirty-year-old equipment cheap, and charging the patients' families for extra LN2 by the litre. Flying on VirginBlue involves a certain amount of the passengers waving their arms and chanting "I believe in aviation! I believe in aviation!" Why no, it wasn't a great flight ...

wedrifid on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-11-20T04:40:02.757340+11:00

Having flown on VirginBlue in Australia, presumably this would entail setting up a cryonics operation that buys thirty-year-old equipment cheap, and charging the patients' families for extra LN2 by the litre.

Could not have said it better!

ciphergoth on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-11-20T21:17:46.741431+11:00

Not that he's a transhumanist, he just runs a huge variety of different businesses and doesn't mind doing unusual things eg Virgin Galactic.

Jakeness on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2012-12-19T09:07:49.949381+11:00

Now that the blog has been made private, could you provide a summary of her claims?

Vaniver on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2012-12-19T13:48:50.991141+11:00

It would have been much easier before the blog was made private! (Looking around, apparently that happened over a year ago.)

I think this will give a better impression than one that I can build from my memory. The basic takeaway I recall was that, to a cryomedical technician, the cryonics culture looked like one of wishful thinking, incompetence, and corruption.

It looks like Melody is still posting on LW, though infrequently.

gwern on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2011-06-04T12:36:45.119589+10:00

Your link isn't very useful - I'm told I don't have permission to read it.

Vaniver on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2011-06-04T12:52:26.026584+10:00

It appears to no longer be public. No clue what's up with that.

Perplexed on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2011-06-04T12:52:09.595502+10:00

In fact, the link takes me to a Google login screen - which makes it look like that phishing scheme Google just warned us about. There is no reason I should have to login just to read a blog posting.

As far as I can tell, it is a real Google login screen, but still ...

AdeleneDawner on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2011-06-04T13:12:26.767402+10:00

It looks like a real google login screen, but I'm clearly logged into google since I'm checking my email in another tab, and it still wants my password. I don't trust it.

gwern on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2011-06-04T13:23:42.733282+10:00

Blogger seems to be a bit different and not quite integrated. For example, I get no password request - it just tells me I'm not allowed and suggests trying a different account.

topynate on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-11-19T20:49:05.493165+11:00

Is there a ceremony theoretical probabilities must undergo to become practical? :-)

Vaniver on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-11-20T03:49:00.156192+11:00

Yes- it must describe a practical event, not a theoretical event. "Can I survive brain surgery?" is a theoretical question about technology; "Will I survive brain surgery performed by X?" is a practical question that is the conjunction of the first question and "Is X good enough at performing brain surgery?"

ciphergoth on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T03:30:41.652371+11:00

I found this article in which John Bischof speaks out against cryonics, so I mailed him, and he very politely replied almost immediately to say that cryobiologists consider cryonics a "faith based approach". Sadly he provided no more detail; I've mailed again asking him to write on the subject at greater length.

Update: he replied to my reply. I have also had mail from Ralph Merkle! Will make a new post on my blog with details later.

k3nt on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-13T07:54:29.300184+11:00

For those of us who are relatively newcomers to the site, please provide a link to your blog. Thanks.

Cyan on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-13T07:58:39.050416+11:00

Let me Google that for you.

k3nt on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-13T08:16:06.234876+11:00

I know i'm a dumbass sometimes. Re-reading I found the link at the top of the page even! Sigh.

I have bookmarked the blog now.

Cyan on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-13T08:18:43.583843+11:00

I'm just waiting for the day someone pulls that shit on me. I know I'll get mine...

CarlShulman on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T00:46:46.621198+11:00

The general problem of deciding what to make of theses cases was discussed in the Overcoming Bias post What Evidence in Silence or Confusion?

ciphergoth on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T00:53:26.527988+11:00

Thanks - have added to the body of the post.

DanielVarga on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-08T22:16:24.550901+11:00

Just two minutes ago, a very good anti-cryonics argument appeared to me. This is not my opinion, just my solution to an intellectual puzzle. Note that it is not directly relevant to the original post: I will not claim that the technology does not work. I will claim that it is not useful for me.

Let us first assume that I don't care too much about my future self, in the simple sense that I don't exercise, I eat unhealthy food, etc. Most of us are like that, and this is not irrational behavior: We simply heavily discount the well-being of our future selves, even using a time-based cutoff. (Cutoff is definitely necessary: If a formalized decision theory infinitely penalizes eating foie gras, then I'll skip the decision theory rather than foie gras. :) )

Now comes the argument: If I sign up for cryonics, I'll have serious incentives to get frozen sooner rather than later. I fear that these incentives consciously or unconsciously influence my future decisions in a way I currently do not prefer. Ergo cryonics is not for me.

What are the incentives? Basically they all boil down to this: I would want my post-cryo personality to be more rather than less similar to my current personality. If they revive my 100 years old self, there will be a practical problem (many of his brain cells are already dead, he is half the man he used to be) and a conceptual problem (his ideas about the world will quite possibly heavily diverge from my ideas, and this divergence will be a result of decay rather than progress).

ciphergoth on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-08T22:21:23.311927+11:00

To be honest, I'd prefer that discussion here stay focussed on the things that I raise in the article rather than becoming another general discussion about cryonics. My blog post on the subject ends with a "comment policy" that asks commenters to stay focussed on technical feasibility, and to avoid presenting novel arguments against technical feasibility in the comments, since if you accept what I argue, any such argument that had merit would deserve more prominence than a comment.

orthonormal on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-08T20:04:36.842970+11:00

cryptology pioneer Professor Ralph Merkle

Er, should this be "cryonics pioneer"?

EDIT: Huh, apparently he's both! Never mind...

ciphergoth on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-08T20:58:36.731601+11:00

I'm a crypto guy first of all, so that's the context I think of him in.

MBlume on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-08T13:50:50.950586+11:00

Your link seems to be broken, but I assume you meant to link this post?

ciphergoth on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-08T18:25:49.699538+11:00

Gah! fixed - thanks!

EDIT: have now put in entire text as per Eliezer's request.

Morendil on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-08T13:14:04.512848+11:00

The New Yorker recently had an article titled The Iceman. Judging from the abstract, it's anti- and not very high quality (excerpt: "The consensus appears to be that when you try to defrost a frozen corpse you get mush", a type of argument covered in your post.)

FrF on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-08T15:00:32.136329+11:00

Hint: Just in case you're not within reach of this issue of The New Yorker, a little bit of Google-fu turns up a scan of said article.

