The first question you need to ask Yudkowsky (and yourself) is a damned difficult one to answer “simply,” and that is what are the currently well known, well understood, and well documented BIOLOGICAL differences in outcome that are likely to pertain using the two different approaches in the reasonably optimum case. Reasonably optimum means that the member is experiencing medico-legal death under controlled conditions with competent cryonics organization personnel in attendance, My bet is that only a few people on the planet can answer that question, and that Yudkowsky isn’t one of them.
Of course, if you do not believe the degree of molecular, histological or gross damage to the patient matters, within broad limits, then such differences are immaterial. For instance, if you think that several hours of warm ischemic injury, followed by 12 to 24 hours of cold ischemic injury, followed by reperfusion injury, followed by grossly inadequate cryoprotective perfusion/equilibration in the brain resulting in large areas of massively ice injured brain tissue will be easily repairable with Nanotechnology, then you will be largely insensitive to the differences between Ci and Alcor, or a well done cryoprotective perfusion and a poorly done one.
My question for such people is, “Why bother with perfusion at all? The ischemic delays are very damaging. Why not just have yourself packed in dry ice as soon as you are pronounced and get shipped off to CI? It would be about $10K to $15 cheaper and you’d only be faced with Nano-repair of cryoinjury?” No need for Nano, Nano, one Nano will do.
I’m in the final stages of preparing Part 3 of THE EFFECTS OF CRYOPRESERVATION ON THE CAT for publication on Chronosophere. Part 3 is the transmission electron microscopy of the tissues under different conditions of cryopreservation (Part 2 was the histology: http://chronopause.com/index.php/2012/02/14/the-effects-of-cryopreservation-on-the-cat-part-2/). You can look at those pictures of cell and tissue structure and decide for yourself which condition you’d rather be in.
I realize I’m probably going to lose some points with you by stating this. But assuming the limit of perfect technology and the absolute correctness of the pattern theory of identity—if you can’t accept these hypotheses, please just say so, instead of answering based on a different hypothesis—is there any definitive rejection of my admittedly naive notion that if you can literally read out every single atomic position, then “Chop off the head with a guillotine and drop it into a bucket of liquid nitrogen” should, yes, just work? I admit that my actual belief and assumption is that current cryonics efforts are massive overkill by people who don’t realize that liquid nitrogen is not a secure encryption method for brains.
Can you refine what you mean by “the limit of perfect technology”? If you expect atomic tweezers, you’re probably right. If you expect superpowered but still annoying analogues of current methods for manipulating individual atoms, you’re probably wrong. Nanotech is surprisingly hard—it looks less like surgery with a knife you made with a rock and more like using the rock to pound on the knife’s handle during surgery. (But I’m an amateur.)
You lose whatever information is no longer in the atoms, which might be a lot because the skull is not designed to assist cooling, and the brain is a considerable thermal mass. It’s going to cool slowly, be shredded to mush by crystal formation, and be warped and cracked by thermal stress, while undergoing runaway chemical reactions and cell death. Your “limit of perfect technology” is then faced with an awe inspiring task of running the reaction products backwards, modelling and reversing the thermal damage, un-killing the cells, and splicing the cracks, in 3D on tissue that does not come with alignment hints, and then inferring a mind. There’s going to be some level of physically unavoidable data loss even in the perfect case, the data is entailed in thermal noise and random photons and the damage is no longer reversible without reversing the universe. Presumably the perfect technology will paper over these cracks by copying in mind structures from Mr Perfectly Average. But the end result would be that you’re less you.
I am a cryoskeptic because I don’t believe the pattern theory of identity, but in any case, it seems that this is a rather important issue for people who do, and who are seeking cryonic suspenstion. This thread (and Mike Darwin’s blog) are full of detailed histories and analysis about numerous aspects of cryonics. But I don’t see an analysis anywhere of how the organizations rate, when evaluated specifically from the perspective that atomic-scale mapping and reconstruction/simulation of the suspended brain will become possible, and that this is enough for personal survival. If we assume this to be true, and if we put aside considerations about the relative ability of cryonics organizations to keep their patients frozen—just focusing on the specific suspension procedures that they apply—how do they rate? Are any of them “not good enough”, even by these assumptions? Or do they all get a pass?
is there any definitive rejection of my admittedly naive notion that if you can literally read out every single atomic position, then “Chop off the head with a guillotine and drop it into a bucket of liquid nitrogen” should, yes, just work?
Logically, it’s possible that there is dynamic information not conveyed by “every single atomic position” that is lost when making a static copy. One could imagine that a recording of the positions over some amount of time would do better.
Admittedly, our current understanding of physics might already rule out this possibility without my knowing.
I’ve wondered, before, whether there’s any way to get yearly MRI, eeg, fMRI, etc. recordings on durable media for future preservation with your corpsicle. I couldn’t afford it, but it seems like it could be useful.
