I'll snip from just one of them (click the link to read the whole thing), by one of my favorite bloggers and regular reads, Athena Andreadis:
…I'll comment just once, as a practicing molecular neurobiologist with dementia as her research focus, in the forlorn hope that this may stem the tsunami of nonsense (or at least counteract the conclusion that silence means the charlatans have carried the day). The central "argument" is the statement that "brain tissue retains its attributes postmortem" -- which, as much else in biology, means something very different at each scale. Bottom line: this is completely untrue in connection with the discussion focus here; namely, continuity of a specific individual's consciousness and personality. Everyone who does even in vitro brain tissue work, let alone in vivo, knows that even a few hours postmortem are enough to usher in irrevocable degradative changes… [P]eddling pseudoscience has real consequences, especially in a culture that has turned as hostile to reality as the contemporary US has…. As for the larger issue of "respectable scientists" -- I'm actually the exception in bothering to discuss such items at all. The vast majority of biologists put transhumanist "science" in the same category as crystal divination and Tarot cards. Some of them may very well accept an invitation to talk at a TH gathering, why not? Free food, a hefty per diem, maybe a nice meeting location, perhaps even eager apprentices for their lab -- but I suspect their attitude would cool significantly if they were asked to explicitly endorse the TH agenda. Scientists are fallible humans, with pride, vanity, mortgages and the very common propensity to fall in love with their theories. However, what legitimate science has that saves it from turning into religion is the self-correction tool: it changes its conclusions whenever new facts come in. Sooner or later, errors are corrected. Scientific consensus is a fluid, dynamic process, rather than an endpoint. As it should be, given what science tries to accomplish: not power, glory or profit, but the understanding of reality.Yay, Athena!
I must say, it is a strange thing the way a reasonably technoscientifically literate and concerned nonscientist can seem to be at a disadvantage with a crusading pseudo-scientist when one admits their limitation while the other leverages a refusal to do the same. There is a danger that under such circumstances my blog risks becoming a vector through which futurological pseudo-scientists spam the credulous to their own benefit despite my own resolute skepticism. In my view, what is actually distinctive about the transhumanists and techno-immortalists is actually not happening at the level of scientific claims at all but through the framing and tropes and narrative gestures that these con-artists and True Believers use to organize superficially scientific content for mostly nonscience pop-tech and sfnal fandoms. Given this view, I have also always thought that my own training in literary, cultural, and rhetorical analysis is actually especially relevant to understanding what is going on in their discourse. But of course, this perspective doesn't fly when I am caught up in disputes with THEM as well as it does when I am trying to understand them from the outside for outsiders.
One has to balance whether fact-based concern and policy is more abused by exposing this futurological nonsense to scrutiny (even where the kind of scrutiny I focus on at the level of discourse is entirely dismissed as non-scientific or even anti-scientific by the flim-flam artists with whom I am arguing) or more abused by just deleted this crap in the expectation that it will not be a good faith conversation in any case given my focus on rhetoric and culture and is, after all, usually or mostly beneath serious consideration on its own terms or the terms of actual scientists. So far, contrary to the whining of futurologists about how unfair and unserious and censoring I am, I have tended to be generous giving these people rope to hang themselves with unless they are commandeering discussion threads or just flinging insults (that's my job!) or we reach obviously diminishing returns. Such good deeds, I have noticed, rarely go unpunished.
Check the extremely interesting conversation for yourself and by all means add your two cents. Skeptics about and satirists of the Robot Cultists are especially welcome guests, Robot Cultists are discouraged from wiping their feces on the walls and lampshades.
49 comments:
Now here's something sad.
http://thelifeofmanquamanonearth.blogspot.com/2012/08/a-video-update-by-kim-suozzi.html
Well, lots of people seem to turn to religion under the stress of such circumstances and, crusty atheist though I am, I am the last one to deny people the real consolations they find wherever they find them, be it in poetry, be it in drunkenness, be it in lovers' embraces, be it in Woody Allen flicks. If a person finds their consolation in a scam -- in thinking they've bought the Brooklyn Bridge or from an evangelical promise of life everlasting for the one who weighs down the collection plate enough -- it remains a scam, however, and however consoling to some, if it offers itself up to public scrutiny, it invites exposure as the scam it is.
Athena's argument completely misses the point. It is equivalent to "meat rots, and you cannot eat rotten meat." Ever heard of the freezer?
Clinging to desperate analogies and worn metaphors won't save you, Prisco, and it certainly doesn't constitute science (any more than the analogies of "migration" and "translation" on which you depend when you peddle your "uploading" fantasies), and, frankly, it scarcely even constitutes crappy science fiction.
Desperate analogies? That's what she says: "Everyone who does even in vitro brain tissue work, let alone in vivo, knows that even a few hours postmortem are enough to usher in irrevocable degradative changes," ignoring the existing tissue preservation techniques that a practicing neuroscientist should know well.
Seriously, Giulio, I know you're stupid, but, like, are you stupid?
I do agree with Giulio that she did ignore, well, that; but if we are honest, most cryonics procedures don't begin within minutes of arrest.
