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

[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).

[juliet]

Mm, true. FWIW I do think that increases in medical science do raise all sorts of issues around sustainability, population growth, and cost.

Some versions I've seen of cryonics are looking at the living-for-ever thing, but in a virtual sense which doesn't use resources in the same way.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

That's the side that interests me most, and that I know most about.

[juliet]

(was going to be edit to earlier comment but you replied too fast :) ) I think I've been mentally expanding outwards from cryonics specifically to the we-can-live-forever brigade (I think some cryonics types are also part of this camp, but not necessarily all of them), who argue (roughly) that if medical sciences keeps extending lifespan, eventually we'll hit a point where you get one extra year of expected life per calendar year, and from that point on no one need die at all. That has obvious repercussions for the planet/world population as a whole.

Anyway! Slight tangent. The virtual thing doesn't (necessarily) hit that problem, although it may conceivably still hit a resources problem, depending on how much power you need to run a virtual-person & where we're at with computing & power technologies. (I have a vague recollection of reading that Moore's Law no longer applies; is that correct?). Quantum computing may be the way forward, but I know v little about that & about how resource-intensive it is.

You do still run into the physical environment (inc the human body environment) problem I mentioned above, though.