Comment author: V_V 05 September 2012 11:22:47PM 0 points [-]

cryonics or permanent death

False dichotomy: Cryonics may fail (actually, will probably fail) to revive you. Or it may succed, and then you die anyway.

Robin Hanson uses an estimate of 5% here

It seems a quite optimistic estimate. Successful revival depends conjunctively on a large number of events, many of which are highly speculative (no damage from preservation, super duper nanotech) or outright implausible (cryo orgs not succumbing to organizational failure).

Comment author: Eudoxia 06 September 2012 12:22:27AM *  1 point [-]

super duper nanotech

MNT isn't strictly necessary. Anabolocytes, and other speculative genetically engineered cells. They are a little more likely than Freitas' nanomedicine because, well, cells exist; which is not an argument that works for MNT.

Comment author: TimS 06 September 2012 12:10:24AM 0 points [-]

More than likely, if you were to rewarm some of the tissues from a cryonics patient frozen today, some of the original cells would still be alive and viable.

Cite please?

Comment author: Eudoxia 06 September 2012 12:19:16AM *  4 points [-]

Physical and biological aspects of renal vitrification.

Cryopreservation of organs by vitrification: perspectives and recent advances (PDF).

EDIT: I should clarify, the kidney was cooled with liquid nitrogen vapor and the lowest temperature it was exposed to was still fifty degrees above that of Liquid Nitrogen. This is important because LN2 temperature is far below the vitrification point of M22, and cooling even a little below T_g causes fracturing.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 4
Comment author: Bakkot 30 August 2012 12:59:03AM 2 points [-]

the history of cryonics is a sordid tale full of expensive boondoggles, fraud, ethical nightmares and positively macabre events

In fairness, so is the history of medicine up until very recently.

Comment author: Eudoxia 30 August 2012 01:17:06AM *  2 points [-]

To the best of my knowledge, doctors don't experiment on patients without their consent, drill burr holes without circulation, or generally just do anything they want without fear of prosecution (Since cryonics is considered a form of interment, whether the person was completely turned into a glass sculpture or straight-frozen like so many people were does not affect the organizations). Doctors may forget rectal plugs or leave patients if funds are unavailable, though.

What do you define as 'very recently'?

Comment author: [deleted] 29 August 2012 09:52:46PM 2 points [-]

I don't think any of the above organizations would go as far as talking about a non-existent facility in the present tense while the patients lay on the floor, rotting.

That's a mighty low bar to clear. Thank goodness CI and Alcor have standards.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 4
Comment author: Eudoxia 29 August 2012 09:57:02PM 0 points [-]

Thank goodness CI and Alcor have standards.

Well, I have this theory that CI stores its neuropatients in the dewar with the dead cats in it.

Comment author: loup-vaillant 28 August 2012 09:59:55AM 3 points [-]

Good. Is this just an intuition, or can you communicate more precise reasons? A list of red flags could be useful (whether they are present or not).

Comment author: Eudoxia 28 August 2012 06:16:56PM 11 points [-]

Alcor: Improperly trained personnel, unkempt and ill-equipped facilities.

[...] Saul Kent invited me over to his home in Woodcrest, California to view videotapes of two Alcor cases which troubled him – but he couldn’t quite put his finger on why this was so.[...] Patients were being stabilized at a nearby hospice, transported to Alcor (~20 min away) and then CPS was discontinued, the patients were placed on the OR table and, without any ice on their heads, they were allowed to sit there at temperatures a little below normal body temperature for 1 to 1.5 hours, while burr holes were drilled, [...] smoke could be seen coming from the burr wound! Since the patient had no circulation to provide blood to carry away the enormous heat generated by the action of the burr on the bone, the temperature of the underlying bone (and brain) must have been high enough to literally cook an egg. In one case, a patient’s head was removed in the field and, because they had failed to use a rectal plug, the patient had defecated in the PIB. The result was that feces had contaminated the neck wound, and Alcor personnel were seen pouring saline over the stump of the neck whilst holding the patient’s severed head over a bucket trying to wash the fecal matter off the stump. These are just a few of the grotesque problems I observed.[...] The operating room was unkempt. The floors were scuffed, stained, dirty, and had obviously not been waxed in a long time. [...] I wouldn’t consider medical treatment in a facility with this appearance – nor for that matter would I like to dine in a restaurant with a kitchen in such a state.

Source

Cryonics Institute: Patient experimentation. No need to say anything else.

