If you have a technical argument against cryonics, please write it up as an actual blog post, ideally under your real name so you can flash your credentials. It will be the most substantial essay arguing for such a point ever written: see my blog. I’m pretty convinced that if there was really a strong argument of the sort you’re trying to make, someone would already have done this, so I take it as strong evidence that they haven’t.
This was supposed to be a quick side-comment. I have now promised to eventually write a longer text on the subject, and I will do so—after the current “bundle” of texts I’m writing is finished. Be patient—it may be a year or so. I am not prepared to discuss it at the level approaching a scientific paper; not yet.
Keep in mind two things. I am in favor of life extension, and I do not want to discourage cryonic research (we never know what’s possible, and research should go on).
I’ve signed up for cryonics (with Alcor) because I believe that if civilization doesn’t collapse then within the next 100 years there will likely be an intelligence trillions upon trillions of times smarter than anyone alive today.
If such an intelligence did come into being do you think it would have the capacity to revive my frozen brain?
While I agree that this is a relevant consideration for the big picture, I just wanted to note in a non-confrontational way that it has the appearance of unfairly shifting cognitive workload to the skeptic—which could perhaps result in the nasty side effect of preventing future skeptics from weighing in. Evaporative cooling and all that. A person specializing in synapse biochemistry probably shouldn’t have to (at least at first) consider all the aspects of future superintelligence in quite the same way that an AI researcher would.
Just to unpack a little on James_Miller’s idea: One example of how this could potentially come into play is that externally gathered data (for example—chat logs, videos, even the recorded reactions of other humans) could be extrapolated to generate a personality sim, and connectome data could be used to verify it.
Mining data from a lot of different sources, the superintelligence could perhaps get much closer to the original than the mostly-blank, yet connectome matching and genetically identical clone we would otherwise have. Having that matching connectome as a starting point could conceivably be an important part of making sure that the personality matches for the right reasons, i.e. comes out with similar structural-functional mappings.
Again, I’m not sure how much of this maps to the domain specific knowledge that kalla724 has, but I’d be fascinated to hear more.
‘Personality reconstruction’ is both less satisfying and more difficult to automate. I think most people who buy into cryonics would prefer to wake up remembering the things they never said in public, rather than having a patched-together doppelganger wear their clothes in the 31st century equivalent of Colonial Williamsburg.
Well, if reliably remembering the things I never said in public were an option, I’d sort of like that ability now rather than waiting until I die for some entity who may or may not deserve the label “me” to have it. In the meantime, I’ll go on reconstructing semifictional accounts of what might have happened based on the information I currently have handy, just like most people do.
Not weighing in either way on cryonics itself, but on the meta level: Why do you consider that strong evidence? It seems to me that most people who don’t think cryonics will work simply aren’t interested in it, and therefore haven’t tried very hard to prove that they’re right.
That’s not my experience; a great deal of anti-cryonics stuff has been written, and it’s my experience that a lot of people who think it won’t work seem to have quite strong feelings about it, so if there is a strong argument that lots of people know then it is surprising that no-one has written it up properly.
kalia724′s comment is an apparently-strong argument that I’d never heard, and you know I’ve actively looked for arguments for and against. I do think you’re putting a bit much hope in absence of evidence of criticism as being non-negligible evidence of absence of possible criticism—the space of concepts working scientists don’t bother thinking about is ridiculously huge, and cryonics hits quite a few green-ink heuristics (unfairly, IMO, but it does) which gets it filed with the mental spam in short order. edit: and see my Facebook post for a mutual friend of ours noting he has qualms about even writing something serious about cryonics as he risks a significant professional status hit by doing so—cryonics is that low-status.
kalia724 evidently doesn’t have time to write this up properly in the foreseeable future, so I think we’d need to ask around to see if there is, at the least, a nameable neuroscientist who thinks kalia’s assertions against cryonics have something to them. (I’ve just hit my socialmediasphere with the question. You, and everyone else interested, probably should too.)
cryonics hits quite a few green-ink heuristics (unfairly, IMO, but it does) which gets it filed with the mental spam in short order.