I found the piece not particulary exciting. It's certainly well-written but Jill Lepore obviously wasn't interested in digging too deeply re: the scientific or non-scientific foundations of cryonics. Instead we get a lot of impressionistic descriptions of Michigan (where the Cryonics Institute is located), slightly disdainful accounts of the CI's facilities and many synopses of SF stories .The latter isn't without reason, though, because Robert Ettinger was very influenced by Science Fiction.

Mrs. Lepore does her best to let Ettinger come across as grumpy, though I suspect that this "grumpiness" has to do with him knowing all to well what will very likely come out of it when a general interest magazine visits the CI. In other words, we are witness to a small culture clash: Of course it must be strange to a historian like Lepore that Ettinger has a completely different sensibility!

ciphergoth on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-08T21:02:01.276217+11:00

Reading that led me to this: Corpsicles in The New Yorker

whpearson on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-08T19:43:53.047156+11:00

Cryonics is hard to argue against as it partially involves magic (in the sufficiently advanced technology sense) and it involves something we don't fully understand, how information is stored in the brain. So the lack of technical criticism might be a rare instance of people shutting up about things they don't understand.

ciphergoth on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-10T09:29:58.287596+11:00

BTW, I've been bugging people for being off-topic all thread, so I thought I should say somewhere: this is exactly on-topic, this objection is as specific to my argument as can be. Thank you.

matt on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-19T15:42:10.647784+11:00

This is off topic too, but kudos to you for splitting off two comments from one when you're making two unrelated points. It keeps the discussions much clearer.

ciphergoth on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-08T20:57:39.416335+11:00

Cryonics advocates make lots of specific claims - see the articles linked at the end. Is there no claim on any of those articles that could be countered?

whpearson on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-08T23:28:05.788373+11:00

I don't know. The thing is the concrete claims do not add up to water tight case for cryonics doing what people want, that is preserving identity over the long term. The Alcor Scientist's article says as much.

There is space for later understanding of the way that the brain stores memories or just some chemical state important for identity to not be preserved by cryonics as it is currently practised.

ciphergoth on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-08T23:47:40.615322+11:00

There is space for that. It could turn out, say, that memories depend on some chemical or other being in one of two isomeric states, and that vitrification fluids will flip all the isomers the same way, leading to immediate information theoretic death.

However, I think that the case that Alcor and others present is enough to shift the burden of proof. At the moment there seems no reason to think that homeopathy or sand-powered tanks will work, and the burden is on proponents to come up with such a reason. By contrast, while we're a long way from being able to say with confidence that cryonics will work, we are at the stage where we can say that we should expect that it is likely to work until someone can come up with a reason why it shouldn't work.

Scenarios like the one in my first paragraph above would be quite a surprise; as far as I know they don't form any part of our current understanding of how memory is stored. It's not enough to throw out a bunch of "maybes": if you accept that there's no part of the evidence presented above that can be taken apart and shown to be flawed, then it is sufficient that it's a mistake to have low confidence in the technical plausibility of cryonics until someone presents a biologically plausible way for it not to work.

whpearson on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T01:06:51.826314+11:00

I'd say It depends how complete you think modern neuroscience is. If you think neuroscience is fairly complete and there won't be many gotcha's about how things work then I would adopt your view.

The less complete it is, and the more known unknowns and unknown unknowns there might be before we get a full understanding the more chance that one of those unknowns will interact with the vitrification fluid or how quickly we manage to get people vitrified at the moment (we might not be being quick enough to preserve some chemical structures).

I half jokingly compared it to alchemy in the pre-chemistry days, they had so many unknown unknowns people couldn't find convincing arguments against it. Should they have expected it to work? That is an extreme example though, I think we have a better handle of the brain than the alchemists did of the possibilities of transmuting lead to gold.

zero_call on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T11:18:56.473313+11:00

I'd just like to point out that the people who don't believe in cryonics aren't the ones asking for money. The burden of proof should be on the organizations like Alcor because they are the ones trying to sell you an actual product. Without a stringent burden of proof they are just snake-oil salesmen.

JGWeissman on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T11:40:22.202583+11:00

The burden of proof should be on the organizations like Alcor because they are the ones trying to sell you an actual product.

From a starting point of ignorance, this would be a reasonable stance. However, as a response to ciphergoth's claim that Alcor's case "is enough to shift the burden of proof" (that is, Alcor has met their burden of proof, and it is now up to the detractors to provide a rebuttal), it does not make sense.

zero_call on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T13:28:29.516209+11:00

You've misread my wording. I'm saying that the burden of proof should stay on Alcor because they are the ones trying to make money. They should do more than just show something "might work" if they are trying to charge you for services which they claim "will work".

Nick_Tarleton on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T13:39:49.482958+11:00

I'm saying that the burden of proof should stay on Alcor because they are the ones trying to make money.

Epistemological conclusions shouldn't be based on fear of being scammed. Alcor's motivation should be taken into account Bayesianically, but argument screens off motivation (limited of course by dependence on unchecked facts).

they are trying to charge you for services which they claim "will work".

From the Alcor FAQ: "Is cryonics guaranteed to work? No."

zero_call on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T15:38:09.826117+11:00

Whoever said they were afraid of being scammed? You're mistaking honest skepticism for paranoia.

Alcor doesn't claim that cryonics will work? OK. But they do argue "it might work or at least have enough probability to be worth the investment", and so on. Then my argument remains the same. This desire for investment puts the onus of proof on them.

ciphergoth on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T19:16:31.555759+11:00

Alcor and CI are non-profits.

ciphergoth on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T22:09:32.319648+11:00

So no matter what Alcor or CI write or what evidence they produce, the burden of proof is still on them and their critics need not say or write a word to justify being dismissive of what they do?

jimrandomh on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T14:29:34.313195+11:00

They make no such claim, so they do not bear that burden.

mattnewport on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T04:17:38.078905+11:00

The paragraph on climate change seems a little out of place. You must be aware that some of your readership will feel it undermines your case so its inclusion seems almost intended to pull in an unrelated debate into the discussion.

propater on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2011-03-09T01:15:43.616343+11:00

Is anyone aware of any article discussing scalability issues?

I agree that from an individual standpoint it is rational to sign up for cryonics but is it really a good idea for mankind in general to massively sign up for cryonics? Would it not create an awful drag on the economy that would delay or maybe even prevent mankind to acquire the technology necessary for reviving the "dead"?

From what I read on the business model of Alcor and CI, the costs of sustaining cryonisation are paid by the dividends/interests of a small capital constituted through life insurance. If more and more people enter cryonisation, there will be more and more of that capital that needs to find investment opportunities. Is it economically feasible to provide capital revenue for an ever growing amount of capital?

