Not even a superintelligence can restore an ice sculpture from a glass of water.
Yes.
It may be helpful to outline what exactly—in terms of information—makes an ice sculpture irrecoverable or recoverable. It is the fact that distinct ice sculptures will result in precisely identical glass of water. Even if you look at the individual water molecules in the glass and try to retrace their motion backwards, due to the introduction of unknowns (interaction of those molecules with the molecules in the actual glass, then in the air, etc etc), they map to every possible ice sculpture.
The ice sculpture is irrecoverable because the final state corresponds to many possible initial states.
Likewise, massive changes in the solvent—which occur in either cryoprotected or non-cryoprotected cryonics—will force bistable molecules and molecular complexes to transition into a third state, losing their state information. This is because changes in the solvent affect intermolecular forces between parts of a protein (making proteins denature, i.e. unfold or re-fold into a different shape), and between different proteins.
Cryonics as it is can not be seen as science fictional stasis field with cracking and distortion that can in principle be undone someday. It involves massive, many-to-one chemical changes.
It is clear that if the cryonics involved cooking your head in a pot and then freezing it—or even letting the head remain at room temperature for a few hours—the chances would seem fairly minuscule to you, due to extensive many to one chemical changes that would occur during cooking. Likewise, the chances of cryonics—without any cooking—seem fairly minuscule to me due to extensive many to one chemical changes that result from either the introduction of the “cryoprotectants” (at concentrations which denatures some proteins) or due to the concentration of all solutes including salt in the inter crystal boundaries (which also denatures proteins). This is all quite far outside the range of any “robustness” against normal environmental conditions, too—I do not expect memories to be any more delicate than rest of the changeable chemical state (By the way, more chemically ‘robust’ storage would also require more energy for writing memories).
Now, of course, given the unknowns, we can’t tell for sure that cryonics does not work. But we can have no reasonable expectation for cryonics to work better than, say, doing good deeds in the hope that it raises chances at resurrection through some sort of look-into-the-past technology utilizing unknown laws of physics, or resurrection possibilities in simulated worlds, or the like—all the other things that no one can prove impossible.
Yes.
It may be helpful to outline what exactly—in terms of information—makes an ice sculpture irrecoverable or recoverable. It is the fact that distinct ice sculptures will result in precisely identical glass of water. Even if you look at the individual water molecules in the glass and try to retrace their motion backwards, due to the introduction of unknowns (interaction of those molecules with the molecules in the actual glass, then in the air, etc etc), they map to every possible ice sculpture.
The ice sculpture is irrecoverable because the final state corresponds to many possible initial states.
Likewise, massive changes in the solvent—which occur in either cryoprotected or non-cryoprotected cryonics—will force bistable molecules and molecular complexes to transition into a third state, losing their state information. This is because changes in the solvent affect intermolecular forces between parts of a protein (making proteins denature, i.e. unfold or re-fold into a different shape), and between different proteins.
Cryonics as it is can not be seen as science fictional stasis field with cracking and distortion that can in principle be undone someday. It involves massive, many-to-one chemical changes.
It is clear that if the cryonics involved cooking your head in a pot and then freezing it—or even letting the head remain at room temperature for a few hours—the chances would seem fairly minuscule to you, due to extensive many to one chemical changes that would occur during cooking. Likewise, the chances of cryonics—without any cooking—seem fairly minuscule to me due to extensive many to one chemical changes that result from either the introduction of the “cryoprotectants” (at concentrations which denatures some proteins) or due to the concentration of all solutes including salt in the inter crystal boundaries (which also denatures proteins). This is all quite far outside the range of any “robustness” against normal environmental conditions, too—I do not expect memories to be any more delicate than rest of the changeable chemical state (By the way, more chemically ‘robust’ storage would also require more energy for writing memories).
Now, of course, given the unknowns, we can’t tell for sure that cryonics does not work. But we can have no reasonable expectation for cryonics to work better than, say, doing good deeds in the hope that it raises chances at resurrection through some sort of look-into-the-past technology utilizing unknown laws of physics, or resurrection possibilities in simulated worlds, or the like—all the other things that no one can prove impossible.