Brain Preservation

What will the failure rate be by the way? Ever think about that?

I daresay people do think about that. But look at it this way: What's the failure rate for revivification after cremation? What's the failure rate for revivification after burial? I personally believe that these techniques have a potentially non-zero revivification rate (we don't know for certain that we can't work backwards from aggregate environmental data), but even so, freezing the brain whole is going to give us success probabilities which are orders of magnitude higher.

Also whose going to re-animate all of these people/brains and what are they going to be paid by the week to do so?

Speculating on future economics is less fruitful than speculating on future motivation. Here's an emotionally moving argument, whether or not it's accurate:

The economic and motivational behaviors of a society are flexible. Societies have existed which are motivated by scientific curiosity or concern for the well-being of their fellow man. Such societies are more likely to resurrect a cryonaut than a society which is motivated purely by selfish profit. This is a good thing, as it means that I am more likely to resurrect into a society which shares my motivational values, than one which holds motivational values which I find contemptuous.

Will they be offered insurance and 2 weeks vacation every year? LOL.

This is, again, an emotional rather than a factual argument - you are attempting to force people's imagination to conjure familiar images of present-day economic working conditions. Statistically, the future is very unlikely to look like the present - note that the present, at any given point in history, looked very unlike its own past.

Will there be a re-animators union run by the teamsters? This is insanity people!

Again with the exclamation points. Also, mentioning union politics automatically hooks into people's political pack instincts, which degrades rational reasoning abilities. People here know this, so they tend to discount arguments which attempt to exploit such hooks.

By the way your $100,000 dollars today will be worth about $1,000 tomorrow. In other words: You probably couldn't spend enough money today to be successfully re-animated in the future.

That would be like Ben Franklin paying $500 to be cryogenically frozen in 1782 so he could be unfrozen in 2322. Do you honestly believe his $500 (useless old world dollars) would be enough to pay for his re-animation process in the future? The answer is NO.

Are you certain you understand how compound interest and investment work? This is directly from Wikipedia:

Franklin bequeathed £1,000 (about $4,400 at the time, or about $112,000 in 2011 dollars[139] each to the cities of Boston and Philadelphia, in trust to gather interest for 200 years. The trust began in 1785 when the French mathematician Charles-Joseph Mathon de la Cour, who admired Franklin greatly, wrote a friendly parody of Franklin's "Poor Richard's Almanack" called "Fortunate Richard." The main character leaves a smallish amount of money in his will, five lots of 100 livres, to collect interest over one, two, three, four or five full centuries, with the resulting astronomical sums to be spent on impossibly elaborate utopian projects.[140] Franklin, who was 79 years old at the time, wrote thanking him for a great idea and telling him that he had decided to leave a bequest of 1,000 pounds each to his native Boston and his adopted Philadelphia. As of 1990, more than $2,000,000 had accumulated in Franklin's Philadelphia trust, which had loaned the money to local residents. From 1940 to 1990, the money was used mostly for mortgage loans. When the trust came due, Philadelphia decided to spend it on scholarships for local high school students. Franklin's Boston trust fund accumulated almost $5,000,000 during that same time; at the end of its first 100 years a portion was allocated to help establish a trade school that became the Franklin Institute of Boston and the whole fund was later dedicated to supporting this institute.

Also, are you certain that you know how future economies will operate? "Money" may not necessarily continue to be a prime motivator.

Wake up people, honestly.

Continuing to show contempt for your audience is an excellent dominance display, but very poor at engaging rational thinking skills. Again - this site is about rational thinking skills. You will not do well to play primate-level affect-manipulation games here. If you want to perform affect-manipulation games here, you need to appeal to higher order emotional responses (pride in the reader's intelligence, for example, or wonder and excitement at future possibility).

The only human beings they may consider re-animating in the future would be those who made a phenomenal impact on society and the world in general (i.e. world renowned physicists, astronomers, Nobel laureates and possibly leaders of nations depending upon their resume).

This is actually a potentially valid argument, which (along with your "what will the failure rate be?" point) merits serious consideration. Historically, technologies are not fairly distributed. People should be having better discussions about the fairness of transhuman/post-singularity technologies. Your voice could lend valid input to that process, if you could learn to speak more clearly about it.

Even this seems highly unlikely due to the cost.

That seems patently absurd. There are MULTIPLE famous people from the past, that Hollywood has spent millions of dollars creating the illusion of "resurrecting". If it were possible to legitimately resurrect famous people, I daresay some reality / news commentary channel would be willing to spend millions of dollars per head just to resurrect them, for no other reason than to make a guest panel for some commentary show.