The first question you need to ask Yudkowsky (and yourself) is a damned difficult one to answer “simply,” and that is what are the currently well known, well understood, and well documented BIOLOGICAL differences in outcome that are likely to pertain using the two different approaches in the reasonably optimum case. Reasonably optimum means that the member is experiencing medico-legal death under controlled conditions with competent cryonics organization personnel in attendance, My bet is that only a few people on the planet can answer that question, and that Yudkowsky isn’t one of them.
Of course, if you do not believe the degree of molecular, histological or gross damage to the patient matters, within broad limits, then such differences are immaterial. For instance, if you think that several hours of warm ischemic injury, followed by 12 to 24 hours of cold ischemic injury, followed by reperfusion injury, followed by grossly inadequate cryoprotective perfusion/equilibration in the brain resulting in large areas of massively ice injured brain tissue will be easily repairable with Nanotechnology, then you will be largely insensitive to the differences between Ci and Alcor, or a well done cryoprotective perfusion and a poorly done one.
My question for such people is, “Why bother with perfusion at all? The ischemic delays are very damaging. Why not just have yourself packed in dry ice as soon as you are pronounced and get shipped off to CI? It would be about $10K to $15 cheaper and you’d only be faced with Nano-repair of cryoinjury?” No need for Nano, Nano, one Nano will do.
I’m in the final stages of preparing Part 3 of THE EFFECTS OF CRYOPRESERVATION ON THE CAT for publication on Chronosophere. Part 3 is the transmission electron microscopy of the tissues under different conditions of cryopreservation (Part 2 was the histology: http://chronopause.com/index.php/2012/02/14/the-effects-of-cryopreservation-on-the-cat-part-2/). You can look at those pictures of cell and tissue structure and decide for yourself which condition you’d rather be in.
I realize I’m probably going to lose some points with you by stating this. But assuming the limit of perfect technology and the absolute correctness of the pattern theory of identity—if you can’t accept these hypotheses, please just say so, instead of answering based on a different hypothesis—is there any definitive rejection of my admittedly naive notion that if you can literally read out every single atomic position, then “Chop off the head with a guillotine and drop it into a bucket of liquid nitrogen” should, yes, just work? I admit that my actual belief and assumption is that current cryonics efforts are massive overkill by people who don’t realize that liquid nitrogen is not a secure encryption method for brains.
It doesn’t have to be a secure encryption method to be a lossy compression method.
Can you refine what you mean by “the limit of perfect technology”? If you expect atomic tweezers, you’re probably right. If you expect superpowered but still annoying analogues of current methods for manipulating individual atoms, you’re probably wrong. Nanotech is surprisingly hard—it looks less like surgery with a knife you made with a rock and more like using the rock to pound on the knife’s handle during surgery. (But I’m an amateur.)
You lose whatever information is no longer in the atoms, which might be a lot because the skull is not designed to assist cooling, and the brain is a considerable thermal mass. It’s going to cool slowly, be shredded to mush by crystal formation, and be warped and cracked by thermal stress, while undergoing runaway chemical reactions and cell death. Your “limit of perfect technology” is then faced with an awe inspiring task of running the reaction products backwards, modelling and reversing the thermal damage, un-killing the cells, and splicing the cracks, in 3D on tissue that does not come with alignment hints, and then inferring a mind. There’s going to be some level of physically unavoidable data loss even in the perfect case, the data is entailed in thermal noise and random photons and the damage is no longer reversible without reversing the universe. Presumably the perfect technology will paper over these cracks by copying in mind structures from Mr Perfectly Average. But the end result would be that you’re less you.
I am a cryoskeptic because I don’t believe the pattern theory of identity, but in any case, it seems that this is a rather important issue for people who do, and who are seeking cryonic suspenstion. This thread (and Mike Darwin’s blog) are full of detailed histories and analysis about numerous aspects of cryonics. But I don’t see an analysis anywhere of how the organizations rate, when evaluated specifically from the perspective that atomic-scale mapping and reconstruction/simulation of the suspended brain will become possible, and that this is enough for personal survival. If we assume this to be true, and if we put aside considerations about the relative ability of cryonics organizations to keep their patients frozen—just focusing on the specific suspension procedures that they apply—how do they rate? Are any of them “not good enough”, even by these assumptions? Or do they all get a pass?
Logically, it’s possible that there is dynamic information not conveyed by “every single atomic position” that is lost when making a static copy. One could imagine that a recording of the positions over some amount of time would do better.
Admittedly, our current understanding of physics might already rule out this possibility without my knowing.
I’ve wondered, before, whether there’s any way to get yearly MRI, eeg, fMRI, etc. recordings on durable media for future preservation with your corpsicle. I couldn’t afford it, but it seems like it could be useful.
There are also more esoteric uses for regular baselines of that sort of thing. They come in handy while recovering from brain damage, for example.