Being an avid cryonicist, I have attempted to express these myths to a wide variety of people. The very few and open-minded folks that will move past utter dismissal usually have a deep and visceral illogical fear of death - or a deep and visceral religious belief in the afterlife. These "Cryonics Myths Debunked" tend to only further convince those who are likely to choose Cryonics anyways.
There must be a better way to convince the masses, but so far no billionaire or government has stepped forward with a serious effort here, and I doubt such a thing will occur in our lifetimes.
My point is, other avid cryonicists should study serious and effective approaches, and abandon the "rational" one. But hey, making it up high on the hacker-news top-10 is a good start.
Funny, I find that the cryonics advocates are the ones with the deep and visceral illogical fear of death. That’s why one signs up for cryonics, right? Being at peace with one’s mortality removes the selfish “rational” incentive for cryonics.
Individual people are replaceable, and don’t belong outside of their own time. If you want to advocate cryonics for the masses, think about what you would do if you had to live in a world with the reanimated masses of the 18th century. Because that’s the kind of mess you propose to inflict on our future descendants.
You also were born in the past. Are you not comfortable with death by your own declaration? So why do you work to avoid it, rather than embracing it? Why are you still alive? Are you not, by your own ethics, outside your time, creating a mess, and less valuable than people born after you?
Yet you undertake continual efforts to remain alive, embracing the use of food and medicine - technologies developed purely and entirely to stave off naturally occurring death.
I feel that you haven't fully examined your own position on this matter.
Just because I don't think it's desirable for me to be alive 300 years from now doesn't mean I don't think it's desirable for me to be alive right now.
> If you want to advocate cryonics for the masses, think about what you would do if you had to live in a world with the reanimated masses of the 18th century.
Sounds like Riverworld. I think it could be quite interesting. But anyway, whether it's a potential mess or not is something for our future descendants to decide on.
Advocating cryonics today doesn't imply that our descendants, even if they have the technology, will accept the resurrection of masses. We have immigration laws today, I'm sure the same concept could be thought up for "people outside their own time", if it ever is an issue.
Or I could just accept my mortality and let my corpse go to some productive use, like organ donation or teaching medical students, rather than investing in some narcissistic notion of being resurrected.
As romantic as "coming to peace with mortality" might sound, I enjoy living life too much to idly accept that i will at some point feel the breeze in my hair for the last time, or never again smell a flower's perfume, or gaze on a beautiful view. Sure, if everything fails, i will have to accept it. But why not give my everything in the mission of taking life further, even if i can help it by an atomic amount? What if there were as many great minds working on solving aging as there are working on cancer research? Why not try and bring a contribution? What if everyone else capable would have the same realisation? Why sit idly and wait to be carried by waves to nothing at all?
You could do both: organ donation is compatible with brain preservation.
Perhaps some are motivated by narcissism, but I'd like to think my fellow cryonicists are motivated by hope, and a belief that the future will be a warm and welcoming place. If the future is narcissistic, I wouldn't want to be revived anyways.
I can't speak for everyone, but my interest in Cryonics stems from a love of life, not a fear of death. Preservation will not solve grief, death, or displacement in time. Nor does it necessitate immortality - I want to die, eventually, but if there is a chance at more life, I'll take it. People have spent more on experimental cancer treatments with similar uncertainty and discomfort, so I suppose it's similar to that.
I would gladly revive a non famous person from the 18th century - diversity in thought doesn't seem to be a mess to me. And any future that would revive me would necessarily agree - I'm just betting there are enough people like me when resurrection is possible. And if everyone is like you, I'd gladly opt to be dissected and studied instead.
Do you really love life, in and of itself, or do you love the things that life makes possible? Just because you're alive doesn't mean you're playing with your great-grandchildren or relaxing on a beach in the Caribbean or making passionate love or creating something that makes people happy. Mere life, without these things, is less than worthless. The industrialized world we live in gives us so much "life" that most of us end up slowly tortured to death in hospitals, delirious and vacant and in interminable, incomprehensible pain, because we consider that more merciful than simply letting sick people die.
