Active shutdown is certainly preferable, but to the best of my knowledge is only legal in Switzerland.
I think anyone who spends 200K on this today should expect to pay 200K again in a decade or two (if they make it that far) since at that point the "state of the art" will almost certainly be with a different company, and I doubt the failed company will give refunds.
Jurisdictions where euthanasia or assisted suicide is legal include the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Estonia, Albania, the US states of Washington, Oregon and Montana, and, starting in 2015, the Canadian Province of Quebec.
I am planning to sign up for cryonics ASAP (as soon as I can afford it), and I would really prefer that stand-by and active shutdown were readily available options, but I'm afraid I would have to do all the research and preparation by myself, if I want it to become a reality.
OTOH, the existence of a company Suspended Animation http://www.suspendedinc.com/ gives me hope. How could a company carve out a market for itself, selling additional services for cryonics, which by itself counts less than 300 patients preserved over its 47 year history - I don't know.
Of course, in the POV of someone who believes in cryopreservation as a way to save lives, preventing it is almost tantamount to murder--probably falling somewhere above negligent homicide, since you'd actively be preventing someone from saving their own life.
I say that as someone who thinks the cryo-folks are deeply delusional about their technology.
I'm a firm believer in the preservation bit, I don't think it will scale and I totally do not believe in the resurrection bit. It's a bit like performing a magical trick where you smash somebody's watch in act one and you still haven't figured out how to do part two.
To use your analogy: You're getting on an airplane and the security guy says "no watches". You're now faced with the assured loss of an heirloom item. So you break it, and the guy lets you board. You figure eventually you may be able to reassemble it in some form. Like the Iranians did to the "destroyed" documents in the US Embassy there.
Murder is so final, while this is more akind to shutting down a computer that you hope to be able to start up again. Hence active shutdown being a more appropriate idea.
> it's clear that restoring a cryopreserved person is possible in principle.
Is it?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryonics#Neuropreservation
What we can do today, is preserving the brain structure. What we can't do today is to restore the brain and body after prolonged preservation, and to fix whatever illnesses caused the patient to undergo this procedure in the first place.
Both of those problems seem to be tractable with nanotech, which we know is real and works (we usually call it "life", but life is nothing but a nanotech that's not ours and we can't controll well enough yet). So at this point I'd say cryopreservation is a bet against continued technological progress (which is not bad, because not taking it means certainly dying), not an act of faith.
One can argue against economics of such, and the cost a cryopreserved person imposes on the living, but comparing it to faith in God and resurrection is IMO wrong.
- that death does not alter the structure irrepairably
- that the structure and information contained therein will not degrade over time
- that the freezing process itself won't damage the information
- that the information will be recoverable
- that we will be able to make sense of such information
- that the information after successful restoration can be transplanted into some other medium
- that this other medium will be able to 'execute' using that information
- that the electrical component of brain activity once lost can be restored
- and that all of the above will result in a restoration of consciousness
- and that this consciousness will somehow be given the status of person (that's more of a social issue)
All of these together to me are equivalent to or maybe even greater than believing in God.
- that death does not alter the structure irrepairably
As far as we can tell, if we freeze it quick enough, it won't. No magic required. (death doesn't mean something magical is happening to matter, it only means molecular machines stop working the way they should)
- that the structure and information contained therein will not degrade over time
Possible. Manageable with technology. Testable. No magic required.
- that the freezing process itself won't damage the information
Possible. Subject to fixing by improved technology. Testable. No magic required.
- that the information will be recoverable
Possible by definition of solving previous two points. Subject to advanced enough technology, which cryopreserved people are hedging against. No magic required.
- that we will be able to make sense of such information
See above.
- that the information after successful restoration can be transplanted into some other medium
Not required. Technology advanced enough to revive a cryopreserved patient will likely be able to fix the original medium. Technology already exists (in form of nanotechnology - viruses, bacteria, proteins, enzymes), but we don't know how to use it yet, as we didn't build it. No magic required.
- that this other medium will be able to 'execute' using that information
See above. Also, if you really insist on another medium, then it depends on whether or not brains run on magic. If they are not, then the problem is addressable with technology (develop a good enough medium).
- that the electrical component of brain activity once lost can be restored
Evidence suggests that this component is mostly irrelevant. Even if, it's solvable with technology (tough luck to those already preserved though). No magic required.
- and that all of the above will result in a restoration of consciousness
Unless you believe consciousness is magic, it's possible by definition of solving #2/#3.
