ciphergoth comments on An open letter to scientific critics of cryonics

Comment on An open letter to scientific critics of cryonics by Paul Crowley

2011-07-17T10:26:58+01:00

You’re right, I should have Googled it. Here it is. Thanks! Will leave it up so this discussion makes sense, but be ruthless in future.

Comment on An open letter to scientific critics of cryonics by Luke Parrish

2011-07-16T17:53:21+01:00

It looks familiar to me. I think it is something I wrote in reply to a question on Yahoo Answers. Someone must be copying stuff based on keywords.

Comment on An open letter to scientific critics of cryonics by Paul Crowley

2011-07-16T08:53:01+01:00

I can’t figure out if this comment is spam or real! On the one hand, it’s relevant to cryonics, but on the other hand, it doesn’t have anything to do with the content of this article, and the name and link are incredibly spammy. I’ve taken a middle route of leaving it up but removing the link to the website, so that if it is spam the spammer doesn’t benefit.

Comment on An open letter to scientific critics of cryonics by free online project management

2011-07-15T11:20:56+01:00

The “lucid dream” option in Vanilla Sky is completely fictional. Real cryonics companies do not make big promises like in Vanilla Sky, and there is not yet any technology to reverse cryogenic damage or to influence dreams.

Comment on An open letter to scientific critics of cryonics by Paul Crowley

2010-10-20T20:40:42+01:00

Don’t worry — my field is crypto and I know what you mean, I don’t think this is patronising.

Could you write an article that explains the problem in your own language? I might not be able to understand it, but I can look for someone who can.

Thanks!

Comment on An open letter to scientific critics of cryonics by ge

2010-10-20T20:11:27+01:00

“Scientific critics of cryonics” I briefly read through this thread after stumbling upon this looking for something totally different. I found it interesting because it doesn’t seem, to me, that anyone responding to this is actually an expert in anything related to what Paul was asking. I thought he was asking for expert opinions on why cryogenics is not plausible. I am an expert in an affiliated area and have worked with cryogenics just to perform my work. @ Paul, this is in no way to sound harsh or condescending, but it is implausible and the way to find these studies is to actually be an expert and have access to places such as medline instead of wikipedia. I can’t even begin to go into why cryogenics (in the magnitude you are describing) won’t work because it would be out of your realm of knowledge from what I read that you posted. That said, I could be wrong because I don’t know you. I understand your frustration on wanting to know why, but it is so completely complicated and with not having the appropriate background, I myself can’t even begin to explain to you why. That is not to belittle you in any way as I am sure you are an expert in an area I am not. The take away point is that there is a TON of evidence/studies on the subject matter, but it’s just not readily available for the lay person that doesn’t study it. Some believe it shouldn’t be available for that very reason. Point in case: @ Luke- do you really know what a stem cell is? I honestly cringe when the topic comes up in mainstream society because it’s pretty much like cancer. I didn’t understand what cancer REALLY was until after med school and then training beyond that specifically dealt with cancer. That’s how complicated it is. As far as stem cell research goes, WE HAVE ACCESS TO STEM CELLS WITHOUT USING EMBRYOS- THEY DO EXIST AND SOME OUTSTANDING RESEARCH HAS BEEN PERFORMED USING THEM!!! Case in point here is Dolly the sheep. She was cloned. What alot of people don’t know is there are several forms of clones. She was the first of a certain type and was begat from her own somatic cell mammary tissue- not an embryo. The whole thing was a fluke bc they forgot to feed the cells and the result was they went into another stage of replication (dormant) that NO ONE was looking at as an alternative for cloning. Stem cells are not the end all for everything. Their use for diseases and the such is understandable. When you get into cloning people and preserving your body to be revived later, that’s just plain narcissism and quite frankly against nature itself. If everyone lived forever, they’d die of cancer. It’s how the body works. There is a certain error in cell replication and you can’t change that. This has nothing to do with nano repair and fracturing from freezing. Your body can only take so much and you die for a reason. So basically, in a nutshell, get access to medline or some authentic peer reviewed medical/research journals and you will find your answers, but good luck understanding it. It takes years of training and TONS of experience to do what these guys do in their work. For anyone that wants to pop off about this answer, examine yourself before you do so because it would be out of sheer insecurity if done.

Comment on An open letter to scientific critics of cryonics by Paul Crowley

2010-02-21T11:16:14+01:00

Yes, it seems certain that there will be some information loss; the question is how this compares to the observed natural processes that cause information loss in living people.

Comment on An open letter to scientific critics of cryonics by Bram Cohen

2010-02-20T22:10:02+01:00

Even with perfect jigsaw powers, some sections of the original CD really will be pulverized, and have to be recovered using error correction. Human brains appear to have a lot of redundancy, but no error correcting codes in the sense that CDs have them, so all damage to a human brain causes some information loss.