Otherwise, If you honestly believe they would take the time, effort and money to re-animate your average joe? Excuse me while I spit my coffee all over the room in laughter.

This argument actually has a kernel of truth and importance to it, which you utterly buried in contempt for your audience. Why are you deliberately weakening your own argument, when you have important things to say? Nevermind your failure to respect your audience; you are failing to respect yourself. Why are you doing this? What you are saying is too important to cover in shit like this.

Someone like ohhh lets say: "John Jones dollar store chain and BBQ restaurant magnate of Kentucky" OR "Jill Holloway trust fund baby of the Wal Mart clan"? ... If you believe such? You are nothing short of CRAZY.

Why do you believe that attacking an argument necessitates denigrating the arguer? Facts should stand on their own merits; why are you feeling the need to repeatedly insult the people you are communicating with?

If you pay for such a service? You are a naive and emotionally disconnected human being of the highest order plain and simple. 2+2=4 people.

I'm afraid I don't follow this at all; each sentence seems to have no connection to the previous, other than to convey a vague emotional sense of superiority, hostility and disdain. In what way do you believe that will help you "win" this argument?

Obviously some human beings self importance, fear of death and narcissism knows no bounds (OR any form of sanity).

I would tend to agree.

If you buy into this scam? I have a bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to sell you as well ...

You appear to be confused; how can I help?

Hello! I'm going to expend karma to reply to you, twice (my response is too long to fit into one comment). I consider this worth it, on the off chance that I can impart knowledge to you that you will find useful. Please accept this as a genuine gesture of goodwill.

My God human beings can be ignorant.

Leading in with this statement is an emotional tactic. People on this site are far better trained to recognize emotional tactics than they are to respond to them. Rather than flagging "I have high status and a willingness to inflict coercive force", your verbal hostility and boldness merely flag "I am attempting to subvert a rational conversation by playing to my audience's dominance instincts". This is a poor tactic to choose here, because people here are explicitly training themselves to not respond favorably to such tactics. Paradoxically, many people here actually respond negatively to such tactics, rather than ignoring them, because using those tactics indicates that you are not part of this community (i.e., not "pack").

The odds a race of people ,living on a planet over populated as it is, will take the time, effort and money to re-animate millions of human beings (simply because they paid to be)? Has a probability rate of ZERO!

Nothing has a probability rate of zero. If you wish to use this community's language (and it's always a good tactic to use the language of your audience), you should rather say "has a probability rate of epsilon". Also, capitalizing 'ZERO' and putting an exclamation point on the end connotes that you are speaking with a level of fervor and passion that most people here do not respond well to, when used to punctuate a numerical fact. Most people appear to respond better in this community, in my observations thus far, if you state your facts with as flat an implied affect as possible. Reserve your passion for your surprising conclusions; most people here respond very favorably to labile displays when expressing surprise - it seems to imply that you are excited at the opportunity to learn something new.

As a follow-up, if you actually state that something has a probability rate of epsilon, be prepared to have people challenge those numbers. This is a VERY math-based community.

The idea that people actually pay to possibly (and unlikely) be re-animated in any form? Makes one believe that they are not only without understanding of how the life and death process truly works but also stupid!

Calling your audience stupid only works if you are pulling on their dominance strings. Most people here respond rather poorly to having their dominance triggers manipulated this crassly. Also, you said "unlikely" in parentheses, immediately after declaring in bold terms that the probability is ZERO! in the previous statement. This introduces stress fractures into your argument, as "unlikely" has a very different emotional connotation than ZERO! - it makes it easy for someone to respond with "which is it? Unlikely, or ZERO! probability? These are very different things."

Once one is dead? They are DEAD! and there are legitimate reasons for this that involve the malfunction of organs etc.

Regrettably, the definition of "death" is not so cut-and-dry. Anyone who has researched medical ethics is familiar with the basic arguments, but ultimately, it comes down to the fact that brain death happens separately from organ death, happens separately in different portions of the brain than in other portions of the brain, and that revival is possible - although statistically less and less likely - at almost any point in the process, even with current technology. We can assume that future technology will be better than current technology, of course, barring some kind of information-destroying disaster.

Don't believe congress will be arguing over proposed bills to help fund the medical procedures necessary to successfully re-animate past human beings so they can actually live through the re-animation process itself! Wont happen.

In the time-scales we're talking about, "congress" may not even be a valid target for speculation anymore. Even if they are, politics in this country have vastly changed over the past 40 years, 80 years, 120 years, 160 years, etc.; there is no reason to doubt that they will continue to do so.

(continued...)