Has someone really considered a society where the number of the "dead" equals the number of the living? Has someone considered a society where the number of the "dead" equals ten times the number of the living?

I saw "economies of scale" mentioned a number of time. Have those economies of scale been quantified? Are they real or is it a magical word? What if we do not manage to grow the energy supply fast enough to ensure cryostasis for everyone?

Have the ethical implications of the risk posed to future generations potential economic and technological growth by massive cryonisation been considered? What if what I pay for my cryonisation would be better used in medical or AI research? What if that money could be used to accelerate the coming of "immortality" for my grand-children? What if my cryonisation slows down or prevents the coming of "immortality" for everyone (including myself but also my grand-children)?

gwern on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2011-03-09T01:22:57.693469+11:00

http://lesswrong.com/lw/2f5/cryonics_wants_to_be_big/

NancyLebovitz on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2011-03-09T02:13:29.353127+11:00

If more and more people enter cryonisation, there will be more and more of that capital that needs to find investment opportunities. Is it economically feasible to provide capital revenue for an ever growing amount of capital?

I think it depends on whether there are good ideas which haven't been funded, and whether the economic and social structure is such as to take advantage of the good ideas.

You might be interested in The Great Stagnation by Tyler Cowan-- as I understand it, he argues that economic grow has slowed in the developed countries (just the US?) because of a lack of good ideas.

I've heard the theory that the recent recession can be traced back to unduly low interest rates, which led to vast amounts of capital wandering the world searching for excessively high returns, and therefore vulnerable to scams.

Has someone really considered a society where the number of the "dead" equals the number of the living? Has someone considered a society where the number of the "dead" equals ten times the number of the living?

In science fiction, there's Why Call Them Back from Heaven? by Simak and Cryoburn by Bujold.

propater on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2011-03-09T02:54:36.224661+11:00

Thanks to both of you for your pointers.

teageegeepea on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-10T06:56:53.670752+11:00

I'm an AGW believer (is that the right term), but I'm skeptical whether there's more money for the pro or anti side. Steve McIntyre is retired and gets by on tips (though admittedly he has not outright denied AGW), how many grants have the RealClimate bloggers gotten? At any rate, I think it's a poor form of argumentation to suggest some side of a dispute is just crap inflated with money while overlooking the substantial amounts on the opposite side.

CaptainOblivious2 on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T14:42:10.588292+11:00

It seems to me that my death is most likely to come from one of 2 scenarios:

1) I become fatally ill with some disease (e.g. cancer) and, after a period of time, succumb to it.

2) I die suddenly as a result of great physical trauma (e.g. car accident)

Obviously other scenarios are possible, but I think these are the most likely. In case 1 I have plenty of time to sign up for cryonics (and could possibly pay for it with a "settlement" of some sort on my life insurance). In case 2, my body and brain suffer massive physical damage, and the cryonics company probably doesn't get involved until there's nothing left to salvage.

In either case, no great harm befalls me for waiting - over time the process will become more plausible (or possibly even proven), or maybe it'll be disproven, and in any event the costs will likely come down as my income and net worth rise... so what's the rush?

Alicorn on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T14:45:32.871820+11:00

Life insurance will become more expensive after you are diagnosed with a terminal illness.

CaptainOblivious2 on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-10T00:03:32.515015+11:00

True, but I've got life insurance already - this would just be a matter of "re-purposing" a small percentage of it. Or maybe I'll just pay it out of my pocket after I get sick - the insurance isn't really a critical part of the plan.

P.S. does anyone know the legalities of cryonics? For example, suppose I pay for it with cash advances on all my credit cards, and then "die". Many years later I'm somehow brought back to life... do I still have that debt (plus interest and penalties, of course), or has it been wiped out? Maybe it depends on how I'm brought back: if my physical body were to be brought back, I think most people would expect the debt to stick with me (after all, I didn't really die - I just took a long nap)... but if I'm reincarnated as a computer program, it might be a little murkier...

gwern on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-05-10T12:23:47.811336+10:00

P.S. does anyone know the legalities of cryonics? For example, suppose I pay for it with cash advances on all my credit cards, and then "die". Many years later I'm somehow brought back to life... do I still have that debt (plus interest and penalties, of course), or has it been wiped out?

Legally, you're just dead. Your life insurance gets paid out as specified, your assets get sold off and dispersed, your creditors take what they can, and after a while, the files are finally closed. What happens to your corpse is a private detail.

There are cases of people returning long after being declared dead, but from what I remember, they usually got very little back. The law doesn't like loose threads; eg. statute of limitations.

(And seriously - interest? What's the point of charging a returnee a few centuries of interest? If the relevant currencies, sovereignties, and entities even exist, compounded interest could be in the billions.)

ciphergoth on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-10T09:37:15.892534+11:00

this would just be a matter of "re-purposing" a small percentage of it.

Why do you want to be frozen only when your death is long anticipated? Why would you prefer not to be frozen if your death was sudden?

Or is there some advantage you get from waiting I'm not seeing?

(Death meaning of course legal death here)

mattnewport on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-10T09:53:15.275206+11:00

Did you read his original post? Sudden death for an otherwise healthy adult is likely to involve severe physical trauma (car accident) or require an autopsy (unexpected deaths of healthy adults generally do) and so greatly lower your chances of being successfully preserved.

This is one of the reasons I don't think cryonics is a good investment for me in my current situation - based on what I've been able to glean from mortality statistics there is a fairly narrow range of circumstances where I might die in the next 20 years and be in a good state for successful preservation.

ciphergoth on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-10T19:20:51.286074+11:00

Alcor/CI will dispense with the money according to your instructions if there's no chance of cryopreservation. The only difference between relying on this and re-purposing in time is that if you do die young in a cryopreservable way, you get the wrong outcome.

Also, sorting out cryonics is hard enough when you're not terminally ill.

(I can't remember if we actually know CaptainOblivious2's gender - am following your example)

gwern on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2011-06-04T12:41:54.816056+10:00

True, but I've got life insurance already - this would just be a matter of "re-purposing" a small percentage of it. Or maybe I'll just pay it out of my pocket after I get sick - the insurance isn't really a critical part of the plan.

Oh, and I'd point out that you may have issues renewing your insurance if you get a terminal disease. I don't know the ins-and-outs but it wouldn't surprise me terribly if term insurance might be hard to get if you outlive a particular time period. ('Why yes, we'd be glad to renew your term insurance policy Mr. Oblivious2; there's just the small matter of your health records...')

CarlShulman on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-03-17T20:24:52.757709+11:00

The Onion on cryonics for college grads.