> I know you're stupid, but, like, are you stupid?
Stupid like a lawyer: "You didn't spell it out, so it's
not in the contract!"
So perhaps Dr. Andreadis will clarify: "Everyone who does even
in vitro brain tissue work, let alone in vivo, knows that even a
few hours postmortem are enough to usher in irrevocable degradative
changes, NO MATTER WHAT AVAILABLE PRESERVATION TECHNIQUES ARE USED."
Or maybe she won't.
;->
From "Mike Darwin", no less.
Algorithm for reanimating cryonics patients:
http://chronopause.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Cryofail-1331.jpg
http://chronopause.com/index.php/2012/04/25/cryonics-an-historical-failure-analysis-lecture-2-inherent-failure-mechanisms-and-risks-part-2/
---------------------
The final blow to the third era of cryonics was the coming of
the “tyranny” of Nanotechnology (NT) and the Singularity, about
which I'll have more to say later in these lectures. . .
(He doesn't seem yet to have gotten around to the "more to
say".)
Mike Darwin indentifies the early inspirations
for cryonics:
http://chronopause.com/index.php/2012/04/15/cryonics-failure-analysis-part-i-initialization-failure-part-2/
-------------------
The core ideas of cryonics, that death is a function of remaining
biological structure (information), technological sophistication,
and that deep cooling can arrest decay and preserve structure
indefinitely to await resurrection by a more sophisticated future
medical technology were first promulgated by Robert Chester Wilson Ettinger
in a science fiction story, "The Penultimate Trump", in 1948. . .
Ettinger, in turn, had been inspired to create cryonics based
on a 1931 science fiction story, "The Jameson Satellite",
by Neil R. Jones, in which one Professor Jameson has his body
rocketed into orbit following his death where he remains, frozen,
until many millennia later his brain is removed and repaired
by aliens, the Zoromes, who place him in a robotic body and
allow him to accompany them on their romps around the galaxy.
Scientology envy.
http://chronopause.com/index.php/2012/04/15/cryonics-failure-analysis-part-i-initialization-failure-part-2/
------------------
[F]ailure to professionalize cryonics. . . led to the empowerment
of amateurs and laypersons, usually with “outsider” personalities,
often with accompanying deficits in social and emotional intelligence.
These people attracted dysfunctional and sometimes frankly
sociopathic personalities as members (and sometimes as activists).
The problem of sociopaths in positions of power and authority in
cryonics is a serious one which I will return to in detail later
in these lectures. . .
Consider, by contrast, the outcome for Scientology, a movement
started by another of Ettinger‘s cohorts (fellow science fiction writer
L. Ron Hubbard) 11 years earlier, in 1953.
Today Scientology is a multimillion dollar enterprise that makes or
breaks legislation in the US, elects representatives to Congress,
tell[s] the IRS what to do, and has at least 50,000 hard core adherents
in the US alone. While it is a tiny entity, and has by no means come
to dominate the culture, it has managed to survive withering attacks
and to carve out a place of safe harbor and exert enormous political
influence relative to its size. That happened because of careful planning
and clever strategizing. It was no accident and it was by no means
inevitable.
------------------
Not that Scientology doesn't have "sociopaths in positions of power
and authority", but hey -- who argues with success?
Also, Giulio,
> Athena's argument completely misses the point. It is equivalent
> to "meat rots, and you cannot eat rotten meat." Ever heard of
> the freezer?
ever heard of "freezer burn"?
Yes, of course you have, and you know the damage done to tissue
by ice crystals. Freezers aren't enough -- you also need
Miracle Cryoprotectant ZYX-321.
Even better would be an SFnal "stasis field" -- you know, one
of them thingamabobs where all the atoms (and electrons, and
quarks, and strings, and quantum foam, and -- golly, who knows
what else?) just siddown and take a load off?
> I am the last one to deny people the real consolations they
> find wherever they find them, be it in poetry, be it in
> drunkenness, be it in lovers' embraces, be it in Woody Allen
> flicks.
Be always drunken.
Nothing else matters: that is the only question.
If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on
your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually.
Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will.
But be drunken.
And if sometimes, on the stairs of a palace, or on the green grass in a
ditch, or in the dreary solitude of your own room, you should awaken
and the drunkenness be half or wholly slipped away from you, ask of
the wind, or of the wave, or of the star, or of the bird, or of the clock,
or whatever flies, or sighs, or rocks, or sings, or speaks, ask what
hour it is; and the wind, wave, star, bird, clock, will answer you:
"It is the hour to be drunken!
Be drunken, if you would not be martyred slaves of Time;
be drunken continually!
With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will.”
-- Charles Baudelaire
I don't know about Woody Allen, though. He's funny, but
not too consoling.