And if that's not enough for you, maybe future generations will have the opportunity to reanimate your corpse in a 25th century hospital and torture it some more to see what they can recover from the brain cells that survived the ordeal? Feel free and sign up for that if you want, but I'm out.
Every day we live for those things and face a small chance that some powerful government or entity will capture and torture us or our loved ones indefinitely, for scientific reasons, or perhaps for no reason at all. Escaping life is one solution, but bracing against fear and leaning onto hope seem like more appealing choices to me. Pessimism is a valid argument against Cryonics, but since it's as unfalsifiable as optimism, I'll gladly take the choice that makes me happier. Maybe that is a priveleged and rare choice these days, but all I can say is I hope you find optimism and hope someday in this life, regardless of the viability of some inconsequential technology.
If we had the ability to reanimate 1,000 people from ancient Egypt, it seems highly plausible the resources could be found to do it. These people would be a font of information from a long forgotten past. The only question is whether they could adjust to the present.
So if preserved people from the past survived long enough, it seems like historical interest could motivate people to re-animate them. There may be other motivations but that's one.
Maybe only a small selection would be reanimated at any one time. But that might others to revived later.
Well, one objection could be that much of the information about the ancient civilizations has been lost, whereas it is highly improbable that a person could add anything to the knowledge about the modern world to a future historian or a linguist.
Maybe but it's pretty common for much knowledge of even the recent past to be lost and it seems plausible that even a detailed selection of texts couldn't give the experience that someone who was there could give.
Diversity of thought, novelty. In the same way it never gets old to watch a child experience "I am your father!" for the first time, I'm sure humans of the future will enjoy entertaining humans of the past.
It’s not name calling. It’s calling it what it is. They promise extended life which they cannot deliver at all. They are just like an astrologist or psychic surgeon.
Then why not write a meaningful reply? Why not say "I think cryonics will not work because... <argument 1>, <argument 2>, <argument 3>", instead of throwing generic insults at people?
For the same reason I’m not gonna spend my time writing a lengthy rebuff of psychic surgery. It’s total nonsense and we as a society have known that for decades, and even a cursory examination makes it obvious.
There is progress being made on the _scientific_ effort to cryopreserve organic materials (ex: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001122401...). The argument is not that you will live forever, it's that what we consider "dead" today may not be the same as what's considered dead a hundred years from now. A hundred years ago if you had a heart attack and went unconscious, you were considered dead. We know now that there's a lot of things that can be done to revive someone who has just collapsed from a heart attack, but the awareness wasn't there yet.
I'm not interested in cryopreservation personally, but it's quite a stretch to lump the efforts in that space along with astrology or psychic healing.
Cryonics Myth #1: "Trustees 200 years in future at a time when your disease [X] is completely curable will care to bring you back."
There's no corporate or legal or NGO structure in the business that will last long enough that anyone will care, and even if they do the cooling system failover will not work in the particularly hot summer of 2074.
While there is a real risk that cryonics organizations will fail, there's no reason to think it's a foregone conclusion. Tons of organizations have been around for over two hundred years. The oldest non-profits in continuous existence are well over a thousand years old. There's no legal barrier to a non-profit corporation or trust continuing to exist indefinitely, as many indeed have. (Heck, the Nobel Prizes are an after-death trust that has only gotten larger and more famous in the 122 years since Nobel's death.)
There is no active cooling system; cryonics patients are passively cooled with liquid nitrogen. The only regular maintenance needed is adding more liquid nitrogen, and the storage dewars can last for many months before replenishment is needed.
There is no shortage of people in the world and no reason to add additional people who are old or diseased, and have no particular skills that are necessary in the future.
It’s much cheaper (not to mention more fun) to make more babies.
There's always a shortage of people who contribute to society with generosity and wisdom. But not many such heads end up in liquid nitrogen tanks, methinks.
>There's no corporate or legal or NGO structure in the business that will last long enough that anyone will care
No people will care because that's what they do and that's why we have schools, hospitals and the like in all countries, not because there is a legal structure requiring them.
Reversible vitrification of organs is a field starting to show some promise. It will revolutionize the transplant industry, and will bring more attention to cryonics.