The way I see it becoming normal starts with adoption by the scientific minded rational atheists who are it's most natural audience. This group is going to be (rightly) skeptical unless we can do a freeze/revive round trip on a person.

I don't think that is reasonable at all. Scientific minded rational atheists who want to be the gatekeepers on this matter should be basing their opinions on the entirety of the available relevant data, not (the equivalent of) whether video tapes of monkeys turning into humans can be produced.

Even if cryonics became massively popular, however, we'd still have several problems: we don't know if we're preserving all the information, we don't know if it will ever be possible to extract the information, we might kill ourselves off first, it might never be cheap enough to revive a significant fraction of those frozen.

Frankly your analysis is one-sided. Uncertainty on this level should be making you move towards .5, not 0, you are seeing the absence of conspicuously conclusive evidence rather than conspicuously absent but expected evidence. That sort of observation increases randomness, it doesn't count as disconfirmation.

We don't know that the information is being lost (that's kind of a key point here, and yes we do have ways of telling when information goes missing, actually the fact that we don't know this is actually pretty good evidence to the contrary). We don't have any particular reason to think we couldn't extract it if it is not lost (while there are limits, the laws of physics do in fact allow a marvelous variety of things to be done). We probably won't kill ourselves off if we're careful (yeah there's a reason we worry so much, and it's because worrying works). Most expensive things not intrinsically resource-expensive tend to grow cheaper on a unit basis when there is enough demand to justify large scale infrastructure and cover initial development costs (I haven't heard a proposal for why reviving humans would be resource-expensive, as opposed to primarily an R&D cost which really seems the more natural assumption).

What I see as most promising, actually, is the continuation of low temperature medical research that has no intended cryonics application.

It's interesting that the guys who froze a rabbit kidney in M22 and reimplanted it successfully were in fact cryonicists (motivated by cryonics and funded by investors with cryonics interests), but kept their mouths shut about it in their published paper, making a big point instead about how this kind of research will be of great help for organ and tissue banking.

The trouble as I see it is that for cryonics to work optimally we need direct research on brain vitrification, so that we can minimize the damage that will need to be repaired. (We should strive as a rule of thumb to get it down to where mere engineered biology, as opposed to the more dramatic mechanosynthetic forms of nanotech, is sufficient.) Focusing on whole bodies and other organs is a suboptimal use of time for this goal except where it serves as a useful model for brains. Also banking of organs may become less of a concern from a general medical perspective over the next 50 years or so as we become better capable of regrowing tissue into functioning organs using scaffold and printing models, from a patient's own DNA.

What I see as most promising, actually, is the continuation of low temperature medical research that has no intended cryonics application.

That would be convenient :) Then I don't have to do anything.

Thanks for the well argued article and comment.

Maybe not popular, but a world where it is tolerated to the point where a large number of people sign up for it. And if something like modern rationality becomes popular and also advertises cryonics, that becomes a possibility.

What about externalities that don't relate to reanimation? For example, we might expect an increase in public confidence in the scientific method rather than supernaturalism as a solution to the big scary problems. Perhaps there would be more STEM professionals and less clergy in a world where cryonics is common. Perhaps it will lead to increased aggregate demand for hard to cure yet rare illnesses (especially forms of brain damage).

Well, it is way simpler than hard drive in your computer. The problem is that it is not mass manufactured, and needs a lot of engineering work. (also i'm considering just the brains).

I'm looking at this table for the solid coolants:

http://physics.info/heat-latent/

Frozen ethane looks promising, half the per-kg latent heat of the liquid nitrogen, and it's probably denser. The freons also have very low melting temperatures and may have high latent heat of fusion but I cant find any data.

It's also hard to estimate the rate of heat transfer through multi layered reflector. I'll think it over when I have time. I'm quite rusty on this. For those who want to calculate, the radiation is proportional to temperature to the 4th power (Stefan–Boltzmann law), and in the equilibrium the shield radiates as much as it absorbs, and I dunno how to model shiny metals.

In any case it would be great to just boost maintenance-free time to a couple years. Not sure everyone wants to wake up after event that maintenance was suspended for decades or a century. Anything can happen incl. show trial for some nonsense crimes. edit: or worse yet the copyright expiration on yourself as IP.

Is it possible that aging is a means for individuals to signal fitness?

Only if you're going to carry on reproducing at that age.

BTW, I may have misstated the method of breeding for earlier cessation of aging. I can't find again what I was reading that I described in those words, but other papers of Rose talk about promoting longevity by selecting for late offspring.

I found this bizarre too. So I looked up a paper by the same authors who wrote the book in the "aging stops" hyperlink to investigate.

