A survey of anti-cryonics writing
(This was originally a link to a post on my blog, A survey of anti-cryonics writing. Eliezer asked me to include the entire text of the article here.)
For its advocates, cryonics offers almost eternal life. To its critics, cryonics is pseudoscience; the idea that we could freeze someone today in such a way that future technology might be able to re-animate them is nothing more than wishful thinking on the desire to avoid death. Many who battle nonsense dressed as science have spoken out against it: see for example Nano Nonsense and Cryonics, a 2001 article by celebrated skeptic Michael Shermer; or check the Skeptic’s Dictionary or Quackwatch entries on the subject, or for more detail read the essay Cryonics–A futile desire for everlasting life by “Invisible Flan”.
That it seems so makes me sad, because to my naive eyes it seems like it might work and I would quite like to live forever, but I know that I don’t know enough to judge. The celebrated Nobel prize winning physicist Richard Feynman tells a story of a US general who spoke to him at a party and explained that one big challenge in desert warfare is keeping the tanks fuelled given the huge distances the fuel has to travel. What would really help, the general said, would be if boffins like Feynman could invent a sort of engine that was powered by sand. On this issue, I’m in the same position as the general; in the same way as a tank fuelled by sand seems plausible enough to him, it makes sense to me to imagine that however your brain stores information it probably has something to do with morphology and chemistry, so there’s a good chance it might not evaporate right away at the instant of legal death, and that freezing might be a way to keep the information there long enough for future societies to extract it with their future-technology scanning equipment.
And of course the pro-cryonics people have written reams and reams of material such as Ben Best’s Scientific Justification of Cryonics Practice on why they think this is exactly as plausible as I might think, and going into tremendous technical detail setting out arguments for its plausibility and addressing particular difficulties. It’s almost enough to make you want to sign up on the spot.
Except, of course, that plenty of totally unscientific ideas are backed by reams of scientific-sounding documents good enough to fool non-experts like me. Backed by the deep pockets of the oil industry, global warming denialism has produced thousands of convincing-sounding arguments against the scientific consensus on CO2 and AGW. Thankfully in that instance we have blogs like Tim Lambert’s Deltoid, RealClimate, and many others tracking the various ways that the denialists mislead, whether through cherry-picking evidence, misleading quotes from climate scientists, or outright lies. Their hard work means that denialists can barely move or speak without someone out there checking what they have to say against science’s best understanding and pointing out the misrepresentations and discrepancies. So before I pony up my £25 a month to sign up to cryonics life insurance, I want to read the Deltoid of cryonics—the articles that take apart what cryonics advocates write about what they do and really go into the scientific detail on why it doesn’t hang together.
Here’s my report on what I’ve found so far.
Nano Nonsense and Cryonics goes for the nitty-gritty right away in the opening paragraph:
To see the flaw in this system, thaw out a can of frozen strawberries. During freezing, the water within each cell expands, crystallizes, and ruptures the cell membranes. When defrosted, all the intracellular goo oozes out, turning your strawberries into runny mush. This is your brain on cryonics.
This sounds convincing, but doesn’t address what cryonicists actually claim. Ben Best, President and CEO of the Cryonics Institute, replies in the comments:
Strawberries (and mammalian tissues) are not turned to mush by freezing because water expands and crystallizes inside the cells. Water crystallizes in the extracellular space because more nucleators are found extracellularly. As water crystallizes in the extracellular space, the extracellular salt concentration increases causing cells to lose water osmotically and shrink. Ultimately the cell membranes are broken by crushing from extracellular ice and/or high extracellular salt concentration. [...] Cryonics organizations use vitrification perfusion before cooling to cryogenic temperatures. With good brain perfusion, vitrification can reduce ice formation to negligible amounts.
Best goes on to point out that the paragraph I quote is Shermer’s sole attempt to directly address the scientific claims of cryonics; once the opening paragraph has dispensed with the technical nitty gritty, the rest of the piece argues in very general terms about “[blind] optimistic faith in the illimitable power of science” and other such arguments. Shermer received many other responses from cryonics advocates; here’s one that he considered “very well reasoned and properly nuanced”.
The Quackwatch entry takes us little further; it quotes the debunked Shermer argument above, talks about the cost (they all talk about the cost and a variety of other issues, but here I’m focussing specifically on the issue of technical plausibility), and links to someone else making the same already-answered assertions about freezing damage.
The Skeptic’s Dictionary entry is no advance. Again, it refers erroneously to a “mushy brain”. It points out that the technology to reanimate those in storage does not already exist, but provides no help for us non-experts in assessing whether it is a plausible future technology, like super-fast computers or fusion power, or whether it is as crazy as the sand-powered tank; it simply asserts baldly and to me counterintuitively that it is the latter. Again, perhaps cryonic reanimation is a sand-powered tank, but I can explain to you why a sand-powered tank is implausible if you don’t already know, and if cryonics is in the same league I’d appreciate hearing the explanation.
It does link to the one article I can find that really tries to go into the detail: Cryonics–A futile desire for everlasting life by “Invisible Flan”. It opens on a curious note:
If you would like my cited sources, please ask me and I will give them to you.
This seems a very odd practice to me. How can it make sense to write “(Stroh)” in the text without telling us what publication that refers to? Two comments below ask for the references list; no reply is forthcoming.
And again, there seems to be no effort to engage with what cryonicists actually say. The article assets
it is very likely that a human would suffer brain damage from being preserved for a century or two (Stroh).
This bald claim backed by a dangling reference is, to say the least, a little less convincing than the argument set out in Alcor’s How Cold is Cold Enough? which explains that even with pessimistic assumptions, one second of chemical activity at body temperature is roughly equivalent to 24 million years at the temperature of liquid nitrogen. Ben Best quotes eminent cryobiologist and anti-cryonics advocate Peter Mazur:
...viscosity is so high (>1013 Poise) that diffusion is insignificant over less than geological time spans.
Another part of the article points out the well-known difficulties with whole-body freezing—because the focus is on achieving the best possible preservation of the brain, other parts suffer more. But the reason why the brain is the focus is that you can afford to be a lot bolder in repairing other parts of the body—unlike the brain, if my liver doesn’t survive the freezing, it can be replaced altogether. Further, the article ignores one of the most promising possibilities for reanimation, that of scanning and whole-brain emulation, a route that requires some big advances in computer and scanning technology as well as our understanding of the lowest levels of the brain’s function, but which completely sidesteps any problems with repairing either damage from the freezing process or whatever it was that led to legal death.
Contrast these articles to a blog like Deltoid. In post after painstaking post, Lambert addresses specific public claims from global warming denialists—sometimes this takes just one graph, sometimes a devastating point-by-point rebuttal.
Well, if there is a Tim Lambert of cryonics out there, I have yet to find them, and I’ve looked as best I can. I’ve tried various Google searches, like “anti-cryonics” or “cryonics skeptic”, but nearly all the hits are pro-cryonics. I’ve asked my LiveJournal friends list, my Twitter feed, and LessWrong.com, and found no real meat. I’ve searched PubMed and Google Scholar, and again found only pro-cryonics articles, with the exception of this 1981 BMJ article which is I think more meant for humour value than serious argument.
I’ve also emailed every expert I can find an email address for that has publically spoken against cryonics. Sadly I don’t have email addresses for either Arthur W. Rowe or Peter Mazur, two giants of the cryobiology field who both have strongly anti-cryonics positions; I can only hope that blog posts like these might spur them into writing about the subject in depth rather than restricting themselves to rather brief and unsatisfactory remarks in interviews. (If they were to have a change of heart on the subject, they would have to choose between staying silent on their true opinions or being ejected from the Society for Cryobiology under a 1982 by-law.) I mailed Michael Shermer, Steve Jones, Quackwatch, and Professor David Pegg. I told them (quite truthfully) that I had recently started talking to some people who were cryonics advocates, that they seemed persuasive but I wasn’t an expert and didn’t want to fall for a scam, and asked if there was anything they’d recommend I’d read on the subject to see the other side.
The only one of these to reply was Michael Shermer. He recommended I read David Brin, Steve Harris and Gregory Benford. This is a pretty surprising reply. The latter two are cryonics advocates, and while Brin talks about a lot of possible problems, he agrees with cryonics advocates that it is technically feasable.
I expanded my search to others who might be knowledgable: Society of Cryobiology fellows Professor Barry Fuller and Dr John G Baust, and computational neuroscience Professor Peter Dayan. I received one reply: Dayan was kind enough to reply very rapidly, sounding a cautionary note on how much we still don’t know about the structure of memory and referring me to the literature on the subject, but was unable to help in my specific quest for technical anti-cryonics articles.
In his 1994 paper The Molecular Repair of the Brain, cryptology pioneer Professor Ralph Merkle remarks
Interestingly (and somewhat to the author’s surprise) there are no published technical articles on cryonics that claim it won’t work.
Sixteen years later, it seems that hasn’t changed; in fact, as far as the issue of technical feasability goes it is starting to look as if on all the Earth, or at least all the Internet, there is not one person who has ever taken the time to read and understand cryonics claims in any detail, still considers it pseudoscience, and has written a paper, article or even a blog post to rebut anything that cryonics advocates actually say. In fact, the best of the comments on my first blog post on the subject are already a higher standard than anything my searches have turned up.
If you can find any articles that I’ve missed, please link to them in the comments. If you have any expertise in any relevant area, and you don’t think that cryonics has scientific merit—or if you can find any claim made by prominent cryonics advocates that doesn’t hold up—any paragraph in Ben Best’s Scientific Justification of Cryonics Practice, anything in the Alcor Scientists’ Cryonics FAQ or the Cryonics Institute FAQ, or anything in Whole Brain Emulation: A Roadmap (which isn’t directly about cryonics but is closely related) - then please, don’t comment here to say so. Instead, write a paper or a blog post about it. If you don’t have somewhere you’re happy to post it, and if it’s better than what’s already out there, I’ll be happy to host it here.
Because as far as I can tell, if you want to write the best anti-cryonics article in the world, you have a very low bar to clear.
Related articles: Carl Schulman links to Robin Hanson’s What Evidence in Silence or Confusion? on Overcoming Bias, which discusses what conclusions one can draw from this.
- Robin Hanson’s Cryonics Hour by (29 Mar 2013 17:20 UTC; 47 points)
- 's comment on Case study: abuse of frequentist statistics by (21 Feb 2010 9:13 UTC; 34 points)
- Is cryonics evil because it’s cold? by (31 Oct 2010 23:59 UTC; 32 points)
- 's comment on How can we get more and better LW contrarians? by (18 Apr 2012 23:51 UTC; 30 points)
- Boo lights: groupthink edition by (15 Feb 2010 18:29 UTC; 27 points)
- 's comment on Open Thread: May 2010 by (3 May 2010 6:02 UTC; 22 points)
- 's comment on Cryonics Wants To Be Big by (6 Jul 2010 5:28 UTC; 16 points)
- 's comment on Woo! by (22 Feb 2010 1:29 UTC; 6 points)
- 's comment on What is bunk? by (9 May 2010 18:59 UTC; 4 points)
- 's comment on PSA: Very important policy change at Cryonics Institute by (8 Oct 2013 19:13 UTC; 4 points)
- 's comment on October 2014 Media Thread by (8 Oct 2014 21:34 UTC; 3 points)
The allegation that cryonics is pseudoscience reminds me of the allegations that Singularitarianism/Transhumanism are “atheist religion”, “the rapture for nerds”, etc. That confusion, I think, comes when people see the questions we’re investigating — “Could we live forever?”, “Could we end suffering?”, etc. — and assume that we’re answering the questions in a way similar to how religion does… or they don’t even think to remember why they believe religion is bad, and they assume that it’s the questions rather than the answers. Obviously, the problem with religion isn’t the questions it asks, nor their motives for asking those questions; the problem is the way religion acquires answers to those questions. The same applies to seeking eternal life. Eternal life as a goal isn’t wishful thinking; it’s wishful thinking when people mistakenly believe that the goal is easy or has already been reached (“you can live forever if you believe in Jesus”, etc.). Yet it’s not surprising that many perfectly intelligent people buy into these memes. They are used to hearing completely bullshit answers to these completely legitimate questions, so they get to the point where the questions themselves set off their bullshit alarms, even in the context of attempting to investigate them within a rigorous scientific/rational framework.
The “singularity == religion” and “cryonics == pseudoscience” memes are comparable to someone in the early 1960s comparing the Apollo program to the story of the Tower of Babel, and then dismissing the program on that basis as a technically infeasible religious fantasy.
Actually the Apollo program was quite well supported by the advancing missile technologies that were developed from the 1940s and onwards. Those early and ongoing tests made clear demonstrations of the ability to launch man-made objects into orbits around the earth and the moon. There’s no such similar testing that has been done for cryonics. That analogy is really exaggerating things.
If you think that the Apollo program was better supported by missile evidence than cryonics is by the rabbit kidney vitrification, you’re going to have to show your workings. You should do so in more than a comment, though, since whatever you post will as I show above be the best anti-cryonics article in the world.
Reading this back, I have to add that the Apollo program was much better supported by missile evidence than cryonics is by the rabbit kidney vitrification. However, I don’t think the difference is qualitative.
