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

[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

[steer.livejournal.com]

I am a huge fan or Dennett and mainly side with him on such issues but that siding with is an issue of belief/faith rather than scientific certainty. I'm not sure what you mean by "not really worried about this one" since it seems like it could not be more germaine to the issue of whether cryogenics can work.

The question here is surely "what information do we need to revive my consciousness?" The answer can only realistically be "we currently have no way of knowing." I am certainly willing to believe that my consciousness would arise from the execution of any of a class of sufficiently similar algorithms in any medium. However, this is a belief not a theorem and certainly not "science".

At one extreme it is possible that in a "singularity" kind of way, any currently existing consciousness could be reconstructed in the future by backtracking its effect on the universe at some distant future point (given unimaginable computing power to do so and very precise large scale measurements). At the other extreme it is possible that your precise consciousness relies on subtle quantum effects which would be lost unrecoverably only moments after "death" and not captured by any freezing process. The cryogenic claim (that a frozen brain could be restored to a working consciousness) lies between these extremes -- we have no current scientific way of knowing.

The "killed by bad philosophy" piece is interesting (though I only skimmed it). However, it proceeds from a belief that we can only currently consider as not supported by science -- that the procedure will work (ignoring all the stuff about souls which is something of a distraction to get the reader on side by making the counter-argument appear ridiculous) -- whereas, in fact, we currently have no way of knowing.

Incidentally, all of Hofstatder and Dennett's "The Mind's I" seems to be online (probably illegally). If you've not read it you might enjoy chap 13 (seems to be bad OCR scan).

http://themindi.blogspot.com/2007/02/chapter-13-where-am-i.html

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Cryonics, not cryogenics. Cryogenics is a respectable scientific field and they so hate association with cryonics that they wrote anti-cryonics into their by-laws in 1982.

I mean that I'm very confident that mental events supervene onto physical events, and therefore whatever it is that causes us to report consciousness will be retained by any sufficiently accurate simulation. I'm worried not about the philosophical problem of whether any simulation could in principle do the job, but the practical problem of whether you can build such a simulation given only a corpsicle.

"The Mind's I" was a huge influence on me as a boy and what started me off as a Dennett fan. I can't remember who I lent my copy to now, so thanks for the pointer!

[steer.livejournal.com]

Ooops sorry for the wrong term.

I'm very confident that mental events supervene onto physical events, and therefore whatever it is that causes us to report consciousness will be retained by any sufficiently accurate simulation

Yes -- but that's confidence not science. That's what I'm talking about when I say there's a good reason there's no expert on this. You can be as confident as you like but then it could well be that some extra particle, effect or physical property which cannot be simulated appears.

Incidentally, what gives you such confidence? It's a weird thing to be quite so confident about. I'm completely open minded either way. Do you take the real hardline "Book of einstein's brain" approach?

Either way, the problems are highly interrelated -- because we don't know at all (excluding the "very confident") what properties of a brain are necessary for consciousness we certainly cannot answer questions about how consciousness can be reconstructed.

[steer.livejournal.com]

Incidentally, don't get me wrong, I'm not mocking the belief that consciousness could be simulated. It's both comforting and plausible but it still remains exactly that, a belief. One can argue all day quite enjoyably about Dennett's "Consciousness ignored" approach versus Penrose's "ooh, it's all weird spooky quantum things which we don't know what they are but ooooooh" versus "it's your eternal soul stupid" -- but it's currently in the realms of philosophic debate not science.