Comment on An open letter to scientific critics of cryonics by Luke Parrish

2010-02-18T02:02:12+01:00

What if we had a less scratch-resistant sort of CD and froze it at LN2 temperatures, then shattered it? Would most of the information be recoverable in theory? My thought is that it would be, since the plastic pieces would take unique enough shapes (undistorted thanks to the cold temperature) that they could be pieced back together like a puzzle.

Brains seem to be redundant in nature. When you think about it, they have to store the same information in multiple places to be able to communicate between the various parts effectively. Some stroke victims have lost an entire hemisphere, iirc. Their remaining hemisphere took over, relearned what they needed to know. How much better would it be if you could simply regrow the lost parts?

I think if you lose 50% of your data you are probably the same person by a reasonable estimation. The less data is preserved the more likely we would be to think of you as a clone/progeny rather than the same person. But even that is worth something I would think.

Comment on An open letter to scientific critics of cryonics by David Gerard

2010-02-17T23:34:57+01:00

e.g. some frogs, which have already evolved to survive partial freezing! http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/3209/05-ask.html

Comment on An open letter to scientific critics of cryonics by Paul Crowley

2010-02-17T23:26:16+01:00

Please can we keep the focus on technical feasibility for now. I want to thrash out this point more before moving on to other objections to cryonics.

Comment on An open letter to scientific critics of cryonics by Bram Cohen

2010-02-17T22:54:40+01:00

You could make a new version of me with a ‘sense of self-continuity’ using 0% of my existing brain matter. The fact that such a sense would be a delusion wouldn’t change the subjective impression of the entity which had it.

Having one’s brain be made superintelligent as a way of overcoming the whole brain damage thing is a nice fantasy, but we don’t run Commodore 64 OS on any modern hardware, even though I’m sure that old OS would appreciate it. There’s no ethical or legal requirement that the remnants of a corpse be treated with any particular respect, and it’s far more plausible that one’s addled brain would be used as is as AI for some cannon fodder in a super-advanced version of Quake as that the future will want you to live out some heavenly fantasy.

Comment on An open letter to scientific critics of cryonics by Bram Cohen

2010-02-17T22:36:22+01:00

Not that it matters directly to cryonics, but a CD put through a meat grinder is information theoretically speaking most likely completely intact. CDs by design use error correcting codes for handling scratches, and the coding itself is so far overkill that usually when a CD skips it’s because it lost tracking not because the error correction failed, and tracking is a physical reading device problem rather than an information theoretic problem. The arc of the tracks and the shape of the pieces should make it easy to narrow down the number of possibilities of how the pieces go together to a reasonable amount, and then the data is recoverable.

Granted, CDs are explicitly designed to handle scratches, while the human brain isn’t designed to handle incisions, and the size of structures in CDs is vastly larger than dendrites, but the CD in a meat grinder example is a better argument in favor of information theoretic preservation than against it.

The ‘what it’s designed for’ criterion is quite substantive. I’m pretty sure one could breed creatures which could survive freezing after a few million generations, but we humans weren’t bred that way, so we can’t.

Comment on An open letter to scientific critics of cryonics by Paul Crowley

2010-02-17T12:34:54+01:00

Thought it might be that sort of thing. Many thanks for checking and commenting!

Comment on An open letter to scientific critics of cryonics by Alison Rowan

2010-02-17T12:07:36+01:00

I have watched it (cos I’m at work and I like listening to Penn and Teller snark). It doesn’t say much that’s substansive. The only actual arguments are: “they’re banking on someone in the future solving thawing”, and “it costs a lot of money”.

Comment on An open letter to scientific critics of cryonics by Paul Crowley

2010-02-17T10:51:47+01:00

That sounds like useful work, but what I’m suggesting is that you narrow your focus even further, to just this one discrepancy you perceive, and write that up. As far as I can tell, no critic of cryonics has ever tried to actually respond to the actual words of a cryonics advocate before, except in the form of blog comments. So just this one article on this one paragraph on this one reference would represent a huge step forward.

Comment on An open letter to scientific critics of cryonics by David Gerard

2010-02-17T09:12:36+01:00

Going through each of Best’s references and comparing them to the original paper is on the to-do list.

Man, this scepticism stuff, it’s work …

Comment on An open letter to scientific critics of cryonics by Paul Crowley

2010-02-17T08:41:42+01:00

I think you are suffering from a failure of relinquishment here, “learning as little as possible from each error”. However, if you really think there’s substance to this, don’t just stick it into the RationalWiki article next to all the dross in there — write a proper article-length exposition on the problem and post it as a blog post. If you don’t feel it’s appropriate for any of your blogs I could post it here.

Comment on An open letter to scientific critics of cryonics by David Gerard

2010-02-16T20:25:39+01:00

No indeed — on rereading, I think Best has misrepresented the paper saying “well, the cells don’t look trashed in their frozen state” as it saying “woohoo, the cells are viable!”