It was a snotty, and probably inappropriate remark. Basically I was commenting on the operational paradigm at CI, which is pretty much “ritual.” You sign up, you get frozen and it’s pretty much kumbaya, no matter how badly things go. And they go pretty badly. Go to: http://cryonics.org/refs.html#cases and start reading the case reports posted there. That’s pretty much my working definition of horrible. It seems apparent to me that “just getting frozen” is now all that is necessary for a ticket to tomorrow, and that anything else that is done is “just gravy,” and probably unnecessary to a happy outcome. ...Even in cases that CI perfuses, things go horribly wrong – often – and usually for to me bizarre and unfathomable (and careless) reasons. My dear friend and mentor Curtis Henderson was little more than straight frozen because CI President Ben Best had this idea that adding polyethylene glycol to the CPA solution would inhibit edema. Now the thing is, Ben had been told by his own researchers that PEG was incompatible with DMSO containing solutions, and resulted in gel formation. Nevertheless, he decided he would try this out on Curtis Henderson. He did NOT do any bench experiments, or do test mixes of solutions, let alone any animal studies to validate that this approach would in fact help reduce edema (it doesn’t). Instead, he prepared a batch of this untested mixture, and AFTER it gelled, he tried to perfuse Curtis with it. See my introduction to Thus Spake Curtis Henderson on this blog for how this affected me psychologically and emotionally. Needless to say, as soon as he tried to perfuse this goop, perfusion came to a screeching halt. They have pumped air into patient’s circulatory systems… I could go on and on, but all you need to do is really look at those patient case reports and think about everything that is going on in those cases critically.

Source

Trans Time:

The principal criticism against Trans Time was their for-profit model, in which, if funding ran out, the patients would be thawed and conventionally interred (This is what would've happened to Janice Foote and the Mills couple), unlike other organizations with a pay-once model in which the storage costs for the patients are covered for perpetuity.

I should add, Ray Mills was actually removed from suspension and placed in a chest full of dry ice.

You can also consider the now-defunct Cryonics Society of California, though I don't think any of the above organizations would go as far as talking about a non-existent facility in the present tense while the patients lay on the floor, rotting.

Comment author: Xachariah 27 August 2012 05:26:37AM 5 points [-]

Question: Why don't people talk about Ems / Uploads as just as disastrous as uncontrolled AGI? Has there been work done or discussion about the friendliness of Ems / Uploads?

Details: Robin Hanson seems to describe the Em age like a new industrial revolution. Eliezer seems to, well, he seems wary of them but doesn't seem to treat them like an existential threat. Though Nick Bostrom sees them as an existential threat. A lot of people on Lesswrong seem to talk of it as the next great journey for humanity, and not just a different name for uFAI. For my part, I can't imagine uploads ending up good. I literally can't imagine it. Every scenario I've tried to imagine ends up with a bad end.

As soon as the first upload is successful then patient zero will realize he's got unimaginable (brain)power, will start talking in ALL CAPS, and go FOOM on the world, bad end. For the sake of argument, lets say we get lucky and first upload is incredibly nice, and just wants to help people. Eventually the second, or the third, or the twenty fifth upload decides to FOOM over everybody. It's still bad end. We need to have some way to restrain Ems from FOOM-ing, and we need to figure it out before we start uploading. Okay, lets pretend we could even invent a restraint that works against a determined transhiman who is unimaginably more intelligent than us...

Maybe we'll get as far as, say, Hanson's Em society. Ems make copies of themselves tailored to situations to complete work. Some of these copies will choose to / be able to replicate more than others; these copies will inherit this propensity to replicate; eventually, processor-time / RAM-time / hard-disk space will become scarce and things won't be able to copy as well and will have to fight to not have their processes terminated. Welp... that sounds like the 3 ingredients required to invoke the evolution fairy. Except instead of it being the Darwinian evolution we're used to, this new breed will employ a terrifying mix of uFIA self-modification and Lamarckian super-evolution. Bad end. Okay, but lets say we find some way to stop THAT...

What about other threats? Ems can still talk to one another and convince one another of things. How do we know they won't all be hijacked by meme-viruses, and transformed Agent Smith style? That's a bad end. Or hell, how do we know they won't be hijacked by virus-viruses? Bad end there too. Or one of the trillions of Ems could build a uFAI and it goes FOOM into a Bad End. Or... The potential for Bad Ends is enormous and you only need one for the end of humanity.

