Sebastian Seung on preventing "connectome death" in cryonics

From Chapter 14 of Connectome: How the Brain's Wiring Makes Us Who We Are, by Sebastian Seung:

At the present time, cryonics is closer to religion than to science, because it is based on faith rather than evidence. Its members believe that a future civilization will be able to resurrect them, based only on their faith in limitless technological progress. The test that I propose is a way of finally bringing some science to Ettinger's Wager. If the vitrified bodies contain intact connectomes, this does not prove that resurrection will be possible. But if connectome death has already occurred, resurrection will almost certainly be impossible.

Many Alcor members might not be eager to see the results of such a test. They may prefer blind belief as a means of consolation about their impendng demise. If a scientific test has the potential to uncover factual information refuting their beliefs, they might prefer that the test not be conducted. There are other members, though, who want evidence over faith, and would demand tests of connectome integrity.

If could turn out that the Alcor members stored in liquid nitrogen are already connectome dead. If so, that would not be the end of Alcor. They could always use connectomics as a means to improve their methods of preparing and vitrifying brains. Short of actually resurrecting their members, this is the only way I can imagine assessing the quality of their procedures. Even if their current method does not prevent connectome death, they could utimately find one that does.

Hey, I want to know the results of that kind of test. I've said for awhile now that the people who dismiss cryonics as unworkable keep leaving off the phrase, "given the way cryonics organizations currently perform their suspensions," which I consider a more reasonable position than simply repudiating the practice altogether. It leaves open the potential to make cryonics work, something which many cryonicists seem reluctant to demand of themselves and their organizations. Seung has apparently picked up on that reluctance, or more likely fecklessness, about us as well.

And as for "finally bringing some science to Ettinger's Wager," I have to ask: You mean we still haven't done this after nearly 50 years? No wonder most scientists write off cryonics as a form of woo-woo.

A reverse "hostile wife phenomenon" at work?

Facebook has an all-male board of directors, and some feminists have complained about that, saying that Facebook's board should show more "diversity" by adding some women.

Hmm. Alcor has an all-male board of directors as well, but no woman I know of has objected to that, apparently because cryonics acts like "female Kryptonite." In fact, I've speculated that if Alcor announced that it would not accept any more women as members, we probably wouldn't see any complaints from women who haven't signed up yet, but want to, because not enough of these women exist to matter. The ban would just reinforce something which the overwhelming majority of women who hear about cryonics refuses to do any way.

(Interestingly enough, the Cryonics Institute's board of directors features a few women. What accounts for the difference? Of course, the Cryonics Institute, like Alcor, also has a "scientific advisory board." Given the inadequate state of both organizations' suspensions, I suspect these other boards serve the purposes of public relations more than they signal a serious commitment to improving cryonic suspensions according to scientific criteria.)

Facebook's ability to draw in a disproportionate number of women as users, and make them waste so much of their time on it, leads me think that it acts like what psychologists call "supernormal stimuli." Facebook's popularity and financial success also signal that getting in control of it will give you status and power, so naturally some women want to intrude into a currently male social space on the company's board of directors.

By contrast, women, apart from the few hard cases in cryonics whom I generally respect (yes, even that one), react to cryonics with what looks like "supernormal aversion," or something to that effect, even though cryonics has the mistaken reputation as a rich man's extravagance. Normally the things which only rich people can afford become status symbols for less successful people, and women often want to get their share of these goods and services by marrying up to men of the highest status who will take them in and spend money on them; but cryonics hasn't followed that pattern by becoming a similar good signaling high status.

"The Gentle Seduction"? Or "The Stood Up Date"?

Back in 1989, during the early days of the Nanotech Delusion, Marc Stiegler published some propaganda about it in a story that I have to admit I found emotionally effective at the time. He titled it "The Gentle Seduction," and it originally appeared in Analog magazine. But looking at this story now, I consider it unintentionally misleading.

Consider this passage, for example:

"Have you ever heard of nanotechnology?" he asked.

"Uh-uh."

"Well, with nanotechnology they'll build these tiny little machines--machines the size of molecules." He pointed at the drink in her hand. "They'll put a billion of them in a spaceship the size of a Coke can, and shoot it off to an asteroid. The Coke can will rebuild the asteroid into mansions and palaces. You'll have an asteroid all to your self, if you want one."

"I don't want an asteroid. I don't want to go into space."

He shook his head. "Don't you want to see Mars?You liked the Grand Canyon; I remember how you told me about it. Mars has huge gorges--they make the Grand Canyon look tiny. Don't you want to see them? Don't you want to hike across them?"

It took her a long time to reply. "I guess so," she admitted.

