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

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

And it would be a huge step forward if people were discussing the stuff that is unquestionably a verifiable prediction, such as their assertion that their vitrification processes eliminate ice cracking in the brain, or any other of the zillion ordinary testable assertions about medicine, the brain or their process that cryonics advocates make all the time to argue in favour of the plausibility of the whole thing.

[djm4]

Can you unpick that a bit?

I don't dispute any of the testable science - some of it may be wrong, I'm not qualified to say, and I would expect to find some of it debunked if it were significantly wrong. But the testable science doesn't give a plausible complete cryonics system. So, to me, it doesn't make the 'whole thing' plausible. The 'whole thing' has problems that we don't know how to solve and which may indeed be unsolvable. The plausibility of solutions to those isn't, to me, linked to the plausibility of assertions which are generally part of mainstream science. I'm unsure why you feel that it is.

To me, it feels a bit like saying that teleportation is plausible because the science of data transmission is well understood. Granted, data transmission is probably going to need to be well understood if we're going to create a working teleporter, but solving data transmission doesn't make it any more likely that we'll solve the other problems posed by teleportation; the ones where we don't even know where to start. (I think cryonics is considerably more plausible than teleportation, for the record, it was just the simplest analogy I could think of.)