Cryonics

Kanastrous · Post by **Kanastrous** » 2007-10-12 06:18pm

What are your perspectives on medical cryonics (that is, the freeze-your-head-to-save-your-ass outfits like Alcor Life-Extension Foundation)?

I have a number of friends who are members, and have assisted on several transport/prep cycles, with Southern California members who have *ahem* de-animated over the last several years.

I am agnostic regarding the practice; perhaps future research will establish how to get a frozen corpse up and kicking again, perhaps it won't (still trying to find the Ernest Rutherford quote, about people projecting the possible frequently being right, people projecting the impossible frequently being proven wrong). And I appreciate that most of the Alcor members I have met, see it pretty much the same way.

So...offered a choice between frozen-with-some-infinitessimal-shot-at-re-animation, and cremated/buried/set out for the vultures and gone forever, which do you choose? And, why?

Let's keep it a discussion of principle; I know that there is a lot of impassioned competitive political crankery among people in the cryonics field, and there are already boards dedicated to that aspect of the issue.

Post by **K. A. Pital** » 2007-10-13 12:19am

Depends on how much damage to nervous process and data the newest cryo techniques do, and whether that is recoverable to the point of reanimation. This is too many factors at once, so the result isn't technically predictable.

Superman · Post by **Superman** » 2007-10-13 12:32am

Stas Bush wrote:Depends on how much damage to nervous process and data the newest cryo techniques do, and whether that is recoverable to the point of reanimation. This is too many factors at once, so the result isn't technically predictable.

Agreed. We're really putting the cart ahead of the horse on this one.

Lord of the Abyss · Post by **Lord of the Abyss** » 2007-10-13 06:27am

I'd go for it. As I see it, it's a choice of being in a frozen state from which we don't know if being "resurrected" is possible, or being dust which it would take a miracle or time travel to bring me back from.

Starglider · Post by **Starglider** » 2007-10-13 02:53pm

The level of redundancy in the human brain is huge, and even fairly severe damage is theoretically correctable to a high degree of fidelity with the appropriate data processing. The main thing about cryonics is not to view it as suspension of life processes in the body, it's preserving your brain structure (and hence knowledge and personality). Eventually (probably sooner than you'd think) we will have the technology to extract that and put it in an artificial brain, initially a computer simulation, but later a scratch-built organic brain that's basically a copy of your original one. The ability to repair and revive people in place will come along eventually as well, but only people deathly afraid of 'continuity flaws' (i.e. delusional about the nature of the self) need that for cryonics to be viable.

Post by **K. A. Pital** » 2007-10-13 03:23pm

The question is whether damage to memory stored in the brain structures would be too great to lead to a personality loss post-recreation, which is technically not much different from death.

andrewgpaul · Post by **andrewgpaul** » 2007-10-13 07:35pm

The other question is whether future generations are even going to bother trying to resurrect them.

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2007-10-13 11:32pm

I hear someone rebuilding a copy of your mind hundreds of years after your brain stopped working is totally continuous consciousness, right? It's not creating an identical copy at all.

I'm not interested, simply because even if it DOES work (and work properly, instead of Starglider's ridiculous make a copy method) I won't be able to afford it anyway. Getting reassembled and having some guy say 'yeah ps you owe us $50M' would be pretty demoralising, and I'm not particularly atavistic. Since it's totally unproven technology it seems to me like desperate flailing by the insecure.

Nephtys · Post by **Nephtys** » 2007-10-14 12:08am

andrewgpaul wrote:The other question is whether future generations are even going to bother trying to resurrect them.

Trust funds. You set it up so they can only legally collect money once you're on your feet

Junghalli · Post by **Junghalli** » 2007-10-14 04:34am

Sure, why not? If I'm going to be dead either way I might as well take the option that will give me a small chance of living again at some point.

Zixinus · Post by **Zixinus** » 2007-10-14 05:49am

Costing an arm and a leg.

