New blog post: An open letter to scientific critics of cryonics

[ciphergoth]

An open letter to scientific critics of cryonics

If this isn't to your tastes, don't worry, no doubt I'll be obsessing over something else soon enough :-)

Comments

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

BTW, do you think that David Pegg could be accused of being a charlatan when he wrote in 1982 "it is the Board’s scientific judgement that the prospects for re-animation of a frozen human, particularly a legally dead human, are infinitesimally low"? That's what I think of as expressing a clear opinion one way or the other with tremendous confidence.

[djm4]

If he still holds that view now, I'd take issue with it. Holding that view in 1982 seems more reasonable. I suspect that the chances of reanimating anyone originally frozen in 1982 are infinitesimally low; there have been major advances in freezing techniques since then.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Just to reiterate from above: I continue to be grateful for your participation in this discussion and I'm sorry I'm coming across more sharply than I intend. I think we're making progress and I hope I can blunt the sharpness of my tone enough for us to continue without blunting the sharpness of my argument :-)

I think there's a good chance that those frozen in 1982 are information-theoretically dead or otherwise beyond the reach of any plausible future technology, but "infinitesimally small" expresses absolutely *tremendous* confidence, and that seems unwarranted to me.