Comment on An open letter to scientific critics of cryonics by Paul Crowley

2010-02-16T16:55:36+01:00

OK, so they haven’t actually come close to saying that they “screwed the pooch”. The closest they’ve actually come to saying it is that they think that he might be the last to be reanimated. Please stop misrepresenting what they say.

Comment on An open letter to scientific critics of cryonics by David Gerard

2010-02-16T16:36:55+01:00

Look up James Bedford, the first man frozen. They didn’t use any cryoprotectants. Pretty much all cells will be ice crystal mush, let alone the dendrites. They acknowledge this one as “very tricky”. No shit.

Comment on An open letter to scientific critics of cryonics by Paul Crowley

2010-02-16T16:21:34+01:00

They’ve already acknowledged that they probably screwed the pooch on the earliest frozen heads

Could you provide a reference for that please?

Comment on An open letter to scientific critics of cryonics by David Gerard

2010-02-16T16:18:15+01:00

They’ve already acknowledged that they probably screwed the pooch on the earliest frozen heads, which are likely crystal-broken mush now. Where is the evidence that what they’re actually doing now is any better?

Calling it a “scam” is a tricky one — the cryonics industry is, generally speaking, not actually engaged in knowing, deliberate fraud. But there’s no evidence it’s not presently profound foolishness to bother spending a large sum of money on.

Comment on An open letter to scientific critics of cryonics by Luke Parrish

2010-02-16T16:05:31+01:00

The comparison to egyptian mummification is a clear case of dramatization. Anyone with the hindsight of today’s science can plainly see that there is no comparison, as mummification does not even keep the brain around.

The science of cryonics may or may not be “sufficiently good” but the case for it not being sufficiently good is not anywhere near as strong as the case against egyptian methods of preservation.

Putting a CD through a grinder would separate and mix the pieces quite a bit. If they were intact, and sufficient context remained to put them back together like a puzzle (in other words, the CD contained predictable data, or the shapes of the plastic fragments were well preserved) it might be possible to reconstruct it even so. With cryonics we have an additional advantage, in that the pieces are still in more or less the same place they originally were.

If you take out the assumption of eventual nanotech capable of repairing dendrites and such, cryonics (i.e. present-day attempts) does look like a scam. But advocates do not see it as particularly reasonable to assume the converse, given the fact that cryonics opens the door to thousands of years of technological advancement as a possible resolution.

Comment on An open letter to scientific critics of cryonics by David Gerard

2010-02-16T11:29:59+01:00

@Luke — what I’m noting is that, for information preservation, the Egyptians pretty clearly screwed the pooch. Because the science behind their preservation technology wasn’t actually good science.

So too, the cryonics industry has shown no evidence that what they do to frozen heads does not similarly screw the pooch. Are the dendrites preserved in a state where their strengths can be measured? How many of them are? For a computer science question: what proportion of interconnects can you randomly trash in a neural net and have it still work usefully?

Or is it like running a CD through a grinder, then asserting that nanobots will some day exist that can read the pits and reassemble the music, and expecting people to pay you to run CDs through a grinder and save the pieces?

Comment on An open letter to scientific critics of cryonics by Paul Crowley

2010-02-16T10:42:25+01:00

Video requires quite an investment of time for me to watch — could you say a little about what it argues so I know whether to spend time on it?

Comment on An open letter to scientific critics of cryonics by Luke Parrish

2010-02-16T00:08:39+01:00

Not all the problems stack in the way you are imagining. In fact, they all boil down to one thing: we cannot yet repair things on a nanoscopic scale.

If we could do so already, cryonics would be unnecessary.

Comment on An open letter to scientific critics of cryonics by Luke Parrish

2010-02-15T23:55:27+01:00

Bringing egyptian mummies back is extraordinary by existing scientific standards. If you were to claim that enough information is present in the hollowed-out skull of a mummy to bring back the personality of the individual, it would be very surprising in terms of today’s science. Can the same really be said of cryonics?

Comment on An open letter to scientific critics of cryonics by Paul Crowley

2010-02-15T23:50:31+01:00

Note that David no longer considers the paper to be lying about the rat hippocampus thing.

Comment on An open letter to scientific critics of cryonics by David Gerard

2010-02-15T22:50:04+01:00

@Maxine — the trouble in the pharaohs’ case is that putting a brain in a jar for six thousand years is not very information-preserving. Livers just aren’t that important to personhood, it turns out.

The Ben Best paper (where he grossly distorts the claims of two out of two of the referenced papers I’ve look up so far) appears to be the current cryonics industry’s best shot at claiming a scientific rationale for the current cryonics industry’s activities. I’ve asked the RationalWiki crowd to research the papers in question and compare what they actually say to the claims in Best’s paper.

(The one where Best claims a rat hippocampus was frozen and put back into place in working order is a complete lie, for example, which doesn’t augur well for the rest. The rabbit’s kidney claim is grossly exaggerated by best. Etc.)