By aging they mean the increase in mortality rate as a person gets older. Ie an 80 year old is more likely to die this year than a 60 year old.

The theory is that there is a given high rate of mortality that would prevail for the whole of life if natural selection did not exist. However, natural selection does exist and so for the early part of an organism's life the mortality rate is lower than it would be otherwise. This lowering reduces over the reproductive part of the organisms life. Thus before reproductive maturity the lowering is maximum, and at the end of its reproductive life the lowering is gone and the organism reaches the (high) unadjusted level of mortality. Thus species that stop reproducing earlier reach this high level of mortality earlier.

From our perspective, and using this definition, it would be better if "aging stopped" later, because then we would live longer before reaching the higher mortality rate.

Of course, what we really want is to simly reduce that higher mortality rate permanently.

Agreed, but I think it'd be a worthwhile project to work towards. I can think of some ways to make it simpler. Recognition of modules could be aided by rfid tags or just plain old barcodes embedded in the objects that have some information about what part a robot is looking at and its orientation relative to the barcode stamp or rfid chip. There could be lines painted on the floors or walls and barcodes visible for navigation around the facility. I guess a really hard part would be maintaining the pyramid or structure or whatever housing everything. You'd have to choose between building something you hope will last a long time and leaving it be - like a big stone pyramid or even a cave. Or you could build it all modular like the rest of it - like a lattice work or robot hive kind of thing. I'm kind of thinking something like these would be useful for city building, too... there was an article in Discover a long while back that referred to a paper by klaus lackner and wendt about their idea for auxons, I think it was- machines that would turn a big chunk of the desert into solar paneling. http://discovermagazine.com/1995/oct/robotbuildthysel569 <--- there. Their suggestion was to harvest raw materials from the desert topsoil using carbothermic separation. I'm thinking you could use something similar for recycling if everything else failed? I don't know enough about the processes involved. I guess the idea has been a research area for a little bit -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clanking_replicator ... well anyways. The redundancy of the elements involved could overcome some reliability issues. There doesn't have to be a crucial part of the chain where if one piece breaks down everything is broken. Problems could at least be relegated to disasters affecting whole classes of objects breaking down at once, like if all the robots were smashed at the same time by vault-robbers.

There are probably good reasons I'm missing. My feeling though is once you get a clanking replicator, you can put more objects into its loop for it to maintain, and grow it up into cities and things that are (eventually) totally self repairing and post-scarcity. Kind of like a big matter-moving operating system. It might only be you know simple at the beginning, but there'd be huge upwards potential for growth and sophistication.

I don't understand the "no one is interested" ones. Wouldn't they get interested once the amount of money in the trust keeping you frozen exceeds the cost of reviving you?

The "it's too expensive" one is similar, although it could be expensive enough that nobody is willing to let money gather in a trust long enough to pay for it.

If cryonics becomes illegal, wouldn't they just move the bodies to somewhere where it's still legal?

Arguably "immortality" has been on the back-burner for a while.

In June 1768 Eramus Darwin told Josiah Wedgewood that Edgeworth had 'nearly completed a Waggon drawn by Fire'. In modern parlance, a motorcar. It didn't work, and Edgeworth was a bit of a dreamer; I don't know how far he actually got. Nevertheless, people saw the technical possibility of motorised road transport that early. Others were also attempting the technology. The motorcar is a good example of a slow burning technological development, taking perhaps 120 years from being obviously possible to being on sale.

When have we ever conceived of a specific technology, which we had any understanding of the workings behind, and taken hundreds of years to make it?

The first that came to my mind was the photovoltaic effect, discovered by Alexandre Edmond Becquerel in 1839. Even today it takes massive subsidies to make photovoltaics competitive. And we are not even close to the energy efficiency of photosynthesis.

I bet there are a lot of other examples.

I'd also mention Fermat's Last Theorum as a very specific example, since it took over 300 years to prove. It's rare, but it's certainly been known to happen.

When have we ever conceived of a specific technology, which we had any understanding of the workings behind, and taken hundreds of years to make it?

Many times, unless you weasel pretty strongly with "any understandings of the workings behind". Science fiction has been around a long time. Mary Shelly, writing in 1818 and aware of Galvani's experiments with electricity and frogs, conceived of applying this to reanimation of the dead. Jules Verne, writing in 1865, conceived of traveling to the moon with a space cannon.

When have we ever conceived of a specific technology, which we had any understanding of the workings behind, and taken hundreds of years to make it?

http://www.alcor.org/cases.html - 1967, first human cryopreservation. That was 45 years ago. We've already been nearly half a century, and I haven't seen any research that suggests that revivification is likely to occur in the next decade. Calling it a century from the first human cryopreservation, a mere doubling of the time we've already waited, does not seem at all like an unreasonable assertion.