Guilio, I think Dale just thinks you spend too much time talking about the possibilities of future technology instead of merely claiming a right to use them safely and consensually when they do become possible. Talking about them makes people aware of how silly they are and how there is a choice about the future. But if you only "advocate equitable consensual access to actually safe, actually available, actually wanted therapies [and] demand their regulation for safety at every stage of development and use" then it is "straightforward equitable consensual heathcare advocacy" and not Robot Cultism. He wants you to follow his example with postgenderism and sooper-omnisexual-reproductive ability, which is perhaps more likely than cryo preservation and/or immortality, but not much more (both don't exist, both probably won't exist, but at least life-extension is consistent with health care and medicine, while same-sex reproduction is not medicine or health care at all, but pure transhumanism. It is not a disease or illness that we are only fertile as the sex we were born as. What he wants, apparently, is everyone to shut up about the things people might be able to do someday using technology, whether we think they are good or bad, and just sit back and wait for them and quietly insist on everything being safe, consensual, and available to everyone when it does get here.
Just ridicule people who say something like "attempting re-animation of people declared dead should be prohibited" as being loons obsessed with death or secret necrophiliacs or something, and then delete their posts when they point out that it is you that is actually insisting on a right to re-animate people. Say, I am only advocating for it to be fair and safe and wanted, blah blah blah... Be sure to put in lots of blah blah blah, that's essential.
Look, Giulio, you've made a friend! The homophobic lunatic guy is on your side!
>So perhaps Dr. Andreadis will clarify: "Everyone who does even
in vitro brain tissue work, let alone in vivo, knows that even a
few hours postmortem are enough to usher in irrevocable degradative
changes, NO MATTER WHAT AVAILABLE PRESERVATION TECHNIQUES ARE USED."
I know all forms of preservation cause damage, but how does tissue decay after it has become vitreous?
Oh my. But I think I prefer your kind of idiocy to his.
> What he wants, apparently, is everyone to shut up about the things
> people might be able to do someday using technology. . .
Dale has no beef with people talking, or fantasizing, or making
up stories about "the things people might be able to do someday
using technology." That's called Science Fiction, dontcha know,
and Dale has been a life-long fan.
Dale's beef is with people taking content that properly belongs
in the Science Fiction section of the bookstore, and
whooping it up into predictions of an Imminent Transcendence
(whether paradisiacal or apocalyptic), founding Institutes
about it, passing the collection plate, presuming to tell
people how their politics are likely to affect the arrival
date of the coming Transcendence, and pretending to know more
about the fields they've decided are relevant to it
than actual experts in the fields upon which these
miracles are supposedly going to be based.
There's a difference between entertainment and flim-flam,
though gifted practitioners of the former can be tempted into
crossing the line to the latter. Remember the character
Frank Morgan plays in _The Wizard of Oz_? (In both the "real"
world of the movie's Kansas and in Dorothy's dreamed-up world
of Oz?)
"You're a very bad man!"
"Oh, no, my dear, I'm a very good man!
I'm just a very bad wizard."
GP: Oh my.
This could be a teachable moment for you (not that it will be, but it could be). Revisit this piece from a couple of years ago: The Essential Continuity and Co-Dependency of Supernative and Superlative Futurisms, of Biocons and Robot Cultists.
Dale's beef is with people taking content that properly belongs in the Science Fiction section of the bookstore, and whooping it up into predictions of an Imminent Transcendence (whether paradisiacal or apocalyptic), founding Institutes about it, passing the collection plate
For more on this, another post from a couple years ago: "Science Fiction Is the Entertainment Wing of Futurism"
> I know all forms of preservation cause damage, but how does tissue
> decay after it has become vitreous?
Perhaps it doesn't, but the initial damage is probably fatal.
And there still remains the question of how to reconstitute
a living mind from whatever the vitreous preservate has managed
to preserve.
"Mike Darwin" (ne Mike Federowicz -- I always have to puncture
these >Hists who have proclaimed their born-again status by
making a [usually] grandiose name change; though Darwin, I understand,
claims to have come by his more honestly -- it was apparently first
bestowed on him by others. But he has adopted it -- even legally,
I presume -- and isn't it **just** a bit grandiose to claim the same
name as Charles Darwin -- thereby implicitly assuming his
intellectual mantle -- when you're not even related to him?).
Anyway, to start over. "Mike Darwin" (Mike Federowicz) has written
a long and technical article entitled
"Does Personal Identity Survive Cryopreservation?"
(February 23, 2011)
http://chronopause.com/index.php/2011/02/23/does-personal-identity-survive-cryopreservation/
in which he discusses these issues in some technical detail.
He acknowledges that there's no way in hell a cryopreserved
brain could be "rebooted" in the sense of having arrested
biochemical processes restarted in the preservate. He thinks
it's **plausible** that there might be enough "information"
in the preservate to reconstruct a meaningfully-preserved human
identity from the preservate, given some (currently unfathomable)
technology to do so.
Whether **you** think it's plausible that enough "information"
is preserved to say that a human **mind** has been preserved
depends partly on whether you even think enough is known about
how the physical human brain instantiates a human mind for anybody
to make such a judgment in the first place. I **don't** think anybody
knows the answer to that.
I'm not Guilio's friend, since I advocate for a law against genetic engineering of human beings. You two are friends, in that you agree with each other that same-sex reproductino and genetic engineering of children should be legal and made safe and available, you just disagree about the politics of bringing it about.
