In case you don’t know, the Cryogenics movement means freeze you now, revive you later. Of course the person does have to be dead first (don’t want to make a mistake there ).
Anyway, I have wondered for some time now. What is the probable fate of the Cryogenics movement?
First, will the companies that provide this service really be around long enough to see if they can do this in the future? Have the technology to revive you, i.e. I assume an educated guess can be made about that even now.
Secondly, has anyone found a solution for the problem of cellular damage? In case you don’t know, freezing causes water in the cells to expand, damaging the cells. A way would have to be found around this. Otherwise certainly no way would be conceivable in the present time at least to revive the person who suffered this damage. (And if indeed there could be, consider the above question then.)
I believe that some of them will. There have already been cryonically frozen people who did not stay frozen and organizations attempting to keep them frozen than did not last, but that didn’t stop others from attempting it. Barring some civilization-level failure, even if all current organizations and corpsicles are lost, someone will start another one. If there is ultimately a technological breakthrough that allows for reviving frozen bodies, I am fairly sure there will be some frozen bodies around to try it on. Whether any of those frozen bodies are currently frozen (or currently alive) is anyone’s guess.
Not yet, obviously. The whole point of cryonics is to punt that problem to the future. Certainly, technology has solved what might have previously seemed like totally insurmountable problems in the past, and presumably will continue to do so (possibly including this one).
Personally, it seems like if you’re going to spring for cryonics, might as well save some money and just do the head. I find it hard to imagine a technological breakthrough that could revive and reconstruct a brain that would have a lot of trouble making new arms and livers and whatever.
It’s pseudoscience. It’s always been pseudoscience, and it remains pseudoscience today.
[The formal position of the Society of Cryobiology is that] cryonics ‘is an act of speculation or hope, not science.’
Will it be pseudoscience forever? I have no way of knowing and can’t speculate. But I’m 100% convinced that nobody frozen today will ever be revived in any way, however you define revived.
I am like 99.9% convinced. But of course that’s how they get you. How much would a rational person pay for a 0.1% chance to cheat death and see the future. A lot!
I’d say I think the chance that at some point in the future there will exist a technology that could take a head that was frozen with less-than-perfect earlier technology some decades in the past and sufficiently map it to generate a simulation of the mind that once existed in it is decently high. I don’t see any fundamental physical limitations that would preclude it. Does that count as being revived? Not very sure, but it seems cool.
The synaptic connection information is only a very tiny portion of the total information needed, and all the rest is completely and irrecoverably lost.
This short article by a neuroscientist is worth reading in its entirety.
It shows clearly, simply, and briefly why the whole idea is a delusion.
While I of course agree with the science in that article, I am wary of statements about intuition.
Everything we’ve ever learned about science tells us that our intuition built on everyday experience gives the wrong answers when applied to the deepest explanations of reality, relativity and quantum mechanics being the obvious examples.
What a really good replica would be like is a matter now for philosophy. We have nothing to base any scientific extrapolation on. I, like the writer, can have my opinions on the matter, but he himself calls the matter “unanswerable” and he should have left it there.
I’m of the (majority) opinion here that it is currently 100% (no fraction) Bunk. Leaving out the gross cellular damage, and the fact that it appears very likely that memory and psyche is probably tied into not just structure, but chemistry, and perhaps even state means that even if the damage is restored, ‘you’ probably won’t be.
The biggest issue I see is that I figure even the most well funded and well meaning of these folks are one dishonest admin or economic crash from being bankrupt. At which point, well, you’re just one more cadaver. And if by some miracle it all works, and future generations develop the tech to defrost AND fix whatever ails you, they aren’t likely to do it for free - and I doubt there’s enough money to preserve you indefinitely and pay the fees for your return and restoration, much less leave you with anything left to live on in a strange world afterwards.
Nope - right now it’s all about giving you the feeling of cheating death, that banking on just enough rich folks that see that .1% chance ( to use @iamthewalrus_3 number) is worth it.
I feel you’ll get more immortality by putting a fund towards an annual scholarship that requires those applying to write a detailed monograph about you. Or building a vanity statue on your alma mater (along with a donation of course) that local students will treat with all due disrespect.
