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Cryonics Myths
31–40 of 57 posts
Re: Cryonics Myths
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
While there is a real risk that cryonics organizations will fail, there's no reason to think it's a foregone conclusion. Tons of organizations have been around for over two hundred years. The oldest non-profits in continuous existence are well over a thousand years old. There's no legal barrier to a non-profit corporation or trust continuing to exist indefinitely, as many indeed have. (Heck, the Nobel Prizes are an a…
There is no shortage of people in the world and no reason to add additional people who are old or diseased, and have no particular skills that are necessary in the future. It’s much cheaper (not to mention more fun) to make more babies.
There's always a shortage of people who contribute to society with generosity and wisdom. But not many such heads end up in liquid nitrogen tanks, methinks.
Re: Cryonics Myths
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
In principle I could be on board with cryonics, but I have one principled objection that I can't seem to get around: I see no reason why anyone with the ability to re-animate/heal cryo-preserved strangers would do so.
If we had the ability to reanimate 1,000 people from ancient Egypt, it seems highly plausible the resources could be found to do it. These people would be a font of information from a long forgotten past. The only question is whether they could adjust to the present. So if preserved people from the past survived long enough, it seems like historical interest could motivate people to re-animate them. There may be othe…
Well, one objection could be that much of the information about the ancient civilizations has been lost, whereas it is highly improbable that a person could add anything to the knowledge about the modern world to a future historian or a linguist.
Re: Cryonics Myths
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
If we had the ability to reanimate 1,000 people from ancient Egypt, it seems highly plausible the resources could be found to do it. These people would be a font of information from a long forgotten past. The only question is whether they could adjust to the present. So if preserved people from the past survived long enough, it seems like historical interest could motivate people to re-animate them. There may be othe…
Well, one objection could be that much of the information about the ancient civilizations has been lost, whereas it is highly improbable that a person could add anything to the knowledge about the modern world to a future historian or a linguist.
Maybe but it's pretty common for much knowledge of even the recent past to be lost and it seems plausible that even a detailed selection of texts couldn't give the experience that someone who was there could give.
Re: Cryonics Myths
#35Being an avid cryonicist, I have attempted to express these myths to a wide variety of people. The very few and open-minded folks that will move past utter dismissal usually have a deep and visceral illogical fear of death - or a deep and visceral religious belief in the afterlife. These "Cryonics Myths Debunked" tend to only further convince those who are likely to choose Cryonics anyways. There must be a better way…
Funny, I find that the cryonics advocates are the ones with the deep and visceral illogical fear of death. That’s why one signs up for cryonics, right? Being at peace with one’s mortality removes the selfish “rational” incentive for cryonics. Individual people are replaceable, and don’t belong outside of their own time. If you want to advocate cryonics for the masses, think about what you would do if you had to live…
> If you want to advocate cryonics for the masses, think about what you would do if you had to live in a world with the reanimated masses of the 18th century.
Sounds like Riverworld. I think it could be quite interesting. But anyway, whether it's a potential mess or not is something for our future descendants to decide on.
Advocating cryonics today doesn't imply that our descendants, even if they have the technology, will accept the resurrection of masses. We have immigration laws today, I'm sure the same concept could be thought up for "people outside their own time", if it ever is an issue.
Re: Cryonics Myths
#36I started casually researching cryonics after reading the WaitButWhy article on it https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/03/cryonics.html and I'm recently leaning towards more towards a "why not?" mindset but I'm not yet fully convinced.
The purely logical, rational side of me wants to say "why should I make an assumption that 21st century norms about the inevitability of death will hold true or are even valid at all?" so I should just do the least presumptuous thing and get frozen.
But on the other hand, what does the quality of life look like for a 21st century human reanimated in 2300 or 2500 or whatever? If history (or Black Mirror) tells us anything, at best, I'll live out my immortal life as some sick museum exhibit/circus curiosity, with no possibility of the kind embrace of death unless some rebellious young person happens to take pity on me.
But that's also assuming humans keep on being Sapiens and don't transcend their present biology/mindset.
But then, of course, how lonely is it to live in a world where I'm one of the last humans tethered to my un-enhanced, primitive biology?
And so on...
Re: Cryonics Myths
#37They mention they don't preserve "heads" in specific but rather brains, and go into detail about how they can't separate a brain from a skull so they preserve the entire head. Wouldn't separating the head from the body cause similar problems of destroying information in the brain? Do they keep the entire body?
Whole-body preservation has been a more expensive option (and I assume still is, but I haven't been keeping up to date). Not that I've tried, but I guess detaching a head at the base has less potential to damage than would opening and removing the whole skull.
I know nothing of this field, is there any idea of how long "information" stays in the brain or any metric like that once blood/oxygen flow to the brain has been inhibited?
Re: Cryonics Myths
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Funny, I find that the cryonics advocates are the ones with the deep and visceral illogical fear of death. That’s why one signs up for cryonics, right? Being at peace with one’s mortality removes the selfish “rational” incentive for cryonics. Individual people are replaceable, and don’t belong outside of their own time. If you want to advocate cryonics for the masses, think about what you would do if you had to live…
> If you want to advocate cryonics for the masses, think about what you would do if you had to live in a world with the reanimated masses of the 18th century. Sounds like Riverworld. I think it could be quite interesting. But anyway, whether it's a potential mess or not is something for our future descendants to decide on. Advocating cryonics today doesn't imply that our descendants, even if they have the technology,…
Or I could just accept my mortality and let my corpse go to some productive use, like organ donation or teaching medical students, rather than investing in some narcissistic notion of being resurrected.
Re: Cryonics Myths
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whole-body preservation has been a more expensive option (and I assume still is, but I haven't been keeping up to date). Not that I've tried, but I guess detaching a head at the base has less potential to damage than would opening and removing the whole skull.
I know nothing of this field, is there any idea of how long "information" stays in the brain or any metric like that once blood/oxygen flow to the brain has been inhibited?
I found a recent review of cases of people resuscitated from combined hypothermia and cardiac arrest: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030095721...
E.g. people found drowned in icy water with no pulse. "Six of nine survivors (66.7%) had minor neurological sequelae with Glasgow outcome scale (GOS) 5 (low disability)" (the rest worse). It's not clear to me from the table what the longest time with no breathing or pulse was among those six best-off survivors. But here's a popular account of another case: http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/child-survived...
Those were the top two google hits that came up. It's not my field, but it doesn't seem plausible to me that much of our identity is encoded in evanescent patterns of electrical activity or such. (As opposed to your short term working memory.) If you can nail down the molecules, the information is bound to be there in their arrangement.
Re: Cryonics Myths
#40As the procedure has not been proved to be reversible, it suggests to me that finding a future cure for the original ailment is the easiest assumption to make in this field. I'm more interested to get better answers to the myth that " Cryonics is not a belief that the dead can be revived " than those presented in the article. I'd be hard pressed to say that there are things I think are impossible, but there are a gre…
http://dx.doi.org/10.1089/rej.2014.1636 "Can memory be retained after cryopreservation? Our research has attempted to answer this long-standing question by using the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, a well-known model organism for biological research that has generated revolutionary findings but has not been tested for memory retention after cryopreservation. Our study's goal was to test C. elegans' memory recal…
Thank you, that's news to me. While I still remain skeptical due to the orders of magnitude of complexity in the gap between C. elegans and humans, it definitely calls for a reassessment of the probability I have previously attached to it.
This is why I like HN...