Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

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To quote from Wikipedia, "A central premise of cryonics is that long-term memory, personality, and identity are stored in durable cell structures and patterns within the brain that do not require continuous brain activity to survive.[13] This premise is generally accepted in medicine; it is known that under certain conditions the brain can stop functioning and still later recover with retention of long-term memory."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryonics#Neuropreservation

What we can do today, is preserving the brain structure. What we can't do today is to restore the brain and body after prolonged preservation, and to fix whatever illnesses caused the patient to undergo this procedure in the first place.

Both of those problems seem to be tractable with nanotech, which we know is real and works (we usually call it "life", but life is nothing but a nanotech that's not ours and we can't controll well enough yet). So at this point I'd say cryopreservation is a bet against continued technological progress (which is not bad, because not taking it means certainly dying), not an act of faith.

One can argue against economics of such, and the cost a cryopreserved person imposes on the living, but comparing it to faith in God and resurrection is IMO wrong.

There are so many assumptions here it might as well be religion:

- that death does not alter the structure irrepairably

- that the structure and information contained therein will not degrade over time

- that the freezing process itself won't damage the information

- that the information will be recoverable

- that we will be able to make sense of such information

- that the information after successful restoration can be transplanted into some other medium

- that this other medium will be able to 'execute' using that information

- that the electrical component of brain activity once lost can be restored

- and that all of the above will result in a restoration of consciousness

- and that this consciousness will somehow be given the status of person (that's more of a social issue)

All of these together to me are equivalent to or maybe even greater than believing in God.

Let's go line by line.

- that death does not alter the structure irrepairably

As far as we can tell, if we freeze it quick enough, it won't. No magic required. (death doesn't mean something magical is happening to matter, it only means molecular machines stop working the way they should)

- that the structure and information contained therein will not degrade over time

Possible. Manageable with technology. Testable. No magic required.

- that the freezing process itself won't damage the information

Possible. Subject to fixing by improved technology. Testable. No magic required.

- that the information will be recoverable

Possible by definition of solving previous two points. Subject to advanced enough technology, which cryopreserved people are hedging against. No magic required.

- that we will be able to make sense of such information

See above.

- that the information after successful restoration can be transplanted into some other medium

Not required. Technology advanced enough to revive a cryopreserved patient will likely be able to fix the original medium. Technology already exists (in form of nanotechnology - viruses, bacteria, proteins, enzymes), but we don't know how to use it yet, as we didn't build it. No magic required.

- that this other medium will be able to 'execute' using that information

See above. Also, if you really insist on another medium, then it depends on whether or not brains run on magic. If they are not, then the problem is addressable with technology (develop a good enough medium).

- that the electrical component of brain activity once lost can be restored

Evidence suggests that this component is mostly irrelevant. Even if, it's solvable with technology (tough luck to those already preserved though). No magic required.

- and that all of the above will result in a restoration of consciousness

Unless you believe consciousness is magic, it's possible by definition of solving #2/#3.

- and that this consciousness will somehow be given the status of person (that's more of a social issue)

That's a social issue, but again, if consciousness is not a magical process, we can hope the society will mature enough to be able to accept revived people as persons.

> All of these together to me are equivalent to or maybe even greater than believing in God.

Now this IMO does not follow. There're no supernatural phenomena required to address any assumptions you stated, so isn't this by definition requiring qualitatively less faith than religion?

'manageable with technology we do not have' -> magic.

Not if by "do not have" we mean "we know it exists and can work, but we haven't figured out how to control it yet". It's a bit similar to saying "we have this computer that we know can do this, but we haven't cracked the root password yet".

> 'manageable with technology we do not have' -> magic.

Christ, are you for real? Was landing on the moon 'magic' up until the moment we did it? Why are people like you even on this website?

You are mistakenly reading 'technology we do not have' as 'things we have not done with technology we do have'.

Going to the moon was the application of a whole pile of existing technology and marginally expanding some of that technology in the process.

As for why 'people like me are even on this website', that's a good question, maybe I should not be here.

I think there's some basic assumption that we disagree on but haven't identified explicitly yet. In order to try and do that, I want to ask you: do you disagree with any of the following statements, and if yes, could you tell where and why?

- an example of nanotechnology exists and works, it's called "life"

- this particular technology is in principle able to do the tasks required to revive a properly cryopreserved person, even though it does not do this now

- it is real for humans to learn in time how to make this technology do that

- current preservation techniques store enough information to revive a human using sufficiently advanced nanotechnology

(1) obviously, agree.

(2) unknown, unknowable

(3) unknown, unknowable

(4) unknown, knowable but only in a very far future (if at all).

So, in short nanotechnology is just like every other technology, it has laws and limits and does not automatically allow us to do everything we would like it to be able to do.

For an analogy: we know that the ribosome + DNA complex creates proteins. But we are still bound in terms of expression by what cells as a concept are capable of.

So even if we can imagine life created at will and even if we can imagine all kinds of amazing creatures there is absolutely no way of knowing whether or not we will ever have the technology to direct things in such a way that these desires and imaginations will come true. Compared to the suggestion that we can resurrect a dead person creating a fire breathing dragon out of Condor and Komodo Varan DNA with some basic chemistry thrown in for pyrotechnics is childs play.

It is at its heart the difference between science and science fiction.

That's why we will most likely not have a space elevator (we know of no material strong enough for the filament) and that's why there will never be a ringworld.

Now for those things we have very clear physical limits that we have identified and we know that these limits will be for all practical purposes unsurmountable.

In the case of cryopreservation 'all bets are off', the gap between where our current understanding is located and the required advances means that we are essentially postulating that people in the advanced future will become gods.

That's a leap too far in my understanding of how human progress has worked to date.

So if I understand you correctly - you're saying that we don't know today the constraints of that particular problem, so we can't make a good guess for the feasibility of (2) and (3). Therefore current culture around cryonics is vastly overstating the chance of success, to the point that it starts looking to you like a scam.

I guess the main point of difference is our estimate of how likely is that those yet unexplored constraints will let us reverse cryopreserving. I seem to have more hope for that than you do, but I admit, at this point it's probably a bit of a guesswork.

You got it perfectly. At some point bets about what is possible in the future become meaningless and this is way past the ability of science to extrapolate what will one day be scientifically possible or declared to be impossible.

Thanks for the exchange, off to bed here (4:39 am...).

> Thanks for the exchange, off to bed here (4:39 am...).

You're welcome, and thank you as well. Also going to bed (03:49 AM here, and I was supposed to be coding up my thesis... I guess it's time to turn on the noprocrast again).

> Why are people like you even on this website?

Nononononononono. Stop that. jacquesm is continuing his long and proud tradition of mostly well thought and insightful comments. He just doesn't agree with you or me on that topic and, like you and me, has some strong opinions. We're trying to have a somewhat productive conversation here.

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