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

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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 :-)

Threaded | Flat

From:

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.

From:

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.