Cryonics

[ciphergoth]

I'm considering signing up with the Cryonics Institute. Are you signed up? I'd be interested to hear your reasons why or why not. It does of course sound crazy, but when you press past that initial reaction to find out why it's crazy, I haven't heard a really satisfactory argument yet, and I'm interested to hear what people think. There are many reasons it might not work, but are there reasons to think it's really unlikely to work? How likely does recovery need to be for it to be worth it?

Comments

[zotz]

The consensus is, as far as I can tell, that microscopic cracks from the freeze-thaw process do fairly comprehensive destruction in spite of the measures taken. I've never heard anyone even speculate about how it might be possible to reverse it.

Also, the record of incorporated organisations for keeping their commitments over the sort of timescales we're talking is the opposite of good. My guess is that for one reason or another all of their bodies will thaw, intentionally or otherwise, over the next few decades.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

The consensus is, as far as I can tell, that microscopic cracks from the freeze-thaw process do fairly comprehensive destruction in spite of the measures taken.

Obviously freeze-thawing a kidney is much easier than doing the same with a brain, but a rabbit kidney has gone through this full cycle and the rabbit it was implanted in lived, so it's not obvious that these cracks are a show-stopper. Would these cracks result in information-theoretic death?

[zotz]

My guess? You're asking the wrong question.

Functionally, I'd expect the damage to be catastrophic.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Any more details you can provide would be very valuable in helping me decide. Most of the people who've really looked into this in detail are cryonics enthusiasts and disagree with your conclusion. If you know of anyone who's really given it a good look and came to the other conclusion I'd love to read more. Thanks!

[zotz]

I'll have a look about. The very vocal sources are from the various institutions, yes, but I'm not sure I'd say that they'd all looked into it in depth. Many of the accounts seem remarkable specious.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

I should clarify: I'm most optimistic about the prospects for scanning and whole-brain-emulation. It doesn't seem crazy to hope that such cracks could be repaired in software, if the information needed is preserved.

[zotz]

At the moment I don't see these ideas as any more than wish-fulfillment fantasies. As far as I can tell we don't know enough about the working of the brain on that fine a scale to know even how to think about what strategies to follow. To assume before we know the questions that we will find practically usable answers strikes me as bizarrely overoptimistic. Same goes for all of these life-extension schemes and institutes, of course.

There is in both cases a wonderful tendency to assume that because something doesn't seem impossible given infinite resources and understanding, it will become plausible in time for it to be useful. It's all very Sixties and very Californian. And not in a good way.

Talk of "information", outside of any identifiable context, serves mainly in this case to divert attention from problems rather than to help understanding. Information still exists in my computer's RAM after I stick a screwdriver through the processor, but is anyone going to seriously try to get it out for me? And that, I should point out, is a trivial problem next to the one you're asking about.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Information still exists in my computer's RAM after I stick a screwdriver through the processor, but is anyone going to seriously try to get it out for me?

Yes.

[zotz]

I think you've failed to grasp my point. My computer. This one, here. Not "is this in principle possible", or "has it been done in a research environment". If my computer keels over in five minutes, is this a practical procedure?

I think this gets close to my problem with it all. There's a massive lack of critical thinking about the development of technology here. What looked utopian forty years ago looks even more so now that we have a deeper understanding of the problems. Ideally it would look closer now then it did, not further away.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

I'd really like to understand this better. Ultimately, the state of the brain is physically stored, and we get better at reading the state of systems all the time; what is it that's so crazily speculative about thinking that we'd eventually succeed in reading the state of a frozen brain? It really seems to me that you would expect that you would be able to unless there was a reason to think you couldn't, no?

[zotz]

What isn't reasonable is to take practical actions based on things that don't currently seem forbidden.

Back when the cryogenics movement was getting going, we were going to have jetpacks and flying cars and Bussard ramjets and fusion power and a million other things that it seemed perfectly reasonable to assume that we'd get eventually.

In most of those cases it now looks like we're never going to have them. In some cases, we've found reasons, and not necessarily technical ones, why they aren't feasible. In others, they just don't look like worthwhile solutions to those problems any more. In some, they still look possible but now look like taking more effort, time and expense than they would justify. Some, on the other hand, have happened, some still look plausible, and many things have happened that weren't really predicted in detail.

Betting on those things would have turned out to be a very bad move then. My guess is that betting on that kind of project is still a bad move. Getting into specifics on that is missing the point - we know too little about this to have specifics we can really judge the significance of.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

We'll probably have fusion power eventually - JET broke new ground, ITER will break new ground and so will DEMO. We do have jetpacks and flying cars, they're just not very useful or commercially viable - in other words, "they just don't look like worthwhile solutions to those problems any more". So any given technology for bringing back the cryopreserved may fail through being eclipsed by a better one, but that doesn't lead us to the conclusion that the cryopreseved will never return.

[zotz]

"Will never return" is too high a standard to set. "Are very unlikely to return" I would subscribe to.

[ruis.livejournal.com]

Kidneys are an interesting case as people frequently have less than 20% of renal function left before they become symptomatic of renal impairment.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Yeah, kidneys are doing a much simpler job than brains, there are very many ways in which brains will be much harder.

[akicif.livejournal.com]

Indeed, yes. For one thing, kidneys are fairly physical devices: hook up the right fluid in- and out- connections and they'll pretty much "just work" under the control of the right chemicals in the bloodstream. The brain, not so much.

(BTW the rabbit that lived with the thawed out frozen kidney? Did it still have the other one?)

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

(BTW the rabbit that lived with the thawed out frozen kidney? Did it still have the other one?) What do you think?

[akicif.livejournal.com]

I'd expect that if it lived, it still had the other kidney.

However, tracking down the original research has been interesting: most citations bother linking to anything link to this conference programme (pdf), which - surprise, surprise - doesn't actually contain a reference to the transplant.

What I did find, though, is that similar work on rabbit liver tissue shows that it suffers fairly severe damage on freezing and thawing.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

So, given that you'd be surprised by it, if you were later convinced that the research was legit and that the rabbit lived with only one thawed kidney, you'd update on that Bayesian evidence?

[akicif.livejournal.com]

If you can point me at a publication in a peer-reviewed journal, of course I'd update.

But kidneys are a heck of a long way from liver tissue, and even further from brain/nervous tissue.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

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

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

[akicif.livejournal.com]

Cheers for those. Fahy's name then leads me to this one: Organogenesis 5:3, 167-175; July/August/September, 2009; © 2009 Landes Bioscience, which is essentially progress since the earlier work. There are still problems with getting the cryoprotectant fluid all the way into the kidney, though, and with the toxicity of the cryoprotectant itself.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Both CI and Alcor claim that their vitrification process now eliminates ice cracking altogether. If they're mistaken about this, please do write up their mistake in as much detail as you can - this is a straightforward, specific, testable claim and I can't find anyone contradicting it (or indeed any other such testable claims from cryonicists), so if it's wrong a lot of people are going to be interested.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Oops, this isn't quite right - they claim to completely eliminate ice crystals, but say there is still some cracking when the brain starts to reach the "glass transition temperature". http://www.benbest.com/cryonics/cooling.html

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Also this: http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/CryopreservationAndFracturing.html