This is expected evidence. Cryobiologists opposed to the practice have consistently labeled cryonics as flawed on grounds of dealing with frozen bodies, not due to cryoprotectant toxicity.
And what do they think of cryoprotectant toxicity? And cryoprotectant diffusion? And ischemia?
(e.g. PZ Myers conflating E-VT with K-VT)
I don’t think he did. I think he claimed that you need kinetic vitrification in order to preserve the relevant structure.
Therefore the question of whether someone in such a jurisdiction is guilty by legal standards should rest on whether the patient can be proven dead beyond a reasonable shadow of a doubt. I think this can easily be established for a straight-frozen person (due to severe structural damage to the cells), but not for a vitrified person.
I’m no lawyer, but I’m pretty sure that any court would consider a vitrified body dead beyond reasonable doubt unless you provided some good evidence that it isn’t. They aren’t going to buy a “You can’t prove it’s dead”.
You are free to support suicide / assisted dying, but this is a very different matter.
Ah, sure, cryopreserved people are not dead, and vitrifying yourself while still alive is not suicide. And Heaven’s Gate people didn’t kill themselves, they boarded the alien spaceship following comet Hale-Bopp.
You are entitled to believe whatever you like, but as long as you don’t provide good evidence that there is a non-negligible chance that the human popsicles are going to be resurrected, sane people will keep considering them dead.
To clarify, I am claiming that there is reasonable evidence that vitrification (including E-VT) does not constitute death in the information-theoretic sense. In fact, I think a stronger claim than that is justifiable because information-theoretic death criteria permits situations where inference of absent structure is needed whereas vitrification provides excellent morphological preservation and thus inference of structure is arguably not necessary (i.e. is not necessary if the connectome hypothesis is true). We could term this stronger claim “survival by inference-free information-theoretic death criteria”. This is importantly distinct because it is hard to estimate how reliable or feasible such inference would be (e.g. you probably can’t infer the structure of a snowflake once it has melted).
A stronger claim yet that I do not make is that E-VT currently leads to the preservation of biologically viable cells (upon thawing without the technology for e.g. first replacing cryoprotectant and deactivating autolysis mechanisms that have been triggered by chilling and toxicity). However I do think that E-VT has the potential to accomplish this (for a heavily preconditioned patient) with a few decades of research. Another claim that I do not make is that the patient can survive independently, something that can only be established (on brain that meets neuroviability criteria) when advanced organ printing and/or other cybernetic enhancement technologies permit a brain to survive without its original natural body.
Interestingly, printed/scaffold-grown organs can be preconditioned and gene-tweaked in ways that should make them more susceptible to K-VT and E-VT, for example expressing Trehalose synthesis as response to chilling, or being threaded with thermally conductive.wires during the printing process. It might thus be a short step from whole-brain revivability with lab-grown organs to more routine reversibility of whole-body cryopreservation.
And what do they think of cryoprotectant toxicity? And cryoprotectant diffusion? And ischemia?
I don’t think he did. I think he claimed that you need kinetic vitrification in order to preserve the relevant structure.
I’m no lawyer, but I’m pretty sure that any court would consider a vitrified body dead beyond reasonable doubt unless you provided some good evidence that it isn’t. They aren’t going to buy a “You can’t prove it’s dead”.
Ah, sure, cryopreserved people are not dead, and vitrifying yourself while still alive is not suicide. And Heaven’s Gate people didn’t kill themselves, they boarded the alien spaceship following comet Hale-Bopp.
You are entitled to believe whatever you like, but as long as you don’t provide good evidence that there is a non-negligible chance that the human popsicles are going to be resurrected, sane people will keep considering them dead.
To clarify, I am claiming that there is reasonable evidence that vitrification (including E-VT) does not constitute death in the information-theoretic sense. In fact, I think a stronger claim than that is justifiable because information-theoretic death criteria permits situations where inference of absent structure is needed whereas vitrification provides excellent morphological preservation and thus inference of structure is arguably not necessary (i.e. is not necessary if the connectome hypothesis is true). We could term this stronger claim “survival by inference-free information-theoretic death criteria”. This is importantly distinct because it is hard to estimate how reliable or feasible such inference would be (e.g. you probably can’t infer the structure of a snowflake once it has melted).
A stronger claim yet that I do not make is that E-VT currently leads to the preservation of biologically viable cells (upon thawing without the technology for e.g. first replacing cryoprotectant and deactivating autolysis mechanisms that have been triggered by chilling and toxicity). However I do think that E-VT has the potential to accomplish this (for a heavily preconditioned patient) with a few decades of research. Another claim that I do not make is that the patient can survive independently, something that can only be established (on brain that meets neuroviability criteria) when advanced organ printing and/or other cybernetic enhancement technologies permit a brain to survive without its original natural body.
Interestingly, printed/scaffold-grown organs can be preconditioned and gene-tweaked in ways that should make them more susceptible to K-VT and E-VT, for example expressing Trehalose synthesis as response to chilling, or being threaded with thermally conductive.wires during the printing process. It might thus be a short step from whole-brain revivability with lab-grown organs to more routine reversibility of whole-body cryopreservation.