8 ms·

The guy who wrote this post used to be president of Alcor (http://alcor.org http://alcor.org), one of the two cryonics organizations in the US. Cryonics is in f

by aoeuid 16y ago

The guy who wrote this post used to be president of Alcor (http://alcor.org http://alcor.org), one of the two cryonics organizations in the US. Cryonics is in fact certainly a procedure where people will definitely die if they don't get it, particularly because it can only be done after 'legal death'. Its efficacy can't be established conclusively right now, but it's certainly more likely you'll be revived if you undergo cryopreservation than if you are cremated or buried underground. But because of various mostly psychosocial factors, practically nobody gets cryopreserved. I think this is the specific example he was trying to point out.

philwelch 16y ago
There's a genuine plausibility difference between inventing new surgical techniques and freezing corpses in liquid nitrogen hoping that future generations will resurrect them. In terms of the high certain burden on the rest of society (in terms of expending resources, denying others the use of one's organs, denying the use of one's remains for medical research or education, etc.) and the very outside chance that one will be successfully and happily resurrected (which is itself the product of several probabilities, many small--the probability that even perfectly preserved corpses can even theoretically be resurrected, the probability that the tissue damage caused in the freezing process can be repaired, the probability that future generations will actually resurrect you rather than put your corpse in a museum or something, and the probability that upon resurrection you will, in fact, be the same person and not suffer extreme brain damage and lifelong mental retardation), cryonics doesn't sound like such a good idea anymore.
- nazgulnarsil 16y ago
  only if you abuse the abstraction of language to impose restrictions on reality that don't exist. people who would have been declared dead 50 years ago are now resuscitated routinely.
  - tptacek 16y ago
    What does that have to do with his point? The resuscitations you're talking about are not part of a continuum of improving outcomes for people with massive total systemic cellular damage from freeze-thaw cycles.
    - nazgulnarsil 16y ago
      you're discussing damage that comes about from primitive forms of cryonic preservation that haven't been used in decades. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18321197 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18321197
      - tptacek 16y ago
        Freeze-thaw cycles in LN2 also damage cells.
  - philwelch 16y ago
    I don't think anyone who's ever been declared "dead" has ever been "resuscitated" more than a year after the fact, at least not since we've been able to distinguish a comatose state from death. Fine, there's a slim chance it's theoretically possible. I openly conceded that. Multiply that by all the other slim chances involved, though, and it gets even slimmer. It doesn't balance against the extreme costs unless your decision-making process is extraordinarily selfish.
    - nazgulnarsil 16y ago
      I choose not to pretend my decisions aren't selfish.
      - philwelch 16y ago
        Even from a selfish perspective, cryonics is basically the science fiction version of Pascal's Wager.
lionhearted 16y ago
Eliezer Yudkowsky has written about cryonics extensively at LessWrong - if anyone you know is forward-minded about living forever and at risk of passing away soon, you should probably start reading those articles and arguments for cryonics and pass them along. (Actually, everyone should read it, but I think the state of medicine makes it unlikely that you're preserved if you die from random trauma like a car accident - so it's of more use to someone who has been diagnosed with a fatal disease, or is getting on in years)
- Eliezer 16y ago
  Posts we've had to Less Wrong on this topic: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Cryonics http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Cryonics
- loup-vaillant 16y ago
  A fatal disease will probably make the life insurance that pays for your cryopreservation much more costly. Signing up when you're still healthy and young may be more beneficial, even when the probability of eventually destroying your brain is higher.
  - gwern 16y ago
    Eliezer wasn't talking about how you sign up or pay for it (he himself is signed up with term insurance & is young and reasonably healthy); he was talking about what kinds of dead people having signed up would be most useful to. Predictable deaths are best because the stabilization teams can be there waiting. (There are of course wrinkles to this. If you die of alzheimers or senile dementia, is there any 'you' left, recorded in the neurons?)
    - philwelch 16y ago
      The scarier question is, if you are resurrected from cryonics, whether they will preserve enough of your neurons to protect you from similar impairment.
    - loup-vaillant 16y ago
dennisgorelik 16y ago
The main reason why practically nobody gets cryopreserved is that Cryonics is a form of scientific scam. It sells people confidence that their mind can be preserved by freezing it. http://aidevelopment.blogspot.com/2008/12/cryonics.html http://aidevelopment.blogspot.com/2008/12/cryonics.html That said, the author seems to be a true believer in Cryonics (however that does not make Cryonics legitimate). The article has interesting points, but cannot really be trusted, because of multiple outrageous statements. For example, the author states: "In hindsight, it seems clear that if humanity had decided in 1939 to colonize space, instead of ... war [WW2], we would have ... very likely self-sustaining outposts on the moon and Mars." As of today, the humanity does not have self-sustaining outposts even in Antarctica. Self-sustaining outposts on Mars are totally unrealistic in the next 100 years. Not only because of technological impossibility, but mostly because of no need for that. The bottom line: the author is unrealistic dreamer. His ideas might be unusual (which is good), but it's better to be very skeptical and not to trust these ideas by default.
- adrianN 16y ago
  I don't think (mostly) self sustaining outposts on the Moon and Mars are technologically infeasible. See for example the studies Robert Zubrin did for NASA. Whether there are sufficient economic incentives to actually build them is unfortunately a different question.
  - dennisgorelik 16y ago
    It's technologically feasible to send a mission to Mars. It's unfeasible to have self-sustaining colony on Mars. Mars Direct proposal does not even try to cover self-sustaining part.
    - adrianN 16y ago
      Actually it does, at least as outlined in his book.
- jarek 16y ago
  Hm... 100 years ago controlled heavier-than-air flight had barely been invented. Do you think it would have been accurate to think then that in 100 years, essentially permanent outposts crewed by several people in modules flying 350 kilometres above the Earth would be unrealistic? Not only because of technological impossibility, but mostly because of no need for that.
Avshalom 16y ago
Except cryonics is pretty much completely backwards of that situation. Heart and kidney machines were invented because we could fix the problem, but we couldn't keep people alive long enough to do it. Cryonics, assuming the current techniques work, is founded on the fact that we CAN'T currently fix the underlying problem(s).

