John Bruce on cryonics (2006)

Link:

Monday, July 31, 2006

Cryonics A “Bad Product”? Say It Ain’t So!

I still get a certain amount of traffic from transhumanists, even though I’ve largely dropped my discussion of the movement. The other day someone came in from a Google search that was intriguing enough that I went back and looked at the results. I think the search string was on something like “cryonics ‘bad product’”. If you do that search, you get a pretty remarkable set of results, not least because the opinions come from cryonics cultists themselves.

Saul Kent, for instance, one of the field’s founders, is frequently cited as calling cryonics a “bad product”. The link says, “His recent essay titled, 'The Failure of Cryonics' concludes that consumers are not attracted to cryonic services for the simple reason that there is no convincing evidence that cryonics will work.” (The essay is apparently not available on line – though maybe one of my visitors can point me to it.)

We shouldn’t err in attributing too much wisdom to Saul Kent, though – he’s traditionally operated at the margins of the law, having had a bad run-in with the FDA in the 1990s for making unfounded claims about the vitamins he sells. In addition, it was Kent’s mother whose body sparked the interest of the Riverside County, CA coroner when it was found that, just before being cryopreserved, she’d died from an overdose of barbiturates.

Beyond that, according to Wikipedia, “At the age of 17 Michael [Darwin aka Federowicz] was invited by Saul Kent to cryopreserve a cryonics patient for CSNY.” So cryonics is a bad product – but that’s OK, it’s so easy a 17 year old can do it! (Mike Darwin’s only medical training, by the way, is as a dialysis technician.)

Anyhow, I find that there’s actually quite a bit of literature even within the movement on the lack of merit to cryonics. For instance:

It's difficult to convey the magnitude of damage that occurs to cryonics patients to those who have not perceived it firsthand. The negative evaluation of current cryonics methods by of long-time activists such as Saul Kent, Mike Darwin and others may seem unduly pessimistic. Perhaps the following analogy will help make clear why they feel those methods are so inadequate.

Most cryonicists would agree that cremation destroys identity permanently for all practical purposes. Even nanotechnology would not be sufficient to recover a cremated individual. What if, instead of burning from the outside-in, the brain burned inside-out, at a million points spread randomly throughout the brain? Imagine taking a blowtorch to the Mona Lisa at random points until only 10-20% of the original surface area of the painting remains. You can still tell it's a painting. You might even be able to tell that it's a painting of a woman. But assuming that you have no prior photos of the painting, how much of the original painting could you recover? At what cost? In what time frame?

Applying current cryonics techniques is like taking a micro-blowtorch to the brain at a million different points. It is for this is the reason [sic] that many of the cryonics activists are so frantic to improve our techniques via research.

Interestingly, these views aren’t from skeptics, but come from committed believers in cryonics. And many of these remarks aren’t recent – they’re from the 1980s and 90s. Is it any wonder that, even in the words of the field’s founders and spokespeople, cryonics hasn’t taken off?

It says something, too, that so many of the people in the field, including those who are paying for cryonics contracts, have PhDs or other advanced degrees. They're either overeducated con artists or overeducated suckers, even by their own standards. And Glenn Reynolds, who, if not a shill for these quacks, is certainly an enabler, nevertheless says with amusement,

JEFF JARVIS: "So I took my unsuspecting teenage son to see Woody Allen’s Scoop and here’s the funniest part: The entire audience was geriatric. There wasn’t a person in the theater — in a decent crowd, by the way — who wasn’t under 50 and most won’t see 60 again. . . . Woody Allen is the newspaper of film directors: His audience is dying off."

The audience reaction seems lukewarm. The good news for Woody: At least people are living longer!

We’re back to the dilemma of Mrs. Winchester: irrespective of physical aging, things go out of date. You can live longer and longer, but you're still going to be old fashioned.

Several observations:

1. As Bruce acknowledges, the web-accessible cryonics literature has shown self-criticism of the cryonics project, now dating back nearly 30 years. Not nearly enough critical thinking for my comfort, but at least it should indicate an internal awareness of cryonics' many problems.

2. We don't know to what extent these problems fall into the fixable category through scientific research and technological progress. I keep emphasizing the need to recruit more human minds to work on these challenges through something like an open innovation model so that we can see some epistemic progress.

3. Cryonicists' formal degrees have no bearing on the validity of the underlying ideas. I know "nanotechnologists" in cryonics with advanced degrees who don't impress me with their credentials. The same goes for "uploading" advocates who don't do real neuroscience in the lab. I value results, not hand-waving reassurances.

4. Why doesn't Bruce like the "old-fashioned"?