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

[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.

[damerell.livejournal.com]

The point is that those premises are fatuous. Either a very specific god exists or no god at all? Says who?

I don't think, conversely, it's at all unreasonable to speculate about what future societies with a high level of medical technology would be like. In particular, as I mentioned in t'other post, it's a somewhat contrived (not impossible, but unlikely) scenario where death isn't still an option if you don't like it.

[emarkienna.livejournal.com]

I don't think the point for everyone is simply that they want to go to the future in the hopes that life is much better (although that would be a nice added bonus), but to live for longer, whatever things may be like.

It's possible that an authoritarian world or nuclear holocaust could happen in our lifetimes, but I'd still rather stay alive to see, and take my chances, rather than killing myself now just in case.

I think the only grounds Pascal's Wager is comparable if is someone was making the argument of "I don't care how unlikely it is; as long as the chance is non-zero, it's worth making the bet", because one could just as well spend the money on voodoo spells. But if one believes cryonics has a better chance of success, that doesn't apply. We have no way of knowing if one kind of God is more likely than another kind of God, but I think we can make better guesses about whether something like this might have a chance of working.