And I'm not homophobic, I support Civil Unions for same-sex couples that would help thousands of families, while you oppose them and insist that what they need more than legal recognition and federal benefits is the right to create genetic offspring. I am opposed to genetic engineering of human beings and to postgenderism, I want to preserve sex and sexual reproduction and equal reproductive rights and marriage rights for all people. If it is anti-gay to oppose genetic engineering so that people can reproduce with someone of the same sex, then it is OK to be anti-gay, and if it is homophobic, then it is OK to be homophobic. I hope that it is possible to support and respect gay people while also prohibiting same-sex reproduction.
I replied to Athena's thoughtful comments in the previous post; I hope that my response will be included in this discussion.
"I must say, it is a strange thing the way a reasonably technoscientifically literate and concerned nonscientist can seem to be at a disadvantage with a crusading pseudo-scientist when one admits their limitation while the other leverages a refusal to do the same."
Dale, if you're referring to me, then can you please point out *exactly* where I "refused to admit any limitations"??
First you accuse me of *too many* "maybes," and "conceivables,"...I referred to cryonics as "merely an idea,"...I fully acknowledge the "long-ongoing marginality" (but dismiss its implied context with regard to the scientific method per se), I even remarked that at best, many currently cryopreserved individuals may be as "irrevocably dead" as you seem to think all of them are....and I'm "refusing to admit any limitations"?
Give me a break.
That has got to be the single goofiest, plainly *wrong* thing you've uttered (typed) during this whole back-and-forth.
Even if cryonics is a complete scam (which it is) the victims are all asshole narcissists to begin with, so who really cares? Let them freeze each other.
And for those that just have to believe, the truth of it is that future generations with the technology to revive corpsicles will laugh about what future scholars will call the The Irony of Cryonics: only asshole narcissists would even consider signing up, and only the frozen corpses of asshole narcissists are the ones incinerated.
Even if cryonics is a complete scam (which it is) the victims are all asshole narcissists to begin with, so who really cares?
Do you feel the same thing about spoon benders, homeopaths, AIDS denialists, flat-earthers, Apollo hoaxers, creation scientists, climate change deniers, safe cigarette advocates, abstinence only educators, gold bugs, reptile alien conspiracists, supply side economists?
Also: Ten Reasons to Take Seriously the Transhumanists, Singularitarians, Techno-Immortalists, Nano-Cornucopiasts and Other Assorted Robot Cultists and White Guys of "The Future."
Taurus Londono:
many currently cryopreserved individuals may be as "irrevocably dead" as you seem to think all of them are
You stick a frozen severed head in a dewar and you think you have suddenly made it "unscientific" for anybody to state that people are mortal? You stick a frozen severed head in a dewar and you think suddenly you have earned the right to distinguish those who are irrevocably versus not irrevocably dead? Dude, you haven't done anything to change what death means or how death is talked about or what reasonable expectations freight the reality of death. You concede that these severed heads "may be... dead" and you want me to congratulate you on your supreme reasonableness? Those dead people may really be dead? Wow! Pin a medal on this guy, get him a Nobel Prize! And you call me goofy and plainly wrong?
Now, I agree that Athena's post was thoughtful and it was enormously welcome. But I do want to stress that I do not think that hers is the only or even necessarily the best kind of reasonable response to the pseudo-scientific crap people like you are indulging in. I think nothing pleases you guys more than to seduce actually credible scientists to pretend that you are worthy of serious scientific engagement. After all, almost none of you are credible scientists in the least and the overabundant majority of those who are excited by your promises are just wish-fulfillment fantasists who want a little sciency whiff to make the dreams feel more real.
Superlative futurology is a techno-transcendental discourse that selectively and superficially deploys science in the service of faith-based initiatives, and I think it is a mistake to imagine that even a sweeping and systematic scientific refutation could actually render it harmless. The Robot Cult is a cultural, subcultural, discursive phenomenon that cannot be properly understood and address finally without a critique addressed to those dimensions.
And just to be clear, Athena finds who guys exactly as ridiculous and pathological as I do. The fact that you are so eager to blow her kisses while at once trying to draw her into endless hair-splitting angels-on-a-pinhead sequelae shows the extent to which she is probably right to think responses to you on terms more like the ones you prefer are entirely a waste of her time.
John Howard reveals the deep truth that I am secretly the ally not the opponent of Giulio Prisco with whom I have incandescently sparred in public hundreds of times for years, and also that I am secretly an anti-gay bigot despite being a queer who wrote his dissertation under the direction of Judith Butler and went to jail as a Queer Nation activist. Also, up is down, cold is hot, and madness is sanity. Especially that last one. Good luck to you John Howard. Shine on you crazy diamond.
> [T]he truth of it is that future generations with the technology
> to revive corpsicles will laugh about what future scholars will
> call the The Irony of Cryonics: only asshole narcissists would even
> consider signing up, and only the frozen corpses of asshole narcissists
> are the ones incinerated.