"I won't tell you all the things I expect to happen," he smiled mischievously, "I'm afraid I'd really scare you. But you'll see it all. And you'll remember that I told you." His voice grew intense. "And you'll remember that I knew you'd remember."

And then the simple-minded female protagonist during the following decades begins to experience, in small steps, a series of gee-whiz medical and technological marvels which ends up extending her life by more decades, then centuries, millennia, and beyond (!), not to mention expanding her capabilities to superhuman levels.

Cool enough, I guess. But I have the impression that Stiegler set his story in a fictional world corresponding to what he thought of the real state of "nanotechnology" in the late 1980's. Over 20 years have passed since then. What the hell happened to all these miracles the nanotech boosters promised us since the time of Ronald Reagan's second term as president? Apparently we haven't even gotten to the pre-pre-pre-etc. miracle stage by now.

This makes even less sense than I first noticed.

The Robert Heinlein geek fan who compares Newt Gingrich to a Heinleinian hero writes:

To a generation of middle-aged voters who grew up on Heinlein and the writers he influenced, the Gingrich message and the Gingrich style have a real resonance. You can see this in how Gingrich has successfully positioned himself as the defiant individualist in his challenging of the media establishment and how easily voters have been convinced to dismiss his unconventional personal life. The fully realized individual is above conventional morality and is not accountable to anyone but himself. The more Gingrich defies those who would judge him the more he proves that he is the kind of individualistic superman which Heinlein's writing has convinced us that we all ought to be. We identify with Gingrich and live vicariously through him, more like a literary character than a real human being.

Uh, what about Gingrich's conversion to Catholicism? I don't think Catholic moral teaching advocates that the self-actualized Catholic becomes a "fully realized individual . . . above conventional morality and . . . not accountable to anyone but himself," much less attain the status of an "individualistic superman." If anyone could become like a Heinleinian superman in real life, I doubt he would go to a Catholic priest for confession. If anything, a priest might seek out the Heinleinian superman for advice.

The idea of a "Heinleinian Republican" deserves further study. People have already noticed and written about Ayn Rand's influence on modern conservatism. I have Gary Weiss's new book on order, for example. Heinlein's life nearly coincides with Rand's, yet he wrote a lot more, over a longer period of time, and in a way which reached about the same kind of demographic as Rand's novels. It wouldn't surprise me if the evidence supports the case that he likewise exerted an unacknowledged but substantial influence on the thinking of the American right in the early 21st Century.

The weirdness of paleofuture movies

I have to laugh sometimes when I watch an old movie which portrays life decades into "the future" relative to the time of the movie's making, and then notice that it shows wrong or even preposterous things happening in a year I can remember. I don't count the movies which show life just a few years into "the future" from the time of the movie's release, like On the Beach or The Omega Man.

For example, the year 1970 in Things to Come:



The year 1980 in Just Imagine. The opening scene of New York's flying car traffic inspired imitations in later movies and cartoons:



The weird mix of hits and misses in 1999 A.D. (intro only in this clip):

And, of course, the various adaptations of Nineteen Eighty-Four over the years, along with 2001: A Space Odyssey and its sequel set in the year 2010.

A number of other movies made ~25-40 years ago portray life in the next few years:

Rollerball (set in 2018).

The Running Man (set in 2019).

Blade Runner (set in 2019 as well).

And the one I watched the bulk of late last night on TCM: Soylent Green (set in 2022). Something about the year 2020 acted as a kind of attractor for many of these films made in the 1970's and 1980's.

And a bit further out, Things to Come does double duty by showing a kind of utopian life in the year 2036 towards the end of the film.

I haven't watched Soylent Green in years, and several things about it struck me. One, it has the look-and-feel of cyberpunk without the cyber, because it doesn't mention or show computers in 2022. Old book-oriented scholars, rather than computer-hip youngsters with tattoos and other body mods, play a role equivalent to hackers in the cyberpunk genre. Yet like in cyberpunk, Soylent Green shows a dysfunctional, if not failing, technological civilization dominated by a mega-corporation which has the monopoly on the main food supply.

Its view of street life also reminds me of what I read about living conditions in the former Soviet Union, where ordinary, shabbily dressed and probably unwashed people have to stand in line much of the day for food rations of dodgy quality. The men wear European-style caps and the women wear scarves, just like you would probably see now on the streets of Russian cities.

The movie's view of social inequality seems a bit off to me. The richest people live in apartments with 1970's middle class conveniences like air conditioning and hot running water, along with sex workers called "the furniture" who come as part of the deal (apparently these guys don't have wives or children), and these tenants have the money and connections to buy scarce goods like liquor, soap, and real food but in small quantities. The courtesan of one of these rich men brought home a piece of beef, which would make about two small steak dinners, as a special treat for her master. Apparently normal agriculture and animal husbandry still function somewhere on the planet to supply this market, but the movie doesn't show how or why that works.

