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As far as I can tell, the thesis of this article amounts to ‘cryonics is a weird idea, but what's even more weird is believing in the future.’ If you put aside

As far as I can tell, the thesis of this article amounts to ‘cryonics is a weird idea, but what's even more weird is believing in the future.’ If you put aside the overt scorn, it's actually a fairly interesting article, and surprisingly upbeat at that.

RajT88 4y ago
That scorn seems earned. Little progress has been made on raising the dead in 50 years. I mean, CPR has gotten better for sure. But that's just for people who are mostly dead. Not going to work on people who are all-the-way-dead. Anyone claiming high chances of resurrection in some sci-fi future are just blathing.
- smaddox 4y ago
  I'm not sure that's entirely true. Scientists have successfully sliced, imaged, and analyzed (i.e. determined the connectome for) the entire brain of very small animal, the common fruit fly, Drosophila. We're still a long way from turning that into a virtual simulation of the creature, but it's a significant step towards it.
  - rewgs 4y ago
    The idea of eventually creating a virtual simulation of the human brain, or even human body, modeling environmental variables and all, totally fascinates me. Are there any sources you’d recommend for someone looking to learn more about this?
- gpm 4y ago
  I agree the scorn seems earned, but for a bit of a different reason. Based on the article it sounds like these bodies are being "preserved" in an absolutely destroyed state. They've kept the outside pretty, but they've pulverized their insides during the freezing process. Even if cryogenics works one day, the chance that these people can be revived seems extremely remote. The chance that the "store the body and not just the head" idea helps seems even more remote given that the organs, blood veseels, etc are destroyed. They didn't discuss it (presumably verifiable information is hard to come by), but if the rest of the body is that destroyed, it seems unlikely that the brain is doing much better..
  - radu_floricica 4y ago
    Haven't read the article (have to finish coffee and start work) but modern cryo procedures are the opposite of this. They guarantee perfect preservation, but they offer no known restoring process.
- nwiswell 4y ago
  Yeah. I just read the entire Wait But Why article linked elsewhere in the thread, and it seems to be taken as a given that technology will continue to increase at an exponential rate, and so the ability to precisely detect and arbitrarily manipulate the positions of individual atoms has got to be in our not-impossibly-distant future. But I think we are having trouble really grasping the magnitude of that challenge compared to the progress made by science and rationalism so far. Today's medical interventions are breathtaking in effect compared to the state of the art of a hundred years ago, but the complexity of those interventions themselves does not even approach the complexity of the biological systems which are being restored. They are really very crude solutions. Even cutting-edge stuff like mRNA vaccines involves hijacking existing machinery rather than creating new machinery from whole cloth. Anyhow, it's possible that humanity will go a long way, and that extinction is not in our future, but that nevertheless some problems will simply forever be beyond our intellectual capacity. It's not hard to imagine that all the requisite knowledge to accomplish this kind of techno-necromancy might not even be attainable in a single lifespan -- even a lifespan augmented by future technology. Maybe AI solves that problem, but it would also be real weird to wake up in the future to discover that a race of incomprehensibly brilliant machines has resurrected you as a pet out of sheer boredom. Ultimately, it appears that the odds of "successful cryonic preservation" due to any foreseeable reason are 0%. So a decision to do it would come down to betting against my own ability to predict the future. Fair enough: I've been wrong before, but I'm probably not wrong this time.

RajT88 4y ago

That scorn seems earned. Little progress has been made on raising the dead in 50 years. I mean, CPR has gotten better for sure. But that's just for people who are mostly dead. Not going to work on people who are all-the-way-dead. Anyone claiming high chances of resurrection in some sci-fi future are just blathing.

smaddox 4y ago
I'm not sure that's entirely true. Scientists have successfully sliced, imaged, and analyzed (i.e. determined the connectome for) the entire brain of very small animal, the common fruit fly, Drosophila. We're still a long way from turning that into a virtual simulation of the creature, but it's a significant step towards it.
- rewgs 4y ago
  The idea of eventually creating a virtual simulation of the human brain, or even human body, modeling environmental variables and all, totally fascinates me. Are there any sources you’d recommend for someone looking to learn more about this?
gpm 4y ago
I agree the scorn seems earned, but for a bit of a different reason. Based on the article it sounds like these bodies are being "preserved" in an absolutely destroyed state. They've kept the outside pretty, but they've pulverized their insides during the freezing process. Even if cryogenics works one day, the chance that these people can be revived seems extremely remote. The chance that the "store the body and not just the head" idea helps seems even more remote given that the organs, blood veseels, etc are destroyed. They didn't discuss it (presumably verifiable information is hard to come by), but if the rest of the body is that destroyed, it seems unlikely that the brain is doing much better..
- radu_floricica 4y ago
  Haven't read the article (have to finish coffee and start work) but modern cryo procedures are the opposite of this. They guarantee perfect preservation, but they offer no known restoring process.
nwiswell 4y ago
Yeah. I just read the entire Wait But Why article linked elsewhere in the thread, and it seems to be taken as a given that technology will continue to increase at an exponential rate, and so the ability to precisely detect and arbitrarily manipulate the positions of individual atoms has got to be in our not-impossibly-distant future. But I think we are having trouble really grasping the magnitude of that challenge compared to the progress made by science and rationalism so far. Today's medical interventions are breathtaking in effect compared to the state of the art of a hundred years ago, but the complexity of those interventions themselves does not even approach the complexity of the biological systems which are being restored. They are really very crude solutions. Even cutting-edge stuff like mRNA vaccines involves hijacking existing machinery rather than creating new machinery from whole cloth. Anyhow, it's possible that humanity will go a long way, and that extinction is not in our future, but that nevertheless some problems will simply forever be beyond our intellectual capacity. It's not hard to imagine that all the requisite knowledge to accomplish this kind of techno-necromancy might not even be attainable in a single lifespan -- even a lifespan augmented by future technology. Maybe AI solves that problem, but it would also be real weird to wake up in the future to discover that a race of incomprehensibly brilliant machines has resurrected you as a pet out of sheer boredom. Ultimately, it appears that the odds of "successful cryonic preservation" due to any foreseeable reason are 0%. So a decision to do it would come down to betting against my own ability to predict the future. Fair enough: I've been wrong before, but I'm probably not wrong this time.