A review of cryonics/brain preservation in 2016

I feel that there is usually an unfortunate disconnect between articles that criticise cryonics and the actual best arguments in favour of cryonics.

I find it pretty depressing to read articles critical of cryonics because of this. There are a number of mistakes that they will predictably make, again and again:

• Author hasn't heard of information theoretic life/death, therefore expects that in order to succeed, cryonics has to bring back the exact same brain cells that you died with.

• (related) If the author does understand the concept of information and life/death, they don't realize that there's no need to preserve information that is generic to all human minds.

• (related) If the author does understand the concept of information and life/death, they don't realize that side channel attacks/correlations are a thing; they assume that if X is lost but Y correlated very strongly with X, then you can't recover X.

• The author goes off on a short & shoddy philosophy expedition, making dubious, contested or false claims about personal identity. For example, they claim that in any process which could make two copies of you, neither copy is 'really you', without reflecting on the fact that it seems oddly convenient that the universe arranges things like this, especially whilst also accepting that going to sleep or under anaesthesia is a process that seems perfectly capable of producing copies if we had enough scanning resolution to scan the brain in enough detail. Where exactly does your personal identity reside? Little labels on the atoms?

• the author makes false or wildly misleading claims about the cost of Cryonics.

• the author makes ad-hominem attacks or direct appeals to the irrationality of the reader ("it's creepy! It must be wrong!").

• various silly non-sequiturs - "it's a cult", "people who believe in it are irrational/deluded/naive"

• the author claims that death is a good thing because it motivates us, ignoring multiple problems such as 'why do we avoid other causes of death, such as cancer, at such great expense?'

• the author makes very precise and confident predictions about how cryo-patients would fare in a future society, always that they will do very badly, be miserable and just commit suicide after a few months. As if a society sophisticated enough to reconstruct a human brain from a messy contemporary cryopreserved patient wouldn't know enough about human psychology to be able to predict what would make that person happy, or a society rich and advanced enough to resurrect someone wouldn't be able to afford the small amount of computing power to give them an enjoyable environment to live in.

Thank you for posting this.

I am not signed up for cryonics because I think the current preservation technology is nowhere near good enough work, but I very much appreciate having a concise summary of recent developments so that when the situation improves, I'll know it's time to reconsider.