GrandMasterTerwynn · Post by **GrandMasterTerwynn** » 2007-10-14 12:11pm

Leaving aside the technical challenges, someone who goes into cryopreservation is taking several big gambles. The first, as others have mentioned, is the cost of one's resurrection. You hope the generations of people managing your trust fund don't screw up somewhere, or a grandson of a grandson of one's broker doesn't embezzle the funds and run off with his trophy wife to Mars . . . leaving the corpsicle without the means to afford his or her own treatment.

The second obvious one is one of interest. What interest would a future generation have in resurrecting someone who is likely to have no applicable skills in the modern world? And the corpsicle may be preserved long enough that present nations and forms of government may be overthrown and pass away, and one is just as likely to wake up in some Orwellian dystopia as they are in a futuristic utopia. Furthermore, one is gambling that a future generation's interests would be benign.

Which leads to the third gamble, which is that a revived corpsicle is going to be accorded similar rights to a presently-living human being. The previously mentioned regime change may usher in a government which may see cryopreservation and one's eventual resurrection in that way to be blasphemous against Jesus and the Holy Testament (as an example.) In that case, corpsicles might either be flushed, or secretly sold off to other governments. Or one may be resurrected as an AI, a simulation in a computer. In which case, one hopes that they sorted out the rights of human or post-human level AIs before they got around to restarting you. Otherwise, one may find they're being started up as a scientific research project. Or as a handy seed for a human-level AI with even less legal standing than a flesh-and-blood slave of old. After all, a flesh-and-blood slave is expensive to maintain, and if one is crippled or dies, the slaveowner has to go through the trouble of acquiring and training a new one. However, for an AI slave, robotic bodies are readily replaceable, and if you decide to get uppity, fzzzt! Out you go, to be reloaded from your last good save-point.

Starglider · Post by **Starglider** » 2007-10-14 03:19pm

Stark wrote:I hear someone rebuilding a copy of your mind hundreds of years after your brain stopped working is totally continuous consciousness, right? It's not creating an identical copy at all.

It is creating an identical copy. This matters not a bit. 'Continuity of consciousness' is an illusion. It's a desperate attempt to rationalise the human instinctive notion of what a person is, which is horribly broken and oversimplified. This is superstition; relatively harmless superstition compared to stuff like Abrahamic religions, but superstition none the less.

Kanastrous · Post by **Kanastrous** » 2007-10-14 11:54pm

andrewgpaul wrote:The other question is whether future generations are even going to bother trying to resurrect them.

If you're the least bit partial to Larry Niven, check out A World Out of Time. I think you'll dig it.

DarthShady · Post by **DarthShady** » 2007-10-15 08:19am

Starglider wrote: It is creating an identical copy. This matters not a bit. 'Continuity of consciousness' is an illusion. It's a desperate attempt to rationalise the human instinctive notion of what a person is, which is horribly broken and oversimplified. This is superstition; relatively harmless superstition compared to stuff like Abrahamic religions, but superstition none the less.

I second that.'Continuity of consciousness' is an illusion,take the example of sleep,we lose consciousness every night.(And no we do not dream all the time).

Seggybop · Post by **Seggybop** » 2007-10-16 01:57pm

Starglider wrote:
Stark wrote:I hear someone rebuilding a copy of your mind hundreds of years after your brain stopped working is totally continuous consciousness, right? It's not creating an identical copy at all.
It is creating an identical copy. This matters not a bit. 'Continuity of consciousness' is an illusion. It's a desperate attempt to rationalise the human instinctive notion of what a person is, which is horribly broken and oversimplified. This is superstition; relatively harmless superstition compared to stuff like Abrahamic religions, but superstition none the less.

Continuity is an illusion? Are you saying that when a human loses consciousness and reawakens, that is effectively the same as having destroyed them and reassembled an identical replacement?

