The story should begin with the victim. This is Kim Suozzi, 23 years old, and diagnosed with a terminal brain cancer that was going to kill her within a few months. She’s doomed and she knows it, so she has gone to Alcor, signed over her life insurance money, and asked to have her head frozen after death in the unlikely hope that someday, someone will be able to revive her. I feel a deep sadness for her; for someone so young, for anyone, to be confronted with an awful mortality is tragic.
She did die too soon after this video was made. And now we learn about the bumbling corpse mutilation that occurred afterwards.
You might want to stop reading right here. It’s a hard story, especially after seeing the young woman alive.
Within minutes of taking custody of the body, the bumbling Alcor team began experiencing a series of equipment failures. A temperature monitor didn’t work because, as it turned out, the batteries were dead. Shortly thereafter, their expensive mechanical chest-compression device stopped functioning. Then, having moved Suozzi’s body into a tub of ice, the Alcor team realized they’d forgotten to bring along a key piece of cooling equipment. Alcor’s after-action report, compiled from the haphazard “free-form” observations of an unnamed but “experienced” observer, determined that such mistakes could in the future be remedied by “the use of a checklist.” Now there’s a thought.
Forty-five minutes after Suozzi was declared dead on the morning of January 17, 2013, her corpse arrived at Alcor headquarters, where a crack team of quacks shaved her head and drilled a number of sizable holes into her skull. Microphones were then inserted in order to detect the cracking sound of tissue-destroying ice crystals—a freezer-burned brain being even less useful to the imaginary reincarnators of the future than an otherwise undamaged one.
At 9:33 a.m., Suozzi’s body was moved to an operating table. Ten minutes later, Alcor’s technophilic necromancers completed “cephalic isolation”—a euphemistic neologism that means they cut off her head. Such bloodless jargon obscures the macabre slapstick of the antics in the morgue—er, “operating room.” As the magazine account went on to relate:
9:45 a.m.: Cephalon placed in holding ring of cephalic enclosure.
[Translation: They put Suozzi’s head in a box.]
9:51 a.m.: Cephalon fell out of holding ring.
[Translation: Her head fell out.]
9:52 a.m.: Cephalon repositioned.
[Translation: It’s a good thing that, as far as anyone knows, none of these people have been operating on live human bodies.]Suozzi’s bodily fluids were flushed and replaced with a specially formulated and questionably effective “cryoprotectant”—antifreeze. The official recap alludes to a certain amount of rubbernecking and bickering consistent with past insider accounts of Alcor operations. That wasn’t all. “Unfortunately,” the Cryonics report notes, “there was some confusion and disagreement regarding the ideal temperature at which to perform surgery.” One might assume a forty-four-year-old organization devoted to storing body parts on ice would have reached some working consensus on this question by now.
In the months ahead of the procedure, Alcor boasted of the important research data it would glean thanks to Suozzi’s corporeal donation. But afterward, the official notetaker lamented that the only information collected during the procedure came from the thermometer crammed into her nose.
In Alcor’s account, “the actual success of perfusion in this case appears negligible.” (Perfusion is the term for pumping fluids through blood vessels.) A CT scan later confirmed that “cryoprotective perfusion was not generally successful”—meaning that Suozzi’s brain would not be well preserved. (Or, in Alcor jargon, “cortical cryoprotection” was “minimal.”) In other words, the procedure was a failure. The Times glossed over this and other facts that undermined its bizarrely credulous narrative, which tacitly endorsed Alcor’s ongoing con job—and, by extension, the agenda of its Ayn Rand–worshiping techno-fetishist leadership.
Read the whole thing. These guys are running a scam, motivated by extreme libertarianism, a misbegotten transhumanism, and an ugly combination of ignorance and wishful thinking. They’re also bankrolled by a lot of young, stupid, filthy rich Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.
I’ve complained before about the bogus ‘science’ behind these vultures, but this story exposes the outright venal stupidity driving it all. It isn’t mere incompetence, it’s malicious ineptitude.
Did they cash the cheque? Then how can you call the operation a failure?