I’ve also encountered people who criticize the predictions surrounding the singularity, which misses the point that the singularity is the point beyond which predictions cannot be made.
edit: Didn’t mean that as a comprehensive definition.
That is not the most common usage here. See Three Singularity Schools and the LW wiki page.
EDIT: The parent comment does not deserve to be at −4. This is a reasonable thing for an inexperienced commenter to say.
Voted up for niceness.
Thanks for saving me from karmic hell, but I still don’t see the conflict. I seem to follow the Vinge version, which doesn’t appear to be proscribed.
I may have been too categorical, obviously one can make all the predictions he likes, and some with a high percentage of certainty, for instance “If cryorevival is possible then post singularity it will be trivial to implement” but that still doesn’t give us any certainty that this will be so, for instance a post singularity paperclip maximizer would be capable of cryorevival but have no interest in it.
If that were true about the Singularity, then wouldn’t it be correct to criticize the people who make predictions about it?
Depends on your objectives. If you believe the singularity is something that will happen regardless then it’s harmless to spin scenarios. I gather that people like Elizier figure that the Singularity will happen unavoidably but that it can be steered towards optimum outcomes by setting down the initial parameters, in which case I suppose it’s good to have an official line about “how things could be/how we want things to be”
I dispute that point.
There is no “point beyond which predictions cannot be made”. That is a SF fantasy.
God forbid someone might mistake our hypothetical discussions about future smarter than human artificial intelligences for science fiction.
More seriously, not only is the question the same, the answer is the same too: “Why yes, you can live forever! And it’s easy! Just pay this reasonable fee to the Organization, and we will take care of it.”
If religion teaches us anything, it is that people really don’t want to die, and will happily be convinced by very poor arguments that they aren’t going to.
Therefore, the fact that a given person is convinced that cryonics will work is much weaker evidence about whether cryonics will work or not than if that that person were convinced it will not, since it would require less high-quality evidence to convince him or her in the “yes” direction.
This argument holds even if the person is yourself—we should be more doubtful about our convictions if they happen to be the kind of thing that we are inherently predisposed to believe.
No it isn’t. The similarity to religion means that people will be more easily convinced it will not work, unless it happens to be the mainstream belief.
Very true! So a clever man will know that the cryonist was convinced against the odds, and so the fact that the cryonist was convinced is strong evidence; clearly the clever man should believe also. But! this must have been how the cryonist reasoned, which explains why he was easily convinced with a minimum of evidence. That means that it is actually very easy to be convinced about effectiveness of cryonics, so other peoples’ belief is weak evidence after all. So I can clearly not believe in cryonics!
A classic blunder!
Yes, getting hugely tangled up in meta-level arguments instead of looking at the actual arguments and evidence and object-level way-the-world-is would indeed be a classic blunder.
This is the best anti-cryonics argument I’ve heard so far. I largely agree with the replies about why it’s wrong, but at least it’s an argument rather than a gut “ewww...” or “blasphemy!” or “crazy talk!” reaction.
http://forums.unicornjelly.com/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=2090#p21074
Your reply really is excellent!
Still—and I’ve been noting this a lot—not to do with technical feasibility. A word I have finally been learning to spell what with writing it so much.
It may seem weird to be so focussed on this one thing what with all the other ways that cryonics can fail, but feasibility is what creates the seriousness barrier. As soon as you think that it stands a really good chance of working, you’re over the line with us wacky people, and you’re arguing about economics or whether the future wants us or suchlike with real skin in the game.
I’m surprised. I’d have though the biggest barrier to it being taken seriously is the comfort of normality barrier. That is most people are comfortable with the narrative of birth-life-death and anything that takes them outside that makes them uncomfortable and is ignored.
Yes, that’s what motivates people to come to a negative conclusion, but I think it’s the plausibility issue that allows them not to worry about the conclusions. Not many people say “if my heart stops, don’t resuscitate me”.
I don’t think it is the coming back from the dead that makes people uncomfortable so much the world and technology that is supposed in the future to enable it. The eternal life from that point on also drastically changes the narrative.
Earendil wins so hard it makes my ears bleed.
Whoops, I just sent off a “you should join LW” message to Earendil on the board without noting that Earendil was the one who posted the link here!
+1 rationality point for reading comments without checking the author. −1 social point for the faux pas.
I find this to be a silly argument, as it assumes that not much will change about the methods of teaching, or of rejuvenation by the time that these people (who have been frozen) are re-constituted in one manner or another.
True, we would be antiquated and ignorant by the standards of the day, but just going into the process of freezing gives us a mind-set that shows us that we must be ready to abandon just about everything we know when and if we wake again. The Man from 1400 discussed in the article did not have that mindset and it was discussed as if his freezing had been an accident rather than an act of intention.
Plus, there is another reason to thaw the people out who have been frozen: Rule of Law. These people have all signed contracts based upon their conception that when and if we develop the technology to reanimate them, that we will do so. I have not examined a contract from Alcor or another cryonics program, so this may be an implicit assumption of the process.
If that is the Best anti-cryonics argument heard so far, then it is a lousy argument.
Edit: Also, if, when revived, the person is going to have an indefinitely long life, then any re-training would be trivial in terms of cost.
I sort of agree with the argument.
you agree that the future will not bring past people back, at least not many?
I’d say that most futures that still have biological humans will reanimate all cryo patients (there are currently about 100), if only because it will actually be rather cheap and it has game-theoretic and signalling benefits. Also, in a population of trillions of future humans, 1000 or so cryo patients would each have a living doing tours, educating, etc. As, of course, would 1000 people from the middle ages in our society.
I don’t know if they will or won’t, but if they do, we’d be a burden and not an asset.
Is it such an outlandish scenario that given adequate and safe technology cryonics patients will be revived because of humanitarian and moral concerns? I see no reason why we’d switch to a burden-asset evaluation scheme of human beings when we have moved beyond that a long time ago (or more likely we never really adhered purely to it). As of now, there are rather few slaves around and we mostly refrain from killing retarded infants.
Human trafficking is a massive problem that goes mostly unreported in the media.
800,000 out of 7 billion people? That doesn’t sound like very much at all.
Before mattnewport’s comment, was there any fact or important value being disputed here, or merely how much negative affect we should be feeling and expressing about that number?
Please provide a list of things you consider more damaging as far as number of people directly affected per year.
Aging
Wait, I’m sorry, was this supposed to be a complete list?
It was supposed to be a convincing list which definitively shows that 800,000 people being tortured and raped by other human beings is not very much, as you claimed.
Yes, aging is bad, good for that insight. I remain convinced that human trafficking is as bad as I perceive it to be; it’s right up there with war-in-general and certain epidemic diseases.
Would you change your opinion if it turned out that the figures for the number of victims are grossly exaggerated?
Would you update on new evidence? Are you a bayessian? Do you read LessWrong?
The 600,000 to 800,000 figure is cited from a 2005 report; mattnewport’s articles are from 2007.
I was attempting to agree with him in the same snarky format he was using. I could have just said, “Yes.”
It was only partly intended to be snarky, there was also a genuine question intended. It’s not clear to me whether the 800,000 is particularly important to you. You could somewhat reasonably claim that you would still consider this a very serious issue even if only 1⁄10 as many people were actually affected.
I don’t know where the cutoff is. The articles you linked downgraded my concern about the topic, or rather, increased my error bars to the point where I no longer feel comfortable placing it in any particular category.
I know that I regularly mock news reports if they mention fewer than 100 deaths and costs in the billions to solve/prevent in the same segment, the most recent example being the Toyota recalls. I expect I’m doing lazy cost-utility analysis.
I apologize—I’m not good at picking up sarcasm in text.
(I value the impetus to look it up myself, however, so I don’t mind.)
Before mattnewport’s comment, was there any fact or important value being disputed here, or merely how much negative affect we should be feeling and expressing about that number?
I introduced a trivial fact (the number) which I felt was relevant to the comment as far as the definition of ‘very few’. I am disputing a pointless definition, and honestly I don’t care that much, but gwern’s smug tone got me angry enough to reply to a months old discussion that hardly mattered in the first place.
It isn’t. Wikipedia tells me that 100,000 people die of aging every day after decades of suffering. So unless each of that 800,000 - remembering that aging deaths are only going to go up and mattnewport’s articles on that 800k being inflated, and that the rapes and tortures are not the average, but extremes, much like Uncle Tom was not the usual experience of Southern US slaves—suffers 45x more than each aging victim, aging is a much bigger problem than human trafficking.
Yes, it is a much bigger problem, and I already admitted that, and I champion that cause myself. I still think human trafficking fits somewhere above ‘very few’, and that for problems on the scope of aging there do not exist adjectives capable of expressing that weight of suffering. I’m also incapable of caring about one thing to the exclusion of all others.
To summarize: Defining “not very much” as “less than 100,000 per day” makes it a useless phrase.
I don’t think it’s useless. We should only care about the largest problems, especially when there’s orders of magnitude between the largest problems and suggested-other-problems-we-should-care-about.
To steal an example from Eliezer: to divvy up your resources and mental effort among multiple causes, some of which are very small, is like seeing a spinning wheel which is 20% red and 80% blue, and thinking, ‘I’ll make the most money by betting 20% of the time on red and 80% of the time on blue!’ Actually, one should just bet 100% of the time on blue, and win 80% of the time; the other strategy would win <80%.
To put it another way, what on earth makes you think the marginal value of your dollar or interest helps human trafficking more than aging?
Human trafficking is a durable institution driven by powerful interests and countless intersecting conditions of life, and arguably will persist as long as economic disparity means there are people who wish to move from ‘poor’ countries to ‘rich’ countries. Working against that is about as likely to help as the trillions poured down the drain of Africa.
Aging, on the other hand, is ‘just’ an engineering problem, which nothing prevents researchers from directly tackling, and it’s not a vicious cycle of interests and desires, but a virtuous one—if you can help the first credible breakthrough be made, the free market may well do the rest (because everyone needs a cure for aging, it’s the largest possible market).
This sort of post is why I get so pissed off at this place, made all the worse because I’ve already agreed, twice, that aging is more important on a scale that there exist no adjectives to even describe, and that I consider this argument pointless and that I’ve already changed my categorization (right over there, maybe you should read the rest of the thread?).
I’ve also made similar scale arguments in support of other initiatives (on this very article!), and I back them up with action. What the fuck more do you want from me? That I stop caring about humans? That I quit my job and start trafficking slaves to force them to work in our anti-aging mines?
You are one heartless son of a bitch.
I apologize for not re-reading the other threads on each reply; when I get the red box, I tend to read just that.
Yes. The spice must flow!
I keep it in inside a needle, which is in an egg, which is in a duck, which is in a hare, which is in an iron chest, which is buried under a green oak tree, which is on the island of Buyan, in the ocean. As long as my heart is safe, I shall never die.
Troll.
Before mattnewport’s comment, was there any fact or important value being disputed here, or merely how much negative affect we should be feeling and expressing about that number?
I do not concede my point that human trafficking is a big problem, and your smug, passive aggressive response only angers me rather than in any way being convincing. Despite the fact I agree with the fundamental point and have constantly tried to get other people to recognize the massive problem of aging-as-a-disease and how we can help correct it. Good way to piss off your supporters. Prick.
Further, consider this from the point of view of a parent. It’s OK for a 20-something young adult to decide to take this risk, but how can a parent take this risk for their child? I wouldn’t have children if I didn’t feel as though I had some control over whether they were well taken care of—how could I send them to an unknown point in the future? Today, there are many people and organizations that exploit children. I’m supposed to glibly pretend that these problems will completely disappear just with future technology? That would be pretty irresponsible.
A lot of people make some argument along the lines of, ’if they revive us, it’s because they value us.” Yeah. And if they value children, without their mommies?
This just breaks my heart, because I can understand the fear. I wouldn’t want to have children if I thought they’d be taken away from me. But if I already had them, I would want them alive first and foremost. Even if that meant they’d be taken away. Living far away > dying in my arms.
I can imagine my kids in bad situations, and in most of those situations I would want them to keep living. If I was dying during some kind of terrible revolution, I wouldn’t kill my children to protect them from an unknown future. They’re already alive, come what may.
Cryonics feels like a choice again, and for me this is a moral choice—perhaps a deontological one. I am willing to hear a variety of moral solutions/arguments, I just think this is something that needs address.
I wrote in another comment,
By “cryonics feels like a choice again”, do you mean it bears emotional similarity to choosing to have children in the first place, more than choosing to let them go on living, and therefore you wouldn’t sign your children up to be revived under any circumstances you wouldn’t have chosen to have them in the first place?
If so, I hope you will do everything you can to reverse that impression. Think of the frozen people as asleep, comatose, blinking, time-traveling—not dead. They will be revived not as infants, not as new people, not as ontologically unrelated snippets of personhood wearing secondhand names—they will wake up. If your children are frozen and revived, then afterwards, they will be alive. If your children are not frozen and revived, then absent really convenient timing, they will be dead.
This sounds reasonable to me, so I’m not sure why it doesn’t feel conclusive. Maybe I’m just waiting for the revolutionary to contribute his necessary component.