Even the stupidest pseudosciences or movements have received excellent debunking; for example, I would put the Urantia cult way down the list below cryonics, and yet, we still have Martin Gardner’s 500 page examination/debunking, Urantia: The Great Cult Mystery.
(I would point out, incidentally, that ‘nobody will criticize low-status things’ is a fully comprehensive proof of the non-existence of the entire skeptics movement, which is pretty much all about criticizing low-status things, and you probably would prefer not to use such a claim as your explanation of the lack of good cryonics criticism...)
A quite obvious possibility is that would-be debunkers who want try to go deeper than Penn and Teller style mockery soon realize that they would have to engage much more seriously with cryonics than with Urantia to try to debunk it—sound like they were taking it seriously—implying a far greater loss of status than soaring casually above Urantia, effortlessly trashing it without a hint of sympathy.
“Everyone who’s tried to ‘debunk’ this seems to have ended up writing casual mockery, and oddly enough no would-be skeptics ever seem to engage the arguments in technical detail, and the arguments are being made by people who sure look like they’re trying to wear technical hats and include a number of otherwise highly technical figures” seems to me like a quite common position when both of these aspects are combined. There are arguments that skeptics don’t bother engaging in detail, but they’re not technical. There are physicists who believe crazy things because they’re bad outside the laboratory, but then they are usually refuted by more than mockery. I may be prejudiced by being mostly interested only in things that are sensible to start with, but the overall state of affairs I have just described is pretty much what you’d expect a correct but weird-sounding idea to look like.
I have no status in science, so your last phrase is just silly. Scientists who are noted sceptics may want to criticise cryonics, and, of course, several have. But the effect I describe is something I saw someone who’d been specifically asked to comment as a scientist invoking, per the link which you should be able to read (rather than relying entirely on theoretical counterarguments, as you have); and I am, of course, noting it as one factor, not as the complete explanation you seem to have read it as.
A quite obvious possibility is that would-be debunkers who want try to go deeper than Penn and Teller style mockery soon realize that they would have to engage much more seriously with cryonics than with Urantia to try to debunk it—sound like they were taking it seriously—implying a far greater loss of status than soaring casually above Urantia, effortlessly trashing it without a hint of sympathy.
“Everyone who’s tried to ‘debunk’ this seems to have ended up writing casual mockery, and oddly enough no would-be skeptics ever seem to engage the arguments in technical detail, and the arguments are being made by people who sure look like they’re trying to wear technical hats and include a number of otherwise highly technical figures” seems to me like a quite common position when both of these aspects are combined. There are arguments that skeptics don’t bother engaging in detail, but they’re not technical. There are physicists who believe crazy things because they’re bad outside the laboratory, but then they are usually refuted by more than mockery. I may be prejudiced by being mostly interested only in things that are sensible to start with, but the overall state of affairs I have just described is pretty much what you’d expect a correct but weird-sounding idea to look like.
I think you may be missing a silent majority of people who passively judge cryonics as unlikely to work, and do not develop strong feelings or opinions about it besides that, because they have no reason to. I think this category, together with “too expensive to think about right now”, forms the bulk of intelligent friends with whom I’ve discussed cryonics.
I don’t think you’re addressing the subject of this thread, which is “does there exist a strong technical argument against cryonics that a lot of people already know”.
Summary: Expanding on what maia wrote, I find it plausible that many people could produce good technical arguments against cryonics but don’t simply because they’re not writing about cryonics at all.
I was defending maia’s point that there are many people who are uninterested in cryonics and don’t think it will work. This class probably includes lots of people who have relevant expertise as well. So while there are a lot of people who develops strong anti-cryonics sentiments (and say so), I suspect they’re only a minority of the people who don’t think cryonics will work. So the fact that the bulk of anti-cryonics writings lack a tenable technical argument is only weak evidence that no one can produce one right now. It’s just that the people who can produce them aren’t interested enough to bother writing about cryonics at all.
I wholeheartedly agree that we should encourage people who may have them to write up strong technical arguments why cryonics won’t work.
If you have a technical argument against cryonics, please write it up as an actual blog post, ideally under your real name so you can flash your credentials. It will be the most substantial essay arguing for such a point ever written: see my blog. I’m pretty convinced that if there was really a strong argument of the sort you’re trying to make, someone would already have done this, so I take it as strong evidence that they haven’t.
