Cryonics will definitely fail if the peace-of-mind cryonicists dominate it instead of the serious adults who want to survive.
You can see most cryonicists’ fundamental lack of seriousness from the fact that they talk a good game about how much they believe in scientific, technological and medical progress. So what happens when you try to draw their attention to the many correctible shortcomings in the real, existing practice of cryonics? They usually shrug those off as if these problems don’t matter.
Uh, hello?
This fundamental lack of an evidence- and reality-orientation in many cryonicists goes a long way towards explaining why mainstream people don’t find the cryonics idea credible, much less its haphazard implementation. I just have no patience these days with cryonicists who invoke Eric Drexler’s discredited fantasies from the 1980′s, or who make fallacious comparisons between cryonicists and the Wright brothers. Cryonics falls into the overlap between neuroscience and cryobiology, and progress in it will have to come from the application of those real sciences.
The way that cryonics was explained to me that made reasonable sense:
On a scale of spreading ashes far and wide; to cooling down your atoms so they are not moving enough. How preserved is thing X. Where ashes are pretty much 0 = not preserved, and cryogenic freezing is 0.99 and more if cooler.
after preserving there is a much higher chance of recreating the preserved entity than after ash spreading. if you believe the chance that medical and recovery technology will be able to revive a preserved entity to be non-zero; you should partake in cryonics for a future N. Where N may be as long as it takes to wait till your revival.
The major questions:
where does consciousness come from; and can we give it to back an entity that died? (while I don’t doubt we can answer that eventually; the answer might come in the form of “yes but its far too difficult and expensive”)
if for example we 3d print a brain that entirely matches a cryonically preserved entity; then link it up to a body, will it be possible to impart consciousness to it?
is it actually possible to measure the state of a preserved entity without destroying it?
can we recreate a preserved entity from the knowledge of where the atoms in its brain were?
will it ever be possible to do so? (as you get closer and closer to perfect recreation; it probably gets harder and harder to do)
I am not enrolled in cryonics, but have nothing against people taking the bet.
I absolutely agree with you that there are correctible shortcomings in today’s cryonics practice; I also agree that we’ll need a whole lot of neuroscience and cryobio to make further progress.
The Mikula paper linked in the article shows one possible avenue to verifiable cryo. The technology exists today: getting the engineering right so that it can be rolled out to paying customers seems to be the difficulty.
Cryonics will definitely fail if the peace-of-mind cryonicists dominate it instead of the serious adults who want to survive.
You can see most cryonicists’ fundamental lack of seriousness from the fact that they talk a good game about how much they believe in scientific, technological and medical progress. So what happens when you try to draw their attention to the many correctible shortcomings in the real, existing practice of cryonics? They usually shrug those off as if these problems don’t matter.
Uh, hello?
This fundamental lack of an evidence- and reality-orientation in many cryonicists goes a long way towards explaining why mainstream people don’t find the cryonics idea credible, much less its haphazard implementation. I just have no patience these days with cryonicists who invoke Eric Drexler’s discredited fantasies from the 1980′s, or who make fallacious comparisons between cryonicists and the Wright brothers. Cryonics falls into the overlap between neuroscience and cryobiology, and progress in it will have to come from the application of those real sciences.
The way that cryonics was explained to me that made reasonable sense:
On a scale of spreading ashes far and wide; to cooling down your atoms so they are not moving enough. How preserved is thing X. Where ashes are pretty much 0 = not preserved, and cryogenic freezing is 0.99 and more if cooler.
after preserving there is a much higher chance of recreating the preserved entity than after ash spreading. if you believe the chance that medical and recovery technology will be able to revive a preserved entity to be non-zero; you should partake in cryonics for a future N. Where N may be as long as it takes to wait till your revival.
The major questions:
where does consciousness come from; and can we give it to back an entity that died? (while I don’t doubt we can answer that eventually; the answer might come in the form of “yes but its far too difficult and expensive”)
if for example we 3d print a brain that entirely matches a cryonically preserved entity; then link it up to a body, will it be possible to impart consciousness to it?
is it actually possible to measure the state of a preserved entity without destroying it?
can we recreate a preserved entity from the knowledge of where the atoms in its brain were?
will it ever be possible to do so? (as you get closer and closer to perfect recreation; it probably gets harder and harder to do)
I am not enrolled in cryonics, but have nothing against people taking the bet.
I absolutely agree with you that there are correctible shortcomings in today’s cryonics practice; I also agree that we’ll need a whole lot of neuroscience and cryobio to make further progress.
The Mikula paper linked in the article shows one possible avenue to verifiable cryo. The technology exists today: getting the engineering right so that it can be rolled out to paying customers seems to be the difficulty.