It's not like flesh-based humans can monitor the system. Once ems are in the 1,000,000x era, they'll be effectively decoupled from humanity. A revolution could start at 10pm after the evening shift goes home, and by the time the morning shift gets in, it's been 1,000 years in Em subjective time. Hell, in the time it takes to swing an axe and cut the network/power cable, they've had about a month to manage their migration and dissemination to every electronic device in the world. Any regulation has to be built inside the Em system and, as mentioned before, it has to be built before we make the first successful upload.

Maybe we can build an invincible regulator or regulation institution to control it all. But we can't let it self-replicate or we'll be right back at the evolution problem again. And we can't let it be modified by the outside world or it'll be the hijacking problem again. And we can't let it self-modify, or it'll evolve in ways we can't predict (and we've already established that it'll be outside of everything else's control). So now we have an invulnerable regulator/regulation system that needs to control a world of trillions. And once our Ems start living in 1,000,000x space, it needs to keep order for literally millions of years without ever making a mistake once. So we need to design a system perfect enough to never make a single error while handling trillions of agents for millions of years?

That strikes me as a problem that's just as hard as FAI. There seems like no way to solve it that doesn't involve a friendly AGI controlling the upload world.

Can anyone explain to me why Ems are looked at as a competing technology to FAI instead an existential risk with probability of 1.0?

Comment author: Eudoxia 28 August 2012 02:16:58AM 0 points [-]

As soon as the first upload is successful then patient zero will realize he's got unimaginable (brain)power, will start talking in ALL CAPS, and go FOOM on the world, bad end.

Now, I have to admit I'm not too familiar with the local discourse re:uploading, but if a functional upload requires emulation down to individual ion channels (PSICS-level) and the chemical environment, I find it hard to believe we'll have the computer power to do that, a million times faster, and in a volume of space small enough that we don't have to put it under a constant waterfall of liquid Helium.

I don't expect femtotechnology or rod logic any time soon, the former may not even be possible at all and the latter is based on some dubious math from Nanosystems; so where does that leave us in terms of computing power? (Assuming, of course, that Clarke's law is a wish-fulfilling fantasy). I understand the reach of Bremermann's Limit, but it may not be possible to reach it, or there may be areas in between zero and the Limit that are unreachable for lack of a physical substrate for them.

Comment author: David_Gerard 22 August 2012 02:39:40PM *  3 points [-]

It's possible that, if the feasibility just isn't there yet no matter the funding, it'll turn out like nanotechnology - funding for molecule-sized robots that gets spent on chemistry instead. (I wonder what the "instead" would be in this case.)

Comment author: Eudoxia 22 August 2012 03:06:03PM 9 points [-]

Narrow AI and machine learning?

Comment author: Eudoxia 19 August 2012 09:35:31PM *  1 point [-]

Alternatively, people could loan her the money until she is revived and can pay back, though I'm not sure if that's entirely legal.

Comment author: Alicorn 19 August 2012 07:18:36AM 9 points [-]

The websites for both are poorly designed and the only thing I could figure out was that maybe under some circumstances CI was cheaper. Not being able to distinguish between relevant features, and feeling it fairly urgent that I stop dithering and start signing up, I blatantly substituted Eliezer's judgment for my own and went with the one he picked.

Comment author: Eudoxia 19 August 2012 08:51:19PM 6 points [-]

Eliezer's judgement was that he had to get signed up to convince people to do the same. And he didn't have much money.

Comment author: ScottMessick 19 August 2012 02:45:16AM 2 points [-]

What about the brain damage her tumor is causing?

This seems important and I'm a little surprised no one's asked. How will her brain damage impact her chances of revival? (From the blog linked in the reddit post, it sounds like she is already experiencing symptoms.) Obviously she is quite mentally competent right now, but what about when she is declared legally dead? I am far from an expert and simply would like to hear some authoritative commentary on this. I am interested in donating but only if there's a reasonable chance brain damage won't make it superfluous.

Comment author: Eudoxia 19 August 2012 03:14:33AM *  3 points [-]

What about the brain damage her tumor is causing?

Jim Glennie (A-1367) had a glioblastoma multiforme, and cryoprotective perfusion achieved the best Glycerol concentration at the time (6.02M glycerol, 1992). A-2091 (name withheld) also had a glioblastoma and reportedly "target cryoprotectant concentration was reached in the brain".

Thomas Donaldson (A-1097) had an astrocytoma (I guess Astrocytes are a kind of glial cell, but I doubt the comparison can be extended further) and his cryopreservation was very good [p.16].

I am far from an expert and simply would like to hear some authoritative commentary on this

Disclaimer: I am not medically trained.

EDIT: I'm not sure if you're referring to brain damage affecting cryoprotection or brain damage affecting her mental state and making her opt out.

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