Comment by nnq | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nnq | Hacker News Reader

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They don't!

If someone could freeze at least a small insect brain after it "learned something", unfreeze it and prove that it retained what it learned, I might have at least a grain of faith in this. Even getting an insect ganglia out on a feeder plate with electrodes, training it to respond in a way to a certain sequence of input electrical impulses and proving that after thawing and reanimation it still preserves that memory would light a spark of faith, but we don't even have this!

Understanding "biology 101" means understanding that biology is about experiments, everyth is empirical (and will be for quite some time I guess), nothing can be said that "it works" in biology or medicine until you experimentally prove it does. Maybe in a few centuries we'll have cool equations describing life and have something like "theoretical biology" that will be like theoretical physics is to physics (no, what we call "theoretical biology" nowadays is not that!). Show me some equations (derived from experiments, of course, and that can predict other experiments of course) describing the amount of information relevant to a human's personality that can be recovered from a frozen brain! If you can't, prove it experimentally. If you can't... bad luck! With the kinds of probabilities involved in biology, "good things" (like being lucky to be able to revive a frozen human brain) don't happen by chance!

"Nature"/"The universe"/"God" is NOT on our side on this path, so there's no room for optimistic thinking, we can only rely on cold (literally) hard science and math!

So your argument is that until it's "proven" that we can cryopreserve and then restore brains, the probability of success is zero? If you agree that the probability is non-zero, then you agree with the cryopreservation advocates. In addition, if you agree that it's non-zero, you must agree that it's better than doing nothing (which clearly has a zero chance of revival).

Cryopreservation advocates do not claim that the process is proven to be work, they claim that the chance may be small, but it's non-zero.

>"Nature"/"The universe"/"God" is NOT on our side on this path, so there's no room for optimistic thinking, we can only rely on cold (literally) hard science and math!

I don't even know where you're going with this discourse. If you're a utilitarian rationalist you can estimate the chance of success for cryopreservation and revival. It's quite easy to show that if the probability is non-zero, then it's beneficial to make such a bet, as the possible positive utility can be huge if the cryopreservation is succesful.

If you think that probability estimates are "not science" and therefore "irrational", you don't know what you're talking about. If you think that current scientific evidence shows that the chance of revival is zero, then you're clearly wrong (and that would contradict your own claims, as zero chance would mean there's no need to make any new experiments).

"Cryopreservation advocates do not claim that the process is proven to be work, they claim that the chance may be small, but it's non-zero."

They implicitly claim that not only is the chance non-zero, but that it's large enough to be worth the opportunity cost of actually freezing people. I agree that a non-zero chance seems obvious, but this claim definitely does not, and needs a lot more substantiation than there actually is.

That's a good point.

You can look it this way: life after rewarming can last for hundreds of years, easily a thousand as medical technology will have advanced at that point. People are currently willing to pay $100k in medical bills to extend their life by about one year with 50% chance, which means that the cost is $200k per year.

Cryopreservation also costs about $100k (slightly more in real life I guess, I'm rounding numbers for simplicity).

If cryopreservation has a 1% of success to extend life by 1000 years for $100k, then they will "buy" 1 year for $10k. Of course, you can change the numbers (in any direction), e.g. 100 years of life would come out to $100k per year, still cheaper than what most people are willing to pay today to live slightly longer. The 1% success rate is rather pessimistic, too.

If you take quality of life into consideration, the argument starts to favour cryonics quite heavily (we can assume that life is a lot better in the future thanks to advancement of technology).

> The 1% success rate is rather pessimistic, too.

Where do you get that? From what little I understand, 1% seems highly optimistic, given how destructive the freezing process is at the moment.

It's my own estimation based on the evidence I've seen. There's plenty of detail when you look at neural tissue using a microscope: http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/braincryopreservation1.htm...

That is not peer-reviewed research, and therefore I treat it about as seriously as I treat any other comment on the internet: at best incompetent, at worst maliciously deceiving. Considering its published by a company that makes money from freezing people...probably the latter.

By all means, please, show us peer reviewed sources that contradict it.

My gut estimate is that the chance is somewhere in the 1-10% range. I've been thinking about it for around 5 years. Part of why that number is so high is the relative lack of coherent and nuanced counterargument that demonstrates the critic at least understands the issue (not just one aspect, but the whole huge convoluted topic) well. I may end up becoming such a critic myself, eventually, but so far things aren't looking so bad for cryonics.

It is true that chances can't just be "non-zero" and be rational, nor simply based on faith, because that's basically Pascal's Wager. However I think my 1-10% gut feeling is something that I could probably be talked out of if it were really arbitrarily low like people keep assuming.

Assuming that probability range, I think selling to ordinary people is pretty defensible at $50k-$500k rates, because we already spend around $5M to avoid accidental deaths via regulatory tradeoffs. If it is lower (0.1% say) and yet still not arbitrarily low, we would then need to restrict to either very rich or very desperate people (where the ratio of marginal utility of life to marginal utility of a dollar differs significantly from the norm). Arbitrarily low chances literally on level with egyptian mummification or worshipping a random god is definitely not something that should be sold to anyone (except as a novelty maybe).