In other words, everyone in the world in 2022 must have gotten poorer in absolute terms, not just relatively, if the so-called rich men have to live like 1970's urban bachelors of the sort Hugh Hefner marketed to with Playboy magazine, but subjected to food rationing as well. That makes for an interesting contrast with all the propaganda lately defaming the so-called "one percent."

Hollywood doesn't seem to produce these kinds of movies so much these days, perhaps as a result of the decline of the idea of "the future" in Western thinking; we especially don't see portrayals where people endure bad stretches of "the future" to reach better living conditions and a happy ending, like in Things to Come. The Star Trek franchise seems to have fallen on hard times as well, though Gene Roddenberry created it as secular humanist propaganda decades before the "New Atheism" phenomenon should have made it seem more relevant, not less. I get the impression that the culture lately resists transmitting speculative portrayals of "the future" in general, good or bad. Bertrand Russell in his History of Western Philosophy writes of the educated men in the Roman Empire during the rule of the Antonines that they "looked to the past for what was best; the future, they felt, would be at best a weariness, and at worst a horror." Have we gotten to a similar point in our history?

Newt Gingrich, the paleofuture candidate

I started to pick up on this myself when Newt brought up the idea of a moon base as a goal for his presidency:

The Rise of the Heinlein Republican (Dave Nalle)

With his surge in the polls I've been trying to get a handle on the philosophy of Newt Gingrich, and after finally seeing signs which should have been obvious all along and confirming them with a bit of research, I realized what I should have caught on to long ago, that Newt Gingrich is a Robert Heinlein Republican.

Like many in my generation I grew up reading Robert Heinlein's Science Fiction novels almost religiously. Heinlein's dystopian vision of the future and his romantic obsession with man as superman was enormously appealing to a teenager growing up in the space age. The Heinlein man could perfect himself and conquer the universe singlehanded by sheer determination and willpower. Heinlein's theme was the triumph of the individual over time in Methuselah's Children, over space in The Man Who Sold the Moon, over conventional morality in Stranger in a Strange Land and over the governments of lesser men in Farnham's Freehold. Heinlein's political philosophy of Rational Anarchism is summed up by the Professor Bernardo de la Paz in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress:

"In terms of morals there is no such thing as a ‘state.’ Just men. Individuals. Each responsible for his own acts. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free, because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything that I do."

Heinlein's muscular, militaristic individualism carried with it a deliberate intention from the very first to influence politics. After World War II Heinlein experimented with direct involvement in politics, served in elective party office in California and ultimately campaigned for Goldwater in 1964 and may have ghostwritten ads and speeches for his presidential campaign. In this period Heinlein had a friendship and rivalry with fellow writer L. Ron Hubbard. They supposedly had a long standing bet to see who could start a religion which would change society. Hubbard's answer to this challenge was the creation of Scientology. Heinlein's answer came through his writing and the ideas expressed in some of his bestselling novels of the late 1960s and its ultimate product seems to be Newt Gingrich.

Gingrich has admitted to being a Heinlein fan and his own fiction has a clear Heinlein influence. Gingrich is also friends with and has collaborated with Science Fiction author and former Reagan era technology adviser Jerry Pournelle, who sees himself as the heir to Heinlein's ideas and literary tradition. Pournelle was a protege of influential neolibertarian thinker Russell Kirk, and has written extensively on politics from a neolibertarian perspective. Neolibertarianism is a branch of libertarianism which fits the Heinlein model quite closely. It at least partially deemphasizes the principle of non-coercion and places a strong emphasis on individual liberty, disdaining bureaucratic government and elevating the military to a near iconic status. The world envisioned in Heinlein's Starship Troopers is very much the world of the neolibertarian movement.

Gingrich has clearly taken the Heinlein ideology to heart on many levels. His serial infidelity and request that his wife engage in an open relationship are pure Heinlein. Heinlein was an avowed libertine who practiced open marriage and advocated total sexual liberation and rejection of conventional morality as a recurrent theme in much of his writing. Gingrich's obsession with colonizing the moon is also straight out of Heinlein's work. Some of Heinlein's most influential writing centers around the colonization and development of the moon in books like The Man Who Sold the Moon and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Gingrich's hostility towards bureaucracy, flaunting of the conventional political process and love of innovation for its own sake are pure Heinlein. His egotism and obsessive character are also straight out of Heinlein. Gingrich himself has much in common with megalomaniacal developer Delos D. Harriman in The Man Who Sold the Moon, though Gingrich seems not to understand that the self-destructive Harriman was intended more as an anti-hero than a role model.

