There is a helpful web page on the probability that cryonics will work.
There are also some useful facts at the Alcor Scientists’ Cryonics FAQ.
The neuroscientist might wish to pay attention to the answer to “Q: Can a brain stop working without losing information?” The referenced article by Mayford, Siegelbaum, and Kandel should be particularly helpful.
Check out Signing up your relatives.
Best of luck, and all my sympathy.
To quote a discussion of long term memory and the specific synaptic changes that take place from Molecular Repair of the Brain:
What, exactly, might these changes be? Very strong statements are possible in simple “model systems”. Bailey and Chen, for example, identified several specific changes in synaptic structure that encoded learned memories from sea slugs (Aplysia californica) by direct examination of the changed synapse with an electron microscope[36].
“Using horseradish peroxidase (HRP) to label the presynaptic terminals (varicosities) of sensory neurons and serial reconstruction to analyze synaptic contacts, we compared the fine structure of identified sensory neuron synapses in control and behaviorally modified animals. Our results indicate that learning can modulate long-term synaptic effectiveness by altering the number, size, and vesical complement of synaptic active zones.”
“Morphological basis of long-term habituation and sensitization in Aplysia” by Craig H. Bailey and Mary Chen, Science 220, April 1, 1983, pages 91-93
A few comments:
1) Sign up for cryonics now. Do not delay because you think “Plastination might be better someday in the future”.
No one is offering plastination now, and you can die now.
It’s not clear when, if ever, anyone is going to offer plastination.
It’s not clear that plastination, if actually offered, will actually be better than cryonics.
2) With chemical preservation, good vascular perfusion is critical. Brain tissue which is not perfused is lost.
3) With cryopreservation, good vascular perfusion results in excellent preservation by vitrification. Brain tissue which is not perfused is still preserved.
4) Most of the costs for neuropreservation are from the up-front logistical and surgical costs. If you want minimal ischemic time and good vascular perfusion for chemical preservation you’re still going to have to pay most if not all of those costs.
You’ll need to read Molecular Repair of the Brain. Note that it discusses a variety of repair methods, including methods which carry out repairs at sufficiently low temperatures (between 4K and 77K) that there is no risk that “molecular drift” would undo previous work. By making incredibly conservative assumptions about the speed of operations, it is possible to stretch out the time required to repair a system the size of the human brain to three years, but really this time was chosen for psychological reasons. Repairing a person “too quickly” seems to annoy people.
You might also want to read Convergent Assembly. As this is a technical paper which makes no mention of controversial topics, it provides more realistic estimates of manufacturing times. Total manufacturing time for rigid objects such as a human brain at (say) 20K are likely to be 100 to 1000 seconds. This does not include the time required to analyze your cryopreserved brain and determine the healthy state, which is likely to be significantly longer. Note that some alterations to the healthy state (the blueprints) will be required prior to manufacture, including various modifications to facilitate manufacture, the inclusion of heating elements for rewarming, and various control systems to monitor and modulate the rewarming and metabolic start-up processes as well as the resumption of consciousness.
After you’ve had time to digest the paper, I’d be interested in your comments. As Ciphergoth has said, there are no (repeat no) credible arguments against the feasibility of cryonics in the extant literature. If you have any, it would be most interesting.
As a neuroscientist, you might also be amused by Large Scale Analysis of Neural Structures.
For recent work on vitrification, I refer you to Greg Fahy at 21st Century Medicine.
The Alcor FAQ has a question and answer relevant to this discussion:
Q: Why haven’t more people signed up for cryonics?
A: People don’t sign up for cryonics because: it’s not traditional, they’re skeptical of anything they haven’t seen work, it costs money, they’re afraid of what their friends might think, they live in denial of their own death, they don’t want to think about the subject, they procrastinate, they don’t like life well enough to want more of it, or they are afraid of a future in which they may be alienated from friends and family and a familiar social environment.
