LINK: BBC News on living forever, cryonics
The BBC News recently ran an interesting piece on living forever. They discuss some of the standard arguments against cryonics and transhumanism; overall, the article is pretty critical of both. I suspect most LessWrong readers won’t find it convincing, but it’s still worth a quick read.
I don’t think it’s worth a quick read as she doesn’t discuss the arguments, just trots them out, but let me try for some karma with a summary:
Science wants to reverse ageing but that has drawbacks says Joan Bakewell.
Ageing process reversed in elderly mice, but no reason for excitement.
Anti-aging for looking young deludes people, bodies age, get used to it.
Years ago people were crippled by disease, this is the proper field for what medicine should do.
Cryogenicists are ‘frantic’ for eternal life, but the world might be different, and why bother trying if revival is uncertain? Who would revive damp and out of date people to add to population problems? Some deluded people get only heads frozen—creepy.
Most don’t want immortality but living longer is good, but also planet should stay same which gives a resources problem. We can’t eat sand, science proposes flights to Mars.
We must consider benefits of anti aging against costs even though it’s distasteful to calculate like that, but China’s one child family rules do that.
Author is too old to benefit from anti-ageing future, but isn’t worried.
Benefits of current longevity: grandchildren marrying, lifestyle pleasures.
Negatives: isolation, lack of employment, rejected by mainstream, indifferent/distant family, inept carers, entropy.
Life is about family, friends, memories; the young are too busy and dismiss these so we old people have to set patterns for their old age.
Honestly, I wouldn’t call that piece interesting at all.
I think it’s worthy of a discussion thread, but I expect the discussion to be far more interesting than the article. The article itself is rambling, makes no actual point, and contains many misleading passages. Perhaps it might be interesting to take it apart and find as many failures of thought as possible?
My favourite example so far:
Followed by
Let’s see. 1. It’s vitrification, not freezing. 2. Nobody has proposed stitching heads onto random bodies. The idea is to re-grow the lost organs and tissues from the patient’s own DNA. As long as the brain survives there is no rational reason to believe a person is truly dead.
(Edited)
You’ve just dismissed an actual useful datum concerning an objection. How often do you hear someone state their squick so clearly?
Honestly, people who don’t know about vitrification or organ regrowing are ignorant. The made up detail about swapping “just any old body” does not impress me much.
Perhaps they are trying to say something other than what it sounds like they are saying, such as that a regrown body (even from their own DNA) wouldn’t match the brain closely enough for that to work. If that is the case they should make that claim, and defend it with facts—instead of wasting people’s time with ridiculous mental images of grabbing a random corpse and stitching the new head on it.
Not by the standards of the majority of the human race.
But yes, if you’re discussing something, it’s generally worthwhile to investigate it somewhat.
The failure of thought in that quote seems to me to be that she came up with an idea of how it could work, and assumed that was what other people believed. Much like people who hear about evolution and assume it says monkeys turn into men.
Due to finding this idea ridiculous, she didn’t bother to find out more, but instead spreads the ludicrous-sounding version she came up with.
I find it hard to be that cynical on a gut level, even if it is accurate. Is there a name for the cognitive bias I’m exhibiting here? If not, I propose “the OH FUCK OH SHIT NO bias”.
Are you referring to the issue of whether not knowing about cryonics is ignorance?
If so, it’s probably the Typical Mind Fallacy.
People in other spheres might call not knowing about football ignorance, or not knowing about politics, or economics. You know about cryonics, so you consider not knowing about that ignorance.
Information gaps that harm people are not to be less hated for being commonplace. However it does imply is that the person isn’t as likely to be the problem. And I can see how the reaction of condescension towards the person might be less likely to result in productive reforms than another reaction.
But if not condescension, then what? How can this gaping hole in the knowledge of most of humankind be filled? Heck, how do we get people to even realize it exists? What is the more appropriate emotion to level at a world that, by and large, just doesn’t get it?
Try to educate/interest them? Project “Hey, this is fascinating, and a really cool idea” Talk about things like animals that can do similar for themselves, and how awesome it would be if we could copy them.
Condescension projects “If you agree that this is actually important then you are low status, and I am high status. You can then regain your status by studying up on all the technical details.” IOW: Condescension has nothing whatsoever with wanting to help them, or feeling bad for them. It’s all about how you’re better than them.
The thought you want to elicit in your listeners is not “I’m an idiot”; that won’t work anyway. The thought you want to elicit is “Wow, they can actually do that?”
Only once someone has concluded that it’s possible is it worth arguing that it’s important.
It is? I thought scanning and emulation would be a more likely outcome.
I doubt repair is significantly more challenging than scanning and emulation. However it is conceivable that memory loss would be lower with the scan/em method, at least when the tech comes out. In an FAI intelligence explosion event, emulation seems slightly more likely due to conservation of resources. But in the grand scheme of things, a standard human isn’t that resource-intensive (compared to e.g. the mass of a planet or a star’s total output). I’d say there’s a good chance of it going either way regardless of FAI versus incremental tech advancement scenario. Fixating on one or the other seems like a case of burdensome detail to me. Maximizing preservation quality is likely to prove helpful in either situation.
Details only become burdensome in that sense if they are misused. It is an unimportant detail for the purpose of deciding how to handle life-challenged individuals. But ‘burdensome detail’ refers to a specific use of details for (poor) predictions that isn’t present here.
An FAI creating bodies for people wouldn’t surprise me either. I’m not sure about the ‘regrow from dna’ thing… that sounds like what we would have to do.
Not worth reading.
Some context, for those less familiar with the BBC: that piece is the script for A Point of View, a short Radio 4 programme in which the presenter (changing every few months) offers their thoughts on a topical issue, with the emphasis on providing entertainment. As such, it isn’t intended to be a serious examination of the issues surrounding attempts to deal with ageing.
It might be worth people responding in the comments, as head-grafting and extending decrepitude are both harmful misrepresentations of what people engaged in this type of activity are trying to achieve.
Ah, didn’t realise it was a radio program. That explains the rambling nature of it, when speaking it’s more generally acceptable to ramble than it is in writing.
It didn’t get much attention on Reddit, but I’m glad to see that the comments there basically tore it up.
Ignorant bigotry can’t get much stupider.