Last night, I had a sad dream that my brother’s little child passed away. (I guess my brain thought this was safe, because my brother doesn’t have kids.) The dream just had one theme: the regret that I felt that when the child died, she was gone forever.
My dream was just an emotion and didn’t address my waking concerns at all. It so happened in my dream that the child died in a way that was perfect for cryo-preservation, and there was an infrastructure for cryonics in the sense that everyone else in the family decided to sign up for cryonics just a little bit later. The extreme sadness was that they would continue in the future forever without the little one. The sadness of her being left behind was very painful.
Don’t leave your children behind. You don’t have the problem with them that I have with my sister. You have the power to sign them up. You don’t have to let your imaginary niece’s fate happen to your kids.
You seem to be thinking as if a person dies, and then cryonics is a way that can maybe bring them back to life. It is more accurate to say that a person loses the capacity to to sustain their own life (and experience it), and cryonics is a way to keep them alive until potential future technology can restore their ability to sustain and experience their life.
Can we please focus on one argument against cryonics at a time? Isn’t this shifting to a new counterargument whenever an old one is addressed just logical rudeness?
If you don’t dispute anything I actually say about technical feasibility, please take this discussion elsewhere.
EDIT: Downvotes are useful information, but comments explaining them are even better—thanks!
I didn’t down vote you but I do feel frustrated about the censure. First, I obviously don’t think technological feasibility is anywhere near the right question. So I should just ignore this post. (But) secondly, other people are discussing other issues—this whole thread is all about whether or not we’ll get revived and why; it has nothing to do with technology. If I don’t respond to this thread because it’s off-topic, then I’m just missing an opportunity to further an agenda that is very important to me. I like to follow rules but I’m not likely to follow them sacrificially while others disregard them.
An important subtext of the current extended discussion, which in one sense can be seen as fallout from the “Normal Cryonics” article, is how to conduct a debate in a manner that is both epistemically and instrumentally rational.
One major issue, raised by the “Logical rudeness” post, is that ordinary conversation has a nasty tendency to go in circles revolving around each interlocutor’s pet anxiety or trigger issue. No one is exempt: I tend to focus on the financial and logistical aspects, and that says something about me.
Rather than think of ciphergoth’s intervention as “censure”, please think of it as the unpleasant but necessary work of a volunteer facilitator, doing his best to keep the conversation on track.
This conversation touches on an issue that is deeply important to you, that much I understand. Perhaps your interests are better served by your drafting a separate post to lay out this issue as clearly as you can, a post in which you’d set out to apply the thinking tools you’ve learned from LW or that you wish to introduce to LW?
Your first point I think you answer yourself, is that fair? Your second is a good one, but I wonder what the right thing to do about it is. I did reply to the top-level ancestor comment of this one to say “this is off-topic”; are you saying that where discussion blossoms anyway, that railing against in-thread commenters is a mistake? Certainly where top-level comments have started talking about other arguments, I think that is logical rudeness, and you don’t seem to disagree; is there anything to be done about it beyond the comment on the top-level comment?
EDIT to make clear: questions are not rhetorical.
I would have preferred if everyone were conforming, because then my argument could have waited.
I think this just represents a real difference in our goals and objectives: you want focused and on-topic comments, and I want to respond to this thread.
Given the dichotomy in objectives, I think I should make the comment, and you should complain again and down-vote me.
Logistically, you should probably have made it more clear in the Less Wrong post that you were trying to enforce this norm; I didn’t know about this until I read a comment you made far down in the thread that we needed to read and follow the rules in a paragraph at the end of your blog post.
I think we both think the other’s objective is fair enough.
I probably should have made it clear, but I’d also like to encourage the norm that with or without such explicit per-post policies, where someone makes a post focussing on counterargument A, that commenting about counterargument B is recognised as logical rudeness. This doesn’t help with the bind you find yourself in today, but might help in future.
Logical rudeness, as I read the article, was referring to switching arguments in the pattern A to B to A but only switching after A was essentially debunked. If byrnema never switches back to A it doesn’t fit the pattern.
I could have misinterpreted the article.
Okay, I was misinterpreting.
As much as threads are better than anything else I have seen to track multiple participants in a conversation, I get the itch that there is a better way. Maybe I should go find one...
It would be nice if we could transplant threads to where they are appropriate, with just a link to and from the old location where they were inspired.
Let’s move this here.
I didn’t read that Ciphergoth was accusing me of logical rudeness—he meant the whole thread. And I agree.
Yes. Thanks.
Rain, I’m aware of human trafficking and other abuses, which is the reason I said “rather few” instead of “no”. But compared to just a few hundred years ago slaves are as rare as hen’s teeth.
And yet population nowadays is so much larger than in ancient times so there are claims the absolute number of slaves is currently higher than ever before
The number given in that article is 27 million slaves. Yet Wikipedia claims that 55 million people lived in the Roman Empire in AD 300-400. Were less than half of them slaves? (And that’s ignoring the slaves in the rest of the world at the time.) The same page claims that in 1750, the world population was almost 800 million. Were 29 out of 30 people at the time really free? Surely slavery was more widespread among the hierarchical city cultures that left written records than among the “barbarians”, but it’s hard to imagine that the number has always been less than 27 million. During the Middle Ages, throughout all of Europe, the vast majority of the people were serfs, bound to their land, living and dying at the mercy of their lords.
If it’s true that 249 out of every 250 people today is free, that sounds like a huge improvement over almost all of human history.
Moral standards in general can improve irregardless of the number of people involved. Besides, one could argue that having more slaves is outweighed by having much more non-slaves living good lives. In regard to cryonics: all else being equal I’d favor to be reanimated in a world with low slave to non-slave ratios if I preferred the probability of my becoming a slave to be as low as possible.
If I can create a new person from a frozen corpse, I can probably also create a new person by duplicating a living person. Why would the corpse have precedence on any moral grounds? Either way a new person is created; and duplication results in a person better adjusted to their era and so happier.
Given limited resources, persons will be created by the highest bidders. Many living persons will have a strong interest in self-duplication. Historical interests in reviving people would face economic competition. That’s why I think they would switch to a burden/asset view.
It definitely depends on the what kind of future there’ll be. Robin Hanson’s Malthusian future of scarcity and effective reproduction is a place where your described things would be indeed commonplace. I personally wouldn’t welcome an explosive wave of replication creating so much scarcity that there’d be an actual competition for resources for an number of additional people that is as small as the number of cryonics patients.
Besides, the corpse would have a great deal of precedence on moral grounds, because a death or failure of reanimation is a huge loss of value that already exists (knowledge, personality, memories, psychological complexity etc.), while duplication only enables the additional person to grow into a unique individual sometimes in the future.
Even if nearly all people were against replication—which is far from given—to prevent explosive replication you would need to either effectively limit everyone’s access to basic resources (so they couldn’t replicate) or to execute, exile or severely limit the rights of illegally created replicas (including allowing them to die of hunger or equivalent resource starvation).
Short of a sysop scenario, I don’t see how this could be accomplished. Of course my inability to see it isn’t proof of anything much, but just hoping it will happen without describing how to make it happen is pretty flimsy. That’s why I regard resource scarcity as a primary feature of any future until proven otherwise.
“Loss of value”—value to whom? Not value to the frozen person, because they don’t exist until revived. Do you think the general public has a moral obligation to increase the diversity of the set of persons in existence? If so, then instead of reviving or duplicating people or even breeding the old fashioned way, they would spend their time artificially engineering new and radically different life forms. Is that what you have in mind?
I agree with that; the other default future would be extinction. My problem is that I regard full-blown Hansonian future as equivalent to extinction because it similarly leads to the total loss of everything humans care about now, but note that this is a subject of heated dispute and I’m on Eliezer’s and Nick Bostrom’s side.
And anaesthetized people don’t exist until resuscitated? There is no meaningful sense in which suspended people automatically cease to exist and then pop back to existence. The sense in which people cease to exist is rather a continuous function of the amount of lost information about people’s brain states. Reanimation from suspension can have as much effect on the subject’s psychology than waking from sleep, or as much as a severe brain injury, depending on the circumstances and the technologies involved. Legal death is a magical category in this case. Of course they exist.
Also, not wanting to die only requires you to not want to die while you’re alive. We would agree that it’s not moral to kill a lot of people on the basis that once they’re nonexistent they won’t care about the matter. To give a closer analogue, it’s not right either to kill sleeping people because they at the moment cannot want to be not killed. Never reviving the suspended me simply equals killing me, with all the moral implications of an ordinary murder. And the fact the revival has some costs does not give it a special status. After all, keeping me alive has its own costs; I could be shot anytime so that more food is left for others.
Does the public has a moral obligation to refrain from killing people? I (personally) disapprove of murder, in general. I suspect that the general public has the same feelings—and yes, this is the primary element of what I have in mind about reanimation.
Aside from this consideration above, I (still) argue that reviving people is more valuable than duplication, for other people. There is stuff there in those frickin’ brains you might find amusing, funny, interesting, useful or aesthetically pleasing. It’s a waste to leave that utter amount of complexity and information that a human brain boasts frozen in ice, inactive and unreachable. The act of duplication, on the other hand, creates not a single bit of information that wasn’t already available, it “just” doubles the total future capacity to think, learn, feel, interact and experience.
To turn back to the quote above, we definitely value individuality and diversity. But I just won’t spend my life mindlessly increasing some amount of a specifically defined “diversity” because I’m not like a paperclip optimizator. Also, “Increase diversity” is not a well-formed moral sentence. The concept of diversity is extremely complex to begin with; diversity as it is valued by people is also a magical category with obfuscated boundaries.
That assumption creates some unpleasant conclusions. To make sure I understand you, please consider the following scenarios.
Suppose that our descendants acquire a deep understanding of human brain operation. They build a machine which can generate a brain-description to given parameters, as different from any existing human as normal humans are different from one another. Given a description, a living brain and body can be built and a person created.
Suppose we generate 10^10 different descriptions. Do we now have a moral duty to instantiate them all in real bodies, because once we have some information-theoretical descriptions of them, they are “existing persons”? Note that we haven’t simulated them; we just computed the single-moment-in-time initial states of possible simulations.
Then, does reviving you once equal killing the potential second copy of you we could also have revived?
A better comparison would be: does the public have a moral obligation to support minimal living conditions for all already-existing people, and keep them from dying from hunger or disease? I think the answer is yet, but it is not absolute; it works so far because the burden happens to be economically easily bearable. It might also work for reviving people if very few people will ever be frozen, so that the total burden of reviving is small. If ever it came to a real economic tradeoff, reviving people wouldn’t necessarily win.
Giving birth to children, the old-fashioned way, and so growing new people also creates interesting new brains. Why would reviving ancient people (who were not outstanding thinkers or personalities in their own time) be so rewarding?
The question about diversity referred to the moral situation. You think there’s a moral obligation to revive people, and you justify doing that instead of duplicating people because the duplicates increase the diversity of society. Is there a factor for diversity in your purely moral calculation, or do you think that morally it doesn’t matter what new person you create, and diversity is only a selfish reason to revive a more interesting person?
We don’t kill many infants, but we do abort lots of fetuses, though. I don’t see any obvious reason why we should give a frozen corpse more rights than a fetus. Everyone who is cryopreserved actually did die; reviving one is more like creating a new person than it is like providing medical care to an existing, living person.
At Alcor and CI there is much written about the definitions of death; their preferred version (mine too) is information-theoretic death. To be precise, legal death is the moment the doctors decide to stop caring for the patient, mostly because they estimate the chance of successful resuscitation too low. On the other hand, information-theoretic death is the point beyond which no technology can restore a mind. This definition is a bit more precise as it being vague requires us to consider the possibility of reversing entropy (EDIT: in other words, the finality of legal death is pretty questionable, but we can only argue against the finality of information-theoretic death if there is a way to reverse entropy).
The subjective experience of waking up from cryonic suspension could range from identical to waking up from sleep to having suffered a serious and pervasive brain trauma, depending on the circumstances of suspension and reanimation. I wouldn’t automatically categorize reanimated people as newly created persons as I wouldn’t do so in the case of sleeping people or victims of brain injury. They are new persons to the extent the continuity between their pre- and post- suspension selves is lost, and I think the same applies to brain injury victims.
Aborting a fetus may or may not be fully moral depending on how developed the fetus is. Killing a zygote is as morally charged as killing a random bacterium. Otherwise, causing suffering to fetuses by abortion is sure a possibility, albeit one that can be reduced by regulations informed by a detailed knowledge of neurosciences.
However, I think the strongest reason why likening cryonics patients to fetuses is ridiculous is that cryonics patients (can) have a huge pile of accumulated life experiences, memories and a unique and rich personality.
That doesn’t sound quite right, can you be a little more precise? If cryonics depended on breaking the Second Law I would have no time for it.
I meant that information theoretic-death is a point beyond which restoring a person requires reversing entropy. Thus we can only argue against the finality of this kind of death if there is a way to reverse entropy (which seems not to be the case). I admit my sentence there was too opaque.
Reversing entropy is insufficient. You have to interact with a past that no longer has any traces in the present. It’s not enough to have a way to turn steam into ice cubes. You need a time camera.
I think the definition is clearer if you avoid reference to entropy, but I get what you’re getting at now. Thanks!