Yes, I've often thought this myself. I.e., that the kind of people
who self-select to be frozen are not likely to be the kind of people
any future civilization would want to revive. Unless, of course,
that future civilization is a kind of Ayn Randian eu/dys-topia
(take your pick) that adulates self-regarding a-holes.
Here's another irony. In his exchange with Dale, "Max More" wrote
"I’m not scared of dying. I am scared of the dying process if it involves
intense, prolonged pain or cognitive decline." Being signed up
for cryonic suspension does **not** currently spare anybody "intense,
prolonged pain or cognitive decline" if they have terminal cancer,
or Alzheimer's, or any other degenerative disease (neuro- or otherwise),
unless they have the strength of will (or sheer craziness), and the
cooperation of a cryonics company willing to face criminal charges,
to undergo suspension -- assisted suicide, basically -- while
still more-or-less healthy. Many of the suspension candidates I've
heard of are also restricting calories and/or popping vitamin
pills so they can "live long enough to live forever" in the words
of Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman, so they don't sound like
the types who would choose to go under early on the off chance
they might wake up in the future.
Cryonics enthusiasts also exhibit a somewhat impoverished
imagination in assuming that they would **want** to live in
the society that revived them. What if they turned out to be
one of the handful of suspendees who happened to be chosen for
revival as archeological specimens, or museum exhibits? Or
were revived to carry out some specific purpose for the revivers that
wasn't part of the revivee's original plan? (This latter theme has been
dealt with in science fiction -- even science fiction TV shows,
which seem to be the only examples I can think of off the top of
my head. Wait -- there's Woody Allen's _Sleeper_,
of course; and that A. E. Van Vogt story "The Monster" a.k.a.
"Resurrection". And two TV shows I can think of are
the _New Twilight Zone_ episode "Quarantine"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarantine_(The_Twilight_Zone)
and the _New Outer Limits_ episode
"Lithia"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithia_(Outer_Limits)
"You stick a frozen severed head in a dewar and you think you have suddenly made it "unscientific" for anybody to state that people are mortal?"
Sigh...
Quit claiming I think things that are the exact opposite of what I've actually said.
Check the very first sentence I posted when you first decided to put my name in lights; of course people are mortal.
"trying to draw her into endless hair-splitting angels-on-a-pinhead sequelae"
She mentioned "5% viability" in a whole brain;
Since that's a pretty darn big difference from the *total* viability demonstrated in tissue slices and whole organs, I'd say that's far from "hair-splitting"!!
5% does not equal 100%!
She said that the course of damage in cerebral ischemia is "irreversible";
Umm...neuroscientist or not, that's not true in any way, shape, or form!
That's unambigiously *incorrect*, and has been demonstrated to be incorrect over the last few decades by scientists who have no connection whatsoever to cryonics.
I posted just one example of a paper showing as much in my original response to her comments.
Dale, this isn't "angels-on-a-pinhead sequelae."
"Irreversible" does not equal "completely and totally reversible."
She said that personal identity is equivalent to the network of neural connections in the brain; I agree!
She then said that cryopreservation doesn't preserve synapses;
Umm...that's wrong! It does!
This is falsifiable stuff; not falisfiable 100 or 1,000 years from now, but *right now*.
I'm a cultist, I'm smearing the walls, blah blah blah.
I get it, Dale; the guilt by association. I understand.
But what I posted in response to Athena is demonstrably true, and not just because I or anybody else says so; she can see the findings published in peer-reviewed journals with her own eyes.
That's not splitting hairs.
I noticed that you haven't posted my original responses to Athena. I suppose you won't post this response either then.
"You concede that these severed heads "may be... dead" and you want me to congratulate you on your supreme reasonableness? Those dead people may really be dead? Wow!"
Another in an endless parade of your emphatic reliance on fallacies;
Being a severed head does not necessarily = death.
See the work of Sergei Brukhonenko or Vladimir Demikhov on the severed heads of dogs, or the work of Robert White at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine (ie; successfully demonstrating an extracorporeal living brain; first head transplant).
"Pin a medal on this guy, get him a Nobel Prize!"
You don't have to be a Nobel laureate to regurgitate accurate scientific facts (ie; the distance from the earth to the sun). Maybe you'll impress enough people with your wordy ad hominems that someone will pin a medal on you instead.
"And you call me goofy and plainly wrong?"
Regarding your goofy and plainly wrong assertions about *what I have said right here on your blog*, most definitely yes. Anybody with eyes can go back and see that.
> The final blow to the third era of cryonics was the coming of
> the “tyranny” of Nanotechnology (NT) and the Singularity, about
> which I'll have more to say later in these lectures. . .
>
> ([Mike Darwin] doesn't seem yet to have gotten around to the "more to
> say".)
