Cryonics: Can I Take Door No. 3?

I meant not even being viable enough to get cancer.

That's a fair question. I was assuming that creatures which can survive full dehydration are so different at the cellular level that nothing less than genetic redesign would do the job, but I'm guessing.

I think part of the problem, too, is that animals who can survive full dehydration, or being thoroughly frozen within and without, are small. We don't often realize just how big humans are, even for land-dwelling tetrapods. We're very large, very active, and very resource-intensive -- certainly there are bigger land animals about today and in our recent past, and very much bigger ones in the fossil record (brachiosaurs, anyone?), but even then we still qualify as megafauna.

The consequences of that size, especially in light of our activity level, are significant. Human physiology is very adapted to dissipate heat well (and our water intake is a big part of that), yet we still routinely have trouble doing it fast enough to avoid ill effects, forcing us to adapt culturally and individually to the problem. We have to conserve quantities (of temperature regulation, of water) at fairly specific levels; our physiology is critically dependent on them.

So, yeah -- if people can be put in suspended animation of some sort (regardless of mechanism), it's gonna have to take our particular case into account. You can flash-freeze a mouse, thaw it, and get biological activity after (they don't exactly go on to live long and prosperous mousey lives, but they do come out the other side for a bit). A mouse is tiny; you can't extend that to a human without different physics becoming relevant. You can dehydrate a tardigrade quickly (just let it do its thing in a low-moisture environment for long enough until it loses enough water) and then leave it sitting until it gets doused again; you can't do that to a human, because we have a lot of water to lose, our bodies fight to hang on to it, our health declines rapidly as we lose even modest amounts, and we proceed straight to death once quantities are insufficient.

With its low probability, it doesn't significantly contribute to expected utility, so for decision making purposes it's an irrelevant hypothetical.

Well, this sounds right, but seems to indicate some problem with decision theory. If a cat has to endure 10 rounds of Schrödinger's experiments with 1/2 probability of death in each round, there should be some sane way for the cat to express its honest expectation to observe itself alive in the end.

Perhaps at this point you can argue, that you totally expect this mental pattern to be reattached to some set of memories or some personality outside the Matrix.

There should be some universes in which the simulators will perform a controlled procedure specifically designed for saving me. This includes going to all the trouble of reattaching what's left of me to all my best parts and memories retrieved from an adequate backup.

Of course, it is possible that the simulators will attach some completely arbitrary memories to my poor degraded personality. This nonsensical act will surely happen in some universes, but I do not expect to perceive myself as existing in these cases.

It seems you are right that gradual degradation is a serious problem with QI-based survival in non-simulated universes (unless we move to a more reliable substrate, with backups and all).

If you believe in an afterlife, the question that concerns you is still whether there is an afterlife, not whether you believe in an afterlife.

I think we are assigning different meanings to "believe". In my sense, a true believer has no doubt, so "whether" is no longer a question. I think we may be getting sidetracked on semantics, though.

Don't underestimate the power of g:

http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/2002ghighlygeneral.pdf

Linda Gottfredson's papers in general reward study:

http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/

I certainly didn't intend to imply that this was the only viewpoint, or even that it was necessarily better, only that it addressed some of the issues with what seemed to be the only current possibility. I agree that it would require considerable research into how to achieve it: my point is that these would be upfront costs, whereas cryonics has backloaded costs (technological as well as financial). I also did not mean that a "hydronically" preserved organism (I like your term) could be stored anywhere, simply that it is easier to establish passive storage. Egyptian mummies lasted thousands of years in their dry, desert tombs, but can decay rapidly when exposed to moister climes. Bacteria need warmth and water to be active: removing one or the other is sufficient. We already preserve food at room temperature using the same principle (salt or sugar both preserve food by dehydrating bacteria).

Thus skipping or being ignorant of the details doesn't help that much.

The fact is, we do not currently have a reliable means of arresting a human's metabolic processes (including post-mortem decay) and restoring them. We don't have the details for restoring cryonically preserved persons. "Advanced nanotech" is just a mysterious answer until we know how to do it. The intention of the post was to stimulate thought (which I think it has done). I do not believe I have to have all the answers before I can ask the questions. New ideas arise from making new connections between existing concepts, and sometimes this means concepts existing in two different minds.

Personally, I'd rather just go on existing here and now. Preservation is just a backup option, much like backing up your computer files: you'd rather not have a system crash, but if you do, you can recover. On the other hand, cryonics is our only current "backup" option, so the choice is a "no-brainer". Even a slim chance is preferrably to no chance.

So eventually before long you have to dig deeper.

Agreed, but I don't know where to begin digging. Which is why I threw this open to the forum.

And doing today what you could do tomorrow ensures you don't get stuck in the past.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by that: don't put off what you can do today?

Yes, but it doesn't fracture everywhere. Hence, if you rewarmed a tissue that was cryogenically frozen, some cells would probably still be viable. Hence, my hypothesis that if you took samples from a current patient where things were done right, some of the cells would still be alive.

A related article : http://www.nature.com/ncomms/journal/v3/n6/full/ncomms1890.html?WT.mc_id=FBK_NCOMMS

substantially better neuroscience

We have plenty of models of neurons and some of them imitate neurons very well.

Eugene Izhikevich simulated an entire human brain equivalent with his model and he saw some pretty interesting emergent behaviour (Granted, the anatomy had to be generated randomly at every iteration, so we still need better computers).

slightly better scanners

It requires substantially better scanners, and a fixation process that preserves all the relevant features.