Radically overestimating the value of an individual’s life.
Individuals are inclined to estimate their own value as high. And the possibility of prolonging life is non nil. The benefactors didn’t over value the individual. They got the money to prove it. They are preying on the individual just like a church.
Marcus @ 2:
I don’t think so. A twenty three year old who is facing death can be easily forgiven for latching onto any hope at all of being able to live out their life at some point. This was also a highly vulnerable person, one who was baldly taken advantage of, of being preyed upon, as DanDare put it.
A good friend is invested in this Alcor thing. Wears the bracelet, etc. The whole thing smacks of religion to me, even though he is an atheist. He recently gave me an argument in favor of this cryo nonsense. It was Pascal’s Wager.
So very sad that someone so young has no chance to live out a normal life span. But I seriously doubt that any of these frozen entities will be revived in the future. It’s a money grab from people who, for a variety of reasons, just don’t want to accept what nature dished them. Sad. (I didn’t read what was below the fold. I don’t need any more gruesome things on my mind.)
Interesting that the YouTube video refers to her as a cyronaught. At first I thought that, if they’re trying to evoke images of explorers like argonauts and astronauts, they should have chosen cyronaut.
But given that this scheme accomplishes nothing for its customers, cyronaught seems appropriate.
I liked Dennis Potter’s take on cryopreservation in his sci-fi TV-series “Cold lazarus”.
Quoting wikipedia: “a group of scientists is working on reviving the mind of the 20th-century writer Daniel Feeld [whose head was cryo-preserved]. Unable to see any profit in the project, they considers discontinuing it, but media mogul David Siltz envisages making a fortune from broadcasting Feeld’s memories on TV”.
The libertarians would be proud.
Unless there are non-human animals that have been successfully resurected, it’s pointless.
She signed over her life insurance benefit to Alcor? So if they revive her, don’t they have to pay it back? After all she didn’t die. A small conflict of interest.
She died believing a delusion that her head will one day live on. Does this remind anyone of something familiar ?
@ 9 ThorGoLucky
Even if this milestone had been passed it entirely depends what you mean by “resurrected”, if you bought a living animal out of hibernation or actually brought a dead one back to life. If you managed to achieve the former that in no way indicates that you’ll be able to do the latter.
What people mean by “dead” is also kind of important here.
@7 Upon first seeing your comment I was baffled. I thought to myself “aren’t those homophones?” Said it to myself several time couldn’t conceive .of how they could even differ. Then realized -naut vs. naught were affected by the “caught-cot merger”. It isn’t mixing them up it’s them being pronounced identically in that dialect. (Grew up in NorCal for the most part.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_English_low_back_vowels#Cot.E2.80.93caught_merger
Even if they had somehow done it “right”*, there’s no guarantee that the organization will last more than a few years before going bankrupt and letting all the cryogenically frozen corpses rot. I remember that happened to a previous cryogenics company, which ran out of money and let all the frozen corpses thaw out. They’re supposedly more careful now, but even still all it takes is a few years of mismanagement and organizational bankruptcy, and it all breaks down.
* “right” being dubious, since they have no idea how to potentially revive someone who has been frozen this way.
In Canada these inept clowns could possibly be charged with committing an indignity to a human body.
You have some awesome laws in US that allow these vultures roam free.
These people should be in jail for fraud.
@9 ThorGoLucky
I haven’t really looked into it, but I did see a story recently about a rabbit brain freezing and even unfreezing. It was said to be fairly successful at preserving the brain, but I dunno if it’s anywhere near good enough. Of course they didn’t get it to live again.
If you want to see how Woo it can get, check out “Global Future 2045”. or “2045 Initiative” or whatever they call themselves:
2045: A New Era for Humanity
So who pays to revive and repair them in the future? Who would even be interested in reviving them? Don’t count on your descendants, particularly if they also have a half-dozen other ancestors stacked up in the freezer and are having trouble making payments on their flying car.
Unless you set up some kind of (very) long term trust fund and medical directives to provide for your revival, this is a dead end journey for you even if the technology does eventually become available.