by aoeuid 16y ago

philwelch 16y ago

There's a genuine plausibility difference between inventing new surgical techniques and freezing corpses in liquid nitrogen hoping that future generations will resurrect them. In terms of the high certain burden on the rest of society (in terms of expending resources, denying others the use of one's organs, denying the use of one's remains for medical research or education, etc.) and the very outside chance that one will be successfully and happily resurrected (which is itself the product of several probabilities, many small--the probability that even perfectly preserved corpses can even theoretically be resurrected, the probability that the tissue damage caused in the freezing process can be repaired, the probability that future generations will actually resurrect you rather than put your corpse in a museum or something, and the probability that upon resurrection you will, in fact, be the same person and not suffer extreme brain damage and lifelong mental retardation), cryonics doesn't sound like such a good idea anymore.

nazgulnarsil 16y ago
only if you abuse the abstraction of language to impose restrictions on reality that don't exist. people who would have been declared dead 50 years ago are now resuscitated routinely.
- tptacek 16y ago
  What does that have to do with his point? The resuscitations you're talking about are not part of a continuum of improving outcomes for people with massive total systemic cellular damage from freeze-thaw cycles.
  - nazgulnarsil 16y ago
    you're discussing damage that comes about from primitive forms of cryonic preservation that haven't been used in decades. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18321197 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18321197
    - tptacek 16y ago
      Freeze-thaw cycles in LN2 also damage cells.
- philwelch 16y ago
  I don't think anyone who's ever been declared "dead" has ever been "resuscitated" more than a year after the fact, at least not since we've been able to distinguish a comatose state from death. Fine, there's a slim chance it's theoretically possible. I openly conceded that. Multiply that by all the other slim chances involved, though, and it gets even slimmer. It doesn't balance against the extreme costs unless your decision-making process is extraordinarily selfish.
  - nazgulnarsil 16y ago
    I choose not to pretend my decisions aren't selfish.
    - philwelch 16y ago
      Even from a selfish perspective, cryonics is basically the science fiction version of Pascal's Wager.