Actually, he has, in
http://chronopause.com/index.php/2011/04/19/cryonics-nanotechnology-and-transhumanism-utopia-then-and-now
Oh, and what "Taurus Londono" **really** thinks:
http://chronopause.com/index.php/2011/04/19/cryonics-nanotechnology-and-transhumanism-utopia-then-and-now/#comment-10176
------------------
All this talk about high school/college drop-outs with little
formal education; the likes of Yudkowsky and Anissimov (my generation;
my age falls inbetween theirs)… Here I am with an AA and a BA and
the minor annoyance of a couple 10s of thousands of student debt,
awash in the doldrums of meaningless, menial labor like a good little
drone while these guys shape the conversation (ie; dealing with
the guilt by association vomited onto me by Amor Mundi’s Dale Carrico).
On the one hand, Mark’s insistent dismissal of Yudkowsky as a
“high-school dropout” is myopic. Yudkowsy and Anissimov are very clearly
more astute than the vast number of inculcated academics like Carrico.
If anything, the ascension of individuals from my generation who
are “taken seriously” (at least by some in the credentialed establishment)
despite lacking any credentials of their own is evidence of the abysmal
shortcomings of our current incarnations of formal education (what
Carl Sagan once described as “reptilian”); suffocation of our society
by traditional credentialing…
The rejoinder would seem to be that as more and more individuals
realize that the mere *ease of access* to knowledge afforded today gives
them the (potential) power to engage *anyone* on *any* subject, the
credentials that *actually matter* will be practical accomplishments
and experience they’ve earned over the course of their own careers
(to the extent they can be called such). I think this applies to some
in the “cyonics community” who are, unfortunately, not taken seriously.
Taurus Londono: Being a severed head does not necessarily = death.
THE END
I noticed that you haven't posted my original responses to Athena. I suppose you won't post this response either then.
Is it even possible that you have tried to publish still more to my comments section than I have posted already? You know, there really is an amazing amount of your scintillating voice here. And to think we only just met!
Be that as it may, I certainly haven't intentionally censored you. To be honest, I think your exasperated declarations about how obvious and commonsensical it is to insist severed heads are not irreversibly dead even if they are dead and how it is an ad hominem attack to say fly by night cryonics techno-immortalist outfits in the desert are marginal from consensus science and so on are incomparably delightful gems of deluded self-disclosure.
I must say that I especially like it when you drill down to some minute detail hoping you can find in it a wee foothold of plausibility from which to leverage the distantly removed fantasies that drive the whole enterprise, ignoring all the endless problems upon problems upon problems, vast ignorances upon ignorances upon ignorances, logistical hurdles upon hurdles upon hurdles -- as if a sliver of cryopreserved rabbit liver really gives anyone reason to expect a severed head is a first class ticket to Immortal Godhood in Santaland. Your earnest discourse is an exposure of the fraud and fantasy of the Robot Cult beyond any poor satirist's skill.
>a sliver of cryopreserved rabbit liver
Well, you gotta start somewhere. The liver has a very complex vasculature after all.
Today, it's New Zealand rabbit livers; tomorrow it's CI's patients being revived by an international industrial cartel to provide untraceable slave labor.
> I get it, Dale; the guilt by association. I understand.
No, I suspect you don't understand. And you don't understand why it's
justified.
Cryonics, which you happen to be focusing on here, is just one animal
in a zoo of equally dubious enthusiasms shared by mostly overlapping
sets of people. You have already revealed (maybe not here, but elsewhere)
that you are at least familiar with, and probably go so far as to
drink from, the whole set of Kool Aid pitchers (to mix a metaphor).
You've claimed that Yudkowsky and Anissimov are savvier than ossified
academic Carrico. They are not. That you think so already
exhibits a lack of judgment on your part.
And by the way, I hate to have to point it out to you, but Athena Andreadis
has already made it clear that she is not going to spend time debating
you on the particulars of peer-reviewed articles by Sniff and Snort,
or the results obtained by Fee, Fie and Fum. You may be a bright guy
(you write like one, I'll give you that), but you're being presumptuous
if you think that permits you to indulge the expectation to debate
Andreadis as if you were her professional peer. You may lament that Carl Sagan
would call that "reptilian", or write it off as academic suffocation,
but get used to it.
Your hero Eliezer Yudkowsky, by the way, caused a bit of a stir
back in 2000 when he presumed, in the most embarrassingly
arrogant and insubordinate manner (allegedly ;-> -- I wasn't there,
but I heard a report from somebody who was), to debate Marvin Minsky
(as if they were equally distinguished professors, chatting over drinks)
during a Q&A session at a Foresight conference. Minsky had to ask the
moderator to tell Yudkowsky to shut up and sit down.
Don't embarrass yourself with Andreadis -- she has a short fuse,
and she'll put you in your place. Maybe you have a thick skin
and won't care (Autistic Spectrum, perhaps); but if you're
a sensitive guy like me ( ;-> ), then quit while you're ahead.
you gotta start somewhere
How about starting with real problems and real solutions? Re-electing Obama, Democrats retaining the Senate and regaining the House, a second stimulus restoring public sector jobs and rebuilding infrastructure and investing in renewables, pushing from ACA to Medicare for All, comprehensive immigration reform, using massive grassroots resistance to push for comprehensive election and campaign finance reform to strengthen democracy and push back plutocracy, common sense gun regulations, ending the war on drugs, raising the taxable cap on Social Security to end the bs talk of insolvency, raising taxes on cap gains, introducing a digital transaction tax to disable global monetary speculative fraud, more money for science and critical thinking and civics education, more money for medical research and space exploration to inspire the world, access to clean water in the overexploited regions of the world, forgiving student loan and IMF debts, supplementing substituting an elected parliament to the United Nations General Assembly, shifting the focus of planetary governance from the WTO to the ILO, and on and on and on.