BenAlbahari on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-10T11:18:28.521198+11:00

I added the sub-debates suggested by Earendil, pdf23ds, and ciphergoth, giving us a total of 7 sub-debates for the cryonics debate:

Is information-theoretic death the most real interpretation of death?
Is cryonic restoration technically feasible in the future?
Is living forever or having a greatly extended lifespan desirable?
Does cryonic preservation with today's best technology cause irreversible brain damage?
Is there life after death?
Is deterioration of the brain after death slow enough for cryonics to be worthwhile?
Assuming it was technically possible, would a cryonically suspended person actually get reanimated?

http://www.takeonit.com/question/318.aspx

Once again, let me know if there's a major sub-debate missing. For the sake of cleanliness I'll attempt to edit this post if someone suggests another sub-debate, rather than adding a new post.

godrealized on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-03-07T06:02:05.681834+11:00

There exists life after death http://www.vijaykumar.org/life_after_death.html ... afterlife as confirmed by sacred Bhagavad Gita of Hinduism... foremost of all sacred scriptures existing on mother earth! The importance of Bhagavad Gita is confirmed from the fact that any human being till date who gained enlightenment... had to assimilate wisdom contained in Bhagavad Gita!

The concept of life after death... afterlife follow from fact that primarily it is our soul... the spirit within that is the absolute master and controller of human body and not vice versa! Every soul manifests a human body to work out its karma... remove dross impurities within! In its lifetime every soul passes through a maze of 8.4 million manifestations on the whole!

After passing through 7.3 million manifestations in insect, plant and animal life... the soul http://www.godrealized.com/hinduism_atman_soul.html finally manifests human form! The moment human beings reached stage of enlightenment (kaivalya jnana)... all is over for soul... the spirit within! Having reached stage of absolute purity... purified soul need not manifest a body further... need for soul to manifest a body further now ceased to exist!

sketerpot on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-03-07T06:27:28.824633+11:00

This illustrates an interesting feature of a lot of religious proselytism: the arguments sound convincing to someone who already believes them, but completely nuts to everyone else. Let's dissect this one:

Life after death happens because the Bhagavad Gita says so. The Bhagavad Gita is true because everyone who your religion says to have achieved enlightenment (a status you confer only upon members of your religion) is a member of your religion.

To anybody else, even people with religions of their own, this is obviously not evidence of anything; it's just religious egocentrism. So why are such arguments so common? (Oh, and you should totally believe that the Bible is true, because Jesus died for your sins. I hear this one all the time.)

byrnema on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-03-07T06:50:22.446912+11:00

If it doesn't sound reasonable, you probably haven't understood it yet. Often because a set of words are more load-bearing than they appear on the surface.

For example, 'achieved enlightenment' may be something that they have had experience with and equate with wisdom. If someone who seems quite wise (at one or two or more levels above yourself) believes in Bhagavad Gita and says their wisdom comes from Bhagavad Gita, you might believe them. Alternatively, you may have identified some thoughts in yourself as 'wise', and then find these thoughts expressed easily and matter of factly by Bhagavad Gita. This is how religions build their credibility: through awe and recognition of common (but noT-too-common) truth.

(So I'll add that) maybe the problem with religion is that people don't understand what the source of wisdom is. They think if they identify a source of one truth, that source is reliable for other truths. So the problem is epistemology, again.

JGWeissman on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-03-07T07:24:18.876458+11:00

Sometimes, a comment that looks like off topic, incoherent rambling (which has been down voted past the view threshold, so we really should not respond to it) really is off topic, incoherent rambling.

Morendil on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-03-07T07:12:55.169496+11:00

Where do you think they're pulling the 7.3 million figure from?

RobinZ on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-03-07T06:13:06.323482+11:00

Please provide evidence of this, drop the subject, or leave.

pre on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T04:43:13.998432+11:00

I'm a long way from being an expert neuroscientist, but as far as I can tell the mechanism under which neural change happens essentially involves a few physical changes:

1) Myelination - the Myelin coating over the Axon of a neuron grows, making the Axon conduct it's signal more powerfully and quickly

2) Change in number and distribution of neurotransmitter receptors in the dendrites of the neuron. Obviously the more of them you have, the more likely the neuron is to fire in the presence of the transmitter which fits that receptor.

3) Change in the number and distribution of vesicles which release neurotransmitters in the Axon Terminal. When the neuron fires, the vesticles in it's Axon terminal's release their load of neurotransmitters. Again, the more of them you have the stronger the signal to make the neuron the other side of the synapse fire.

4) The actual path the Axon's and Dentrites take, snaking from one cell to the next. Litterally the 'wiring'.

There may well be other changes to the neural structure which change the way it behaves, but these seem to be the major mechanisms. Interestingly, a neuron firing tends not only to release neurotrasmitters from it's vesticles, but also to change the structure of the neuron, make it grow more receptors etc

So does Cryonics actually preserve these things?

I'm not in a position to tell. If the cell walls were really being burst, then no, I doubt that the number and distribution of vesticles and receptors would be preserved since those things are built into the cell walls. My impression was that proper cryopreservation did indeed store the cells intact though.

If the cells are stored intact, including the position of the receptors and releasors in the cell walls at each end of every branch of the axons in the neurons, then I think this seems likely to be where the brain's long-term state is stored.

There'll doubtless also be short-term memories which are just feedback loops of signals travelling around the brain. They'll be lost, I would think, just as they were lost in my brother when he spent a few weeks in a coma and remembered nothing until the day before he got beaten up.

Course, I'm nowhere near qualified to really judge either. All I've done is read a bit.

I signed up for the Alcor UK mail-list at the beginning of the year. It's pretty much silent though. As far as I can tell, shipping your dead body to the US is the only way it's really gonna work. I fear that makes it much less viable here than there.

ciphergoth on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T04:57:16.846463+11:00

If the topic is the technical plausibility of cryonics then this is on-topic, but I'm hoping to focus a little more narrowly than that, on the specific subject of existing writing that argues against cryonics, its accuracy and quality, and what we can infer from that.

BTW: I too am in the UK and having real trouble!

pre on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-13T10:44:32.398271+11:00

Heard back from the guy I emailed. Sounds like the meeting next month is mostly for folks who are signed up already, with more policy and practice stuff than enrolment and talk about the actual process.

I've asked him if he'll either do a Q&A here on exactly what UK folks would have to do, or else suggest someone who will.

Seems like it'd be a lot of effort to trek up to Sheffield for just the answers to some questions.