For some definitions of “rational”, maybe. After all, there are plenty of elderly and terminally ill people who rationally choose not to spend even a fraction of that kind of money on seeking treatments that would have a far higher chance of giving them years of prolonged life right here and now.
Some rational people just feel that after eight or nine decades it’s okay to give up on this “being alive” business permanently, and don’t see death as something that needs to be “cheated”.
Plus, they want their money to go to someone or something they care about more than they care about obtaining a vanishingly small chance to have (some part of) their corpse reanimated at some unknowable future time (and 0.1% is an awfully high estimate for that chance, AFAICT).
Doubtful that we will ever get a living mind/soul out of a corpsicle, however I would not mind leaving a DNA sample towards the future. I doubt that it would recreate me if they cloned it, however perhaps having the DNA available would help if there was ever a genetic bottleneck/need to send DNA to space for cloning at the other end for population variety sake.
This is very much like saying that “I doubt that an avacado can do my income taxes.” The idea is so utterly not even right that there should be no room for doubt.
I’ve read a few ‘Thawed out Corpsesicles’ books (love Larry Niven’s term for them). And they often start with someone brought back to life and informed that they’re now beholden to a corporation (‘Altered Carbon’) or The State (Niven’s ‘World Out Of Time’).*
*which also starts with “You know all that money you invested in stocks, so you’d have a nest egg when revived? Yeah, we passed laws saying dead people couldn’t own money, so you’re broke. You either work for us now, or it’s back in the freezer for you.”
Back in 1999, when all the world was a-panic over Y2K, there was this programmer busting his ass to get some code updated for the occasion, until he finally burned out and quit. Not wanting to even be around for the impending cataclysm, he had himself frozen, with instructions to be revived in another 200 years.
Well, with all the chaos and economic disaster of Y2K, that all got forgotten and he didn’t get revived in another 200 years or even 2000 years. Fast forward about 8000 years, until the year 9998.
Our programmer wakes up to find himself in a very futuristic looking laboratory, with some very excited futuristic-looking people buzzing around him. (You know, with the enlarged bulbous crania like you always see in the sci-fi flicks.) At least, fortunately, they still speak English (sort-of).
Our programmer asks them the usual questions (Where am I? What’s going on? When am I? etc.) They explain to him what has happened, and then mention: “… And it says here in your papers that you know COBOL!”
And the people who would rather throw their money away selfishly on the small chance they get revived are exactly the ones any just future society would not want to revive.
Unless they need protein, of course.
And look what happened. Corbell ended up beating the system, outliving the State, and saving the world.
As to the OP, I think in a hundred, two hundred years, when everyone who knew the corpsicles is long past, the facilities will be quietly shut down and the bodies disposed of. The more ethical places will bury or cremate them, the less ethical will dump them in New Jersey, next to the mob bodies. CSI:NNY will have an interesting episode out of it.
I read this as: we cannot yet map a brain with sufficient precision to restore it. But I don’t see any claim in the article that precludes the physical possibility. Is there a reason to be sure that no future technology will enable doing so? I don’t think so.
An analogy, if you will: Imagine you were a woolly mammoth cryonics advocate, trying to persuade your fellow mammoths to freeze your body deep below the permafrost in the hopes that someday, after all other mammoths had died, someone would be able to use the stored frozen mammoth to make more. He’s pretty fuzzy on the details of how that might work. What an absurd idea, right! As soon as you read the initial phrase “woolly mammoth cryonics advocate” it’s obvious it’s nonsense. There’s no way to make woolly mammoths out of frozen dead mammoths. Literally everyone knows that. And yet!
Is this a scientific claim? No, of course not. But there are plenty of things that learned experts of the past proclaimed impossible that we can now do.
These are good points, and I didn’t mean to imply that it’s irrational to not try to freeze your brain, just that it’s not a totally crazy thing to try, even acknowledging that the chances of it working for any given individual are extremely slim.
A few hundred years ago, you could say that there’s literally no way for sand to do math, but a computer is basically exquisitely arranged sand.
Could some future technology engineer plants that can do your taxes? I have no idea, but, again, I don’t see any physical constraints that would make it impossible to do so.
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