"We describe here a new cryobiological and neurobiological technique, aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation (ASC), which demonstrates the relevance and utility of advanced cryopreservation science for the neurobiological research community. ASC is a new brain-banking technique designed to facilitate neuroanatomic research such as connectomics research, and has the unique ability to combine stable long term ice-free sample storage with excellent anatomical resolution."
They mention they don't preserve "heads" in specific but rather brains, and go into detail about how they can't separate a brain from a skull so they preserve the entire head. Wouldn't separating the head from the body cause similar problems of destroying information in the brain? Do they keep the entire body?
I know nothing of this field, is there any idea of how long "information" stays in the brain or any metric like that once blood/oxygen flow to the brain has been inhibited?
E.g. people found drowned in icy water with no pulse. "Six of nine survivors (66.7%) had minor neurological sequelae with Glasgow outcome scale (GOS) 5 (low disability)" (the rest worse). It's not clear to me from the table what the longest time with no breathing or pulse was among those six best-off survivors. But here's a popular account of another case: http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/child-survived...
Those were the top two google hits that came up. It's not my field, but it doesn't seem plausible to me that much of our identity is encoded in evanescent patterns of electrical activity or such. (As opposed to your short term working memory.) If you can nail down the molecules, the information is bound to be there in their arrangement.
I think a big myth people need dispelled is that cryonics is really expensive. It's not a very expensive gamble to take, and it's pretty easy to see that it's worthwhile for many people.
This procedure is not yet reversible because of other damage (not caused by ice) including biochemical effects of the vitrification solution — but it eliminates ice damage and the preservation of fine structure is excellent.
As the procedure has not been proved to be reversible, it suggests to me that finding a future cure for the original ailment is the easiest assumption to make in this field. I'm more interested to get better answers to the myth that "Cryonics is not a belief that the dead can be revived" than those presented in the article.
I'd be hard pressed to say that there are things I think are impossible, but there are a great many things I think are very improbable. In the movie A.I., there's a part where advanced aliens temporarily restore the life of the hero's "mother" using a lock of her hair and some pseudoscientific stuff about information they managed to retrieve from the space-time continuum. All this without even having access to her brain! Impossible? I don't know - perhaps having the theoretical ability to retrieve a specific configuration which maybe exists at some dimension, somehow holographically stored in the fabric of universe combined with an unimaginably advanced intelligence and technological ability might make it doable. Do I believe there's a non zero probability if it being possible? Yes. Do I believe it will ever happen? No. Although cryonics is far less presumptuous than reviving back a personality from a lock of hair and information extracted from the "spacetime continuum", the complete lack of evidence for any sort of reversibility of the process makes me extremely skeptical in the wisdom in paying for such a procedure, regardless of how well intentioned it might be.
"Can memory be retained after cryopreservation? Our research has attempted to answer this long-standing question by using the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, a well-known model organism for biological research that has generated revolutionary findings but has not been tested for memory retention after cryopreservation. Our study's goal was to test C. elegans' memory recall after vitrification and reviving. Using a method of sensory imprinting in the young C. elegans, we establish that learning acquired through olfactory cues shapes the animal's behavior and the learning is retained at the adult stage after vitrification. Our research method included olfactory imprinting with the chemical benzaldehyde (C6H5CHO) for phase-sense olfactory imprinting at the L1 stage, the fast-cooling SafeSpeed method for vitrification at the L2 stage, reviving, and a chemotaxis assay for testing memory retention of learning at the adult stage. Our results in testing memory retention after cryopreservation show that the mechanisms that regulate the odorant imprinting (a form of long-term memory) in C. elegans have not been modified by the process of vitrification or by slow freezing."
Thank you, that's news to me. While I still remain skeptical due to the orders of magnitude of complexity in the gap between C. elegans and humans, it definitely calls for a reassessment of the probability I have previously attached to it.
Even if the probability is astronomical, isn't a non-zero probability better than null? Sure there is a cost, but is it that high that you couldn't justify taking the chance, and instead just blowing it on a couple other fancy things or whatever?
