Discussion article for the meetup : Seattle Secular Solstice

Discussion article for the meetup : Seattle Secular Solstice

BuzzFeed just posted a fairly comprehensive and positive article on cryonics; Hacker News discussion here. It does a good job of raising and addressing the common objections, and goes into a lot of detail for a general-audience article. Excerpt:

One thing that kept tripping me up about the feasibility of cryonics is that it hinges on the notion that we can just put the brain to sleep, like a laptop, then turn it back on and have the screen appear exactly the way we left it. I can get behind the idea that we could freeze a collection of tissue and organs, and bring them back someday (it’s possible on small organisms already), but the idea that Josh Dean, guy who detests beets and goes irrationally bananas about sporting events, would just magically still be there — after however many years — seemed impossible. Where would that person (or soul or collection of electrons or whatever) go in the intervening years/decades?
This scenario — of the brain turning back on once a person warms up — happens all the time, Aubrey de Grey told me. “That’s exactly what occurs when someone falls through ice in a frozen lake and is unconscious for a half-hour.” When the body temperature drops below 18 degrees Celsius, he said, electrical activity stops completely. There are many cases of people falling into frigid water, lapsing into unconsciousness, and being reawakened when warmed up. And if that’s true for two hours, it should in theory also be true for two years (or 200) — if we can just find a way to reach the temperatures needed to forestall decay, without causing damage. The crux, de Grey said, is determining whether or not cryonics preserves the molecular structure of the brain without inflicting irreparable damage to the data that makes us who we are.

Remember the Brain Preservation Foundation? This is Kenneth Heyworth's project to test methods of brain preservation, with a large rewards going to (1) the first group to preserve a mouse brain, and (2) the first group to preserve a large mammalian brain. Two teams, attempting preservation via cryonics and plastination respectively, are ready to have their mouse brain preservations evaluated. But the BPF lacks the funds to carry out the tests (5nm 3D scans of a randomly selected cubic millimeter to verify high-fidelity preservation).

Solicitations for donations have come from both Robin Hanson and Eliezer Yudkowsky, but the response has been...underwhelming thus far.

The BPF general fund has 9 donors listed; The Evaluation Fund has 5, one of whom is BPF's President. This does not include large donations from the anonymous $100k prize backer, Robin Hanson, John Smart, Daniel Crevier, and (again) Kenneth Hayworth. This puts an upper limit on the number of people in the world willing to donate to find out if there exists a method of reliably preserving brains indefinitely at...18 people.

I know that there are more than 17 other people like me in the world, who really want to see the results of these attempts. A world in which brains can be cheaply preserved indefinitely is a world I want to live in - and it would just be sad if this project fizzled because it lacked the funds to verify the already-existing results.

Donate here.