It's equally nonsensical to waste time worrying now about the specter of revived cryo-slave armies (They Saved Hitler's Brain!) as it is to waste time masturbating over fantasies of nanobotic abundance or techno-immortalism.
There are real problems and real solutions that beset us if we educate, agitate, and organize on the basis of actually existing stakeholders and resources and techniques and get past all the marketing bullshit and hype from consumer marketing and religious fundamentalists and hybrids of the two like the Robot Cult.
Actually, Jim, I give people a long rope; when you have lab members, you learn to be patient. I simply have no desire to legitimize charlatanry -- and little stomach for watching adults pee themselves in public and proudly point at the stain.
OK...just one more...
"you're being presumptuous
if you think that permits you to indulge the expectation to debate
Andreadis as if you were her professional peer"
"Debate," huh...
A debate on the merits of cryopreservation would be fun, but I was just pointing out that she's blatantly wrong (ok, made some misstatements) about stuff like the irreversibility of the course towards damage in cerebral ischemia. That has nothing to do with cryonics per se.
(I have to believe that she misspoke and that she knows you can just reoxygenate tissue)
You're being presumptuous if you think empirical evidence derived from the scientific method is any less "real" if it comes out of the mouth of a 2-year-old rugrat or a 75-year-old astronomer royal.
It could come out of the mouth of the Swedish Chef. A child could make a scientific discovery (it's actually happened).
Not only did Andrea not debunk anything I said, she actually said some things that are demonstrably false. She's not a walking encyclopedia, go figure.
Little old me, on the other hand, I'm just some dude telling you guys shit that you (or Andrea) could've known if you opened up a contemporary textbook (or, ya know, used teh internetz to go to, say, the Society for Cryobiology's website). Stuff I wrote about electrocerebral silence, and ischemia, and necrosis in brain tissue...that stuff is *literally* in textbooks; there are people failing quizes on this! The fact that you guys go batshit over this just because I'm the one writing it is face-palmingly sad.
I recite demonstrable facts and point to research published in peer-reviewed journals... You talk about cultists. Go figure.
Like I said to Dale, if you think that these *specific* journals (ie; not some "random trans-humanist journal published in some kid's basement in Berkeley") and the critical scrutiny of the scientific community would suffer the uncommented publication of something like the phrenological measurements of Uncle Goober's bald spot....then please, by all means, I'd encourage you to write to the editorial boards and tell them to put a halt to this farce at once!
Bah, meant to say "Athena." It's an uncommon name (so's mine).
Taurus is getting off this merry go round! He's got another one to ride... to The Future!
> You're being presumptuous if you think empirical evidence derived
> from the scientific method is any less "real" if it comes out of the
> mouth of a 2-year-old rugrat or a 75-year-old astronomer royal.
For a layman in the field (as am I; as are you), the sensible thing
would be to suspend judgment on **both** the rugrat's pronouncement
**and** the 75-year-old astronomer royal's dictum (I'm assuming the
guy is retired from active stargazing by now) and leave the
verdict to the folks in their prime who actually have day jobs
as researchers in the field. If they think it's worth taking
any notice of either revelation (if it hasn't already been revealed
a dozen times before; if their own between-the-lines intuition about
the state of the field -- their "nose for news" -- leads them to
believe it's worth the time and effort) then they'll perform
the analyses and experiments and duke it out amongst
themselves over the results and their implications, and eventually,
in a couple of years or a couple
of decades, you can do a literature search and find out (if
you care by then) whether the rugrat or the geezer were
onto something. (The overwhelming likelihood, in both cases,
is that they weren't.)
As Bertrand Russell said in an interview in 1959, "If you've
got a good scientific imagination, you can think of all sorts
of things that **might** be true. But then you've got to
go see whether it is or not. And generally it isn't."
Cryonics enthusiasts also exhibit a somewhat impoverished
imagination in assuming that they would **want** to live in
the society that revived them.
Discussed in Warren Ellis' Transmet. While the reanimation of cryonically frozen people is possible, they're unwelcome and the future world is so strange as to send them into a permanent state of shock.
"The busy optimists at Ryley ever so gently hacked off Mary's head, wrapped it in fairly crude protective fabrics, and dropped it into a steel can full of liquid nitrogen, like throwing a coin into a wishing well.
[...]
Looking at her new charity-donated clothes, still bearing the ammonia spoor of the man who wore them last, Mary's shocked brain started to a new understanding. She wasn't wanted here. She was Revived out of a sense of begrudged duty. She'd been foisted upon a future already busy enough with its own problems by a past that couldn't have cared less."