Typical Alcor members (if any Alcor member could be called “typical”) tend to be highly educated independent minded people who enjoy life and think cryonics has a reasonable chance of working. They pay for it with life insurance and think the future is likely to work out pretty well. They often have friends or relatives who are Alcor members. They expect Alcor to revive them using nanomedicine and expect to continue their lives with as much passion and joy as today — only with much more amazing technology.
You might want to read Cryonics, cryptography, and maximum likelihood estimation.
Short summary: if cryptanalytic methods can recover the wiring of World War II rotor machines knowing only some input-output pairs and with only limited information about the actual wiring, then similar algorithms should be able to recover the neuronal “wiring” between different cortical areas when we already have a wealth of information about that wiring plus a good knowledge of acceptable input-output pairs.
How many bytes in human memory? is a very brief article providing estimates of just that. Evidence from human learning experiments suggests that, after using a very good data compression algorithm, human long term declarative memory holds only a few hundred megabytes.
How much of that information is common knowledge, such as knowledge of the English language, memories from media such as books or television, or knowledge of local buildings and streets, is unclear.
Additional information specific to an individual could be gained from email, internet posts, and other personal electronic information and written records, such as diaries; as well as individual genomes, which will soon be ubiquitously available.
The modest information content of human declarative memory might be relevant to some of the discussions on this thread.
General advice: if you can afford it, sign up with Alcor. If you can’t, sign up with CI.
If you want more information, I’d recommend the Alcor FAQs.
I should provide some context for my comments on Alcor’s previous track record on creating endowments: we had just received a $7M bequest, had placed $3.5M into the Patient Care Trust Fund, and the Board had decided to put the other $3.5M into an Endowment and withdraw only 2% per annum, or about $70,000 per year, for Alcor’s operational needs. Some members were feeling quite euphoric and were proposing that we spend some significant amount of the principal on various worthy projects, including reduced dues for said members and increased spending on certain pet projects. It seemed advisable to inject a note of sobriety into the discussion and to somewhat deflate the expanding expectations. While helpful, this bequest did not free us from the constraints of fiscal responsibility, and explaining why the Board was being so parsimonious with this windfall seemed appropriate at the time.
Given this context, I wouldn’t interpret these comments as “disturbing”.
There has been some discussion on this thread about who would revive you once you were cryopreserved, and how they would pay for it.
This is covered in the Alcor FAQ (which is really excellent, and well worth browsing):
Q: Who will revive the patients?
A: The short answer is “Alcor will revive them.”
The third item in Alcor’s mission statement is: “Eventually restore to health all patients in Alcor’s care.”
Reviving the patients is also required by Alcor’s contracts with members: “When, in Alcor’s best good faith judgement, it is determined that attempting revival is in the best interests of the Member in cryopreservation, Alcor shall attempt to revive and rehabilitate the Member.”
Reviving the patients is also a duty of the Alcor Patient Care Trust: “At such time as Alcor deems that repair and revival of the Patients is feasible, the Trust shall expend whatever amounts of money are necessary to revive the Patients and reintroduce them to society, as long as on-going care of the Patients remaining in biostasis is not endangered. It is the intent of the Trust that such repair and revival proceed in such manner that ongoing Trust earnings reasonably can be predicted to provide for the eventual repair and revival of all Patients.”
Financially, the Patient Care Trust should grow in real value over time — compound interest should eventually produce sufficient assets to cover the costs of revival. At the same time, as technology progresses the cost of reviving patients should decrease over time. Eventually, the ever increasing funds available in the PCT should be sufficient to pay for the ever decreasing costs of reviving the patients.
Socially, Alcor is a community. Some members of this community are alive and healthy, while others have been cryopreserved. This community forms an interconnected network of friendships and close ties. At any point in time the healthy members of this network have friends, relatives and loved ones in cryopreservation and will seek to revive them. Once revived, those members will in turn have other friends in cryopreservation, and they will in turn seek to revive them.
The plan is not for “them” to revive us. The plan is that we, the Alcor community, will revive ourselves.
The probability that cryonics will work likely exceeds 85%, discounting dystopian futures, assuming a good quality of cryopreservation, and assuming that MNT is developed more or less as expected.