A special type of teacher's password.

Eudoxia is referencing Mike Darwin's idea of modifying white blood cells with arbitrarily-sophisticated biotechnology (we're talking "you can design new organelles to spec" as a lower-level requirement) to do active cell repair, sucking up cell contents and yoinking nuclear genetic information from even very-damaged cells before digesting the old contents and replacing them. It's an elaborate thought experiment with technical-looking diagrams that elides huge black boxes in its proposed mechanism. Basically it's the idea of nanomedicine before the term was coined.

We've done body transplants in primates in the past. Hooking up the nerves is still tricky, but we could probably figure it out. Also, cloning one mammal is basically like cloning another. There's really no doubt we could clone a human being if we really wanted to. The trick is that current cloning mechanisms have a very high failure rate, and nobody wants to deal with the pile of dead babies and fetuses that would come out of such a process.

Realistically, though, 3d tissue printing is probably the way to go. We can already do several organs that way, and resolution is essentially the only limit to being able to fabricate most of the rest.

Most people don't need an extra 900 years of life.

I find that to be a stunningly selfish and elitist point of view. How do you know, and why are you deciding for them?

I think you agree here as the situation you describe as a likely outcome is by no means desirable ... an elite group of humans enforcing the complete subjugation of the rest of the planet.

It's not subjugation if all they do is prevent independent outbreaks of destructive technology.

I can see that I described four forms of posthuman technocracy, that we could call wilderness, meritocracy, exploiter, and cult. (Don't hesitate to employ better names if you think of them.) Wilderness and meritocracy are the ones that you quoted and I can't view them as bad, in fact they could be positively utopian. We're talking about a world which has solved the crisis created by technology, by arriving at a social and cultural form that can employ technology's enormous potential constructively.

Such a world has to ensure that the crisis isn't recreated by independent reinvention, and it has to regulate its own access to techno-power. The "policing" is for the first part, and "entry exams for the techno-aristocracy" is for the second part. Do you find the prospect of even that much structure depressing, or is it just that you think the dystopian possibilities would inevitably come true?

You also dismiss the problem of over population, lack of resources, and colonisation of space ... Instead of looking for contingency plans we should confront the problems of global warming lack of food and energy sources directly.

We should distinguish between any exacerbation of existing problems due to longevity (your first list), and the problems that already exist and would continue to exist even without extra longevity (your second list). Just so we have names for things, I'll call the second type of problem a "sustainability problem"; a technological solution to a sustainability problem, a "sustainability technology"; the first type of problem, an "exacerbation problem"; and a technology implicated in an exacerbation problem, a "destabilizing technology". So we can call, for example, solar cells a sustainability technology, and stem cells a destabilizing technology. (These are precisely the sort of ultra-broad categories that can lead you astray, because under certain circumstances, solar cells might be destabilizing and stem cells might be sustainability-enhancing. But I felt the need for some extra vocabulary.)

So I summarize this part of your position as follows: we should prioritize the solution of sustainability problems, and avoid exacerbation problems by staying away from destabilizing technologies.

There's a large number of sub-issues we could explore here, but I see the central fact as the failure of relinquishment as anything more than a local tactic that buys time. Someone somewhere will develop the destabilizing technologies. Independent development can't be prevented or "policed" except by someone already possessing similar powers. So ultimately, someone somewhere must learn how to live with personally having access to destabilizing technologies, even if these powers are locked away most of the time and only brought out in a crisis. The various "posthuman technocracies" that I sketched are speculations about social forms that don't keep advanced technology completely sealed away, but which nonetheless have some sort of resilience.

I don't think we should allow our selfishness to corrupt the natural continuation of the human race.

Well, the moral and existential dimension of these discussions is hotly contested. I focused on politics and pragmatism above, but I'll try to return to the other topics in the next round.

"I find this point of view unsurprising as it reflects the greed and selfishness instilled in the population of the over indulgent western world today."

"Selfish" is more typically attached to those people who are okay with other people dying; not the people who are not okay with it.

Everything should be for sale, we should be able to have whatever we want, even though the consequences for the rest of humanity

I don't know of any person here who wants immortality only for themselves and says to hell with everyone else. I suggest you actually read up on the actual views of the people in this community rather than strawmanning and making caricatures out of them.

Death isn't a problem to be overcome it's the natural conclusion to life.

You're imbuing a moral quality to the word "natural" which isn't actually there. By the same argument earthquakes and tsunamis are also not problems to be overcome, they're the natural result of tectonic movement.

Nor is starvation a problem to be overcome, it's the natural conclusion to the lack of sufficient food. Nor is infant mortality a problem to be overcome -- after all women can make babies once every nine months, so it's natural for so many infants to perish.

All problems to be overcome are "natural". Until they're solved, at which point they're no longer natural, their solution is.

To ask the natural followup question:

If a Victorian thinker had challenged the appropriateness of medical advances like open heart surgery on the grounds that the Earth was dangerously close to carrying capacity, would you be persuaded that medical researchers were selfish or misguided.

Putting it slightly differently, there's not yet a compelling case that the current average human lifespan or carrying capacity of the planet are set in stone by physical laws. Human science has increased both those numbers many times throughout history.

If you want to make the argument that a counter-factual world with 3 billion humans, all living the American standard of living would be more moral than the current setup, that's a respectable position. But there's substantial difficulty getting from here to there. If we're both wishing for pie-in-the-sky, doesn't it seem more pleasant to wish for the world of 6 billion sustainably American standard of living, and trying to think of how to get to that outcome?