Anti-cryonics links

[ciphergoth]

I may not reply to everything in that 159-comment thread but thanks to everyone who participated. I hope people don't mind if I carry on asking for your help in thinking about this. I might post articles on specific areas people raised, but first I thought to ask this: my Google-fu may be failing me. I'd appreciate any links anyone can find to good articles arguing against signing up for cryonics, or pointing out flaws in arguments made for cryosuspension. I don't mean South Park, thanks :-) I'm looking for something that really intends to be persuasive.

thanks again!

Update: here's some I've found

• Ebonmuse, On Cryonics
• Ebonmuse, Who Wants to Live Forever?
• Why we'll never be downloaded
• Why Minds Are Not Like Computers - actually there's quite a lot of scholarly writing arguing that the idea of simulating a brain on a computer is not merely impractical but impossible in principle.
• Michael Shermer on cryonics
• Skeptic's Dictionary on cryonics
• Cryonics–A futile desire for everlasting life
• Quackwatch - Is Cryonics Feasable?
• Ben Best - Debates about Cryonics with Skeptics (Best is President/CEO of the Cryonics Institute, but this is a snapshot of a debate on the James Randi forums, with a link to the original forum debate)
• Frozen Stiffs, Ruth Holland, BMJ 1981

If you find any of these articles at all convincing, let me know and I'll point out the problems with them. Update: while I am definitely interested in continuing to read your arguments, I'm really really keen to know about anyone anywhere on the Internet who seems well-informed on the subject and writes arguing against it. Such people seem to be strikingly few and far between, especially on the specific question of the plausibility of recovery. There's a hypothesis here on why that might be, but I'm not sure it's enough to wholly account for it.

Comments

[uberredfraggle.livejournal.com]

I don't know if this is of any use to you but this is about part cryo suspension and how they had to use other methods to prevent brain damage.

http://sciencelinks.jp/j-east/article/200011/000020001100A0260262.php

Still googling for other stuff. :)

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

I'm not an expert in these fields at all, which is why I'm glad people are discussing this with me. I'm afraid I don't see the implications for cryonics, could you spell it out for me?

[uberredfraggle.livejournal.com]

One of my main thoughts is the risk of brain damage. If this patient was incredibly high risk brain damage during this operation surely a complete body suspended long term would be at even higher risk?

I know less than you so I'm just poking around.

Just watching a youtube video on the pros and cons to see if there is anything useful in there.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MkCBhEwJNw

[ajva.livejournal.com]

I must confess I have been rather enjoying today the thought of coming to, much like from an epileptic fit, spaced and confused, trying to grasp memories that seem to slip too easily from my grasp, to see the friendly, near-euphoric face of ciphergoth looking over me, and hearing:

"Anne! Welcome to 2563! You'll never guess how quantum mechanics worked out! That's old hat these days!"

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

I really would be absolutely unspeakably euphoric to see you.

[ajva.livejournal.com]

Actually, I'd freeze myself for 500 years just to get a chance at a full explanation of quantum entanglement. :o) I'm sure they'll have worked it out by then.

[ajva.livejournal.com]

"Unfortunately the first time anchor wasn't put down until 2115, but I already met Holly Draycott's great-granddaughter, and she's the spit of K, and apparently was a hugely successful author back in the day. Given you're an Early Adopter, we've been given a special permit to go back, if you like - just the once - it's bloody expensive. Honestly, it's almost like the 21st century back in the 22nd. Almost like home..."

I mean, the possibilities are endless, eh? ;o)

[damerell.livejournal.com]

Worse if some seemingly trivial matter from the 20th century has got out of proportion. "Oh wise one from the past, is it boots then corset, or corset then boots? Millions have died in the great Corset War. And what is a corset, anyway?"

[damerell.livejournal.com]

Argh, not the Pascal's Wager analogy, that's obviously bogus. The trouble with Pascal's Wager is that you _don't_ in fact know that the possible outcomes are oblivion or eternal bliss. But you can speculate quite sensibly about what a future that might revive corpsicles might be like - you might be wrong, but you certainly have _some_ information.

I think a much more cognent objection is the one that there are probably better ways to extend your life with $30,000.

[akicif.livejournal.com]

Other way round: by its very premises Pascal's Wager is such that the only outcomes are Heaven, Hell or oblivion.

But by speculating about what life as a revived corpsicle would be like one falls into the Underpants Gnome fallacy and palms the card with the route between here and there.

You are quite right to say there are more productive ways to spend the money.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_lj_sucks_/]

I recommend listening to This American Life episode 354, Mistakes Were Made (http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1291).

Also, Penn and Teller's "Bullshit", the episode on cryonics is worth watching.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

There's lots of interesting stuff online about the Robert Nelson fuckup.

What's the angle of the Penn and Teller programme? Do they go into medical detail, or just correctly observe that there are many aspects to the revival problem that we don't yet have a solution to?

[elsmi.livejournal.com]

That "Why we'll never be downloaded" article is curious. "I want to give two reasons that are totally unlike Searle's Chinese Room argument, because that argument sucks. Argument 1: Searle!"

[andrewducker]

That last one says some odd things:
"The implicit idea of the Turing Test is that the mind is a program and a program can be described purely in terms of its input-output behavior."
strikes me as particularly barking.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

I know, but it's the best I can find. Given that pretty much everyone is convinced that it's obviously crazy, it's odd that there isn't a P Z Myers out there, meticulously detailing all the false claims and such of the cryonics world.

[juliet]

Some of your comments (& that last link above) implied that your thought is more about "keeping brain on ice until technology exists such that it can be scanned & reimplemented" rather than "keep body on ice until technology exists to fix whatever killed me".

