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]

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.