Post by **K. A. Pital** » 2007-10-16 02:20pm

Are you saying that when a human loses consciousness and reawakens, that is effectively the same as having destroyed them and reassembled an identical replacement?

If memories and mental processing history are fully identical up to POD, achieved either through imitation or ressurecting the initial brain, what is the reason to assume it's discontinous?

Death is the loss of ability for mental processing, in the end. If that ability is revived with all the prior data, why would that not be me?

Starglider · Post by **Starglider** » 2007-10-16 02:47pm

Seggybop wrote:Are you saying that when a human loses consciousness and reawakens, that is effectively the same as having destroyed them and reassembled an identical replacement?

Not quite. Some brain activity continues during sleep; dreaming, obviously, and there's good evidence that some problem solving and memory filtering continues during sleep.

But destroying and reassembling someone is 'effectively the same' as them going into a deep coma then reawakening, or cryonically freezing them and thawing/reviving them, or putting them in a sci-fi statis field for a while. There's no subjective difference, there's no measureable difference in behaviour, there's no change in information, the future mind states are just as casually dependent on the past mind states as they would be without the copying process etc etc.

It's not precisely analogous to moving a piece of software from one computer to another, because there you can easily ensure literally perfect copying fidelity. The only way the 'continuity' whine brigade can deal with that is to claim (ludicrously) that only analogue processors can possibly support intelligent, digital processors can't (for no other reason than their ludicrous 'real people can't be copied... that's the definition of real people!' argument). With analogue substrates it's a question of fidelity; past 99.99whatever accuracy any errors are utterly overwhelmed by the inherent noise and drift and general messiness of the substrate (hell, in the human brain functional neurons are /constantly dying off/ without replacement, an attrotious hardware characteristic from any intelligent designer's point of view). But oh no, the whine brigade are out in force claiming that 'oh noes you got the instantaneous energy level of an electron in a receptor in a synapse in neuron number 43,242,541,642 wrong, that's not me, that's just a horrible fake that thinks it's me and is completely indistinguishable from me!' Morons.

Seggybop · Post by **Seggybop** » 2007-10-17 02:48pm

Starglider wrote:But destroying and reassembling someone is 'effectively the same' as them going into a deep coma then reawakening, or cryonically freezing them and thawing/reviving them, or putting them in a sci-fi statis field for a while. There's no subjective difference, there's no measureable difference in behaviour, there's no change in information, the future mind states are just as casually dependent on the past mind states as they would be without the copying process etc etc.

So it's like if one clinically died, was chopped up, but then was reassembled somehow, we would still consider them the same person. If so, then a reconstructed copy would definitely be the same person as the original. Nevertheless, the original person is still dead, right? As dead as that person would be if we made a copy without destroying the original, and then killed him afterwards.

Starglider · Post by **Starglider** » 2007-10-17 04:46pm

Seggybop wrote:If so, then a reconstructed copy would definitely be the same person as the original. Nevertheless, the original person is still dead, right?

If you drill down into the semantics of these vague everyday words, you'll find that you have to invent precise definitions. The whole concept of 'death' comes from a time where a brain ceasing functioning and the irreversible loss of someone's personality were inextricably linked.

Strictly, a person is a (very specific) class of information processing system. Particular arrangements of matter may classify as implementations of that person. Similarity is a not just a non-binary metric, it's a highly multidimensional one, so the practical answer to whether two intelligences are instances of the 'same person' actually depends on additional context.

Human instincts are completely out of whack with this, because they evolved to deal with a steady temporal progression from the current self to the future self, with no splits, joins or interruptions. They presume a binary category of 'selfhood' that worked ok before copying, uploading and freezing people became possible, but really makes no sense in absolute causal terms.

As dead as that person would be if we made a copy without destroying the original, and then killed him afterwards.

So yes, in the sense that 'original' means 'instance existing at an earlier time', but note that killing is now purely a cesation of life functions. It has been uncoupled from the destruction of personality information or the possibility of new instances of the just-killed person being created in the future.