A view on cryonics (was Re: [extropy-chat] Bad Forecasts!)

[Brett Paatsch]

Giu1i0 Pri5c0 wrote:

> On Fri, 10 Sep 2004 11:59:56 +1000, Brett Paatsch
> ... But it is possible that cryonics
> will never work. This is essentially
> > my current position (and I did not arrive at that position without
taking
> > a close look at the arguments made in its favour).

> Are you talking of the current/proposed techniques or of the concept
> itself? I would find it difficult to believe that no possible
> technique can restore a deceased patient to life. You are right, I
> think, that there are no sacred cows. Rather, if it works it works, if
> it does not work we have to go back to the drawing board.

I think I've read what I understand to be about the best most current
proposed techniques and discussions on cryonics. I've read Merkle's
paper on the Molecular Repair of the Brain (I'm not a fan of that one),
Max More's thesis (or part of it), the Alcor documentation from the
mid 1990s, the Suda papers and I still subscribe to the cryonet list.

I read that stuff because on first impression I found the possibility of
cryonics appealing and not obviously implausible. I thought that if on
serious consideration a sceptic like me could come to think that cryonics
would work for me, then I could probably sell it to other people. I thought
I might have the skills to become the Australian franchise holder of
whatever
was the best of the US cryo companies at some point in the futue. I thought
I would know how to build cryonics as a business. I am confident enough
of my ability to judge what will and won't work that if I was really
convinced
that if cryonics was a viable solution for me, then I could persuade others
that it would also be a solution for them.

To answer your question I now think that cryonics will never work for
me, not just with proposed current techniques but with any possible future
techniques that might be conceivable recognizable as cryonics and carried
out within the laws of physics.

This does not mean that I believe in souls or spirits I don't. I am a
materialist.
I just think that I am a material thing that is biological and has grown. I
am
made up of atoms sure but far more relevantly to what makes me me I am
made up of cells. I don't think that any cryonics procedure can disassemble
me to the cellular level and put me back together again. I think I would be
destroyed in the wholesale disassembly process and that the wholesale
disassembly process cannot be gotten around because at the time the
cryonics "freezing" processs is initiated I would have been composed of
inorganic highly perishable cells. And cells aren't structured in
efficiently
evolved biological organisms so as to leave service lanes for nanobots
(on the contrary the brain is protected by a blood brain barrier precisely
to reduce the opportunity for entry disease). Evolution didn't design my
brain to rebuilt it, it gave it some capacity for repair and adaption but
ultimately
evolution will be perfectly happy to start again and grow another. The me
bit encoded in my brain is entirely expendable from evolutions standpoint.

I don't accept the information theoretic criteria of death. I think the
information
theoretic criteria of death is a hurdle that is chosen specifically because
IT
savvy folk feel confident that it could be jumped over. I don't think the
information
theoretic criteria of death has any other applications other than to satisfy
an
understandable yearning (I'd like to avoid dying too) to avoid dying.

If the information theoretic critera was valid rather than just a
rationalisation it
would hold some value not just at the end of life but at the start of it.
DNA is
information but it is not life. A recipe is not a cake. I think the unit of
life is the
cell.

In short I think cryonicists believe in cryonics for similar reasons that
christians
believe in the resurrection - they want to live and they can't clearly see
that it
is impossible (that don't see that any irrevocable scientific laws are
broken or
that they cannot be gotten around) so they continue to hope for what might
work without knowing exactly how.  I can relate to the wanting to hope but
I can't pull of belief in cryonics with intellectual integrity any better
than I can
pull of belief in reincarnation or the resurrection. Yet being human and
mortal
cryonics was a subject that I felt compelled to explore. I could not just
keep
an open mind on it and not explore it, that would have been to have
shortchanged myself a great opportunity for both survival and perhaps a
very successful business had it been possible.

Now that I have reached a conclusion on cryonics I feel in much the same way
towards transhumanists that still think it will work and still suspend
disbelief to
hold hope as I once felt towards friends and family that remained religious
when
I grew out of it. I like them. I respect them when they argue sensibly and I
don't
put much stock in their beliefs but am interested in their values. Its the
cryonics
thing that makes transhumanist and extropes look a bit cultish and so easy
to
parody in my opinion.

And I have seen embryonics stem cell scientists differentiate their work in
front
of public audiences by pointing at the Raelians as the irresponsible
unbelievable
face of cloning but I've also seen them talk of cryonics in the same way.

Cryonics as a meme is out there - the meme has been given a fair shake by
some
pretty persistent and impassioned advocates over quite a period of time. And
I'm
glad that it has been. But scientists and the public know about it.
Scientists as a
class are not indifferent to means of prolonging or extending their own
surivival.
Those that are not signing up are not all not signing up because they are
ignorant
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.

When I see those who support cryonics lobbying for it, I don't oppose them,
the libertarian in me thinks that people should be able to do whatever they
like
so long as it harms no one else, and championing an idea like cryonics may
actually bring a sector of the public to a sort of interest in science and
technology
that otherwise might not be motivated to learn something about it. And I
would
have not accepted other people advice had they told me not to explore the
possibility
of something like cryonics if it seemed useful for me to do so. But if
something isn't
true there eventually will be harmful ramifications if a lot of people
believing it,
because a lot of believers can constitute a entropic political force.

Perhaps through much of human history it has been the religious visionaries
driven
by personal need that have blazed the fuzzy trails that scientists came
along to later
to apply harsher standards but more slowly too. If cryonics is a central
article of
faith to most transhumanists and I don't think it necessarily is to all of
them (but there
don't seem to be many that have ruled it out) then I guess I'd regard
transhumanism
as a sort of latter day religion. Perhaps a successor or variant on
christianity where
the preserve-hope-for-the-future function of the resurrection myth is
replaced by
a less obviously unscientific one.

Brett Paatsch