- and that this consciousness will somehow be given the status of person (that's more of a social issue)
That's a social issue, but again, if consciousness is not a magical process, we can hope the society will mature enough to be able to accept revived people as persons.
> All of these together to me are equivalent to or maybe even greater than believing in God.
Now this IMO does not follow. There're no supernatural phenomena required to address any assumptions you stated, so isn't this by definition requiring qualitatively less faith than religion?
Christ, are you for real? Was landing on the moon 'magic' up until the moment we did it? Why are people like you even on this website?
Going to the moon was the application of a whole pile of existing technology and marginally expanding some of that technology in the process.
As for why 'people like me are even on this website', that's a good question, maybe I should not be here.
- an example of nanotechnology exists and works, it's called "life"
- this particular technology is in principle able to do the tasks required to revive a properly cryopreserved person, even though it does not do this now
- it is real for humans to learn in time how to make this technology do that
- current preservation techniques store enough information to revive a human using sufficiently advanced nanotechnology
(2) unknown, unknowable
(3) unknown, unknowable
(4) unknown, knowable but only in a very far future (if at all).
So, in short nanotechnology is just like every other technology, it has laws and limits and does not automatically allow us to do everything we would like it to be able to do.
For an analogy: we know that the ribosome + DNA complex creates proteins. But we are still bound in terms of expression by what cells as a concept are capable of.
So even if we can imagine life created at will and even if we can imagine all kinds of amazing creatures there is absolutely no way of knowing whether or not we will ever have the technology to direct things in such a way that these desires and imaginations will come true. Compared to the suggestion that we can resurrect a dead person creating a fire breathing dragon out of Condor and Komodo Varan DNA with some basic chemistry thrown in for pyrotechnics is childs play.
It is at its heart the difference between science and science fiction.
That's why we will most likely not have a space elevator (we know of no material strong enough for the filament) and that's why there will never be a ringworld.
Now for those things we have very clear physical limits that we have identified and we know that these limits will be for all practical purposes unsurmountable.
In the case of cryopreservation 'all bets are off', the gap between where our current understanding is located and the required advances means that we are essentially postulating that people in the advanced future will become gods.
That's a leap too far in my understanding of how human progress has worked to date.
I guess the main point of difference is our estimate of how likely is that those yet unexplored constraints will let us reverse cryopreserving. I seem to have more hope for that than you do, but I admit, at this point it's probably a bit of a guesswork.
Thanks for the exchange, off to bed here (4:39 am...).
You're welcome, and thank you as well. Also going to bed (03:49 AM here, and I was supposed to be coding up my thesis... I guess it's time to turn on the noprocrast again).
Nononononononono. Stop that. jacquesm is continuing his long and proud tradition of mostly well thought and insightful comments. He just doesn't agree with you or me on that topic and, like you and me, has some strong opinions. We're trying to have a somewhat productive conversation here.
The flaw in the analogy is that there's fairly widespread experience in restarting computers after shutdown, as well as a wealth of knowledge about how fix the computer if it doesn't come back up. None of that holds for cryonics and human death.
Well, it's not really called anything much at the moment as no one does it but certainly not all killing is called murder. You kill enemies with bombs, that's heroic service, civilians with bombs it's collateral damage, kill patients trying to save them medically then it's an unfortunate result, kill deliberately in a manner banned by your government then it's murder. For me suspending someone to save them would be closest to heroic service.
So not really, no. And you should really know better than replying with such trollbait, that's not contributing to the discussion in the slightest. This is the announcement of the death (?) of someone, not the place to argue ethics (or religion, because we all know that's what coming up next).
The title clearly reads that he's being cryopreserved. If it was about his death I would expect something that would announce that rather than his so-called preservation.
This is the trans-humanist movement claiming this moment as theirs rather than an announcement of a good persons death.
It's simply an Alcor advertorial, not a eulogy.
Supposedly he's not really dead, so either we can react to the article and he'll read this in the future and laugh at me or we should mourn him because he really is dead. Make up your minds.
Just as in the case of someone who falls into a coma from which they'll probably never wake up, both mourning and hope are reasonable responses. I don't think it's fair to slam this announcement for choosing to put more emphasis on hope.
Mourning is a reasonable response. Advertising is not and this article does not contain a whole lot of mourning (I can't detect any, correct me if I'm wrong) but it certainly does contain a ton of advertising. Essentially it is not about the person at all except for the first 10 words or so.
And people can be sad that the probability of seeing him alive in close timeframes suddenly dropped from nearly 1 to somewhere closer to zero.