[I’m deleting this comment soon. No reason to pick another fight. Maybe I’ll take Morendil’s advice and write a post about how much I disagree with people assuming moral positions for anyone but themselves and where I see that heading. I don’t have time at the moment.]
I urge you to err strongly on the side of not deleting comments. If I post something I later regret, I just edit them to say “oops!” For one thing, it’s easy to overreact and underestimate their quality.
OK.* I was mainly just trying to prevent another big long sidetrack. Since thomblake already replied, it needs to stay anyway.
*From now on, I’ll just edit with an ‘oops’.
We have had numerous top-level posts regarding ethics and meta-ethics; what one should do seems intimately related to rationality. This is already a place where we discuss what moral judgements are correct, and has been since its inception. Example
No, I agree with Roko. Some people would probably want us. It’s just that we’d be consumption goods rather than capital goods.
Just like kids, really. Most 1st Worlders don’t have kids because they are good little workers, they have them because they make them happy. The few dozen cryopreserved people would be a scarce commodity in a world with very few scarcities.
Obviously this would only happen in a nice post-singularity world, or a weird future in which advanced nanotech comes before AI.
Does it matter? Any future that revives us will be really wealthy.
Most futures that still have human values will reanimate all cryo patients, if scanning and WBE counts as reanimation.
It seems to me that the future goes one of two ways: virtually complete disaster (uFAI, other technology disaster, complete loss of humane values) or a fairly strong win for human values with massive easing of material constraints—superabundance.
In the latter group of scenarios, the cost of reanimating someone by scanning and building a new fleshy body for them would be close to nothing, and the market for sentimentally special objects (such as people from before the positive singularity) would be huge.
The scenarios that scare me are those where a friendly AI is built that reasons timelessly that it would have wanted to precommit to placing massive threats/rewards on anyone who knew about the singularity risk problem, and that unfortunately you (or I) in particular performed below some set standard of risk mitigation, and the FAI is going to put us in a horrific torture simulation forever. The argument against this is that rewards motivate better than punishments.
Disagree that you should be scared rather than curious. Such scenarios are not well worked out.
Which argument?
The one in the link.
Basically, that the cost of reviving and taking care of large numbers of frozen people will exceed the value of those people to the future, so there won’t be very many frozen people revived.
How do you work that out? We’re talking about a future society that can revive a cryonics patient, how can you be so certain that cost would be an issue for them?
Also interestingly, there appear to be no published technical articles that claim that it will.
Last week, I searched for articles on how mammalian cryopreservation is done. I found nothing. Not a single journal article on any of the techniques Alcor uses. There are many articles on cryopreserving sperm, and embryos; there are studies on attempting to preserve other types of tissue samples. But I could not find a single article on methods to attempt to cryopreserve adult mammals. Not even in the journal Cryobiology, which is entirely about cryopreservation.
Go to the current issue of Cryobiology and look at the article titles to see what actually is being done in the field. Also notice that the author names are almost all Asian and (non-English/French/German) European. Cryonics for humans is most popular in nations that don’t publish on cryonics. (Don’t know if it’s popular in the Nordic countries.)
That’s forbidden by the Society for Cryobiology by-laws.
Why?
See Alcor’s side of the story (also linked in the article).
Aha. I hadn’t been aware of that conflict between cryonics and cryobiologist. I plan to go and read the Alcor page in full, then the letter in full, but right now one thing comes to mind: whatever document justifies the cryobiologists’ decision to outright ban cryonics should lay out the most credible extant arguments against cryonics. They wouldn’t take such a serious decision on a whim.
[EDIT: the below is wrong.]
As far as I can tell, there is no such document. This I consider very striking evidence on the credibility of anticryonics.
Of course the by-law is 28 years old, so even if there were such a document it would need updating.
I’m wrong: I found the document and some earlier drafts.
Very interesting. I like to synthesize and summarize, so this is my synopsis.
I read that they have one mild moral objection, that they were willing to stand behind over several drafts, and one scientific objection, that they were not willing to reiterate.
1st objection: you shouldn’t sell a technological service that hasn’t been scientifically demonstrated (presumably, even if the buyer is aware that they’re only buying a potential technology)
It is interesting that they would like to call this fraud even though they can’t quite:
(This reminds me of the argument I lost as to whether people would be justified in thinking that cryonics was a scam for some weak interpretation of ‘scam’ .)
2nd objection: that however people are cryo-preserved now, it is unlikely to be un-doable
I don’t agree with the first objection: if informed people want to pay for the chance of reanimation, I think that’s their decision.
The second objection would be strong, if it were true that cryo-preservation causes irreversible damage (information loss), but that appears currently undecided.
All the arguments I’ve found so far that are in favour of that position are either very vague on details, or fatally flawed on details. Most cryonics critics don’t appear to understand the issue of information theoretic death clearly enough to articulate a position on it.
Thanks. The revision history is particularly interesting.
Thanks for the link, and eeew.
That’s one of the most depressing things I’ve read in a while >.<
Pretty much agree.
The only thing that gives much comfort is that was written in 1991 so there’s theoretically enough time for some of the obstructionist cohort to have retired or run out of steam on the subject. Perhaps the upside of a pessimistic view on scientific progress could be kicking in by now?
I tried to verify the actual current state of the Society for Cryobiology’s bylaws to see if they even contain the provisions banning cryonicists or their research any longer. With 20 years for them to have realized that such censorship is at the very least in poor taste, maybe things have settled down? When I tried looking for an online version of the document with the it didn’t appear to be something they have on display.
Does anyone else have stronger google-fu than I? It would be neat to track down the document so we could see for ourselves :-)
Wow, I’m actually having a very hard time finding any information on relations between the two more current than the ’91 article
Nice link—I added Alcor’s side of the story to the question “Is cryonics worthwhile?”:
http://www.takeonit.com/question/318.aspx
Thanks to everyone’s suggestions, there’s now 5 sub-debates for cryonics:
Is information-theoretic death the most real interpretation of death?
Is cryonic restoration technically feasible in the future?
Is living forever or having a greatly extended lifespan desirable?
Is there life after death?
Does cryonic preservation with today’s best technology cause information-theoretic death?
Wow, that really stirs up the rebel in me.
I’m curious now to look more into the state of the art in cryopreservation. How close are we to successfully cryopreserving an organ?
I think most cryobiologists are going about it the wrong way, trying to get incrementally better at cryopreserving tissue. The work I’m aware of that seems most promising (I say, having almost no familiarity with the field) is Ken Storey’s work with wood frogs. They can freeze and thaw naturally.
I looked into it because I hoped I might be able to move some genes from a wood frog into a mouse, freeze it, thaw it later, and win the Methuselah Mouse prize. But it turns out that the frog has an anti-dessicant response to protect tissue from lack of water, an anti-ischemia response to protect tissue from lack of oxygen, a glucose response to produce glucose as a cryoprotectant, an anti-glucose response to protect cells from the huge amounts of glucose, and a bunch of other mysterious responses. It involves hundreds of genes. It’s going to take a large program to import entire gene pathways from one organism to another.
The wood frog mechanism is very different from the proposal of cryonics proper, which is vitrification (not freezing, at least under ideal conditions) and subsequent repair or uploading. Cryonics involves much lower temperatures than a wood frog could possibly survive at under natural conditions. Unsurprisingly, Ken Storey is a major cryonics skeptic.
On the other hand, the use of ice-blocking polymers in vitrification is analogous to antifreeze proteins used in biology. This reduces the concentration of penetrating cryoprotectants needed to achieve vitrification at the glass transition temperature, which in turn reduces toxicity.
My thought as to how gene therapy could be useful is that if you could have ice-blocking proteins or cryoprotectant sugars present inside of the cells to begin with, lower concentrations still could be used, implying less time at high temperature where toxicity can occur. Removal of cryoprotectants during thawing is a major problem which this would also help with.
Optimistically, this would lead to a revivable brain and/or cryogenic banking of other individual organs. I think whole body will be a lot harder than brain only, perhaps dramatically so. It may be better to work on robotic and biological life support technologies to permit the brain to survive on its own if we want to see a person or mammal actually making the trip both ways within our lifetimes.
Haha. Creative thinking, but I’m not sure if that would count as life extension by the rules of the M-Prize.
It would have been stupendously trivial if all one had to do is to copy-paste some genes into a mouse egg, or do some gene-therapy, in order to become freeze-resistant. Aubrey’s beard would go white in an instant.
Done, though not at LN2 temperatures:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15094092
http://www.cryostasis.com/perspectivesandadvances.pdf
Awesome. Thanks for the links.
I’m having the same problem. All the studies I’ve looked at have only studied the plausibility of cryonics. None have actually attempted to freeze and thaw a mammal (or any other warm blooded animal). All the examples of “natural” cryonic preservation deal with cold blooded animals (usually frogs or fish).
Can anyone point me to studies showing that cryogenic freezing and thawing in warm blooded creatures is possible? I’d hate to throw down a bunch of money on a cryonics policy, only to end up dead anyway, because the freezing process permanently damaged my tissues.
Not an entire mammal, but Greg Fahy has cryopreserved a kidney, brought it back and shown a rabbit able to live using it as its sole kidney.
Perhaps just as importantly for this whole discussion, nematodes have been shown to survive cryopreservation, with “memories” intact.
Very interesting! Again, not LN2 temperatures though.
EDIT: I’m wrong—thanks for the correction!
The abstract I linked to does mention LN2. Though I’m not sure how much difference various sub-freezing temperatures make, if our concern is how well the current protocols of cryonics can protect the brain against freezing damage.
I Googled for articles concerning nematodes because they’re the standard “simplest organism with a nervous system”, and this was among the first hits, filtering to exclude all publications by cryonicists.
What would be the next “higher” organism someone might have tried that on, that also has a nervous system?
Cryonics is hard to argue against as it partially involves magic (in the sufficiently advanced technology sense) and it involves something we don’t fully understand, how information is stored in the brain. So the lack of technical criticism might be a rare instance of people shutting up about things they don’t understand.
BTW, I’ve been bugging people for being off-topic all thread, so I thought I should say somewhere: this is exactly on-topic, this objection is as specific to my argument as can be. Thank you.
This is off topic too, but kudos to you for splitting off two comments from one when you’re making two unrelated points. It keeps the discussions much clearer.
Cryonics advocates make lots of specific claims—see the articles linked at the end. Is there no claim on any of those articles that could be countered?
I don’t know. The thing is the concrete claims do not add up to water tight case for cryonics doing what people want, that is preserving identity over the long term. The Alcor Scientist’s article says as much.
There is space for later understanding of the way that the brain stores memories or just some chemical state important for identity to not be preserved by cryonics as it is currently practised.
There is space for that. It could turn out, say, that memories depend on some chemical or other being in one of two isomeric states, and that vitrification fluids will flip all the isomers the same way, leading to immediate information theoretic death.
However, I think that the case that Alcor and others present is enough to shift the burden of proof. At the moment there seems no reason to think that homeopathy or sand-powered tanks will work, and the burden is on proponents to come up with such a reason. By contrast, while we’re a long way from being able to say with confidence that cryonics will work, we are at the stage where we can say that we should expect that it is likely to work until someone can come up with a reason why it shouldn’t work.
Scenarios like the one in my first paragraph above would be quite a surprise; as far as I know they don’t form any part of our current understanding of how memory is stored. It’s not enough to throw out a bunch of “maybes”: if you accept that there’s no part of the evidence presented above that can be taken apart and shown to be flawed, then it is sufficient that it’s a mistake to have low confidence in the technical plausibility of cryonics until someone presents a biologically plausible way for it not to work.
I’d say It depends how complete you think modern neuroscience is. If you think neuroscience is fairly complete and there won’t be many gotcha’s about how things work then I would adopt your view.
The less complete it is, and the more known unknowns and unknown unknowns there might be before we get a full understanding the more chance that one of those unknowns will interact with the vitrification fluid or how quickly we manage to get people vitrified at the moment (we might not be being quick enough to preserve some chemical structures).
I half jokingly compared it to alchemy in the pre-chemistry days, they had so many unknown unknowns people couldn’t find convincing arguments against it. Should they have expected it to work? That is an extreme example though, I think we have a better handle of the brain than the alchemists did of the possibilities of transmuting lead to gold.
But remember that the alchemists’ conclusion is correct. You can turn lead into gold. It’s harder than they thought, and the tools at our disposal are far more effective than they could have imagined. In the end, it turns out that the latter won out over the former.
In a case of uncertainty, you assign broad probability distributions. If the bet has a lopsided cost function, then uncertainty, “unknown unknowns”, etc, are reasons to take the bet. More uncertainty = more expected payoff.
I’d just like to point out that the people who don’t believe in cryonics aren’t the ones asking for money. The burden of proof should be on the organizations like Alcor because they are the ones trying to sell you an actual product. Without a stringent burden of proof they are just snake-oil salesmen.
From a starting point of ignorance, this would be a reasonable stance. However, as a response to ciphergoth’s claim that Alcor’s case “is enough to shift the burden of proof” (that is, Alcor has met their burden of proof, and it is now up to the detractors to provide a rebuttal), it does not make sense.