lionhearted 16y ago

Eliezer Yudkowsky has written about cryonics extensively at LessWrong - if anyone you know is forward-minded about living forever and at risk of passing away soon, you should probably start reading those articles and arguments for cryonics and pass them along. (Actually, everyone should read it, but I think the state of medicine makes it unlikely that you're preserved if you die from random trauma like a car accident - so it's of more use to someone who has been diagnosed with a fatal disease, or is getting on in years)

Eliezer 16y ago
Posts we've had to Less Wrong on this topic: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Cryonics http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Cryonics
loup-vaillant 16y ago
A fatal disease will probably make the life insurance that pays for your cryopreservation much more costly. Signing up when you're still healthy and young may be more beneficial, even when the probability of eventually destroying your brain is higher.
- gwern 16y ago
  Eliezer wasn't talking about how you sign up or pay for it (he himself is signed up with term insurance & is young and reasonably healthy); he was talking about what kinds of dead people having signed up would be most useful to. Predictable deaths are best because the stabilization teams can be there waiting. (There are of course wrinkles to this. If you die of alzheimers or senile dementia, is there any 'you' left, recorded in the neurons?)
  - philwelch 16y ago
    The scarier question is, if you are resurrected from cryonics, whether they will preserve enough of your neurons to protect you from similar impairment.
  - loup-vaillant 16y ago

dennisgorelik 16y ago

The main reason why practically nobody gets cryopreserved is that Cryonics is a form of scientific scam. It sells people confidence that their mind can be preserved by freezing it. http://aidevelopment.blogspot.com/2008/12/cryonics.html http://aidevelopment.blogspot.com/2008/12/cryonics.html That said, the author seems to be a true believer in Cryonics (however that does not make Cryonics legitimate). The article has interesting points, but cannot really be trusted, because of multiple outrageous statements. For example, the author states: "In hindsight, it seems clear that if humanity had decided in 1939 to colonize space, instead of ... war [WW2], we would have ... very likely self-sustaining outposts on the moon and Mars." As of today, the humanity does not have self-sustaining outposts even in Antarctica. Self-sustaining outposts on Mars are totally unrealistic in the next 100 years. Not only because of technological impossibility, but mostly because of no need for that. The bottom line: the author is unrealistic dreamer. His ideas might be unusual (which is good), but it's better to be very skeptical and not to trust these ideas by default.

adrianN 16y ago
I don't think (mostly) self sustaining outposts on the Moon and Mars are technologically infeasible. See for example the studies Robert Zubrin did for NASA. Whether there are sufficient economic incentives to actually build them is unfortunately a different question.
- dennisgorelik 16y ago
  It's technologically feasible to send a mission to Mars. It's unfeasible to have self-sustaining colony on Mars. Mars Direct proposal does not even try to cover self-sustaining part.
  - adrianN 16y ago
    Actually it does, at least as outlined in his book.
jarek 16y ago
Hm... 100 years ago controlled heavier-than-air flight had barely been invented. Do you think it would have been accurate to think then that in 100 years, essentially permanent outposts crewed by several people in modules flying 350 kilometres above the Earth would be unrealistic? Not only because of technological impossibility, but mostly because of no need for that.

Avshalom 16y ago

Except cryonics is pretty much completely backwards of that situation. Heart and kidney machines were invented because we could fix the problem, but we couldn't keep people alive long enough to do it. Cryonics, assuming the current techniques work, is founded on the fact that we CAN'T currently fix the underlying problem(s).