Hopefully he'll say yes :)

pre on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T05:41:58.156875+11:00

Yeah, I can't help on finding stuff written on cryo though I'm afraid. That's the topics it'd have to address to have much meaning to me: Whether or not the distribution of those proteins in the cell membrane are stored or destroyed. It might still not work even if it saves those things, but if it doesn't save those things it's not got a chance.

There's some kinda cryonics UK meeting next month which I'd half planned to think about going to. Will give it more thought when I get back from a work-trip next week.

{EDIT: Actually, I'll email 'em now and see what the score is]

DonGeddis on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-08T16:20:30.518705+11:00

"Pseudoscience" isn't the only possible criticism of cryonics. One could believe that it may be scientifically possible in theory, still without thinking that it's a good idea to sign up for cryonics in the present day. (Basically, by coming up with something like a Drake equation for the chance of it working out positively for a current-day human, and then estimating the probability of the terms to be very low.)

You're right, that most of the popular criticism of cryonics is mere non-technical mocking. Still, there's a place for reasoned objections as well.

ciphergoth on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-08T18:26:11.036754+11:00

there's a place for reasoned objections as well.

There certainly is. Please point me to them.

clay on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-08T16:53:30.083514+11:00

This article http://www.alcor.org/printable.cgi?fname=Library%2Fhtml%2FWillCryonicsWork.html gives something like a drake equation for cryonics

MichaelHoward on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T02:51:27.284958+11:00

Maybe it's the correlation between believing in cryonics and being a smart rationalist, but for my money the most rational arguments against cryonics [Edit: or how cryonics is being practiced] don't come from people against cryonics. They come from cryonics supporters exploring the other side of the argument, or confronting what's wrong so they can try to fix it. I take that as strong evidence that those against cryonics are getting something badly wrong.

I nominate the appropriate bits of the above Alcor article as currently the best anti-cryonics article in the world.

ciphergoth on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-11T10:10:30.037366+11:00

Ben Best is also now talking about taking on the challenge to write the best anti-cryonics article.

gwern on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-05-10T12:00:43.923115+10:00

Did he ever write it? It's been 2 or 3 months, and I don't see anything in http://www.benbest.com/cryonics/cryonics.html

ciphergoth on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-05-11T22:03:13.069567+10:00

Not that I heard about. I don't think there's much point to be honest, he wouldn't have credibility with disbelievers.

MichaelHoward on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-10T01:18:44.630811+11:00

The first 4 minutes of this is another good example. The guy on the left is Mike Darwin.

k3nt on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-13T08:14:44.702230+11:00

Love love love this article! A ton of interesting questions to chew on as I wrestle with this problem.

Thanks very much for the link. I bookmarked it and will return to it.

orthonormal on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-08T14:13:39.450183+11:00

Thanks again! I'd still prefer if this sentence were modified so that it doesn't appear to be your thesis on first reading:

The idea that we could freeze someone today in such a way that future technology might be able to re-animate them is nothing more than wishful thinking on the desire to avoid death.

You could bracket it in a "skeptics claim X" the way a (good) journalist would, perhaps...

ciphergoth on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-08T19:32:13.899314+11:00

I've replaced the full stop with a semicolon, to make it clearer that the "To its critics" opening covers that whole claim.

gregconen on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-08T13:50:59.475071+11:00

Betting on technology that doesn't currently exist is never a sure thing. But cryonics is a good deal even if the probability of revival is low.

MichaelGR on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-08T12:23:20.218370+11:00

Your "read more" link doesn't work.

Tordmor on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-08T23:50:54.194354+11:00

I don't know whether this is on topic since it is not a technical argument, but it is from my field of expertise which is economics. From the CI Faq: "Cryonics is practiced because of a belief that the damage caused by current cryopreservation can someday be repaired."

Now from the preceding paragraphs I get the feeling that science proceeds in the way of developing better preservation techniques that reduce the potential damage. So damage repairing technologies would have to be developed separately. In order for those technologies to be developed, however, there needs to be an economic gain expected. Now what would that gain be? The money payed for cryonics has already been payed. New customers are gained by better preservation techniques not by repairing techniques. The knowledge of the preserved people would probably be obsolete by then.

A small amount of people signing up for cryonics is necessary to show that to be a viable market so that preservation technologies are being developed at all. However if the customer base is too large without significant advances in this field the pressure to develop better preservation technologies is reduced. In any case the people already preserved the old way are probably dead unless there would be a significant amount of preserved people whom future societies value only for their personalities or any inflicted damage is in fact negligible already.

ciphergoth on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T00:20:47.836368+11:00

No, I wouldn't consider this to be on-topic, sorry. I'd like to stay focussed on technical feasibility and the arguments raised in the article.

nazgulnarsil on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-08T14:50:20.667623+11:00

this is what tipped the scales heavily in favor of cryonics for me. the skeptics make ridiculous claims, and the people who know about the current state of biological research seem genuinely optimistic about it. that's good enough for me considering the low cost and potentially very very high utility payoff.

roland on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-13T06:43:43.860921+11:00

I'm not worried about the technical aspects, I believe it is just a matter of time especially considering the singularity.

What worries me more are economic reasons: will our civilization be stable long enough until we reach the singularity? What about resource shortage, peak oil, global warming, wars? Eventually the cost of cryopreservation will be too high to maintain and cryonics corporations will go bankrupt. The weakpoint is the assumption that the US$ 80,000 will be enough to keep you freezed over the next decades. Conjunction fallacy anyone? Still I think that cryonics is the best bet for those who want a shot at eternity.

EDIT: I think I need to flesh out the conjunction here a bit more: what assumptions went into the cost of US$ 80,000? How stable has the economy have to be for those assumptions to hold? What if peak oil suddenly becomes a reality and the economy collapses as a lot of folks predicted? How high will the price for cryopreservation climb in that scenario? And this is just one scenario of 1000s that can happen over the next decades.

Rain on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T05:55:38.987652+11:00

My critique of cryonics: other things are more important, and more worthy of my money, than preserving my own life.

Unknowns on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T06:15:12.179721+11:00

Do you also donate all the money you would otherwise spend on health insurance?

Rain on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T06:23:17.555381+11:00

I have three buckets of spending:

Life support - food and shelter. It's expensive to keep on living, and earning more money. Consider this overhead.
Frivolous pursuits - WoW, booze, the occasional passion in music or literature. This takes less money than you might think. Wastage.
Donations - I'm planning for this to be 22.5 percent of my gross income this year. By contrast, this will be 20 times my actual health insurance costs, barring unexpected personal injury, and will likely be more than life support and frivolous pursuits combined.

