[extropy-chat] re: A view on cryonics

[ben]

Brett Paatsch wrote:

"some of them, like me, are not going for it because they are confident 
that it cannot work. And their confidence I think comes not from 
conservatism but from an understanding of biology."

Lord Kelvin's belief (i think it was him) that the sun could only burn 
for 6000 years or so was based on his good understanding (for the time) 
of physics. He wasn't to know that the sun isn't actually made out of coal.

The one thing that has struck me most forcibly about biology is how very 
little we know. I went to college over 20 years ago to do a biochemistry 
degree, and got some inkling of how ignorant we were then. I now feel, 
if anything, even more ignorant 20-odd years later; not because of what 
i have forgotten, but because of what i have learned since.

I still say now what i used to say then, but with even more conviction: 
The more i learn, the more i realise just how little i've learned.

Your pessimism regarding the feasibility of cryonics is understandable, 
but i don't think it is justified. We simply don't know enough to make 
that kind of decision at this point in time. Personally, i think cryonic 
suspension remains "the second worst thing that could happen".

Please don't take this as a personal attack on your knowledge, or an 
insult, it's not, and it also applies to me and to everyone else, but 
your understanding of biology is miniscule. I think it was Einstein who 
said something about scratching about at the beach looking at the sand, 
when the great ocean of truth was just yards away. He was talking about 
physics, but it applies even more to biology. We're still just 
scratching the surface.


OK, after reading more of that thread, maybe i'm getting the wrong end 
of the stick about your objection:

"...you think that you can in some sense survive as a sort of 
disembodied pattern despite the fact that all the cells that make you up 
are destroyed in order to determine that pattern. "

This is an interesting line of thought. What is a disembodied pattern? 
Can there be such a thing? It sounds a bit like the traditional 
christian concept of a soul. Clearly that concept is nonsense. Even if 
it could exist, 'the soul' couldn't possibly represent 'you' in any 
meaningful way. Why would evolution have come up with the most complex 
machine in the known universe, if it wasn't necessary to embody a mind?

I don't see how a pattern can be disembodied. It must be embodied in 
something. The important thing, for a mind, is whether it is embodied in 
a static medium, as a 'recording', or in an active one, in which it can 
continue to process information, and, effectively, 'live'.

The destruction of the cells you mention is happening all the time, 
anyway. Human bodies are like those clouds that hang around mountain 
tops. It looks like the same cloud from one minute to the next, but in 
fact it is composed of different water molecules all the time, as they 
flow into the low-pressure region, condense, then evaporate again as the 
wind carries them out of the cloud. The cloud IS the pattern. But it is 
not a disembodied pattern. It couldn't exist without the wind and the 
water molecules. We are the same, except vastly more complex.

If you think that only a biological substrate can handle the complexity 
of the pattern of a human mind, that's another argument. Feel free to 
start it :-).


"there is no evidence anywhere ever that a homo sapiens can survive 
separate from the cellular substrate that makes up their brain."

Of course not. Not yet, there isn't. There was no evidence anywhere ever 
that homo sapiens could survive in the vacuum of space, or at the bottom 
of the sea, or that we could fly above the clouds, not until we did 
those things. The absence of proof that you can do something is not 
proof that you cannot do it.

I would agree that a mind cannot exist without something to embody it, 
but not that that something has to be a biological brain (or even a 
cellular structure, but who says we couldn't make artificial cells, 
anyway?).

Human bodies and brains *are machines* (do you deny this?). It's no more 
startling to expect that the mind could be implemented on a different 
machine than it is to expect that a digital watch can do the same job as 
a water clock (Of course, there's no denying that a digital watch 
requires a completely different level of technology to a water clock).

ben