That last link makes reference to the tangled causational web of brain/mind, but doesn't explicitly talk about the influence of everything else that goes on in your body. IIRC there's evidence that at least some of our thoughts are post-justifications of emotional processes that are already going on when we start creating the thought to justify them, and emotions are strongly linked to hormones & assorted brain-chemicals. If that's the case, then to replicate "you" you'd need also to replicate a fair amount of physical infrastructure to go along with that. Obviously, scanning hormonal/chemical state as a snapshot at time of death isn't going to be wildly useful; I have no idea to what extent it's feasible to suggest that one would be able to scan all the relevant physical bits & reconstruct how your own chemical makeup worked the rest of the time.

I think my own concern with the idea more generally (apart from the practical issues of "how many people can we support in the world anyway, if some of 'em stop dying") is what djm4 says about Wonderfluonium. I am unconvinced by the "but we will get unimaginably better at this in the future!" argument. (Possibly especially so given that in my more depressive moments I'm inclined to suspect that as a world, our ability to pursue technical innovation is likely to drop over the next 50-100 years, not to increase.)

Last time I was looking into such things, which admittedly is a while back now, I found the calorie-reduction thing a far more plausible option for life extension. Probably not going to get you the sort of timespan you're after, though; it's more aimed at hanging on in there until anti-aging science gets better.

[lovelybug.livejournal.com]

That's interesting about the hormonal/chemical stuff, it relates to what I've been trying to understand about how a computer could replicate a person, not just a mass of neurons.

[lizw.livejournal.com]

how many people can we support in the world anyway, if some of 'em stop dying

But at this stage that seems to be primarily a question for the people developing cures for cancer and other fatal diseases, rather than for the people developing cryonics. Cryonics, if it works, won't enable people to avoid death altogether, it just enables what you might call delayed access to a cure which, once invented, will presumably be offered to all cancer patients whose health systems can afford it, not just the people revived from cryonic storage. The former will almost certainly hugely outweigh the latter. It's going to take an awful lot of people signing up for cryonics before the population effect of people being revived and cured is going to outweigh the population effect of better medical care before conventional death (which we're already seeing).

[adjectivemarcus.livejournal.com]

My problem with it runs thus:

There's three technologies, and three sets of payments.

There's freezing you when you nearly-die (lump sum), storing you (regular costs), and reviving you (lump sum and an end to the regular costs).

The tech to freeze and store you is currently rudimentary (at least compared to how the frezzing and storing technology will look when the reviving technology is cracked). Consequently it's all quite expensive.

The money you give, is in part invested to pay for your storage.

As time goes on, the freezing and storing will get cheaper. So more people will take them up. But they'll have paid less, because as the cost of freezin and storing gets cheaper, so the projected cost of an undiscovered tech will get cheaper too.

Even if it does become possible to revive you, and society is all much the same, etc. is it in the company's interests, financially, to stop storing you?

[barakta]

Random thought:
I wonder what happens if you die of something where your body/brain deteriorates - e.g cancer cos it wouldn't be legal to kill you off sooner (Switzerland notwithstanding) but would theoretically be much harder to preserve you cos your body (and brain?) may have wasted away a lot so there's additional barriers to being able to freeze you.

[ergotia.livejournal.com]

Can you point me to anyone on the Internet who seems well informed on the subject and writes arguing for it?

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

My problem is that when I google "cryonics" nearly all the hits are from people arguing in favour, and the top-ranked ones are full of details that *seem* plausible to the non-expert. Of course just because they seem plausible doesn't mean they are - lots of arguments that global warming isn't real seem plausible if you don't know the counterarguments. But unlike with AGW (or with many other things that I'm a skeptic about) there doesn't seem to be even one blog or even one article by someone turning their biological/medical expertise on explaining why all this plausible-seeming stuff isn't really plausible. If that blog or article is out there, I'd really like to find it and read it.

[palmer1984.livejournal.com]

As I said yesterday, the fact that you take it seriously makes it seem less mad to me. And it would be unspeakably awesome if it did work :).

[steer.livejournal.com]

I think the problem is that the root questions are unanswerable in current science because we don't know the answer to any of the hard questions about consciousness. The important question (for me) is can my consciousness be revived (by whatever means) from information in my "dead" brain. Whether the technology is some sort of "jump start" on the same tissue or scanning and complete software emulation is an interesting side issue but it is a side issue.

The thing is that for the moment we don't know really any of the important answers about consciousness. We don't know if it can be emulated. We don't know what properties of the brain or its process cause consciousness to arise.

In this sense the sceptics and the believers in cryogenics are somewhat in the position of a specialist in AI (in the strong Turing test passing sense) or a medieval expert in the nature of dragons (I can't remember who first compared AI experts with dragon experts, possibly Dennett). We can't yet answer questions about the possibility because the answers are not yet known because we simply don't know what information/algorithm/biological process is necessary for consciousness. Indeed we don't even know if it is necessary that there is a biological process or if simply the execution of a certain algorithm (whether in wetware or "the book of Einstein's Brain") is sufficient.

Any guesses about whether it would be "the same" consciousness or a different one are pretty much guesses. We can be pretty clear that if we put our brain in a liquidiser or in the ground to rot or in a furnace then it is going to be harder to recover such information.

I'd be sceptical of anyone making hard claims about where the cut-off for "any possible future technology" reconstructing your consciousness comes in either pro or anti. We just don't know right now.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

As you know, I'm definitely a Dennett sort of guy when it comes to the "hard problem of consciousness", and so I'm not really worried about this one. You might be interested in this essay, though, which discusses it in more detail:

http://www.brainpreservation.org/web_documents/killed_by_bad_philosophy.pdf