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]

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.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

But is there no more detail available than this on why it's so unlikely? From what I've been able to find out, it's plausible to imagine that it might be as simple as serially slicing the brain open and scanning the surface with an SEM and various technologies to find out about the chemistry at the exposed surface, then doing a whole-brain-emulation on the result. Is there any part of that story that would be a big surprise given what we currently know about the brain?

I've no interest in throwing my money away on false hope. I really want to know.

[zotz]

It's not impossible that a more delicate and advanced version of that might be possible, but it's so far from what's currently possible as to be pie in the sky for all practical purposes, and there is no point getting involved in detailed discussions of crust compositions before we even understand the problem.

I don't think an answer is currently possible that would satisfy you. It's likely to be possible in principle, it might be possible in practice, but it's far enough in the future that I wouldn't trust any existing organisation (with the possible exception of the Catholic Church) to be around in a recognisable form to implement it for me.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Please tell me how I can find out more about why there is so much distance between where we are and where we would need to be!

[zotz]

As an example, using molecular dynamics to simulate organic macromolecules has only to date been used (with extreme difficulty) to model the smallest of protein molecules for periods of about a millisecond. Going by what I was told was the state of the art 20 years ago, I'd guess we're at least two centuries off (assuming Moore-style continuing advance, which is admittedly a major assumption) off being able to do this for a brain-size object even as a grand-challenge computing project.

And that, you will note, is simply assembling the computing power, and will at that point only allow one person to be simulated briefly and at an extremely slow pace. Whether it would be possible to construct such a model at that point depends on far less quantifiable factors. Whether microscopes will exist by then that can resolve not just locations of atoms but also their type and molecular associations, without disturbing those around and behind them enough to render the task futile, is as far as I can tell impossible to guess. Damaging your sample before you've found out all you want to know isn't usually a big problem in microscopy - you just try again with a different sample. In this case, not so easy.

I'm not really sure that approach would be any easier than repairing a dead brain, to be honest.

[djm4]

...it's plausible to imagine that it might be as simple as serially slicing the brain open and scanning the surface with an SEM and various technologies to find out about the chemistry at the exposed surface, then doing a whole-brain-emulation on the result.

Do you have a citation for that? It honestly looks more like Star Trek 'tech' than anything remotely plausible to me, and I'd be interested to know what advances in Scanning Electron Microscopy have happened without my knowledge or are envisaged that make that seem simple.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Lots of details here.

[djm4]

At first sight, I would describe that as a green ink PDF.

On Electron Microscopy, for example:

"How much of the functionally relevant information can be deduced from scanning in a particular modality (e.g. electron microscopy)? At present, electron microscopy appears to be the only scanning method that has the right resolution to reach synaptic connectivity, but it is limited in what chemical state information it can reveal. If it is possible to deduce the function of a neuron, synapse or other structure through image interpretation methods, then scanning would be far simpler than if this is not (in which case some form of hybrid method or entirely new scanning modality would have to be developed). This issue appears to form a potentially well‐defined research question that could be pursued. Answering it would require finding a suitable model system for which ground truth (the computational functionality of target system) was known, using the scanning modality to produce imagery and then testing out various forms of interpretation on the data."

You may translate that as 'it's plausible to imagine that EM can do this simply'. I would translate it as: 'EM's the only technology that could give us the resolution, and there is absolutely no way it can reveal the chemical state, nor is there any way of preparing a sample of organic tissue for EM that won't damage the very state you're trying to record. Charge build-up will be a real issue on a sample you don't make conductive (even with TEM), and making it conductive without masking the underlying detail you're searching for is probably impossible. It might be possible to overcome one of these limitations in the future, but nobody has a clue how to.'

Also, they're asking whether it's possible to deduce the 'function' of a neuron - even if that were possible, it's an altogether harder prospect to deduce the state of the neuron at the time of death, even if you know the function.

I find it difficult to imagine that that passage was written by anyone at all familiar with how EM works - it smacks of someone who thinks it's basically like optical microscopy with a bigger lens - and furthermore, in the twenty years since I first did any hands-on SEM and TEM, we've moved no closer to making brain scans with it a practical proposition (as far as I can tell from reading around Wikipedia).

[djm4]

(Not sure I'll have time to give a better answer than this one, though - I realise it's somewhat lacking - but it's just eaten me for almost an hour, and I can't let it continue to do so.)

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Not expecting you to follow up on this any time soon, but just for your interest I note that the sentence you quote is from the introductory part of the PDF. There's a much more detailed discussion of scanning technology starting on page 40.

[damerell.livejournal.com]

But now you aren't, in my view, restoring me to life. You've managed to simulate me - well, good luck to that chap in the future, I'd probably quite like him, I imagine _he'll_ be jolly glad to be alive (from his POV, "again") on less fragile hardware, but I'm just as dead.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Have you read Hofstadter and Dennett's "The Mind's I"? It's a collection of essays, short stories, and story extracts exploring issues around philosophy of mind. This is almost exactly the question it opens with - using a teleporter rather than WBE, but to the same end. If you haven't, I really recommend it, I think you might really enjoy it.

[djm4]

Yes, I'm not convinced that there wasn't a 'me' in that sense that died last year when I was under anesthetic. Of course, I have his memories, but then I would.

But then, that's true moment-to-moment. As you know, I tend to the view that 'consciousness' itself is an illusion in the sense that most people (including me) think of it, so I'm not sure that I'm saying anything stronger than that with my anasthetic example.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

I'm guessing you've already read how general anaesthesia played a key role in Greta Christina's deconversion?

[wight1984.livejournal.com]

Puts me in mind of John Hicks' Replica theory of the Resurrection, which explores a similar issue.