To note another contrast, the cost of a single full body preservation at Alcor, plus membership dues, appears to be close to the SIAI yearly budget.

James_Miller on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T13:28:34.292481+11:00

The real cost of your "Frivolous pursuits" is time. Spend less time drunk or on WoW, use the saved time to work at Burger King and use the money from Burger king to pay for cryonics.

Rain on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T15:11:11.813912+11:00

At that point, the equation would be, "work at Burger King and use the money <to donate to cause X>". The same for getting life insurance. And that option is currently not feasible due to the fact that I already have a hard time going to work at the job I have. There's a reason I called it wastage.

I know it sounds like a status grab and signalling and all that jazz, so let me explain: I consider my martyrdom to be a symptom of depression that just so happens to benefit certain organizations. I doubt they'd complain, despite its effects on my life. I used to tell people I didn't know what to do with my money (interesting aside: the dozen or so times I said this, the answer was always the same, nearly verbatim: "give it to me"), then for a while I told people I was going to live forever (cryonics, transhumanism, etc), now I tell people I'm going to save the world.

Ideally, I'd like to do both, but right now the cost of cryonics is outrageous when compared with the (lack of) funding put toward such important issues as existential risk. I honestly believe the values don't even fit on the same scale.

Jordan on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T16:25:05.163633+11:00

Power to you.

I'd only note that the monthly cost of WoW is roughly half as much as the monthly insurance cost for cryonics.

Rain on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-10T00:48:32.076854+11:00

Yes. And if I had life insurance, I don't see why I wouldn't sign that over to the same organizations I donate to, since the cost is not the monthly dollar figure, but the amount spent on the process. For $150,000, you can preserve one failed human body with a low chance of success, or you can fund existential risk research for most of a year.

If I were some kind of perfect utility maximizer, I would be able to cut out all the non-essentials, but I have akrasia more strongly than I've heard it stated by anyone else on this site. I can actively look at a situation, say to myself, "Y is wrong. It will hurt me, it will hurt the other people involved, and produces no good in the foreseeable future. X is better in every way." And then I take action Y. If I were a theist, I'd say I was possessed, as I walk down the sidewalk ranting at myself, "What are you doing?! You know it's wrong! You don't even want it! Why are you doing it?!" on my way to do Y.

I take my victories where I can get them. I consider the value equation to be very rational - existential risk is far more important than one life. The possibly rationalized part is where I don't do both to mitigate uncertainty. I can see this as potentially a form of cryocrastination brought on by low self-esteem. I can also see it as counteracting the abnormally large emphasis we place on our own continued existence, bringing the value comparison more fully into view... it's just a good thing not everyone feels that way.

CronoDAS on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T18:18:09.351832+11:00

That's for term life insurance that becomes worthless if you don't die within a specified time period. After that time period, if you don't have $50,000 in the bank, you'll have to pay a much higher premium because you're older.

timtyler on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T10:21:31.962578+11:00

Would you say you are a utiliarian - or aspire to be one? [edit: thanks for your reply]

Rain on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T12:42:32.867968+11:00

I try not to apply labels to myself since they limit options. I currently have strong issues with the concept of value / utilons.

brazil84 on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-08T13:52:25.675984+11:00

I agree that the link doesn't seem to be working. But I would very interested to learn more. I haven't been all that skeptical of cryonics until now. Logically it seems like if there is a way to preserve the information in your brain, then one day somebody will figure out how to extract it. I guess that's a bit like running an engine on sand. After all, sand in theory contains a great deal of energy in the form of nuclear bonds.

BTW I've studied the issue carefully and probably disagree with you about global warming. Probably it's too charged an issue for rational debate in this forum, but I did lay out my case here:

brazil84.wordpress.com

twanvl on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-08T13:48:58.028150+11:00

The difference between cryonics and, for example, global warming denialism is that the former makes a claim like "it is probably a good thing to do X", while the latter makes a claim like "X is/is not true". These are completely different things!

Perhaps it is better to compare it to the anti vaccine movement. They do make a claim of the form "X is good/bad for you". Now the difference becomes about evidence. For cryonics there is little evidence either way: it has never worked, and it has never not-worked. In such a case there is little we can do beyond trying to use reason alone (always a dangerous thing) and waiting for more experiments.

On the other hand, there is a lot of evidence that vaccines work just fine. Denying that evidence is wrong.

wedrifid on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-08T14:40:19.409360+11:00

For cryonics there is little evidence either way: it has never worked, and it has never not-worked.

Your definition of evidence is too narrow.

Eliezer_Yudkowsky on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T09:36:14.475718+11:00

Why is it a sin to deny a lot of evidence, but not a little evidence?

randallsquared on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-10T03:39:16.305545+11:00

Because the less evidence there is, the better the chance that we're mistaken about it, all else equal. But this seems obvious enough that I guess I'm missing your point.

ciphergoth on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-10T09:34:56.256577+11:00

Sure, the weaker the evidence, the less you'll be misled on average by ignoring it. But there doesn't come a point where ignoring evidence is not misleading at all compared to updating on it. It's never going to be a good idea to start saying to yourself "that's only a little bit of evidence, so I'll just pretend it wasn't there".

randallsquared on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-10T13:17:24.298092+11:00

If updating were costless, I'd agree.

mariz on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T09:47:11.917183+11:00

I posted an argument here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/1mc/normal_cryonics/1i92

I didn't see a major criticism. There were some interesting responses and questions, like what constitutes a 5% increase in quality of life (I don't know; it's a crude metric), but my point stands. You're better off spending your money on marginal increases in quality of life with high probabilities of success than on cryonics.

ciphergoth on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T19:24:26.938850+11:00

That argument does not address technical feasibility and is not on-topic for this post. Instead, you assume that feasibility is very low.

Also, my survey doesn't include blog comments - I'm looking specifically for articles and other writing designed to stand alone.

mariz on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T09:50:58.842115+11:00

BTW, it's ironic, given the goals of this web site, how much groupthink occurs with regard to cryonics. Robin and Eliezer have biased the crowd a lot on this one.

Morendil on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T18:56:58.564567+11:00

Actually, the recent posts on cryonics have dug up new information, some of which contradicts Eliezer's earlier assertions. The cost of cryonics has been established as much higher than $300/year for some people (e.g. myself). The difficulty of signing up if you live outside the US has been highlighted. The strong opposition of a mainstream group of scientists, cryobiologists, has been brought forward. Our best efforts to uncover actual evidence against the basic science (ciphergoth's current focus of inquiry) have not yet succeeded. But we keep going.