This was supposed to be a quick side-comment. I have now promised to eventually write a longer text on the subject, and I will do so—after the current “bundle” of texts I’m writing is finished. Be patient—it may be a year or so. I am not prepared to discuss it at the level approaching a scientific paper; not yet.
Keep in mind two things. I am in favor of life extension, and I do not want to discourage cryonic research (we never know what’s possible, and research should go on).
Thanks. While a scientific paper would be wonderful, even a blog post would be a huge step forward. In so far as a technical case has been made against cryonics, it is either Martinenaite and Tavenier 2010, or it is technically erroneous, or it is in dashed-off blog comments that darkly hint and never get into the detail. The bar you have to clear to write the best ever technical criticism of cryonics is a touch higher than it was when I first blogged about it, but still pretty low.
I’ve signed up for cryonics (with Alcor) because I believe that if civilization doesn’t collapse then within the next 100 years there will likely be an intelligence trillions upon trillions of times smarter than anyone alive today.
If such an intelligence did come into being do you think it would have the capacity to revive my frozen brain?
I don’t think any intelligence can read information that is no longer there. So, no, I don’t think it will help.
While I agree that this is a relevant consideration for the big picture, I just wanted to note in a non-confrontational way that it has the appearance of unfairly shifting cognitive workload to the skeptic—which could perhaps result in the nasty side effect of preventing future skeptics from weighing in. Evaporative cooling and all that. A person specializing in synapse biochemistry probably shouldn’t have to (at least at first) consider all the aspects of future superintelligence in quite the same way that an AI researcher would.
Just to unpack a little on James_Miller’s idea: One example of how this could potentially come into play is that externally gathered data (for example—chat logs, videos, even the recorded reactions of other humans) could be extrapolated to generate a personality sim, and connectome data could be used to verify it.
Mining data from a lot of different sources, the superintelligence could perhaps get much closer to the original than the mostly-blank, yet connectome matching and genetically identical clone we would otherwise have. Having that matching connectome as a starting point could conceivably be an important part of making sure that the personality matches for the right reasons, i.e. comes out with similar structural-functional mappings.
Again, I’m not sure how much of this maps to the domain specific knowledge that kalla724 has, but I’d be fascinated to hear more.
‘Personality reconstruction’ is both less satisfying and more difficult to automate. I think most people who buy into cryonics would prefer to wake up remembering the things they never said in public, rather than having a patched-together doppelganger wear their clothes in the 31st century equivalent of Colonial Williamsburg.
Well, if reliably remembering the things I never said in public were an option, I’d sort of like that ability now rather than waiting until I die for some entity who may or may not deserve the label “me” to have it. In the meantime, I’ll go on reconstructing semifictional accounts of what might have happened based on the information I currently have handy, just like most people do.
Not weighing in either way on cryonics itself, but on the meta level: Why do you consider that strong evidence? It seems to me that most people who don’t think cryonics will work simply aren’t interested in it, and therefore haven’t tried very hard to prove that they’re right.
That’s not my experience; a great deal of anti-cryonics stuff has been written, and it’s my experience that a lot of people who think it won’t work seem to have quite strong feelings about it, so if there is a strong argument that lots of people know then it is surprising that no-one has written it up properly.
kalia724′s comment is an apparently-strong argument that I’d never heard, and you know I’ve actively looked for arguments for and against. I do think you’re putting a bit much hope in absence of evidence of criticism as being non-negligible evidence of absence of possible criticism—the space of concepts working scientists don’t bother thinking about is ridiculously huge, and cryonics hits quite a few green-ink heuristics (unfairly, IMO, but it does) which gets it filed with the mental spam in short order. edit: and see my Facebook post for a mutual friend of ours noting he has qualms about even writing something serious about cryonics as he risks a significant professional status hit by doing so—cryonics is that low-status.
kalia724 evidently doesn’t have time to write this up properly in the foreseeable future, so I think we’d need to ask around to see if there is, at the least, a nameable neuroscientist who thinks kalia’s assertions against cryonics have something to them. (I’ve just hit my socialmediasphere with the question. You, and everyone else interested, probably should too.)