Many observers of the libertarian end of the political spectrum see Heinlein's vision and the ideas of the neolibertarians as the "ugly" side of libertarianism. Disconnected from social morality and focused on the responsibility of the individual to himself and not to society, it can lead to views which verge on being an oxymoronic kind of libertarian fascism. Ironically, this aggressive subset of the generally much more innocuous libertarian movement seems to have much greater political marketability.

To a generation of middle-aged voters who grew up on Heinlein and the writers he influenced, the Gingrich message and the Gingrich style have a real resonance. You can see this in how Gingrich has successfully positioned himself as the defiant individualist in his challenging of the media establishment and how easily voters have been convinced to dismiss his unconventional personal life. The fully realized individual is above conventional morality and is not accountable to anyone but himself. The more Gingrich defies those who would judge him the more he proves that he is the kind of individualistic superman which Heinlein's writing has convinced us that we all ought to be. We identify with Gingrich and live vicariously through him, more like a literary character than a real human being.

Sorry, I just don't see Gingrich's appeal, and I generally like Heinlein. Gingrich's habitual lying, his corruption, his three consecutive wives (he seems to abandon the current one when she gets seriously ill) and his serial religious apostasies signal an unstable and unreliable character to me, and I don't think he has any business becoming president.

I find Mitt Romney acceptable as a candidate, especially because I consider the super-rich as "early adopters" of the lifestyles that ordinary people could enjoy in a few centuries if we can sustain exponential economic growth (by no means a self-evident scenario, I admit). American families have a median net worth of about $100,000, or so I've read. Assuming constant dollars and 2 percent economic growth interpreted as the return on the capital in that amount with reinvestment & compounding, $100,000 grows into $100 million in about 350 years. That would seem to get you to the threshold of "super wealth" by today's standards, and into the neighborhood of Mitt Romney's family fortune. So to my way of thinking, Romney has more of a futuristic aura about him than Gingrich, especially because I suspect that bourgeois, patriarchal and conservative values will return to social dominance in the next few generations, led notably by the example of Mormonism.

Jeez, not this again.

Eric Drexler's ex-wife, Christine Peterson, still has some leadership position with the Foresight Institute, which I consider ironically named, given that its history of nanotech advocacy should embarrass those people by now. I don't know if she has a regular job and just runs this dubious "institute" on the side. But I get the impression that she continues to drink the Nanotech Kool-Aid, especially after reading this announcement:

Foresight co-founder among panelists discussing role of technology in human existence

Foresight Institute Co-Founder and Past President Christine Peterson was among four panelists addressing the role of technology in human existence for a Stanford University Continuing Studies series. From a report in The Stanford Daily by Marshall Watkins “Bay Area thinkers ponder ‘life’“:

Christine Peterson, co-founder and president of The Foresight Institute, a public interest group seeking to educate the community on forthcoming technological advances, emphasized the increasingly prominent role that nanotechnology has come to play.

Peterson noted that nanotechnology has the potential to create new materials and make vast advances without the side effects, such as pollution, that would currently ensue. She allowed, however, that the near-invisible and highly sensitive technology might enable intrusions on privacy.

“We need to know what data is collected,” Peterson said, “how it is used and how long it is retained. We have those rights.”

Peterson highlighted the medical benefits of nanotechnology, noting, “The ability to control atoms and molecules would mean that there really isn’t a physical illness [that] we wouldn’t be able to address.”

The report quotes the moderator of the panel, author Piero Scaruffi, as stating that the four panelists were picked because “They discussed life as in the future, rather than life as in the past.” We can certainly expect that life after advanced nanotechnology has been developed will be fundamentally different from life up until that point.

Does Christine have a calendar? Doesn't she realize that we live in "the future of nanotechnology" that her ex-husband wrote about back in the 1980's, and that it simply doesn't exist? How much longer can she keep this up before people lose interest in these empty promises, stop inviting her to their conferences and stop donating to her "institute"?

Contrast this delusion with genomics over the past 20-25 years. In 2012 we can see that genome sequencing works; has gotten dramatically cheaper; generates real data; and has begun to transform our understanding of biology, evolutionary history and medicine.

In other words, we live in "the future of genomics" from the perspective of 1990 or so, and some of its potentials have started to pay off. It doesn't disappoint because it exists in the real 21st Century, not in the paleofuture 21st Century promoted by certain aging Baby Boomers, including a politician in the news lately who still thinks we live in "the space age."