The usual error made in these analyses is to imagine many different kinds of “disasters”, all correlated, that could cause cryonics to fail, and then multiply their probabilities together. But because all the probabilities are correlated, the resulting overall probability is unrealistically low, often by orders of magnitude.
The only real problems are (a) information theoretic death occurs for one reason or another or (b) the necessary technology to restore you to full health is never developed and applied.
Causing information theoretic death is actually a lot harder than people think. Scrambling information is not destroying information, as cryptanalysis tells us, and the laws of physics are reversible. This whole issue is discussed in Cryonics, Cryptography, and Maximum Likelihood Estimation.
The ability to arrange the atoms from which you are made as might be required to restore you’re cryopreserved self to a fully functional and healthy state should be developed in the next several decades. Betting your life that Molecular NanoTechnology (MNT) will not be developed seems singularly foolish given the available evidence.
In today’s modern cryopreservations carried out under reasonable conditions the patient’s brain is vitrified, making it hard to argue that information theoretic death occurs during cryopreservation. Likewise, it is hard to argue that information theoretic death could occur during storage at the temperature of liquid nitrogen. This leaves us arguing over whether cryonics will work when the cryopreservation is carried out under unreasonable (poor) conditions, if Alcor itself will survive, or if the future will suffer from some dystopian disaster so awful that it makes all our efforts moot.
The most effective way to insure a good cryopreservation is to move close to Alcor before being cryopreserved. Betting your life that Alcor will spontaneously crash and burn seems remarkably pessimistic when the historical record shows that a much smaller Alcor successfully survived many challenges since 1972 and today’s Alcor is much better able to survive any future challenges. This is even more true when we can shift the odds in our favor by pitching in and helping insure that Alcor survives, rather than sitting on the sidelines and simply hoping. Dystopian futures seem to be more a projection of an individual’s own depression, rather than accurate forecasts of the future.
Which leads to the conclusion that cryonics actually has a high probability of success.
In discussions with a friend, who expressed great discomfort in talking about cryonics, I finally extracted the confession that he had no emotional or social basis for considering cryonics. None of his friends or family had done it, it was not part of any of the accepted rituals that he had grown up with—there was an emotional void around it that placed it outside of the range of options that he was able to think about. It was “other”, alien, of such a nature that merely rational evaluation could not be applied.
He’s in his 70′s, so this issue is more than just academic. He understands that by rejecting cryonics he is embracing his own death. He does not believe in an afterlife. He becomes emotionally perturbed when I discuss cryonics precisely because I am persuasive about its technical feasibility.
Perhaps this observation isn’t germane to the present thread, as this seems an emotional response rather than a response driven by “no belief.” But perhaps “no belief” has an emotional component, as in “I don’t want to have a belief. If I had a belief, then I’d have to take an unpleasant action.”
Alcor is indeed a charity, both formally in the legal sense and in the sense that everyone in the Alcor community donates their time, money, resources, their names, and anything else that will help Alcor grow and prosper. The Board all donate their time, and often much more. The staff put in long hours for modest wages. And we have countless volunteers and part-time contributors and contractors who make an immense contribution. We also have contractual relationships with other companies, who are also dedicated to the same cause.
This is because we believe in what we’re doing.
Our thanks to the Less Wrong community. The monthly Board meetings review new applicants and the reasons they give for joining Alcor. Less Wrong is mentioned more and more often these days, keep up the good work!
Ralph C. Merkle, Alcor Board member
Scenario Analysis using a Simple Econometric Model of Alcor Finances by Robert A. Freitas Jr., October 2010, provides the most recent discussion of Alcor finances.
It includes a discussion of total costs to cryopreserve members, and has references to previous estimates along with inflation adjustments.