(Transmetropolitan, Issue #08 "Another Cold Morning")
If I wanted to arm-wrestle with a tantrumizing five-year old (which is equivalent to shooting at a squirrel with a SAM missile), I'd have produced my own. And if you think domain-specific expertise doesn't matter, have the next person you meet in the street do your root canal, electric housewiring or, hell, haircut.
> > I get it, Dale; the guilt by association. I understand.
>
> . . .
> Cryonics, which you happen to be focusing on here, is just one animal
> in a zoo of equally dubious enthusiasms shared by mostly overlapping
> sets of people. You have already revealed (maybe not here, but elsewhere)
> that you are at least familiar with, and probably go so far as to
> drink from, the whole set of Kool Aid pitchers (to mix a metaphor).
A circumstance warned against by none other than Mike Darwin:
http://chronopause.com/index.php/2011/08/20/interventive-gerontology-1-0-02-first-try-to-make-it-to-the-mean-diet-as-a-life-extending-tool-part-3/#comment-3430
---------------------
My credibility, and the credibility of others who advocate
cryonics, is already severely tarnished just because of cryonics.
In general, I recommend that cryonicists try to confine themselves
to advocating for just one impossible thing before breakfast,
because otherwise, if we go about like Alice, believing 12 impossible
things before breakfast, we are likely to be taken for having
fallen down the rabbit hole and being completely unable to get back up.
> Taurus Londono said...
>
> Bah, meant to say "Athena." It's an uncommon name
> (so's mine).
Perhaps not so uncommon in Greece. But if that means your
name isn't one of those self-chosen Extropian ones
(like Khannea Suntzu or Extropia da Silva), then I'm relieved
to hear it. ;-> (Of course, the astrological or automotive
associations are only slightly less worrisome.
Oh, I shouldn't be making fun of your name. At least you
don't call yourself "Infiniti").
Athena mentions domain-specific expertise.
In particle physics, you may find people who are world leaders in discovering the properties and predictions of important classes of quantum field theory, but who also hold remarkably illogical or unexamined views about the meaning of quantum mechanics itself. It seems that for many people, the intellectual price that they paid, in order to get on with *applying* quantum mechanics in their work, was the silencing of their own curiosity about *why* quantum mechanics works.
I think I see something remotely analogous here at work. Various people have pointed out that a lot of cell structure can be preserved. It's the *restoration of function* in cryopreserved neural tissue which is the big challenge. It does imply knowledge and technology far in advance of what we now possess, and we also just don't know how much information is truly being lost in present-day procedures.
So if your job is the restoration of function in neural tissue that's still *in vivo*, if you've devoted decades of your life to that and know it's still a long hard slog, it may be tempting to dismiss that further ambition as simply impossible, using whatever reasons present themselves as plausible.
Again I would make an analogy with quantum mechanics. Apologists for the completeness of quantum mechanics appeal to a variety of technical results, such as Hardy's theorem, which are "no-go theorems" showing that some things can't be done. But these "things which can't be done" are only a subset of "the things one might attempt" in order to produce a deeper theory. Any serious discussion of possible explanations for quantum mechanics quickly arrives in uncharted territory, where the questions just haven't been answered. And it seems much the same for scientific discussion of the viability of cryonics.
> Any serious discussion of possible explanations for quantum mechanics
> quickly arrives in uncharted territory. . .
I fear that **any** discussion invoking quantum mechanics, especially
among non-physicists, is liable to "quickly arrive in uncharted
territory" -- anywhere from Frank & Fritjof Capra -land to
Deepak Chopra country.
That's quite true, but I was talking about a discussion among physicists. Browse the questions tagged "quantum-interpretations" at Physics Stack Exchange for many examples.
> Browse the questions tagged "quantum-interpretations"
My impression, garnered from somebody who was briefly a professional
physicist but who has been for decades "merely" a technical
copyeditor (and a damned good one), is that the "interpretations"
are something professional physicists indulge in as a kind
of entertainment, after work.
In working time, they let the math do the work.
That **may** be all we'll ever get from QM -- one of those
20th century shockers about the limits of human knowledge.
Also, unless you know the math through and through,
"interpretations" are almost **guaranteed** to mislead you.
That's another thing I've learned from my friend.
**All** the popular physics books, from Stephen Hawking
to Brian Greene, basically come down to handwaving.
All there is, really, is the math. Which is kind of unfortunate,
because it means the vast majority of people are more-or-less
forever shut out.
Taken literally, "interpretation" implies hermeneutics. But there is plenty of math in the "interpretation debate", especially where it really does involve the development of new theories.
You're right that it's very hard for an outsider to judge who's right or even what's going on in these debates. You can get the gist of a surprising amount of technical QM from Feynman's book "QED", but that's about mathematical procedures, not ontology. I expect that the ontological issues will be resolved in the fullness of time, but we are still at a stage where progress consists of exploring many possibilities at once. And that's being achieved by a process which looks more like a cacophonous brawl than a lucid consensual division of labor.
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