You’ve misread my wording. I’m saying that the burden of proof should stay on Alcor because they are the ones trying to make money. They should do more than just show something “might work” if they are trying to charge you for services which they claim “will work”.
Epistemological conclusions shouldn’t be based on fear of being scammed. Alcor’s motivation should be taken into account Bayesianically, but argument screens off motivation (limited of course by dependence on unchecked facts).
From the Alcor FAQ: “Is cryonics guaranteed to work? No.”
Whoever said they were afraid of being scammed? You’re mistaking honest skepticism for paranoia.
Alcor doesn’t claim that cryonics will work? OK. But they do argue “it might work or at least have enough probability to be worth the investment”, and so on. Then my argument remains the same. This desire for investment puts the onus of proof on them.
Alcor and CI are non-profits.
So no matter what Alcor or CI write or what evidence they produce, the burden of proof is still on them and their critics need not say or write a word to justify being dismissive of what they do?
If the cryonics organizations (or the scientific community) found strong evidence, then the critics would certainly have to justify themselves strongly. The current state of the evidence I would not call strong—but others on LW seem to disagree. After discussing this semi-extensively on prior Less Wrong threads, the confusion seems to arise due to a blog philosophy of evidence as a “Bayesian entity” (I quote this because I haven’t studied Bayesian statistics so I’m not quite sure what it’s all about) whereas the general scientific community views evidence most strongly as a physical entity (i.e., established through direct tests, polls, experiments, theoretical results, and so on) -- I tend to take the latter viewpoint more seriously.
Then you should learn. Start here, or if you already have some experience applying Bayes’ Theorem, start here.
They make no such claim, so they do not bear that burden.
Epistemological conclusions shouldn’t be based on fear of being scammed.
Epistemology should not be based on not being scammed.
I recently found this article, that attempts to survey the arguments against cryonics. It only finds two arguments that don’t contain any obvious flaws:
Memory and identity are encoded in such a fragile and delicate manner that cerebral ischemia, ice formation or cryoprotectant toxicity irreversibly destroy it.
The cell repair technologies that are required for cryonics are not technically feasible.
the article link is broken. Via wayback machine I found it was redirected some time ago to http://www.evidencebasedcryonics.org/2011/03/11/the-case-against-cryonics/
This is an implicit appeal to an intuition about a missing dataset. So let me repeat my plea to make this dataset formal! Collect disputes from the past and dig for similar data on them—how many tech arguments by who in their favor, how many against, and so on. And especially—who was eventually right?
How could we do this? It seems to me that even if you were trying hard to avoid it, you’d have a very hard time not biasing your search in favour of examples that suited what you wanted to prove. Is there some external source of examples you could lean on that would unbias your survey, the way that people publish search terms in public databases when doing surveys of scientific consensus?
This is an issue with data collection on any interesting topic. It doesn’t prevent such efforts from being useful. You choose a criteria and collect data that way, others who think your criteria off complain and choose a subset of your data to see if that makes a difference, or go collect more data according to criteria they prefer.
How would you start on a project like this? Serious, not rhetorical question.
Hence TakeOnIt, a database of expert opinions. Over the last few hours I’ve peen entering in all the expert opinions on cryonics that people have been posting links to:
Cryonics debate: http://www.takeonit.com/question/318.aspx
FYI—Robin Hanson’s opinions on TakeOnIt: http://www.takeonit.com/expert/656.aspx
Sorry, that’s just not the same thing at all.
My point is that the same infrastructure can be used to capture any debate, whether its the current cryonics debate or other various debates in the past. The good thing about having a database of expert opinions is it makes questions like the one you asked easier.
Infrastructure is really not anything like the limiting factor. I’d donate pencils and paper too if that would help, but it won’t. Beware overrating the stone in stone soup.
It’s a start. If it became popular and scaled up, it would provide that dataset.
I misread the last line, and briefly imagined you had a page for “Is TakeOnIt a useful resource?”.
The paragraph on climate change seems a little out of place. You must be aware that some of your readership will feel it undermines your case so its inclusion seems almost intended to pull in an unrelated debate into the discussion.
I’m not sure whether or not Melody Maxim should count. She isn’t anti-cryonics, but is thoroughly disgusted with the cryonics organizations that exist today- which seems strongly relevant for anyone deciding whether or not to sign up, but not for anyone interested in theoretical probabilities.
I certainly don’t want to sign up with organisations like Alcor and CI. I want to sign up with Virgin Cryonics. Unfortunately the latter doesn’t exist, so I’m signed up with CI. In answer to your question I think there’s a huge gulf between “cryonics is a good idea that should be better implemented than it is” and “cryonics is crazy”.
Virgin Cryonics?
If anyone was going to turn cryonics into a mass-market product, Richard Branson might...
Wow. The same ‘Virgin’ that is known here for the budget airline. I had no idea that he was likely to be into cryonics kinds of ventures too.
Having flown on VirginBlue in Australia, presumably this would entail setting up a cryonics operation that buys thirty-year-old equipment cheap, and charging the patients’ families for extra LN2 by the litre. Flying on VirginBlue involves a certain amount of the passengers waving their arms and chanting “I believe in aviation! I believe in aviation!” Why no, it wasn’t a great flight …
Could not have said it better!
Not that he’s a transhumanist, he just runs a huge variety of different businesses and doesn’t mind doing unusual things eg Virgin Galactic.
Now that the blog has been made private, could you provide a summary of her claims?
It would have been much easier before the blog was made private! (Looking around, apparently that happened over a year ago.)
I think this will give a better impression than one that I can build from my memory. The basic takeaway I recall was that, to a cryomedical technician, the cryonics culture looked like one of wishful thinking, incompetence, and corruption.
It looks like Melody is still posting on LW, though infrequently.
Your link isn’t very useful—I’m told I don’t have permission to read it.
It appears to no longer be public. No clue what’s up with that.
In fact, the link takes me to a Google login screen—which makes it look like that phishing scheme Google just warned us about. There is no reason I should have to login just to read a blog posting.
As far as I can tell, it is a real Google login screen, but still …
It looks like a real google login screen, but I’m clearly logged into google since I’m checking my email in another tab, and it still wants my password. I don’t trust it.
Blogger seems to be a bit different and not quite integrated. For example, I get no password request—it just tells me I’m not allowed and suggests trying a different account.
Is there a ceremony theoretical probabilities must undergo to become practical? :-)
Yes- it must describe a practical event, not a theoretical event. “Can I survive brain surgery?” is a theoretical question about technology; “Will I survive brain surgery performed by X?” is a practical question that is the conjunction of the first question and “Is X good enough at performing brain surgery?”
The general problem of deciding what to make of theses cases was discussed in the Overcoming Bias post What Evidence in Silence or Confusion?
Thanks—have added to the body of the post.
this is what tipped the scales heavily in favor of cryonics for me. the skeptics make ridiculous claims, and the people who know about the current state of biological research seem genuinely optimistic about it. that’s good enough for me considering the low cost and potentially very very high utility payoff.
Your link seems to be broken, but I assume you meant to link this post?
Gah! fixed—thanks!
EDIT: have now put in entire text as per Eliezer’s request.
I’m not worried about the technical aspects, I believe it is just a matter of time especially considering the singularity.
What worries me more are economic reasons: will our civilization be stable long enough until we reach the singularity? What about resource shortage, peak oil, global warming, wars? Eventually the cost of cryopreservation will be too high to maintain and cryonics corporations will go bankrupt. The weakpoint is the assumption that the US$ 80,000 will be enough to keep you freezed over the next decades. Conjunction fallacy anyone? Still I think that cryonics is the best bet for those who want a shot at eternity.
EDIT: I think I need to flesh out the conjunction here a bit more: what assumptions went into the cost of US$ 80,000? How stable has the economy have to be for those assumptions to hold? What if peak oil suddenly becomes a reality and the economy collapses as a lot of folks predicted? How high will the price for cryopreservation climb in that scenario? And this is just one scenario of 1000s that can happen over the next decades.
I added the sub-debates suggested by Earendil, pdf23ds, and ciphergoth, giving us a total of 7 sub-debates for the cryonics debate:
Is information-theoretic death the most real interpretation of death?
Is cryonic restoration technically feasible in the future?
Is living forever or having a greatly extended lifespan desirable?
Does cryonic preservation with today’s best technology cause irreversible brain damage?
Is there life after death?
Is deterioration of the brain after death slow enough for cryonics to be worthwhile?
Assuming it was technically possible, would a cryonically suspended person actually get reanimated?
http://www.takeonit.com/question/318.aspx
Once again, let me know if there’s a major sub-debate missing. For the sake of cleanliness I’ll attempt to edit this post if someone suggests another sub-debate, rather than adding a new post.
There exists life after death http://www.vijaykumar.org/life_after_death.html … afterlife as confirmed by sacred Bhagavad Gita of Hinduism… foremost of all sacred scriptures existing on mother earth! The importance of Bhagavad Gita is confirmed from the fact that any human being till date who gained enlightenment… had to assimilate wisdom contained in Bhagavad Gita!
The concept of life after death… afterlife follow from fact that primarily it is our soul… the spirit within that is the absolute master and controller of human body and not vice versa! Every soul manifests a human body to work out its karma… remove dross impurities within! In its lifetime every soul passes through a maze of 8.4 million manifestations on the whole!
After passing through 7.3 million manifestations in insect, plant and animal life… the soul http://www.godrealized.com/hinduism_atman_soul.html finally manifests human form! The moment human beings reached stage of enlightenment (kaivalya jnana)… all is over for soul… the spirit within! Having reached stage of absolute purity… purified soul need not manifest a body further… need for soul to manifest a body further now ceased to exist!
This illustrates an interesting feature of a lot of religious proselytism: the arguments sound convincing to someone who already believes them, but completely nuts to everyone else. Let’s dissect this one:
Life after death happens because the Bhagavad Gita says so. The Bhagavad Gita is true because everyone who your religion says to have achieved enlightenment (a status you confer only upon members of your religion) is a member of your religion.
To anybody else, even people with religions of their own, this is obviously not evidence of anything; it’s just religious egocentrism. So why are such arguments so common? (Oh, and you should totally believe that the Bible is true, because Jesus died for your sins. I hear this one all the time.)
If it doesn’t sound reasonable, you probably haven’t understood it yet. Often because a set of words are more load-bearing than they appear on the surface.
For example, ‘achieved enlightenment’ may be something that they have had experience with and equate with wisdom. If someone who seems quite wise (at one or two or more levels above yourself) believes in Bhagavad Gita and says their wisdom comes from Bhagavad Gita, you might believe them. Alternatively, you may have identified some thoughts in yourself as ‘wise’, and then find these thoughts expressed easily and matter of factly by Bhagavad Gita. This is how religions build their credibility: through awe and recognition of common (but noT-too-common) truth.
(So I’ll add that) maybe the problem with religion is that people don’t understand what the source of wisdom is. They think if they identify a source of one truth, that source is reliable for other truths. So the problem is epistemology, again.
Sometimes, a comment that looks like off topic, incoherent rambling (which has been down voted past the view threshold, so we really should not respond to it) really is off topic, incoherent rambling.
Where do you think they’re pulling the 7.3 million figure from?
Morendil… the figure of 7.3 million is clearly laid out in sacred Bhagavad Gita of Hinduism!
Okay! Thanks for the info! You can leave now!
byrnema… one who knows Bhagavad Gita… becomes the knower of all… gains omniscience for all practical purposes… become an enlightened one!
sketerpot… Bhagavad Gita of Hinduism is one such sacred scripture which has universal appeal. Hinduism primarily is never termed a religion… it is a way of life! Bhagavad Gita is not the sole propriety of Hinduism. Anyone belonging to any religion can follow precepts of Bhagavad Gita and reach stage of enlightenment (kaivalya jnana)!
Lord Krishna http://www.godrealized.com/lordkrishna.html … an avatar of his era (God manifest human form) who gave doctrine of Bhagavad Gita to mankind came about 1500 years earlier to Jesus Christ… about thousand years earlier to Mahavira… the 24th Tirthankara (preceptor) of Jainism! Gautama Buddha followed about 77 years later to Mahavira!
The doctrine of Bhagavad Gita contains truth and only truth. Albert Einstein… a great physicist was an open exponent of teachings of Bhagavad Gita! The prime reason why people failed to understand gist of Bhagavad Gita is… contents of Bhagavad Gita can never be understood literally… it needs reading in between the lines!
Please provide evidence of this, drop the subject, or leave.
RobinZ… putting it other way… normal human beings used their brain 1%! Albert Einstein used his brain 4%! An enlightened one… the knower of Bhagavad Gita used ones brain hundred percent! For assimilating pearls of wisdom contained in Bhagavad Gita… practice of absolute celibacy http://www.godrealized.com/celibacy.html for a minimum period of 12 years in continuation is necessitated!
This 12 years practice of absolute celibacy results in full awakening of kundalini shakti http://www.godrealized.com/glossary/Kundalini-energy.html … that results in opening of Shahastra Pushpa (thousand petaled Lotus) within our brain that exists behind forehead! The moment this happens… one gained enlightenment… liberated self from cycle of birth and death forever! This is all contained in Bhagavad Gita of Hinduism!