Now that I think about it, computing machines might be another good example. To the Wikipedia-mobile, Batman !

Abacuses (or abacii or however you spell them) existed in ancient Babylon, but were obviously quite primitive. Mechanical calculators were developed in the 17th century AD. Charles Babbage designed his Difference Engine in 1822, but the technology to build one did not yet exist (or if it did, it was more expensive than a battleship, which amounts to the same thing). Convergent improvements in computing technology as well as mechanical engineering led to the building of mechanical analytical engines a few decades later. Electronic computers began showing up in the 20th century; and today, we have the Internet for people to twitter on.

What about industrial steam power ? Hero of Alexandria developed a steam-powered toy back in the first century AD, but it took a millennium and a half before a true steam engine was developed and harnessed for useful work.

I have a wide probability distribution. There's a chance, of course, that my basic intuitions are wrong in such a way that it's actually impossible to emulate a human brain and have it preserve the "essential" stuff. Aside from that (which I give less than 5% credence), I'd be quite surprised if it took less than 5 years or more than 100 years of technological development, since we currently have a reasonable roadmap and since there are plenty of other technologies (like nanotech) that would enable massive shortcuts.

(If there were a nuclear war or an anti-scientific dystopia, of course, that would halt the timeline of progress. That's why I say years of technological development, not of clock time.)

You mean only people capable of making the choice for systematically rational reasons, rather than what something "sounds like", will be saved? Fine with me, Darwin at work ;)

(not serious)

THANK YOU. Seriously.

Truth hurts!

This entire conversation reminds me of the sig quote from TvTropes/Slashdot:

On my deathbed I shall whisper the word: Instrumentality.

Every life is precious, according to EY/HJPEV, and most people currently alive are religious, so you have to speak their language to sell the message.

Dithering even for a second because of the misplaced qualms about the way you might come across is a crime against transhumanity.

Haven't we had mechanical hearts since 1982?

By "mechanical brain" I was trying to indicate something much simpler than an AI.

Are you claiming that the following sentence is obviously false?

"Except that we can make mechanical hearts and you stay the same person on receiving one."

Because it strikes me as obviously true.

When a wood frog freezes itself for the winter does it unfreeze as a different frog?

You'd have to ask the wood frog. If the wood frog were to ponder its own existence, it would be a different frog. In both cases, human and frog, it's the same body before and after freezing. Note, frogs do freeze themselves and still function afterward, humans don't. Humans have a lot of their energy invested in cognitive functions and they don't act quite the same without it, and that's what freezing demolishes.

What? If your friends asked questions to both you and your Sims 3 replica, you think they wouldn't be able to tell which was which? It's clearly not anywhere close to a copy of you.

The best answer to this would be to not reply, that would be highly amusing, but aside from that, I hope you understood that I meant in the Sims World, that is how I would react. Sims don't even need to breath air, they don't have lungs. Given the somewhat different conditions in Pleasant Valley, Sims have somewhat different requirements than humans. If I modified my human body to become a Sim, then I would be exactly what I designed there.

How is sleep, unconsciousness, deep anesthesia any different, though?...But further, why is continuity important?

Those two questions are two sides of the same coin to me. Those examples preserve continuity in the form of synapses and other neural connections. In none of those cases does the brain actually stop running, just the consciousness program. You can't just pull out someone's heart while they're anesthetized--if the brain's cells die from lack of fuel, you're destroying the hardware that the consciousness program needs to reboot from.

If intelligence can be simulated on a computer, and it seems likely that intelligence sophisticated enough to ponder it's own consciousness probably really is conscious, why would a reboot have any effect on its identity?

Assuming that you have programmed it to care about its own consciousness, not just to ponder it, the first boot would die, and the reboot would wake up thinking it was the first boot.

...cryonics is probably unnecessary if I can instead do a molecule-level brain-image upload before death (assuming that turns out to be possible). But if that's so, don't we also need to reject the idea of a personal future?

When you upload your brain-image, please make the most of your life after that, because it would be the same as with the computer. You will die in fear and loneliness, and your copy will wake up convinced he is you. (That would make a great fortune-cookie message!) In both cryonic preservation, and brain upload, the original quantum system which is you is being shut down--no splitting realities are involved here (except the usual ones)-- you are going to experience death, and it was my understanding that the point of cryonics and mind transfer was to avoid experiencing death. (By "experience death", I mean that your mind-pattern ceases to function.) Anyone deriving comfort from those two methods should seriously consider this concrete downside to them.