Your argument from utility has received responses, for instance I have clearly stated that at $300/year I would jump to sign up, since I already spend at least that much on things that bring me a negligible increase in life satisfaction. The quote I have received is closer to $2000/year and that is large enough to give me pause, given that I currently enjoy an unreliable level of income as a freelancer.

But your argument is also an argument in favor, to anyone who has enough money that the marginal utility of $2000/year becomes insignificant so that the expected utility of longer life again dominates.

If you're going to call "groupthink" on the current discussion, I request that you hold yourself to at least as high an epistemic standard as the people who are participating in the discussion, and substantiate your accusation of groupthink with actual evidence and analysis.

Otherwise, "groupthink" can too easily become one of those reverse applause lights. What should we call them, "boo lights"? Are those used on TV? Anyway, I've seen people (here and elsewhere) use the word to cheaply establish their status as a skeptic, without actually doing any critical thinking or even basic due diligence. That devalues the technical meaning of "groupthink".

We want the term groupthink to still be useful when we really need it - when we actually succumb to groupthink.

Eliezer_Yudkowsky on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-15T05:56:19.703593+11:00

What a fine comment to be posted under a parent voted down to -5 where no one will ever see it.

Morendil on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-15T06:33:51.865084+11:00

Thanks. The bottom half I'm already planning to yank up to a post, per wedrifid's request, probably tomorrow and certainly sometime this week.

The top half only summarizes evidence discussed elsewhere in the Normal Cryonics thread and the root post, all of which I hope will get consolidated somewhere at some point - though I'm less sure I'll be the one to do that.

I find myself wondering how common this kind of thing is in the LW corpus - people finding useful observations buried under heavily downvoted ones, presumably egregious mistakes. (I tend to think better about things by explaining them to others, and mistakes tend to draw out my most sincere attempts. But that could be just me.) LW is old enough by now that mining the comments database might yield interesting patterns.

Eliezer_Yudkowsky on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-15T15:11:55.855834+11:00

I'm not sure that merited a top-level post, but it would merit a top-level comment in this thread.

ciphergoth on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T19:25:44.839289+11:00

I vote down any comment that is no more than an accusation of groupthink without evidence. It's the genetic fallacy.

wedrifid on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-14T17:35:51.807307+11:00

Last half comment + more expansion and a few linkages to the other related concepts you refer to + top level post = lots of karma + happy wedrifid + An easy link-to-previous-post comment to go with the downvotes that so many of us use in these sorts of situations.

Morendil on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-14T19:47:51.139204+11:00

Will do.

timtyler on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T06:10:23.463268+11:00

I think cryonics compares unfavourably in financial terms to the more conventional route to immortality - namely having babies - for most people.

There will be a few exceptions - elderly men with no kids who can't get a date, post-menopasual women with no kids, the otherwise infertile, rich people locked into unproductive marriages - etc.

No doubt this contributes to cryonics's lack of popularity.

Cyan on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T06:24:13.194552+11:00

"I don't want to be immortal by having kids; I want to be immortal by not dying."

- Woody Allen, mutatis mutandis

timtyler on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T06:49:16.464218+11:00

In biology 101 one learns that most organisms value having kids over living for a long time.

It appears to be fairly easy to trade kids for longer life - adopt a regime of dietary energy restriction.

Very few people do that. I figure they mostly value kids over a long life.

Also, check out the "cryonics wives" effect. It looks as though some people are not happy about the resource-investment conflict between ice and offspring.

Prospective sleepers no-doubt have their own values. I am describing one reason why most people don't sign up for cryonics. It's partly because it makes little economic sense.

tommccabe on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T07:45:23.816491+11:00

"In biology 101 one learns that most organisms value having kids over living for a long time."

This is very definitely a confusion over what evolution values versus what organisms value. Suppose you were faced with a choice: get sterilized now, or get shot in ten years. Evolution would favor B but the vast majority of people themselves would favor A.

"Very few people do that. I figure they mostly value kids over a long life."

Most people don't know about CR and don't know what they want very clearly anyway.

Jack on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T07:49:10.821428+11:00

This is very definitely a confusion over what evolution values versus what organisms value. Suppose you were faced with a choice: get sterilized now, or get shot in ten years. Evolution would favor B but the vast majority of people themselves would favor A.

Interestingly though, if the choice is: get shot now or one of your children gets shot now most people would choose the former.

timtyler on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T08:35:53.065670+11:00

Your example is pathological. "Painless sterilisation" and "being shot in ten years" are uncommon as choices to be made in the ancestral environment. By contrast, most organisms constantly face decisions regarding whether to expend resources on body maintenance programs or courtship, mating and reproduction.

Like I said, most organisms value having kids over living for a long time. That is because nature is concerned with reproduction - and not longevity. If you still do not "get" that, try sitting in on the class I mentioned.

tommccabe on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T08:39:30.306050+11:00

"Your example is pathological. "Painless sterilisation" and "being shot in ten years" are uncommon in the ancestral environment."

Yes, that's why the two are different- because evolution did a lousy job at making an organism's desires match its own desires.

"Like I said, most organisms value having kids over living for a long time. That is because nature is concerned with reproduction - and not longevity. If you still do not "get" that, try sitting in on the class I mentioned."

You do not understand the difference between what evolution wants and what an organism wants. They are not the same thing. See http://lesswrong.com/lw/l0/adaptationexecuters_not_fitnessmaximizers/.

timtyler on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T08:44:21.590649+11:00

For "lousy" read "excellent".

You seem to be having difficulty with reading what I wrote. I never claimed that "what evolution wants" and "what an organism wants" referred to the same thing in the first place. You appear to be criticising a straw man of your own making.

tommccabe on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T08:53:17.293177+11:00

You are saying, "Evolution would want organisms to value X, therefore organisms really do value X". I pointed out that this is not valid logic, and gave a case where the logic breaks down. What is your reply? From your comment "For "lousy" read "excellent"" it seems to be faith in the ability of evolution, to which my reply is http://lesswrong.com/lw/ks/the_wonder_of_evolution/.

timtyler on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T09:03:32.727924+11:00

What I originally said was:

"most organisms value having kids over living for a long time."

I said MOST organisms - and referred to a specific example: kids vs lifespan.

Your representation of my position drops the qualifying word "most" and generalises it. That is not a legitimate operation in an argument.

Also, perhaps best to stop using quotation marks when attributing distorted versions of my views to me.

mattnewport on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T09:10:01.850099+11:00

You appeared to be generalizing in this case from 'most organisms' to 'most people' which doesn't seem valid to me.

tommccabe on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T09:09:15.887480+11:00

"I said MOST organisms - and referred to a specific example: kids vs lifespan."