If at any stage one feels offended… rather feels I am trying to teach Hinduism… I shall quit! I am only putting my perspective from Hinduism point of view… the oldest religion of world!
Also uses exclamation marks one hundred percent!
Sorry, but you are not ready to contribute to this site. You will need more English fluency, clarity of thought and general writing skill before you will be able to write anything that we consider worth reading.
I found this article in which John Bischof speaks out against cryonics, so I mailed him, and he very politely replied almost immediately to say that cryobiologists consider cryonics a “faith based approach”. Sadly he provided no more detail; I’ve mailed again asking him to write on the subject at greater length.
Update: he replied to my reply. I have also had mail from Ralph Merkle! Will make a new post on my blog with details later.
For those of us who are relatively newcomers to the site, please provide a link to your blog. Thanks.
Let me Google that for you.
I know i’m a dumbass sometimes. Re-reading I found the link at the top of the page even! Sigh.
I have bookmarked the blog now.
I’m just waiting for the day someone pulls that shit on me. I know I’ll get mine...
The New Yorker recently had an article titled The Iceman. Judging from the abstract, it’s anti- and not very high quality (excerpt: “The consensus appears to be that when you try to defrost a frozen corpse you get mush”, a type of argument covered in your post.)
Hint: Just in case you’re not within reach of this issue of The New Yorker, a little bit of Google-fu turns up a scan of said article.
I found the piece not particulary exciting. It’s certainly well-written but Jill Lepore obviously wasn’t interested in digging too deeply re: the scientific or non-scientific foundations of cryonics. Instead we get a lot of impressionistic descriptions of Michigan (where the Cryonics Institute is located), slightly disdainful accounts of the CI’s facilities and many synopses of SF stories .The latter isn’t without reason, though, because Robert Ettinger was very influenced by Science Fiction.
Mrs. Lepore does her best to let Ettinger come across as grumpy, though I suspect that this “grumpiness” has to do with him knowing all to well what will very likely come out of it when a general interest magazine visits the CI. In other words, we are witness to a small culture clash: Of course it must be strange to a historian like Lepore that Ettinger has a completely different sensibility!
Reading that led me to this: Corpsicles in The New Yorker
The Onion on cryonics for college grads.
It seems to me that my death is most likely to come from one of 2 scenarios:
1) I become fatally ill with some disease (e.g. cancer) and, after a period of time, succumb to it.
2) I die suddenly as a result of great physical trauma (e.g. car accident)
Obviously other scenarios are possible, but I think these are the most likely. In case 1 I have plenty of time to sign up for cryonics (and could possibly pay for it with a “settlement” of some sort on my life insurance). In case 2, my body and brain suffer massive physical damage, and the cryonics company probably doesn’t get involved until there’s nothing left to salvage.
In either case, no great harm befalls me for waiting—over time the process will become more plausible (or possibly even proven), or maybe it’ll be disproven, and in any event the costs will likely come down as my income and net worth rise… so what’s the rush?
Life insurance will become more expensive after you are diagnosed with a terminal illness.
True, but I’ve got life insurance already—this would just be a matter of “re-purposing” a small percentage of it. Or maybe I’ll just pay it out of my pocket after I get sick—the insurance isn’t really a critical part of the plan.
P.S. does anyone know the legalities of cryonics? For example, suppose I pay for it with cash advances on all my credit cards, and then “die”. Many years later I’m somehow brought back to life… do I still have that debt (plus interest and penalties, of course), or has it been wiped out? Maybe it depends on how I’m brought back: if my physical body were to be brought back, I think most people would expect the debt to stick with me (after all, I didn’t really die—I just took a long nap)… but if I’m reincarnated as a computer program, it might be a little murkier...
Legally, you’re just dead. Your life insurance gets paid out as specified, your assets get sold off and dispersed, your creditors take what they can, and after a while, the files are finally closed. What happens to your corpse is a private detail.
There are cases of people returning long after being declared dead, but from what I remember, they usually got very little back. The law doesn’t like loose threads; eg. statute of limitations.
(And seriously—interest? What’s the point of charging a returnee a few centuries of interest? If the relevant currencies, sovereignties, and entities even exist, compounded interest could be in the billions.)
Why do you want to be frozen only when your death is long anticipated? Why would you prefer not to be frozen if your death was sudden?
Or is there some advantage you get from waiting I’m not seeing?
(Death meaning of course legal death here)
Did you read his original post? Sudden death for an otherwise healthy adult is likely to involve severe physical trauma (car accident) or require an autopsy (unexpected deaths of healthy adults generally do) and so greatly lower your chances of being successfully preserved.
This is one of the reasons I don’t think cryonics is a good investment for me in my current situation—based on what I’ve been able to glean from mortality statistics there is a fairly narrow range of circumstances where I might die in the next 20 years and be in a good state for successful preservation.
Alcor/CI will dispense with the money according to your instructions if there’s no chance of cryopreservation. The only difference between relying on this and re-purposing in time is that if you do die young in a cryopreservable way, you get the wrong outcome.
Also, sorting out cryonics is hard enough when you’re not terminally ill.
(I can’t remember if we actually know CaptainOblivious2′s gender—am following your example)
Oh, and I’d point out that you may have issues renewing your insurance if you get a terminal disease. I don’t know the ins-and-outs but it wouldn’t surprise me terribly if term insurance might be hard to get if you outlive a particular time period. (‘Why yes, we’d be glad to renew your term insurance policy Mr. Oblivious2; there’s just the small matter of your health records...’)
I don’t know whether this is on topic since it is not a technical argument, but it is from my field of expertise which is economics. From the CI Faq: “Cryonics is practiced because of a belief that the damage caused by current cryopreservation can someday be repaired.”
Now from the preceding paragraphs I get the feeling that science proceeds in the way of developing better preservation techniques that reduce the potential damage. So damage repairing technologies would have to be developed separately. In order for those technologies to be developed, however, there needs to be an economic gain expected. Now what would that gain be? The money payed for cryonics has already been payed. New customers are gained by better preservation techniques not by repairing techniques. The knowledge of the preserved people would probably be obsolete by then.
A small amount of people signing up for cryonics is necessary to show that to be a viable market so that preservation technologies are being developed at all. However if the customer base is too large without significant advances in this field the pressure to develop better preservation technologies is reduced. In any case the people already preserved the old way are probably dead unless there would be a significant amount of preserved people whom future societies value only for their personalities or any inflicted damage is in fact negligible already.
No, I wouldn’t consider this to be on-topic, sorry. I’d like to stay focussed on technical feasibility and the arguments raised in the article.
I think he raised a very valid concern. Also, cost is a very important dimension in terms of technological development. If money were not an issue, I have little doubt that we would have seen manned missions to Mars and several asteroids. However, money is very much an issue.
Why will so much go into recovering brains when new ones are so damn cheap?
I’m not disputing that it’s a valid concern, I’m trying to focus on one particular question in the discussion rather than just opening another general discussion on the subject of cryonics.
Just two minutes ago, a very good anti-cryonics argument appeared to me. This is not my opinion, just my solution to an intellectual puzzle. Note that it is not directly relevant to the original post: I will not claim that the technology does not work. I will claim that it is not useful for me.
Let us first assume that I don’t care too much about my future self, in the simple sense that I don’t exercise, I eat unhealthy food, etc. Most of us are like that, and this is not irrational behavior: We simply heavily discount the well-being of our future selves, even using a time-based cutoff. (Cutoff is definitely necessary: If a formalized decision theory infinitely penalizes eating foie gras, then I’ll skip the decision theory rather than foie gras. :) )
Now comes the argument: If I sign up for cryonics, I’ll have serious incentives to get frozen sooner rather than later. I fear that these incentives consciously or unconsciously influence my future decisions in a way I currently do not prefer. Ergo cryonics is not for me.
What are the incentives? Basically they all boil down to this: I would want my post-cryo personality to be more rather than less similar to my current personality. If they revive my 100 years old self, there will be a practical problem (many of his brain cells are already dead, he is half the man he used to be) and a conceptual problem (his ideas about the world will quite possibly heavily diverge from my ideas, and this divergence will be a result of decay rather than progress).
To be honest, I’d prefer that discussion here stay focussed on the things that I raise in the article rather than becoming another general discussion about cryonics. My blog post on the subject ends with a “comment policy” that asks commenters to stay focussed on technical feasibility, and to avoid presenting novel arguments against technical feasibility in the comments, since if you accept what I argue, any such argument that had merit would deserve more prominence than a comment.
Er, should this be “cryonics pioneer”?
EDIT: Huh, apparently he’s both! Never mind...
I’m a crypto guy first of all, so that’s the context I think of him in.
Is anyone aware of any article discussing scalability issues?
I agree that from an individual standpoint it is rational to sign up for cryonics but is it really a good idea for mankind in general to massively sign up for cryonics? Would it not create an awful drag on the economy that would delay or maybe even prevent mankind to acquire the technology necessary for reviving the “dead”?
From what I read on the business model of Alcor and CI, the costs of sustaining cryonisation are paid by the dividends/interests of a small capital constituted through life insurance. If more and more people enter cryonisation, there will be more and more of that capital that needs to find investment opportunities. Is it economically feasible to provide capital revenue for an ever growing amount of capital?
Has someone really considered a society where the number of the “dead” equals the number of the living? Has someone considered a society where the number of the “dead” equals ten times the number of the living?
I saw “economies of scale” mentioned a number of time. Have those economies of scale been quantified? Are they real or is it a magical word? What if we do not manage to grow the energy supply fast enough to ensure cryostasis for everyone?
Have the ethical implications of the risk posed to future generations potential economic and technological growth by massive cryonisation been considered? What if what I pay for my cryonisation would be better used in medical or AI research? What if that money could be used to accelerate the coming of “immortality” for my grand-children? What if my cryonisation slows down or prevents the coming of “immortality” for everyone (including myself but also my grand-children)?
http://lesswrong.com/lw/2f5/cryonics_wants_to_be_big/
I think it depends on whether there are good ideas which haven’t been funded, and whether the economic and social structure is such as to take advantage of the good ideas.
You might be interested in The Great Stagnation by Tyler Cowan—as I understand it, he argues that economic grow has slowed in the developed countries (just the US?) because of a lack of good ideas.
I’ve heard the theory that the recent recession can be traced back to unduly low interest rates, which led to vast amounts of capital wandering the world searching for excessively high returns, and therefore vulnerable to scams.
In science fiction, there’s Why Call Them Back from Heaven? by Simak and Cryoburn by Bujold.
Thanks to both of you for your pointers.
I’ve written a short followup blog entry detailing the latest in my ongoing search.
I’m an AGW believer (is that the right term), but I’m skeptical whether there’s more money for the pro or anti side. Steve McIntyre is retired and gets by on tips (though admittedly he has not outright denied AGW), how many grants have the RealClimate bloggers gotten? At any rate, I think it’s a poor form of argumentation to suggest some side of a dispute is just crap inflated with money while overlooking the substantial amounts on the opposite side.
My critique of cryonics: other things are more important, and more worthy of my money, than preserving my own life.
That is indeed an admirable self-sacrifice.
Do you also donate all the money you would otherwise spend on health insurance?
I have three buckets of spending:
Life support—food and shelter. It’s expensive to keep on living, and earning more money. Consider this overhead.
Frivolous pursuits—WoW, booze, the occasional passion in music or literature. This takes less money than you might think. Wastage.
Donations—I’m planning for this to be 22.5 percent of my gross income this year. By contrast, this will be 20 times my actual health insurance costs, barring unexpected personal injury, and will likely be more than life support and frivolous pursuits combined.
To note another contrast, the cost of a single full body preservation at Alcor, plus membership dues, appears to be close to the SIAI yearly budget.
The real cost of your “Frivolous pursuits” is time. Spend less time drunk or on WoW, use the saved time to work at Burger King and use the money from Burger king to pay for cryonics.
At that point, the equation would be, “work at Burger King and use the money ”. The same for getting life insurance. And that option is currently not feasible due to the fact that I already have a hard time going to work at the job I have. There’s a reason I called it wastage.
I know it sounds like a status grab and signalling and all that jazz, so let me explain: I consider my martyrdom to be a symptom of depression that just so happens to benefit certain organizations. I doubt they’d complain, despite its effects on my life. I used to tell people I didn’t know what to do with my money (interesting aside: the dozen or so times I said this, the answer was always the same, nearly verbatim: “give it to me”), then for a while I told people I was going to live forever (cryonics, transhumanism, etc), now I tell people I’m going to save the world.
Ideally, I’d like to do both, but right now the cost of cryonics is outrageous when compared with the (lack of) funding put toward such important issues as existential risk. I honestly believe the values don’t even fit on the same scale.
Power to you.
I’d only note that the monthly cost of WoW is roughly half as much as the monthly insurance cost for cryonics.
Yes. And if I had life insurance, I don’t see why I wouldn’t sign that over to the same organizations I donate to, since the cost is not the monthly dollar figure, but the amount spent on the process. For $150,000, you can preserve one failed human body with a low chance of success, or you can fund existential risk research for most of a year.
