ciphergoth | Anti-cryonics links

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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

ciphergoth.livejournal.com

Cryonics organisations make lots of claims about why cryonics might be a good bet (one example: Scientific Justification of Cryonics Practice, Ben Best pdf) which sound impressive to the non-expert. If these claims are rubbish, it's a shame no-one's spending any time debunking them.

From:

djm4

If these claims are rubbish, it's a shame no-one's spending any time debunking them.

Well...

If they're rubbish, a few relatively rich people get ripped off. After they're dead. I think Ben Goldacre has bigger fish to fry. What's more, you're telling people with a very strong fear of death that they can't avoid death in the way they hope they can. You're probably not going to get any thanks for that.

As I keep saying, it's hard to debunk something that says 'in the future, this technology may exist'. Which, I'm afraid, is what the really tricky bits in everything you've linked to, and all their references that I can read, come down to. The bits that quote actual science often debunk themselves (as I pointed out yesterday in my reply about scanning techniques), but often hide it by saying 'well, of course, this won't work, but if we add in a feature of this incompatible technology (which we can't do, on account of its being incompatible), it might.' And so a third, as yet uninvented, technology with the features of both is posited, but with no indication of how to make such a chimera. Might be possible. Might not. No way to debunk it; so you might as well believe it if you want to, and trying to debunk it would be a waste of time.

Note, also, that the key bit in that PDF reads:

"If there are plausible models for the repair and reanimation of cryopreserved cryonics subjects64,65 it seems reasonable to rely upon them when deciding upon human cryopreservation as a long-term treatment which may or may not succeed."

That's a big 'If'. Firstly, the two papers it links to - here and here - do not, to my mind, offer anything approaching a plausible model for the repair and reanimation of cryopreserved subjects. They talk in broad, speculative terms about Nanotechnology; even in the 2005 paper, the existing technology can't do anything approaching what would be needed, and the future technology is spoken of in 'this might be possible at some point' terms. There's nothing concrete enough to either agree with or debunk. And note that there's a 1981 paper, a 2005 paper, and both refer to an aspirational lecture Feynmann gave in 1959. This technology is maturing slowly, rather than racing ahead with revolutionary discoveries every month.

From:

drdoug.livejournal.com

If they're rubbish, a few relatively rich people get ripped off. After they're dead.

Yes, this. If cryonics had more of a social impact, I'd take it a bit more seriously as a debunking target.

it's hard to debunk something that says 'in the future, this technology may exist'

Yes! All the serious scientists I know who've responded to any enquiries say things like "Well, I can't say it would *never* happen, but it looks very unlikely to work for reason X and Y - though of course I could be wrong about those."

Aha - I think I may have sussed the underlying problem: Cryonics makes no verifiable predictions!

Well, they are I suppose in theory verifiable, but only by people who live another 500 years. And even then you could say it'll be there in another 500 years. For all practical purposes, you simply can't prove them wrong. The people involved in this conversation are in no position to answer the question of whether cryonics is possible.

That makes it very, very hard to argue against. At least with other forms of woo there are implications for the observable world that you could actually observe. You get plenty of argument about how to settle the question methodologically, of course, and what the data (or theories) actually are. Cryonics is not so much an Invisible Gardener as a Gardener Will Show Up Later, After We've Gone, No Really.

Right, I've spent more time than I meant to on this - I'm off to get a takeaway for supper. :-)

From:

ciphergoth.livejournal.com

I don't think that's the underlying problem, and we can show that in two different ways.

(1) I think that it is plausible that cryonics patients will be revived by the year 3000. That's now a falsifiable prediction.

(2) Here's two more unfalsifiable predictions:

- The Conservatives will one day again govern Britain
- Jupiter will one day spontaneously morph into a gigantic rubber duck

Even though neither of these are falsifiable, we can still have more confidence in one than in the other, and evidence will change our confidence.

From:

djm4

I think that it is plausible that cryonics patients will be revived by the year 3000. That's now a falsifiable prediction.

Yes, it is, and

drdoug addresses that very point in his paragraph starting 'well, I suppose they are in theory verifiable'. I won't repeat the argument here; go back and re-read that paragraph.

(2) Here's two more unfalsifiable predictions:

Both of your predictions in (2) involve concepts that we're relatively familiar with, and think we have a handle on probabilities of.

On the other hand:

- we will invent a form of microscopy that can scan brains in a way that allows us to reconstruct them with the 'consciousness' of the person intact
- we will invent a form of nanotechnology that will allow us to repair the tissue damage to vitrified patients

are far less so. As I say in the thread below, the route to that technology navigates Ant Country. Evidence, and time, will change our confidence, but we have precious little of it now. Neither prediction breaks the currently-known laws of physics in a 'Jupiter turning into a rubber duck' way, but neither of them involves something we know has happened in the past and may well happen again in a 'Conservatives governing Britain' way.

You can believe in either of those statements if you like. But looking for people to debunk either of those claims is futile; no reputable scientist is going to try to debunk a claim like those on the knowledge we have today. And deciding that claims like that must be plausible simply because no one has debunked them would be deluding yourself.

(I don't, as it happens, think cryonics as a whole requires either of those claims to be true to work in some form. There are other conceivable ways of storing consciousness, and vitrification without tissue damage could be possible in the future. But the PDF seemed to make those specific claims so it's those I'm addressing.)

I have a whole reply brewing about the wisdom or otherwise of saying, as that PDF does: 'we can make scientific predictions about things we've never seen like the Earth's core or future climate change, so we can also make scientific predictions about things we've never seen like a brain scanner that can scan consciousness and nanites that can fix tissue damage from vitrification.' But I also have a garage full of my dad's stuff to move, and in any case, you can probably guess how that post might go.

From:

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.

From:

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.)