You were obviously not excluding humans, since you then said immediately afterward:

"It appears to be fairly easy to trade kids for longer life - adopt a regime of dietary energy restriction. Very few people do that. I figure they mostly value kids over a long life."

If you had said "most organisms would prefer to die in a few years rather than be sterilized, but humans are different because we have more complex value systems" you might at least have a case, but you're very clearly trying to extent your argument from biology to humans (at least most humans) and it very clearly fails.

AllanCrossman on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-11T09:17:57.493982+11:00

"In biology 101 one learns that most organisms value having kids over living for a long time."

This is a bit more advanced than you imply; I learned about the trade-off between long life and reproductive fitness in a second year dedicated evolution class.

Cyan on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-11T08:43:51.284554+11:00

If vasectomy and tubal ligation performed before having kids had the side effect of physical immortality, would you expect these procedures to be more or less popular than they are currently?

Morendil on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T06:46:22.002276+11:00

How many children do you have?

Cyan on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T08:26:28.093474+11:00

timtyler has actually already refused to respond to a direct inquiry as to how he goes about fulfilling this biological imperative (too lazy to find the link). File it under things that make you go "hmm...".

timtyler on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T09:59:26.071020+11:00

Right, so: the ad hominen section. I hope you have fun probing into my personal life.

Meanwhile, perhaps try to remember to address the actual arguments while you are at it.

Morendil on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T17:44:46.129111+11:00

Your actual argument concerns how much money it takes to raise a kid. I claim expertise in this domain, having sired three. You have not established yours.

The price I'm quoted for cryonics is far less than I spend on "the conventional route to immortality" which, by the way, isn't that. What it is is creating persons.

ciphergoth on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-13T09:23:17.784403+11:00

I've written a short followup blog entry detailing the latest in my ongoing search.

LauraABJ on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T04:06:03.711335+11:00

There were some fantastic links here. Thankyou!

Does anyone here know what the break-down is among cryonics advocates between believing that A) in the future cryopreserved patients will be physically rejuvinated in their bodies and B) in the future cryopreserved patients will be brain-scanned and uploaded?

I think there is a reasonable probability of effective cryopreservation and rejuvination of a mammal (at least a mouse) in the next 25 years, but I think our ability to 'rejuvinate' will be largely dependent on the specific cryoincs technologies developed at that time, and that it is very unlikely cryonics methods developed before that time will be acceptable for rejuvination. Realize that once an effective cryopreservation method has been developed, socially there will be much more interest in perfecting it than there will be in going back to the old technology used to freeze past generations and figuring out how we can get that to work for their sake.

BenAlbahari on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-08T23:38:44.148751+11:00

I've added most of your sources to the TakeOnIt wiki debate:

"Is cryonics worthwhile?"
http://www.takeonit.com/question/318.aspx

The cryonics debate now has four sub debates:

Is information-theoretic death the most real interpretation of death?
Is cryonic restoration technically feasible in the future?
Is living forever or having a greatly extended lifespan desirable?
Is there life after death?

Am I missing any major sub-debate?

ciphergoth on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T00:03:23.336846+11:00

Wow, the Caplan and Stark arguments against aren't worth adding here, I don't think.

Edited to add: the question I'm most keen to hear arguments on is "does the cryonic freezing process cause information-theoretic death?"

BenAlbahari on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T01:45:01.024768+11:00

OK, per your suggestion I added the question: "Do the best currently available cryonic techniques cause information-theoretic death?". I can't actually find any expert who answers yes to this question. Any pointers?

P.S. I actually think the Caplan and Stark arguments reasonably reflect the mainstream objections to cryonics. However, if you know of better critics, please suggest some.

pdf23ds on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T21:29:01.199651+11:00

I forget who brought this up--maybe zero_call? jhrandom?--but I think a good question is "How quickly does brain information decay (e.g. due to autolysis) after the heart stops and before preservative measures are taken?" If the answer is "very quickly" then cryonics in non-terminal-illness cases becomes much less effective.

pdf23ds on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-09T21:48:12.749274+11:00

I came across a few cites supporting the "quite a bit" answer in the "Cold War" article at Alcor (linked elsewhere on this thread).

It is interesting and more than a little ironic to note that fifteen years prior to the time that Persidsky wrote the words above, a large and growing body of evidence was already present in the scientific literature to discredit the "suicide-bag concept" of lysosomal rupture resulting in destruction of cells shortly after so-called death. I cite below papers debunking this notion:

Trump, B.F., P.J. Goldblatt, and R.E. Stowell, "Studies of necrosis in vitro of mouse hepatic parenchymal cells; ultrastructural and cytochemical alterations of cytosomes, cytosegresomes, multivesicular bodies, and microbodies and their relation to the lysosome concept," Lab. Invest., 14, 1946 (1965).

Ericsson, J.L.E., P. Biberfeld, and R. Seljelid, "Electron microscopic and cytochemical studies of acid phosphates and aryl sulfatase during autolysis," Acta Patho Microbio Scand, 70, 215 (1967).

Trump, B.F. and R.E. Bulger, "Studies of cellular injury in isolated flounder tubules. IV. Electron microscopic observations of changes during the phase of altered hemostasis in tubules treated with cyanide," Lab Invest, 18, 731 (1968).

Eight years before Persidsky pronounced the situation hopeless due to lysosome rupture after death, an excellent and exhaustive paper appeared, entitled "Lysosome and phagosome stability in lethal cell injury" (Hawkins, H.K., et al., Amer. Jour Path., 68, 255 (1972)). The authors subjected human liver cells in tissue culture to lethal insults such as cyanide poisoning and then evaluated them for lysosomal rupture. They state: "In conclusion, the findings do not indicate that the suicide bag mechanism of lysosomal rupture prior to cell death was operative in the two systems studied. On the contrary, the lysosomes appeared to be relatively stable organelles which burst only in the post-mortem phase of cellular necrosis." And when does this "post-mortem phase of cellular necrosis" occur? Again, to quote from the Hawkins paper: "As late as four hours after potassium cyanide and iodoacetic acid poisoning, where irreversible structural changes were uniformly seen, it was clear that the great majority of lysosomes continued to retain the ferritin marker within a morphologically intact membrane . . ." To translate: even four hours after poisoning with drugs that mimic complete ischemia, the cells had stable lysosomes.

There's more at the link.

jsalvatier on A survey of anti-cryonics writing

2010-02-08T14:37:01.890104+11:00

I really appreciate this post. I am in the cryonics process, so it is nice to read an evaluation of the prospects. Even if I have made my decision for now, I could always cancel my life insurance.