Note also that cryonics storage cost is influenced by economies of scale, so mass-produced cryonics is likely to be a lot less expensive per person than the cost you see on the market today. If you could seriously measure a non-arbitrary 0.01% it wouldn't necessarily be impossible to justify even on the mass market and even to relatively death-complacent people -- it would just have to be very cheap for them. Granted, gut feelings are hard to calibrate well to reality at such extremes (hence lottery tickets) so I'm not going to seriously argue that, I'm just saying this to give you a feel for why I think there's a need for fairly strong counterargument before you can reasonably take the position that cryonics is just innately bad/fraudulent business.

I also anticipate various positive externalities from the cryonics business, such as sooner (eventual) development of suspended animation of the damage-free variety, which has potential to save a lot of lives and spare a lot of suffering. These too should be accounted for as part of a robust criticism.

Maybe a good analogy would be intelligent design. Sure, we can't say there is a 0% chance ID is false. But all evidence points to that. It's a fallacious argument to say something is possible because science hasn't proven it completely false.

What is the probability of dying and a super-natural being transferring you to heaven? It's non-zero. I've heard the same exact argument from ultra religious people.

I am all for keeping a bit of hope alive, but a non-zero chance argument on its own is not enough. What is the probability exactly, can it be proven.

Robin Hanson puts the probability around 5%: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/03/break-cryonics-down.ht...

The "non-zero" argument can be fixed simply by comparing relative likelihoods, or noting that while one can't ever rationally believe with 0% probability, you can use epsilon as a substitute for "it's more than 0 but I can't measure how much because it's so small". Personally I think there's enough evidence to put religious ideas of afterlife far below the probability of a single sha256 hash resulting in a new block in the bitcoin blockchain: http://blockexplorer.com/q/probability

Hanson's estimate is no better than the Drake equation. Everyone assigns different numbers to the various probabilities, multiplies them together, and gets a different result.

Sure, though the more important part of the exercise is the analysis. Same thing with the Drake Equation. And in both cases the terms aren't immune to new information, nor can you expect to honestly get away with assigning anything you want. You might have a different list of criteria or different probabilities, but the point is to lay them down and give a reason why you think it's unlikely enough not to pay the small sum of money. It also lets others argue with you over your estimates, because they might have information you don't, now or in future years. Several of Hanson's criteria can have their probabilities increase towards 1 or decrease towards 0 depending on what humanity does in the coming years.

> And in both cases the terms aren't immune to new information, nor can you expect to honestly get away with assigning anything you want.

Actually, you can get away with assigning anything you want. That's hidden in the assumption that the criteria he lists are more-or-less independent.

> You might have a different list of criteria or different probabilities, but the point is to lay them down and give a reason why you think it's unlikely enough not to pay the small sum of money.

You've got the burden of proof backward. The cryonics advocates are the ones trying to argue that cryonics will work with sufficiently high probability to make investing in it worthwhile. The grandparent cited 5% as if that figure had even one significant digit -- which it doesn't, by Hanson's own calculation.

> It also lets others argue with you over your estimates, because they might have information you don't, now or in future years.

It also lets others argue even if they don't have new information, which just wastes everyone's time. The same phenomena also occurs with the Drake equation.

Yes, I agree it's non-zero. It's a (1. benefit) x (2. probability of benefit) / (3. cost) type of reasoning, and both (1) and (3) are subjective, so everyone can choose for himself whether "it's worth it" or whether you want it.

I'm just emphasizing that this technology is not a realistic solution to anything, just as a lottery ticket is not a solution for one's financial problems. I may choose to buy a lottery ticket myself, same as I may choose to have my head frozen, but I'm not going to consider this as a real solution to any problem - just like a lottery ticket, it may have more "entertainment" value than real value (though the "entertainment" value may be enough for me to buy it).

My only point is that we should always see the difference between "lottery tickets" and real solutions, and always see the former as what they are: hope growing "entertainment" forms... I know, most people don't like this way of looking at things and label it "dark and gloomy", but it's how I see it :)

The difference is that people win lotteries every week, and so far no-one has been frozen and thawed.

As we're using analogies: we know that machine-flight is possible. But how many people broke their legs after gluing feathers to wings strapped to their arms and jumping off a barn, flapping wildly, before Kitty Hawk flew?

> Understanding "biology 101" means understanding that biology is about experiments, everyth is empirical (and will be for quite some time I guess), nothing can be said that "it works" in biology or medicine until you experimentally prove it does.

Part of this isn't really biology (as we know it) though, so I'm not sure that biologists who criticize are seeing the whole picture. Look at it like a cryptographer: Is putting a brain in liquid nitrogen a secure erasure method against all future attacks from a determined opponent with lots of resources? Would you trust your financial data to such a method of data erasure?

> "Nature"/"The universe"/"God" is NOT on our side on this path, so there's no room for optimistic thinking, we can only rely on cold (literally) hard science and math!

I like this sentiment, I wish more cryonics people took it to heart, but at the same time I don't believe that "The Force" is actually against us. There is some reasonable burden of proof on the assertion that the data is is utterly gone and out of reach of all realistic future technology.

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