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

[makyo.livejournal.com]

I don't have any particular opinions one way or the other about cryonics - and I'm not currently well-informed enough to state any. But I did like

I now feel like a tennis player, in mid-serve, who notices that his opponent is no longer holding a racket.

which I hadn't heard before, but which succinctly describes a lot of discussions I've had about religion over the years. Thanks for posting it.

[reddragdiva]

Now we get them from climate change denialists, whose fallacies actually map surprisingly well to those favoured by the creationists. I have about as much patience with them these days.

[reddragdiva]

It's not really clear to me why you felt a need to go past:

"The Society does, however, take the position that cadaver freezing is not science. The knowledge necessary for the revival of whole mammals following freezing and for bringing the dead to life does not currently exist and can come only from conscientious and patient research in cryobiology, biology, chemistry, and medicine. The act of freezing a dead body and storing it indefinitely on the chance that some future generation may restore it to life is an act of faith, not science."

It's clearly not impossible, in the same way that strong AI isn't impossible. But you also clearly have on the order of a hundred years' furious innovation to get from here to there.

And really, that some sort of freezing and revival is not theoretically impossible does not mean the cryonicists aren't the ones who have to do the legwork to show that what they're currently doing isn't an exercise in futility, and there's no reason for scientists to spend more than a moment on it.

If Alan Turing had spent the 1940s loudly proclaiming that strong AI was just around the corner and everyone must act as if it's on the way right now, and that he would happily take $120,000 of your money to this end - everyone would have every reason to expect him to put up the evidence - they would not have any reason to waste a second trying to prove it wasn't possible.

I've extended the RationalWiki cryonics article considerably; feel free to hack away on anything you consider ill-considered or not rational.

[reddragdiva]

Arse, left the link out. Anyway.

[makyo.livejournal.com]

Yes, there does seem to be a sizeable intersection between the creationists and the climate change denialists, consisting largely of right-wing American conservative types. I'm not sure why this is.

[reddragdiva]

Not just the actual overlap in the US, I mean the argument overlap from the UK ones. Variations on argument from authority, argument against authority, argument from personal ignorance, argument from personal distaste, argument from completely insane bollocks ... of late I just call them fuckwits. Which probably isn't helpful, but saves me a lot of work getting nowhere with the hard of thinking.

[djm4]

This. You (ciphergoth) want to believe cryonics is plausible. That's fine; I don't want you not to believe. I think your passion on the subject may be blinding you to the fact that most people who don't think it's plausible aren't all that passionate about it.

I don't think it's plausible. I also don't think it's implausible, still less impossible. I don't think we know enough yet to judge. I think the path there navigates chaotic ant country, and involves speculation about proposed technologies that most certainly aren't science ... but I don't see most cryonicists claiming that they are in any way that can be debunked.

By and large - and this certainly goes for what I've read of any of the pro-cryonics documents that you've linked to in this discussion, the cryonicists get the current science correct. They also speculate abut the future science, but not in terms that allow debunking. This is fine, and presumably encouraging for you, because you want to believe that cryonics could work and you won't find anyone able to prove that it doesn't. But it doesn't make the absence of a debunking strong evidence for cryonics working.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Thanks for your edits to that article. What did you make of my points about the "ideal article" at the bottom of my blog post?

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

I'll get into the more specific arguments when I can, but one point leaps out. I wish people would stop saying it's fine for me to want to believe. It's true that I'd prefer if it was true, but I want to believe *whatever is actually true*. I've no interest in wasting money and hope pursuing a fantasy. To free a man from error is to give, not to take.

[reddragdiva]

Well, I was neutral-to-positive on the subject of cryonics until I started looking further for that article and realised what a pile of bollocks the current cryonics industry actually seems to be.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

People seemed to agree in this disucssion that in order to tell a reasonable guess about what future technology might bring from an unreasonable guess, you have to get down to the technical nitty-gritty. So in this instance, that would involve replying to the specifics that cryonicists do provide about possible future reanimation technology, and pointing out where the biggest gaps are. See the "then a miracle occurs" section of my post.

[reddragdiva]

I think the Ouroboros post does that pretty well.

Although it isn't directly about the science, the bit where a cryonicist threatened the Society for Cryobiology with a lawsuit over their proposed condemnation speaks volumes. Because suing scientists for speaking out against your science is really convincing evidence ... that you're a pseudoscientist.

Then there's the debate between Ben Best and CSICOP skeptics, where Mr Best repeatedly compares being called on his unsupported claims of success rates to accusations of rape and child molestation o_0 And he proudly puts this up on his website!

If they're not pseudoscientists, they're doing a damn good imitation.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

There's plenty more where that came from, I assure you - things like renaming yourself FM-2030 in honour of the year when you expect to be reanimated.

On the other hand they were pretty much in the process of describing a business that Darwin was at the head of as actually fraudulent, and I think quite a few business would threaten to sue under those circumstances, though I don't generally think they should.