I don't know, who are you? Perhaps you may be someone that enjoys walks, beautiful views, or maybe the perfume of a loved one? Maybe you're the type of person that would want to never stop experiencing these things. Or maybe you're the type of person that only does things approved and recommended by [rich person from pop culture]. Yeah, why even take any chances if they're not thoroughly sold to you by some CEO. It's just your existence we're talking about after all. Who are you to exist if [rich person from pop culture] stopped a while ago anyway?
I started casually researching cryonics after reading the WaitButWhy article on it https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/03/cryonics.html and I'm recently leaning towards more towards a "why not?" mindset but I'm not yet fully convinced.
The purely logical, rational side of me wants to say "why should I make an assumption that 21st century norms about the inevitability of death will hold true or are even valid at all?" so I should just do the least presumptuous thing and get frozen.
But on the other hand, what does the quality of life look like for a 21st century human reanimated in 2300 or 2500 or whatever? If history (or Black Mirror) tells us anything, at best, I'll live out my immortal life as some sick museum exhibit/circus curiosity, with no possibility of the kind embrace of death unless some rebellious young person happens to take pity on me.
But that's also assuming humans keep on being Sapiens and don't transcend their present biology/mindset.
But then, of course, how lonely is it to live in a world where I'm one of the last humans tethered to my un-enhanced, primitive biology?
56 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 123 ms ] threadThere must be a better way to convince the masses, but so far no billionaire or government has stepped forward with a serious effort here, and I doubt such a thing will occur in our lifetimes.
My point is, other avid cryonicists should study serious and effective approaches, and abandon the "rational" one. But hey, making it up high on the hacker-news top-10 is a good start.
Individual people are replaceable, and don’t belong outside of their own time. If you want to advocate cryonics for the masses, think about what you would do if you had to live in a world with the reanimated masses of the 18th century. Because that’s the kind of mess you propose to inflict on our future descendants.
But I do want to see spaceships bringing people beyond the boundaries of human life spans.
I don't one can reasonably hope for faster-than-light travel. But cryonics is a technology that looks, at the very least, feasible.
Yet you undertake continual efforts to remain alive, embracing the use of food and medicine - technologies developed purely and entirely to stave off naturally occurring death.
I feel that you haven't fully examined your own position on this matter.
You're the one who hasn't fully examined my position on this matter, judging by your bizarre strawman argument.
Sounds like Riverworld. I think it could be quite interesting. But anyway, whether it's a potential mess or not is something for our future descendants to decide on.
Advocating cryonics today doesn't imply that our descendants, even if they have the technology, will accept the resurrection of masses. We have immigration laws today, I'm sure the same concept could be thought up for "people outside their own time", if it ever is an issue.
Perhaps some are motivated by narcissism, but I'd like to think my fellow cryonicists are motivated by hope, and a belief that the future will be a warm and welcoming place. If the future is narcissistic, I wouldn't want to be revived anyways.
I would gladly revive a non famous person from the 18th century - diversity in thought doesn't seem to be a mess to me. And any future that would revive me would necessarily agree - I'm just betting there are enough people like me when resurrection is possible. And if everyone is like you, I'd gladly opt to be dissected and studied instead.
And if that's not enough for you, maybe future generations will have the opportunity to reanimate your corpse in a 25th century hospital and torture it some more to see what they can recover from the brain cells that survived the ordeal? Feel free and sign up for that if you want, but I'm out.
I see no reason why anyone with the ability to re-animate/heal cryo-preserved strangers would do so.
So if preserved people from the past survived long enough, it seems like historical interest could motivate people to re-animate them. There may be other motivations but that's one.
Maybe only a small selection would be reanimated at any one time. But that might others to revived later.
None of us want to die but giving these scammers your money won’t save you.
This is the lowest form of disagreement, and probably also the most common. We've all seen comments like this:
u r a fag!!!!!!!!!!
But it's important to realize that more articulate name-calling has just as little weight. A comment like
The author is a self-important dilettante.
is really nothing more than a pretentious version of "u r a fag."
http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html
I'm not interested in cryopreservation personally, but it's quite a stretch to lump the efforts in that space along with astrology or psychic healing.
