Well, the position you’re advocating here is certainly not one I—or other smart cryo advocates—agree with, but there is room for debate to be had. Let me keep it short for this comment though.
First of all, cryonics aims to vitrify people, not freeze them. This means they—ideally—turn into glass, not ice.
As such, they could not be thawed.
Going up a step in complexity, most cryo advocates don’t believe that they will be revived in the same body, rather that the information that makes them who they are will be extracted and used to construct a real or virtual or robotic body.
Also, this:
They don’t really know how to do this yet. How far along are they now? Have they frozen and thawed a mouse yet,
Putting aside that cryonics is not about freezing and thawing, there is the issue of wanting to wait until the revival side of cryonics is perfected. Well, sure, by the time science has advanced to that point, you would no longer have to make a probabilistic decision. But by that point, medical conditions—including aging—will probably have been eliminated. If you survive that far, good on you. But suppose we reach that point in 200 years’ time. If you refuse cryonics because it’s not yet proven, you will be dead by the time the proof comes.
So you have to make the decision right now: do you want to lose $1/day if cryonics doesn’t work, or do you want to gain your life back if it does?
And this:
I won’t let them freeze me earlier than that, because there’s essentially no chance I’ll be even able to walk and talk
I’m confused here. If you are cryopreserved (please, not frozen) at date X, and then at a later date X+100 they invent better revival technology, you can have that better revival technology used on you, even if it hadn’t been invented when you were deanimated and cryopreserved! This seems so obvious to me that I’m confused about why you’re objecting to it. Help me out?!
I think the reason a person would object is that the default hypothesis would be that when revival technology is invented, it will be invented in conjunction with a matching cryopreservation protocol, and previous cases will not have used that protocol. So previous cases will not be revivable.
default hypothesis would be that when revival technology is invented, it will be invented in conjunction with a matching cryopreservation protocol, and previous cases will not have used that protocol. So previous cases will not be revivable.
Anyway, the bottom line here is that you can’t reasonably bet against cryonic preservation success at the kind of extreme odds you were proposing upthread. You wouldn’t bet on any medical claim at odds anywhere near 100,000:1, even in the case that there was a lot of evidence against it (and there is none at all against cryonics—the skeptical argument is entirely based on hypothetical information carrying entities that may or may not actually exist).
If you still think 100,000:1 against is reasonable, imagine making 100,000 statements about medical controversies, and being wrong only once.
It is not known for certain whether modern cryopreservation preserves “enough”, partly because we are not entirely sure how long-term memories and personality are actually stored. We do know that the connectome is preserved, and modern techniqued such as aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation seem to preserve cell membranes, synapses, and intracellular structures. See Wikipedia and the relevant paper.
It is possible that some key piece of information is destroyed by these protocols, with no way of recovery. Everything that we know is required to be preserved, is preserved.
Given that c. elegans survived vitrification, it’s not surprising that its memory persisted, though it does underline the point that memory is not some kind of magic—it’s physically recorded. Of course large mammals like humans are very different from c. elegans.
Given that
humans survive immersion in freezing water and 60 minutes of brain death with their memories intact
c elegans survives full vitrification with memories intact
connectome information and intercellular structure survives aldehyde stabilised cryopreservation
we can conclude that the skeptical case is trying to thread through an ever narrower gap. If you claim that the physical correlates of memory are too delicate, you contradict existing results. If you claim they are too robust, you are forced to conclude that they are preserved by the best cryo.
Well, the position you’re advocating here is certainly not one I—or other smart cryo advocates—agree with, but there is room for debate to be had. Let me keep it short for this comment though.
First of all, cryonics aims to vitrify people, not freeze them. This means they—ideally—turn into glass, not ice.
As such, they could not be thawed.
Going up a step in complexity, most cryo advocates don’t believe that they will be revived in the same body, rather that the information that makes them who they are will be extracted and used to construct a real or virtual or robotic body.
Also, this:
Putting aside that cryonics is not about freezing and thawing, there is the issue of wanting to wait until the revival side of cryonics is perfected. Well, sure, by the time science has advanced to that point, you would no longer have to make a probabilistic decision. But by that point, medical conditions—including aging—will probably have been eliminated. If you survive that far, good on you. But suppose we reach that point in 200 years’ time. If you refuse cryonics because it’s not yet proven, you will be dead by the time the proof comes.
So you have to make the decision right now: do you want to lose $1/day if cryonics doesn’t work, or do you want to gain your life back if it does?
And this:
I’m confused here. If you are cryopreserved (please, not frozen) at date X, and then at a later date X+100 they invent better revival technology, you can have that better revival technology used on you, even if it hadn’t been invented when you were deanimated and cryopreserved! This seems so obvious to me that I’m confused about why you’re objecting to it. Help me out?!
I think the reason a person would object is that the default hypothesis would be that when revival technology is invented, it will be invented in conjunction with a matching cryopreservation protocol, and previous cases will not have used that protocol. So previous cases will not be revivable.
Right.
I’m afraid the preservation techniques are still so bad that you can’t be revived correctly even with improved future techniques.
Anyway, the bottom line here is that you can’t reasonably bet against cryonic preservation success at the kind of extreme odds you were proposing upthread. You wouldn’t bet on any medical claim at odds anywhere near 100,000:1, even in the case that there was a lot of evidence against it (and there is none at all against cryonics—the skeptical argument is entirely based on hypothetical information carrying entities that may or may not actually exist).
If you still think 100,000:1 against is reasonable, imagine making 100,000 statements about medical controversies, and being wrong only once.
It is not known for certain whether modern cryopreservation preserves “enough”, partly because we are not entirely sure how long-term memories and personality are actually stored. We do know that the connectome is preserved, and modern techniqued such as aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation seem to preserve cell membranes, synapses, and intracellular structures. See Wikipedia and the relevant paper.
It is possible that some key piece of information is destroyed by these protocols, with no way of recovery. Everything that we know is required to be preserved, is preserved.
There’s also “Persistence of Long-Term Memory in Vitrified and Revived C. elegans”, Vita-More & Barranco 2015 - so we know that in at least one species (which did not evolve for being frozen) that long-term memory is preserved by the best cryonics techniques.
Given that c. elegans survived vitrification, it’s not surprising that its memory persisted, though it does underline the point that memory is not some kind of magic—it’s physically recorded. Of course large mammals like humans are very different from c. elegans.
Given that
humans survive immersion in freezing water and 60 minutes of brain death with their memories intact
c elegans survives full vitrification with memories intact
connectome information and intercellular structure survives aldehyde stabilised cryopreservation
we can conclude that the skeptical case is trying to thread through an ever narrower gap. If you claim that the physical correlates of memory are too delicate, you contradict existing results. If you claim they are too robust, you are forced to conclude that they are preserved by the best cryo.