To quote from the article: “This procedure yields: TE$2010 = ($76,520)ncryo + ($1,614)Nmemb + ($622.5)Ncryo with the square of the correlation coefficient (i.e., the coefficient of determination) R^2 = 0.77. In this formulation, each member costs Alcor $1,614/yr in base expenses [16] and each new (average) cryopreservation costs Alcor about $76,520, with both figures measured in constant 2010 dollars. The latter figure seems a bit high but is very roughly consistent with estimates made by Darwin in 1990 [5] of the total cost of a neuro ($48,010) or WB ($62,526) cryopreservation in constant 2010 dollars, especially considering that much less-expensive cryoprotectants were used in 1990 than the much pricier ones (e.g., M22) that are employed in 2010. (Whelan’s 1993 estimates [7] of $42,320 (neuro) and $53,325 (WB), as converted to 2010 dollars, are slightly lower than Darwin’s.)”
Where
TE$2010 = Real Total Expenses for 2010
ncryo = Number of patients (both neuro and whole body) in cryopreservation
Nmemb = Number of Alcor members
Patient care costs assume “a constant neuro/WB mix of 65%/35% in the present and future”.
Further cost estimates and assumptions are available in the article.
The most obvious cost-reduction likely to occur with widespread adoption of cryonics would be the amortization of fixed costs over a larger number of cases. The use of standard medical facilities would also allow amortization of costs over a broader base. Scheduling cryopreservations in advance could further reduce costs.
Patients already in an operating room in an attempt to save their life using existing medical procedures could be cryopreserved less expensively because many of the needed resources would already be in place. If the open heart surgery goes badly, the team could roll straight into a cryopreservation.
However, it is also possible that cryopreservation costs could increase as more sophisticated methods are developed and used. In addition, Alcor has traditionally eschewed profits in an effort to keep cryonics affordable. More traditional medical institutions might adopt higher prices to enhance profitability.
Read Signing up your relatives.
Best of luck!
I wrote Signing up your relatives to help cryonicists do exactly that.
Towards the end of the article it says:
Well, you’ve tried all the soft sell approaches. You’ve used all the rational arguments. You’ve pointed out all the simple, easy, straightforward reasons why Pat should choose cryonics. They haven’t worked. It’s time to try something with a bit more punch:
“How would you feel if I put a shotgun in my mouth and blew out my brains?”
“What?”
Pat might well try to evade answering the question. The obvious counter to any attempt at evasion is to simply repeat the question (possibly in shortened form or possibly after acknowledging Pat’s attempted counter but then saying that doesn’t answer the question):
“How would you feel if I put a shotgun in my mouth and blew out my brains?”
It seems unlikely that Pat would feel at all good in response to your hypothetical action, so we can reasonably assume that Pat eventually provides some variant of the following answer:
“Terrible!”
At which point you can say:
“That’s how I feel about what you’re doing. Look, it’s easy for you to say you don’t want cryonics. You won’t have to grieve over your own death – but I will. Remember when died? Remember how you felt? Well, that’s how I’m going to feel if you aren’t cryopreserved. And I’m going to keep grieving for you for the rest of my life. Is that what you want to leave me, a lifetime of grief?”
If Pat has conceded that cryonics has some chance of working you can make an even stronger argument: “Even worse, think about what happens if cryonics is successful and I’m revived and rejuvenated: the rest of my life could be thousands of years or even longer. I’m scared I’ll never stop thinking about you and wishing you were with me, going over this conversation we’re having right now again and again in my mind, and blaming myself for not being more persuasive, for not trying harder, and for eventually giving up.”
The last quote is from Jim Halperin who said “This is the exact argument that finally convinced my dad earlier this year after countless unsuccessful attempts over the previous 15 years.”
Ralph
Cryonics likely has a probability of success of ~85%, as estimated at Will Cryonics Work?. Lower probability estimates are either unsupported, or supported by arguments with obvious errors. Cryonics deniers sometimes display gross breakdowns in their rational functions, as illustrated by a remarkable quote by Kenneth Storey.
Because deciding against cryonics is a form of suicide, it is selfish for the same reason that suicide is selfish: it causes pain and grief for the survivors, who loved the person who committed cryocide.
Ralph