It's not clear how to work out
P(cryonics advocates behave crazily|reanimation will happen in the future)/P(cryonics advocates behave crazily|reanimation will not happen in the future) though...

[djm4]

I wish people would stop saying it's fine for me to want to believe.

Well, tough, because that's the best you can have at the moment. Until a great deal more is known about the technology - even about which technological path is ultimately going to give cryonics the best shot - it is simply not possible to come anywhere near value of 'true' or 'false' to it. Very few people on either side of the debate do that, and I I'll cheerfully call any that do charlatans, whether they're pro- or anti-crynoics.

To use a simile that hasn't already been flogged to death, it would be like wanting to know now whether it's true that Liverpool will be playing football in the Champions League next year. They might be; they might not be. It's certainly possible, but it's by no means a certainty. You might want to bet money on it, but you would bet that money knowing that until nearer the end of the season, you wouldn't know whether you were going to win or not. And, while you might have a feeling for how Liverpool might manage to finish in the top four in the Premiership, you wouldn't be able to say with any certainty which games they will or won't lose int he next few months.

And certainly, if you were to post something saying 'I request that sceptics of Liverpool's chances post clear proof that Liverpool will lose to Man City next weekend, and I'd like to know the scoreline' you'd rightly be looked at a bit oddly. Making predictions about the future just doesn't work like that.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

What I'm getting at is that I don't wish to choose beliefs on the basis that they give me a warm fuzzy, or make me sound interesting at parties, or any other such criterion: I want them to model the truth as accurately as possible. Obviously it would be silly to hope that one could for example know the outcome of the Liverpool v Man City game next weekend with 99% confidence, but insofar as I care about the outcome of that game I want my subjective probability that Liverpool will win to map to the true outcome as closely as I can manage.

[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]

Well, yes. My point is that talking about the 'truth' of events that haven't happened yet and which are inherently unpredictable is questionable terminology - whether or not those events are football matches or as-yet-unimagined advances in electron microscopy or nanotechnology.

Incidentally, I am trying to free you from error. I believe that your way of thinking about cryonics as something that's either 'true' or 'false', with you able to work out the truth here and now by reading as much science as you can and coming to a decision, is erroneous. I wouldn't be bothering to reply otherwise; you and other pro-cryonics folk are certainly rude and patronising enough about the quality of anti-cryonics debate that I don't do it for kudos. If you weren't a good friend I'd have no interest in discussing this.

[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]

I'm genuinely sorry that I am coming across as rude to you about this; in my head it doesn't sound that way but in these things it is success in coming across the way you want to, not good intentions, that make the difference, and I am clearly not succeeding. I can't control what other cryonics advocates have to say, but I'm very much against being rude to friends who are trying to free you from error, I appreciate the effort you're putting in to argue the other side of this, and I hope that I can get some guidance from you on how to avoid doing it any more; face-to-face is good for that if you prefer.

I think that it makes sense to think that there is a truth of the matter on whether Liverpool will win that game, but I agree entirely that we can't today come to a position one way or the other in which we can have >99% confidence, so we have to reason probabilistically. Looking at Betfair, I'm about 32% confident that Liverpool will win that game.

[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.

[reddragdiva]

Looks like a reasonable roadmap. RationalWiki, fortunately, doesn't demand that level of rigor ;-) It officially holds "SPOV", where the S is both "scientific" and "snarky." That said, I'm citing like a citing thing.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Citing is great, but they have to reflect what you're using them for. For example, every article you link to about cryonics and Pascal's Wager raises the wager only to set out that equating the two is a fallacy, so using them as evidence that cryonics is like Pascal's Wager doesn't really seem fair.

[reddragdiva]

Acting like a pseudoscientist is not a scientific measure. But it sure doesn't do you any favours and is a strong indicator there's woo going on here.

(Isaac Newton was famously a complete fucking arsehole, but he was clear on how science applied to his physics. Despite his fondness for astrology.)

In this discussion, I think it's useful to distinguish the statement "some sort of cryonic suspension and revival may be possible with as yet unrealised future technologies" from "what the cryonics industry does right now does any good at all." The pro-cryonics folk tend to hear the second and answer the first. They are not the same.

In researching stuff for the RationalWiki article, I looked around for any scientific evidence that what the cryonics industry does is more than a plausible hypothesis, and does any better at information preservation than mummification did. I found none. Is there any at all?

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Since you're editing the RationalWiki entry about this I'm guessing you've already read Ben Best's Scientific Justification of Cryonics Practice. However, you might also find Bostrom and Sandberg's Whole Brain Emulation: A Roadmap useful. Note that djm4 has has some commentary on the latter.

[reddragdiva]

The citations are only to show that cryonicists bring out Pascal's Wager a lot. A clearer way of showing that's what I'm providing evidence for is most welcomed.