If I were some kind of perfect utility maximizer, I would be able to cut out all the non-essentials, but I have akrasia more strongly than I’ve heard it stated by anyone else on this site. I can actively look at a situation, say to myself, “Y is wrong. It will hurt me, it will hurt the other people involved, and produces no good in the foreseeable future. X is better in every way.” And then I take action Y. If I were a theist, I’d say I was possessed, as I walk down the sidewalk ranting at myself, “What are you doing?! You know it’s wrong! You don’t even want it! Why are you doing it?!” on my way to do Y.
I take my victories where I can get them. I consider the value equation to be very rational—existential risk is far more important than one life. The possibly rationalized part is where I don’t do both to mitigate uncertainty. I can see this as potentially a form of cryocrastination brought on by low self-esteem. I can also see it as counteracting the abnormally large emphasis we place on our own continued existence, bringing the value comparison more fully into view… it’s just a good thing not everyone feels that way.
That’s for term life insurance that becomes worthless if you don’t die within a specified time period. After that time period, if you don’t have $50,000 in the bank, you’ll have to pay a much higher premium because you’re older.
Would you say you are a utiliarian—or aspire to be one? [edit: thanks for your reply]
I try not to apply labels to myself since they limit options. I currently have strong issues with the concept of value / utilons.
I’m a long way from being an expert neuroscientist, but as far as I can tell the mechanism under which neural change happens essentially involves a few physical changes:
1) Myelination—the Myelin coating over the Axon of a neuron grows, making the Axon conduct it’s signal more powerfully and quickly
2) Change in number and distribution of neurotransmitter receptors in the dendrites of the neuron. Obviously the more of them you have, the more likely the neuron is to fire in the presence of the transmitter which fits that receptor.
3) Change in the number and distribution of vesicles which release neurotransmitters in the Axon Terminal. When the neuron fires, the vesticles in it’s Axon terminal’s release their load of neurotransmitters. Again, the more of them you have the stronger the signal to make the neuron the other side of the synapse fire.
4) The actual path the Axon’s and Dentrites take, snaking from one cell to the next. Litterally the ‘wiring’.
There may well be other changes to the neural structure which change the way it behaves, but these seem to be the major mechanisms. Interestingly, a neuron firing tends not only to release neurotrasmitters from it’s vesticles, but also to change the structure of the neuron, make it grow more receptors etc
So does Cryonics actually preserve these things?
I’m not in a position to tell. If the cell walls were really being burst, then no, I doubt that the number and distribution of vesticles and receptors would be preserved since those things are built into the cell walls. My impression was that proper cryopreservation did indeed store the cells intact though.
If the cells are stored intact, including the position of the receptors and releasors in the cell walls at each end of every branch of the axons in the neurons, then I think this seems likely to be where the brain’s long-term state is stored.
There’ll doubtless also be short-term memories which are just feedback loops of signals travelling around the brain. They’ll be lost, I would think, just as they were lost in my brother when he spent a few weeks in a coma and remembered nothing until the day before he got beaten up.
Course, I’m nowhere near qualified to really judge either. All I’ve done is read a bit.
I signed up for the Alcor UK mail-list at the beginning of the year. It’s pretty much silent though. As far as I can tell, shipping your dead body to the US is the only way it’s really gonna work. I fear that makes it much less viable here than there.
If the topic is the technical plausibility of cryonics then this is on-topic, but I’m hoping to focus a little more narrowly than that, on the specific subject of existing writing that argues against cryonics, its accuracy and quality, and what we can infer from that.
BTW: I too am in the UK and having real trouble!
Heard back from the guy I emailed. Sounds like the meeting next month is mostly for folks who are signed up already, with more policy and practice stuff than enrolment and talk about the actual process.
I’ve asked him if he’ll either do a Q&A here on exactly what UK folks would have to do, or else suggest someone who will.
Seems like it’d be a lot of effort to trek up to Sheffield for just the answers to some questions.
Hopefully he’ll say yes :)
Yeah, I can’t help on finding stuff written on cryo though I’m afraid. That’s the topics it’d have to address to have much meaning to me: Whether or not the distribution of those proteins in the cell membrane are stored or destroyed. It might still not work even if it saves those things, but if it doesn’t save those things it’s not got a chance.
There’s some kinda cryonics UK meeting next month which I’d half planned to think about going to. Will give it more thought when I get back from a work-trip next week.
{EDIT: Actually, I’ll email ’em now and see what the score is]
“Pseudoscience” isn’t the only possible criticism of cryonics. One could believe that it may be scientifically possible in theory, still without thinking that it’s a good idea to sign up for cryonics in the present day. (Basically, by coming up with something like a Drake equation for the chance of it working out positively for a current-day human, and then estimating the probability of the terms to be very low.)
You’re right, that most of the popular criticism of cryonics is mere non-technical mocking. Still, there’s a place for reasoned objections as well.
There certainly is. Please point me to them.
This article http://www.alcor.org/printable.cgi?fname=Library%2Fhtml%2FWillCryonicsWork.html gives something like a drake equation for cryonics
Maybe it’s the correlation between believing in cryonics and being a smart rationalist, but for my money the most rational arguments against cryonics [Edit: or how cryonics is being practiced] don’t come from people against cryonics. They come from cryonics supporters exploring the other side of the argument, or confronting what’s wrong so they can try to fix it. I take that as strong evidence that those against cryonics are getting something badly wrong.
I nominate the appropriate bits of the above Alcor article as currently the best anti-cryonics article in the world.
Ben Best is also now talking about taking on the challenge to write the best anti-cryonics article.
Did he ever write it? It’s been 2 or 3 months, and I don’t see anything in http://www.benbest.com/cryonics/cryonics.html
Not that I heard about. I don’t think there’s much point to be honest, he wouldn’t have credibility with disbelievers.
The first 4 minutes of this is another good example. The guy on the left is Mike Darwin.
Love love love this article! A ton of interesting questions to chew on as I wrestle with this problem.
Thanks very much for the link. I bookmarked it and will return to it.
Maybe it’s the correlation between believing in cryonics and being a smart rationalist, but for my money the most rational arguments against cryonics don’t come from people against cryonics. They come from cryonics supporters exploring the other side of the argument, or confronting what’s wrong so they can try to fix it. I take that as strong evidence that those against cryonics are doing it wrong.
I nominate the appropriate bits of the above Alcor article as currently the best anti-cryonics article in the world.
Betting on technology that doesn’t currently exist is never a sure thing. But cryonics is a good deal even if the probability of revival is low.
Thanks again! I’d still prefer if this sentence were modified so that it doesn’t appear to be your thesis on first reading:
You could bracket it in a “skeptics claim X” the way a (good) journalist would, perhaps...
I’ve replaced the full stop with a semicolon, to make it clearer that the “To its critics” opening covers that whole claim.
I agree that the link doesn’t seem to be working. But I would very interested to learn more. I haven’t been all that skeptical of cryonics until now. Logically it seems like if there is a way to preserve the information in your brain, then one day somebody will figure out how to extract it. I guess that’s a bit like running an engine on sand. After all, sand in theory contains a great deal of energy in the form of nuclear bonds.
BTW I’ve studied the issue carefully and probably disagree with you about global warming. Probably it’s too charged an issue for rational debate in this forum, but I did lay out my case here:
brazil84.wordpress.com
Your “read more” link doesn’t work.
The current Wikipedia article on cryonics states flatly that it is pseudoscience. The citation is: https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2002-09-29-0209290429-story.html which again recites the freezing argument, and says that critics include “nearly all mainstream scientists”, without really saying who.
I was unconvinced. But attempts to introduce some balance were quickly reverted and got the article locked. I don’t have the Wikipedia editing experience to attempt to win an edit war, but if it’s still the case that
Then this seems like a problem. The Wikipedia article is often the first hit on web searches for “cryonics”, and so may influence public opinion in a way that may endanger the legal safety of cryonics organizations. Maybe someone should Do Something.
Here is another idea that might be argued to be anti-cryonics. Should we clone Neanderthals?
There were some fantastic links here. Thankyou!
Does anyone here know what the break-down is among cryonics advocates between believing that A) in the future cryopreserved patients will be physically rejuvinated in their bodies and B) in the future cryopreserved patients will be brain-scanned and uploaded?
I think there is a reasonable probability of effective cryopreservation and rejuvination of a mammal (at least a mouse) in the next 25 years, but I think our ability to ‘rejuvinate’ will be largely dependent on the specific cryoincs technologies developed at that time, and that it is very unlikely cryonics methods developed before that time will be acceptable for rejuvination. Realize that once an effective cryopreservation method has been developed, socially there will be much more interest in perfecting it than there will be in going back to the old technology used to freeze past generations and figuring out how we can get that to work for their sake.
I’ve added most of your sources to the TakeOnIt wiki debate:
“Is cryonics worthwhile?”
http://www.takeonit.com/question/318.aspx
The cryonics debate now has four sub debates:
Is information-theoretic death the most real interpretation of death?
Is cryonic restoration technically feasible in the future?
Is living forever or having a greatly extended lifespan desirable?
Is there life after death?
Am I missing any major sub-debate?
Wow, the Caplan and Stark arguments against aren’t worth adding here, I don’t think.
Edited to add: the question I’m most keen to hear arguments on is “does the cryonic freezing process cause information-theoretic death?”
OK, per your suggestion I added the question: “Do the best currently available cryonic techniques cause information-theoretic death?”. I can’t actually find any expert who answers yes to this question. Any pointers?
P.S. I actually think the Caplan and Stark arguments reasonably reflect the mainstream objections to cryonics. However, if you know of better critics, please suggest some.
I forget who brought this up—maybe zero_call? jhrandom?--but I think a good question is “How quickly does brain information decay (e.g. due to autolysis) after the heart stops and before preservative measures are taken?” If the answer is “very quickly” then cryonics in non-terminal-illness cases becomes much less effective.
I came across a few cites supporting the “quite a bit” answer in the “Cold War” article at Alcor (linked elsewhere on this thread).
There’s more at the link.
I really appreciate this post. I am in the cryonics process, so it is nice to read an evaluation of the prospects. Even if I have made my decision for now, I could always cancel my life insurance.
The difference between cryonics and, for example, global warming denialism is that the former makes a claim like “it is probably a good thing to do X”, while the latter makes a claim like “X is/is not true”. These are completely different things!
Perhaps it is better to compare it to the anti vaccine movement. They do make a claim of the form “X is good/bad for you”. Now the difference becomes about evidence. For cryonics there is little evidence either way: it has never worked, and it has never not-worked. In such a case there is little we can do beyond trying to use reason alone (always a dangerous thing) and waiting for more experiments.
On the other hand, there is a lot of evidence that vaccines work just fine. Denying that evidence is wrong.
Your definition of evidence is too narrow.
Why is it a sin to deny a lot of evidence, but not a little evidence?
Because the less evidence there is, the better the chance that we’re mistaken about it, all else equal. But this seems obvious enough that I guess I’m missing your point.
Sure, the weaker the evidence, the less you’ll be misled on average by ignoring it. But there doesn’t come a point where ignoring evidence is not misleading at all compared to updating on it. It’s never going to be a good idea to start saying to yourself “that’s only a little bit of evidence, so I’ll just pretend it wasn’t there”.
If updating were costless, I’d agree.
I’d just like to note that Quackwatch is more like a guardian of medical orthodoxy than a place of truthful investigation and has an unflattering reputation among life extension enthusiasts. It provides good conclusions in regard to blatantly non-medicine therapies like faith healing or homepathy but tends to fail when a careful evaluation of evidence is required, for example in the case of diet or supplements.
I posted an argument here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/1mc/normal_cryonics/1i92
I didn’t see a major criticism. There were some interesting responses and questions, like what constitutes a 5% increase in quality of life (I don’t know; it’s a crude metric), but my point stands. You’re better off spending your money on marginal increases in quality of life with high probabilities of success than on cryonics.
That argument does not address technical feasibility and is not on-topic for this post. Instead, you assume that feasibility is very low.
Also, my survey doesn’t include blog comments—I’m looking specifically for articles and other writing designed to stand alone.
BTW, it’s ironic, given the goals of this web site, how much groupthink occurs with regard to cryonics. Robin and Eliezer have biased the crowd a lot on this one.
Actually, the recent posts on cryonics have dug up new information, some of which contradicts Eliezer’s earlier assertions. The cost of cryonics has been established as much higher than $300/year for some people (e.g. myself). The difficulty of signing up if you live outside the US has been highlighted. The strong opposition of a mainstream group of scientists, cryobiologists, has been brought forward. Our best efforts to uncover actual evidence against the basic science (ciphergoth’s current focus of inquiry) have not yet succeeded. But we keep going.
Your argument from utility has received responses, for instance I have clearly stated that at $300/year I would jump to sign up, since I already spend at least that much on things that bring me a negligible increase in life satisfaction. The quote I have received is closer to $2000/year and that is large enough to give me pause, given that I currently enjoy an unreliable level of income as a freelancer.
But your argument is also an argument in favor, to anyone who has enough money that the marginal utility of $2000/year becomes insignificant so that the expected utility of longer life again dominates.
If you’re going to call “groupthink” on the current discussion, I request that you hold yourself to at least as high an epistemic standard as the people who are participating in the discussion, and substantiate your accusation of groupthink with actual evidence and analysis.
