What I observe, however, is that most people, including those in the referenced fields, have only the vaguest position on cryonics picked up from pop-culture. If you’re lucky, something like “those idiots spend a fortune on con artists who tell them freezing a body means it can be revived after Science develops a cure for whatever killed them.”
Common sense positions aren’t necessarily wrong: any astrogeologist will agree that the Moon is indeed not made of green cheese.
Anyway, comments by “kalla724”, who identifies him/herself as a neuroscientist (I can’t verify that, but I have no reason to believe he/she is lying) seem quite detailed, and PZ Myers, an evolutionary biologist specialized in the nervous system, also made a technical comment against cryonics. The Society for Cryobiology, which was initially sympatetic towards cryonics and included cryonicists as their members, later formally distanced themselves from the practice and even banned cryonicists from being members. Is their position on cryonics just vaguely picked up from pop-culture?
So why aren’t more scientists writing detailed debunkings of cryonics? Well, one of the house rules of the scientific community is that the burden of providing evidence lies on who is making the claim. Most scientists will not invest time and effort to debunk every detail of arguments in the form of “you can’t prove this doesn’t work”. At least not until those who make these claim generate enough noise in the arena of public opinion and start political lobbying. At that point, scientists may feel compelled to debunk as a form of civic duty.
The fact that physicists have not flocked to cryonics providers is not in any sense strong evidence that they possess evidence we don’t.
No, but the fact that neurobiologists and cryobiologists haven’t flocked to cryonics, and in particular cryobiologists have flocked away from it, implies that according to the best available scientifc understanding of the subject, cryonics is unlikely to work.
Common sense positions aren’t necessarily wrong: any astrogeologist will agree that the Moon is indeed not made of green cheese.
Anyway, comments by “kalla724”, who identifies him/herself as a neuroscientist (I can’t verify that, but I have no reason to believe he/she is lying) seem quite detailed, and PZ Myers, an evolutionary biologist specialized in the nervous system, also made a technical comment against cryonics.
The Society for Cryobiology, which was initially sympatetic towards cryonics and included cryonicists as their members, later formally distanced themselves from the practice and even banned cryonicists from being members. Is their position on cryonics just vaguely picked up from pop-culture?
So why aren’t more scientists writing detailed debunkings of cryonics? Well, one of the house rules of the scientific community is that the burden of providing evidence lies on who is making the claim. Most scientists will not invest time and effort to debunk every detail of arguments in the form of “you can’t prove this doesn’t work”.
At least not until those who make these claim generate enough noise in the arena of public opinion and start political lobbying. At that point, scientists may feel compelled to debunk as a form of civic duty.
No, but the fact that neurobiologists and cryobiologists haven’t flocked to cryonics, and in particular cryobiologists have flocked away from it, implies that according to the best available scientifc understanding of the subject, cryonics is unlikely to work.
Bye.