There's no corporate or legal or NGO structure in the business that will last long enough that anyone will care, and even if they do the cooling system failover will not work in the particularly hot summer of 2074.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-edybFkBiO4 -- Rod Steiger as Mr. Joyboy, the masterful mortician at work
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoZ5dTQa_2E -- Liberace as a funeral home salesperson
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaGtDJo5R5o -- Aimee Thanatogenos visits Mr. Joyboy and his mother
Also we don't know how long this needs to work. If it happens at all I expect it'll be in much less than 200 years. (Yes, of course that's a big if.)
See also Alcor's reply to "Who will revive patients?": http://alcor.org/FAQs/faq01.html#whowillrevive
There is no active cooling system; cryonics patients are passively cooled with liquid nitrogen. The only regular maintenance needed is adding more liquid nitrogen, and the storage dewars can last for many months before replenishment is needed.
It’s much cheaper (not to mention more fun) to make more babies.
No people will care because that's what they do and that's why we have schools, hospitals and the like in all countries, not because there is a legal structure requiring them.
https://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/216900...
There is also some interesting work spurred by the Brain Preservation Prize:
http://www.brainpreservation.org/small-mammal-announcement/
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cryobiol.2015.09.003
"We describe here a new cryobiological and neurobiological technique, aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation (ASC), which demonstrates the relevance and utility of advanced cryopreservation science for the neurobiological research community. ASC is a new brain-banking technique designed to facilitate neuroanatomic research such as connectomics research, and has the unique ability to combine stable long term ice-free sample storage with excellent anatomical resolution."
Not that I've tried, but I guess detaching a head at the base has less potential to damage than would opening and removing the whole skull.
E.g. people found drowned in icy water with no pulse. "Six of nine survivors (66.7%) had minor neurological sequelae with Glasgow outcome scale (GOS) 5 (low disability)" (the rest worse). It's not clear to me from the table what the longest time with no breathing or pulse was among those six best-off survivors. But here's a popular account of another case: http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/child-survived...
Those were the top two google hits that came up. It's not my field, but it doesn't seem plausible to me that much of our identity is encoded in evanescent patterns of electrical activity or such. (As opposed to your short term working memory.) If you can nail down the molecules, the information is bound to be there in their arrangement.
I think a big myth people need dispelled is that cryonics is really expensive. It's not a very expensive gamble to take, and it's pretty easy to see that it's worthwhile for many people.
This procedure is not yet reversible because of other damage (not caused by ice) including biochemical effects of the vitrification solution — but it eliminates ice damage and the preservation of fine structure is excellent.
[1] https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/03/cryonics.html
"Can memory be retained after cryopreservation? Our research has attempted to answer this long-standing question by using the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, a well-known model organism for biological research that has generated revolutionary findings but has not been tested for memory retention after cryopreservation. Our study's goal was to test C. elegans' memory recall after vitrification and reviving. Using a method of sensory imprinting in the young C. elegans, we establish that learning acquired through olfactory cues shapes the animal's behavior and the learning is retained at the adult stage after vitrification. Our research method included olfactory imprinting with the chemical benzaldehyde (C6H5CHO) for phase-sense olfactory imprinting at the L1 stage, the fast-cooling SafeSpeed method for vitrification at the L2 stage, reviving, and a chemotaxis assay for testing memory retention of learning at the adult stage. Our results in testing memory retention after cryopreservation show that the mechanisms that regulate the odorant imprinting (a form of long-term memory) in C. elegans have not been modified by the process of vitrification or by slow freezing."
This is why I like HN...
The purely logical, rational side of me wants to say "why should I make an assumption that 21st century norms about the inevitability of death will hold true or are even valid at all?" so I should just do the least presumptuous thing and get frozen.
But on the other hand, what does the quality of life look like for a 21st century human reanimated in 2300 or 2500 or whatever? If history (or Black Mirror) tells us anything, at best, I'll live out my immortal life as some sick museum exhibit/circus curiosity, with no possibility of the kind embrace of death unless some rebellious young person happens to take pity on me.
But that's also assuming humans keep on being Sapiens and don't transcend their present biology/mindset.
But then, of course, how lonely is it to live in a world where I'm one of the last humans tethered to my un-enhanced, primitive biology?
And so on...