Otherwise, “groupthink” can too easily become one of those reverse applause lights. What should we call them, “boo lights”? Are those used on TV? Anyway, I’ve seen people (here and elsewhere) use the word to cheaply establish their status as a skeptic, without actually doing any critical thinking or even basic due diligence. That devalues the technical meaning of “groupthink”.
We want the term groupthink to still be useful when we really need it—when we actually succumb to groupthink.
I vote down any comment that is no more than an accusation of groupthink without evidence. It’s the genetic fallacy.
It sounds like the kind of thing that would contribute to groupthink.
What a fine comment to be posted under a parent voted down to −5 where no one will ever see it.
Thanks. The bottom half I’m already planning to yank up to a post, per wedrifid’s request, probably tomorrow and certainly sometime this week.
The top half only summarizes evidence discussed elsewhere in the Normal Cryonics thread and the root post, all of which I hope will get consolidated somewhere at some point—though I’m less sure I’ll be the one to do that.
I find myself wondering how common this kind of thing is in the LW corpus—people finding useful observations buried under heavily downvoted ones, presumably egregious mistakes. (I tend to think better about things by explaining them to others, and mistakes tend to draw out my most sincere attempts. But that could be just me.) LW is old enough by now that mining the comments database might yield interesting patterns.
I’m not sure that merited a top-level post, but it would merit a top-level comment in this thread.
Last half comment + more expansion and a few linkages to the other related concepts you refer to + top level post = lots of karma + happy wedrifid + An easy link-to-previous-post comment to go with the downvotes that so many of us use in these sorts of situations.
Will do.
“Quantum chemistry” a new window into lives of molecules
I suppose the question is how fragile memory really is and if there are any quantum effects involved?
Roger Penrose is now on related points looking more credible.
I think cryonics compares unfavourably in financial terms to the more conventional route to immortality—namely having babies—for most people.
There will be a few exceptions - elderly men with no kids who can’t get a date, post-menopasual women with no kids, the otherwise infertile, rich people locked into unproductive marriages—etc.
No doubt this contributes to cryonics’s lack of popularity.
“I don’t want to be immortal by having kids; I want to be immortal by not dying.”
- Woody Allen, mutatis mutandis
In biology 101 one learns that most organisms value having kids over living for a long time.
It appears to be fairly easy to trade kids for longer life—adopt a regime of dietary energy restriction.
Very few people do that. I figure they mostly value kids over a long life.
Also, check out the “cryonics wives” effect. It looks as though some people are not happy about the resource-investment conflict between ice and offspring.
Prospective sleepers no-doubt have their own values. I am describing one reason why most people don’t sign up for cryonics. It’s partly because it makes little economic sense.
“In biology 101 one learns that most organisms value having kids over living for a long time.”
This is very definitely a confusion over what evolution values versus what organisms value. Suppose you were faced with a choice: get sterilized now, or get shot in ten years. Evolution would favor B but the vast majority of people themselves would favor A.
“Very few people do that. I figure they mostly value kids over a long life.”
Most people don’t know about CR and don’t know what they want very clearly anyway.
Interestingly though, if the choice is: get shot now or one of your children gets shot now most people would choose the former.
Your example is pathological. “Painless sterilisation” and “being shot in ten years” are uncommon as choices to be made in the ancestral environment. By contrast, most organisms constantly face decisions regarding whether to expend resources on body maintenance programs or courtship, mating and reproduction.
Like I said, most organisms value having kids over living for a long time. That is because nature is concerned with reproduction—and not longevity. If you still do not “get” that, try sitting in on the class I mentioned.
“Your example is pathological. “Painless sterilisation” and “being shot in ten years” are uncommon in the ancestral environment.”
Yes, that’s why the two are different- because evolution did a lousy job at making an organism’s desires match its own desires.
“Like I said, most organisms value having kids over living for a long time. That is because nature is concerned with reproduction—and not longevity. If you still do not “get” that, try sitting in on the class I mentioned.”
You do not understand the difference between what evolution wants and what an organism wants. They are not the same thing. See http://lesswrong.com/lw/l0/adaptationexecuters_not_fitnessmaximizers/.
For “lousy” read “excellent”.
You seem to be having difficulty with reading what I wrote. I never claimed that “what evolution wants” and “what an organism wants” referred to the same thing in the first place. You appear to be criticising a straw man of your own making.
You are saying, “Evolution would want organisms to value X, therefore organisms really do value X”. I pointed out that this is not valid logic, and gave a case where the logic breaks down. What is your reply? From your comment “For “lousy” read “excellent”″ it seems to be faith in the ability of evolution, to which my reply is http://lesswrong.com/lw/ks/the_wonder_of_evolution/.
What I originally said was:
“most organisms value having kids over living for a long time.”
I said MOST organisms—and referred to a specific example: kids vs lifespan.
Your representation of my position drops the qualifying word “most” and generalises it. That is not a legitimate operation in an argument.
Also, perhaps best to stop using quotation marks when attributing distorted versions of my views to me.
You appeared to be generalizing in this case from ‘most organisms’ to ‘most people’ which doesn’t seem valid to me.
I do also think is is generally true that most people value having kids over living for a long time—though I wasn’t making a logical generalisation from “most organisms” to “most people” in the absence of other observations.
Biology has reproduction as an ultimate goal, and longevity as an instrumental one—and most people’s actions seem broadly consistent with that to me—though obviously there are a few methusalahites.
“I said MOST organisms—and referred to a specific example: kids vs lifespan.”
You were obviously not excluding humans, since you then said immediately afterward:
“It appears to be fairly easy to trade kids for longer life—adopt a regime of dietary energy restriction. Very few people do that. I figure they mostly value kids over a long life.”
If you had said “most organisms would prefer to die in a few years rather than be sterilized, but humans are different because we have more complex value systems” you might at least have a case, but you’re very clearly trying to extent your argument from biology to humans (at least most humans) and it very clearly fails.
Humans are organisms too. They appear to do a pretty good job of reproducing to me. Check with the 6.9 billion humans. Looking at their actions, it seems fairly evident that most humans value kids pretty highly—otherwise they wouldn’t consistently raise so many of them.
This is a complete non-sequitur. Most people, I think, want to have kids, but this says nothing about whether people want kids or not dying more. I, after all, have always wanted a pony.
That just looks like this to me:
Tom: “you’re very clearly trying to extent your argument from biology to humans”
Tim: “Humans are organisms too”
Tom: “This is a complete non-sequitur”
Tim: It seems as though you missed some connections.
Humans are organisms. But it does not follow that if something applies to most organisms, it applies to most humans; after all, most organisms cannot learn to read. This kind of inference would only follow if instead of “most organisms X” the claim was “most members of all species of organisms X”.
Riiight. However, note that I never claimed that “if something applies to most organisms, it applies to most humans” in the first place.
It’s true. You did not use those exact words. However, you made the claim about most organisms, and went on to talk about humans. If you did not mean to imply an inference, you a) failed and b) were talking even worse nonsense than I thought.
Not inference: analogy with supporting statements.
I made a statement about biology, then I made an observation about humans and said that this observation was consistent with the statement made about biology.
“For “lousy” read “excellent”.”
Then, pray tell, why do so many people work so hard to go from the Third World to the First World, when the Third World has higher population growth and so a higher chance for more surviving grandchildren?
“In biology 101 one learns that most organisms value having kids over living for a long time.”
This is a bit more advanced than you imply; I learned about the trade-off between long life and reproductive fitness in a second year dedicated evolution class.
If vasectomy and tubal ligation performed before having kids had the side effect of physical immortality, would you expect these procedures to be more or less popular than they are currently?
Why couldn’t you have kids and restrict calories? And correct me if I’m wrong, but I had thought that there was still very little evidence on caloric restriction actually extending life in humans.
I don’t know if calorie restriction is the same thing or how this applies to men, but underweight women will stop menstruating, and presumably can’t reproduce.
For your “why” question, perhaps see: http://cr.timtyler.org/why/
I still don’t understand why you can’t restrict calories and have kids, especially if you take a short break from calorie reduction to devote more energy to semen production or periods, and then resume the caloric restriction.
Think of how many calories it must take to be a bodybuilder or grow ginormous peacocks.
Hmm. Do you mean if you ignore the evidence about how it does that in lots of other species—and that it produces similar short-term health improvements and metabolic changes in humans and other animals—and instead insist on only counting studies directly involving human longevity as evidence?
Yes. I’m one of those crazy people who wants to see calorie reduction actually extend human lives before I believe that calorie reduction extends human lives.
But I would be interested in seeing evidence that caloric reduction leads to “short-term health improvements” in humans.
See here.
Caloric restriction clearly can benefit the average American. The verdict is out on whether this is only because the average American has such an awful diet that decreasing consumption necessarily decreases consumption of an awful diet; however, the additional evidence from other species combines to be pretty compelling in my mind.
I don’t partake in chronic caloric restriction, but I fast occasionally, ideally as much as I can while maintaining the amount of muscle that I like to keep, and without dropping my productivity levels. The evidence in favor of the health benefits of intermittent fasting seems slightly better than CR, although I believe it is only beginning to get more attention in research.
E.g.:
“At present, although only limited information is available on the effect of CR on humans, credible data exist that allow us to make some reasonable predictions. For example, a 1994 European clinical study on non-obese, middle-aged subjects under a 10-week, 20% energy reduction (Velthuis-te Wierik et al. 1994), and the 2-year Biosphere experience (Walford et al. 1999, 2002)), produced promising human data on CR’s efficacies (Rae 2004). Further, a recent report (Fontana et al. 2004) shows CR’s beneficial effects, including the suppression of an atherosclerosis and inflammation biomarker in humans, solidifying the possibility of CR’s extension of human longevity. One clear-cut and most immediate sign of CR’s effect in human subjects is body weight reduction, as in the case of rodents. It is important to realize how simple weight reduction (mainly from loss of fat mass, particularly visceral adiposity) could have a strong impact on inflammation, insulin resistance, and diabetes in humans as reported recently (Dandona et al. 2004; Ferroni et al. 2004). If obesity is a state of inflammation and obesity-related insulin resistance is a chronic inflammatory disease, as indicated by biomarkers, then a reduction of adiposity by CR alone could exert a great improvement on human health and functional longevity, which is already widely accepted by many biomedical researchers.”
http://www.springerlink.com/content/y4v8476763644335/fulltext.pdf
How many children do you have?
timtyler has actually already refused to respond to a direct inquiry as to how he goes about fulfilling this biological imperative (too lazy to find the link). File it under things that make you go “hmm...”.
Upvoted for humor, but please, don’t encourage him… Imagine having Tim Tyler as your dad…
Right, so: the ad hominen section. I hope you have fun probing into my personal life.
Meanwhile, perhaps try to remember to address the actual arguments while you are at it.
Your actual argument concerns how much money it takes to raise a kid. I claim expertise in this domain, having sired three. You have not established yours.
The price I’m quoted for cryonics is far less than I spend on “the conventional route to immortality” which, by the way, isn’t that. What it is is creating persons.
There’s a p(success) needed in this argument. The cost of raising kids is not up for debate here—we all have access to a lot of information about that.
For genetic immortality, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immortality#Physical
I concede that your (and my) life choices are not relevant to establishing the “cost” side of the equation. I mistakenly assumed you were comparing the unweighted costs.
If we want to reason about p(success), we have to define clearly what “success” means. We’re comparing apples to oranges if we multiply the cost of a child by p(immortality through children) on one side, and the cost of funding suspension by p(immortality through not dying) on the other.
One of the more obvious and simple approaches would be to calculate the expected delta in gene copies in (say) 2100 - as a result of investing a dollar in cryonics vs investing a dollar in kids. p(cryonics success) is the biggest unknown here.
If we believe the salesman’s figures, http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/WillCryonicsWork.html gives 0.15 and 0.0023 as optimistic and pessimistic estimates. I figure kids would win either way under many circumstances.
I don’t care about gene copies, I care about persons. And I care about not dying. Uploading counts as a success as far as I’m concerned.
I don’t love my kids for their genes. I don’t raise my kids for their genes. If I did, I would try to marry them off right after puberty, and hold it as moral to do so, and damn their education and all that. Breed them like rabbits; count that as success. So much for obvious and simple; more like obvious, simple and wrong.
What I value about my kids is the persons they are, and my pride in them and love for them is bound up in the fact that their personhood is a joint project, a creation of myself, my wife and each of them.
(EDIT: shoot, I ought to move this thread from here where it doesn’t belong. Any idea where it does belong?)
I was presenting what you get if you model people as fitness maximisers. That is a nice, simple and neat model. Feel free to calculate results using a different model if you like.
I am rather puzzled by your description of how you think a fitnesss maximiser would behave in a modern society. This is assuming you are not constrained by contractual obligations to your wife, I take it. Even then, are you sure that is best? In particular: if everyone else in society is following a K-selected strategy, is an r-selected strategy really very likely to work?
None of that is really very relevant to a thread which itself started out off-topic. (I’ll just note that my question upthread which offended you so much does turn out to have some relevance.)
If and when we get around to discussing which, of immortality through children or immortality through not dying, someone ought to want, we can take up r/K again in one of the leaf nodes. For now, I’m signing out.