Even the stupidest pseudosciences or movements have received excellent debunking; for example, I would put the Urantia cult way down the list below cryonics, and yet, we still have Martin Gardner’s 500 page examination/debunking, Urantia: The Great Cult Mystery.
(I would point out, incidentally, that ‘nobody will criticize low-status things’ is a fully comprehensive proof of the non-existence of the entire skeptics movement, which is pretty much all about criticizing low-status things, and you probably would prefer not to use such a claim as your explanation of the lack of good cryonics criticism...)
A quite obvious possibility is that would-be debunkers who want try to go deeper than Penn and Teller style mockery soon realize that they would have to engage much more seriously with cryonics than with Urantia to try to debunk it—sound like they were taking it seriously—implying a far greater loss of status than soaring casually above Urantia, effortlessly trashing it without a hint of sympathy.
“Everyone who’s tried to ‘debunk’ this seems to have ended up writing casual mockery, and oddly enough no would-be skeptics ever seem to engage the arguments in technical detail, and the arguments are being made by people who sure look like they’re trying to wear technical hats and include a number of otherwise highly technical figures” seems to me like a quite common position when both of these aspects are combined. There are arguments that skeptics don’t bother engaging in detail, but they’re not technical. There are physicists who believe crazy things because they’re bad outside the laboratory, but then they are usually refuted by more than mockery. I may be prejudiced by being mostly interested only in things that are sensible to start with, but the overall state of affairs I have just described is pretty much what you’d expect a correct but weird-sounding idea to look like.
I have no status in science, so your last phrase is just silly. Scientists who are noted sceptics may want to criticise cryonics, and, of course, several have. But the effect I describe is something I saw someone who’d been specifically asked to comment as a scientist invoking, per the link which you should be able to read (rather than relying entirely on theoretical counterarguments, as you have); and I am, of course, noting it as one factor, not as the complete explanation you seem to have read it as.
A quite obvious possibility is that would-be debunkers who want try to go deeper than Penn and Teller style mockery soon realize that they would have to engage much more seriously with cryonics than with Urantia to try to debunk it—sound like they were taking it seriously—implying a far greater loss of status than soaring casually above Urantia, effortlessly trashing it without a hint of sympathy.
“Everyone who’s tried to ‘debunk’ this seems to have ended up writing casual mockery, and oddly enough no would-be skeptics ever seem to engage the arguments in technical detail, and the arguments are being made by people who sure look like they’re trying to wear technical hats and include a number of otherwise highly technical figures” seems to me like a quite common position when both of these aspects are combined. There are arguments that skeptics don’t bother engaging in detail, but they’re not technical. There are physicists who believe crazy things because they’re bad outside the laboratory, but then they are usually refuted by more than mockery. I may be prejudiced by being mostly interested only in things that are sensible to start with, but the overall state of affairs I have just described is pretty much what you’d expect a correct but weird-sounding idea to look like.
I think you may be missing a silent majority of people who passively judge cryonics as unlikely to work, and do not develop strong feelings or opinions about it besides that, because they have no reason to. I think this category, together with “too expensive to think about right now”, forms the bulk of intelligent friends with whom I’ve discussed cryonics.
I don’t think you’re addressing the subject of this thread, which is “does there exist a strong technical argument against cryonics that a lot of people already know”.
Summary: Expanding on what maia wrote, I find it plausible that many people could produce good technical arguments against cryonics but don’t simply because they’re not writing about cryonics at all.
I was defending maia’s point that there are many people who are uninterested in cryonics and don’t think it will work. This class probably includes lots of people who have relevant expertise as well. So while there are a lot of people who develops strong anti-cryonics sentiments (and say so), I suspect they’re only a minority of the people who don’t think cryonics will work. So the fact that the bulk of anti-cryonics writings lack a tenable technical argument is only weak evidence that no one can produce one right now. It’s just that the people who can produce them aren’t interested enough to bother writing about cryonics at all.
I wholeheartedly agree that we should encourage people who may have them to write up strong technical arguments why cryonics won’t work.