@19 Maybe an anthropologist? But other than that, probably no one.
There are several species that can withstand prolonged freezing, resuming normal biological activity afterwards. However, none of them can survive decapitation. Also, they are not Homo sapiens sapiens…
Good grief… Who was carrying this procedure out, the Three Stooges? Did anybody get their foot stuck in the “cephalic enclosure” at any point?
@ Larry Niven wrote a short story about that topic:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Defenseless_Dead
@19 I wanted to say
Couldn’t watch more than a minute. They were so obnoxiously condescending to her, and so ghoulishly excited at her prognosis.
It is stuff like this that causes me to reserve the same disdain for transhumanist cultists that I have for the religious variety. These creeps preyed upon a vulnerable woman to extract money from her, all the while promising a magic resurrection that I don’t think even they consider likely, given the slap dash approach they took to their ‘cryo-preservation’ procedure.
It seems pretty clear that they knew they were just going through empty, essentially ritualistic motions, and went through with it principally in the name of plausible deniability – they performed the procedure, so they can argue that this speaks to an honest belief that it could work, which would impact upon the mental element of any potential fraud charge. It is self serving cynicism all the way down.
I agree with Charly @ 16; they should be in jail for fraud, but I doubt any of them will ever see the inside of a cell.
Tim Guequen: “In Canada these inept clowns could possibly be charged with committing an indignity to a human body.”
So many of us commit those every day, without even involving anyone else’s body…
Brian Pansky
to successfully inject antifreeze in the rabbit brain, they had to use a fixative that in itself is toxic.
Apparently mishandling the cephalic isolation is a recurring issue:
(from here (from 2010), though this article (discussing same procedure) makes no mention of any droppages, just an extended description of inefficient decapitation – also Ettinger comes off as a rather… unpleasant… person)
Cryonaught???? Well, she’s naught to cry about now, though those who cared for her may be disappointed not to benefit from the insurance she was robbed of. But you’d think even scammers would know the difference between nautical and naughty.
For better or worse, her chances of future resuscitation are unchanged by the incompetent “clinical” procedure. Even cremation wouldn’t have been any worse from that point of view.
Transmetropolitan had a recurring set of characters that represented the “best case” scenario to this sort of fantasy. In it, the revival process worked, and people could even be made different genetically and a government agency inherited the remains of this sort of company and upheld the promises they made to their clients and revived them just as requested…
To be broke, often subject to all manner of abuse, homeless, and often rendered completely catatonic owing to the culture shock of going 1000 years into the future in society and not being able to handle it or adjust, just sort of living a miserable life muttering to oneself before passing on again. And that’s the extrapolation based on this not being a scam run by incompetents based on fake made-up non-existent science.
(See the entry in the link labeled Mary):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Transmetropolitan_characters#Allies
Cerberus@31: Mary’s story (and that of her fellow Revivals) always struck me as the most tragic element of Transmetropolitan (which, for a kick-ass-take-no-names comic series had a helluva lot of tragedies in the pages). It really summed up the phrase “banality of evil” for me.
See this is why you do the Whole-Body freezing, and you don’t cheap-out and go for the Head-only package… :/
Yeah, as Dale Carrico and others before and after him pointed out, the various techno-transcendentalist movements (Singularity, transhumans, Digitopia) are just religious furniture repackaged and rebranded to be enticing for the information society. What else is cryonics but life after death/resurrection of the dead with a new label?
I can tell you what it isn’t, serious scientific practice. Nobody has solved the problem of how the fine intracellular structures are irreversibly damaged by low temperatures, anti-freeze or not. If science is still to be believed, it’s not a problem that’s solvable in the first place. The human brain is the most fragile, intricate organ known to us, good luck trying to restore it to its full functionality after all metabolic activity ceased…
Even if you could get “mind-uploading” to work – and again, the problems of ultra-high resolution scanning and actually building a machine that can perfectly replicate cognitive patterns are very much non-trivial – the simple fact stands this “upload” would be a copy of you, and not you. The human mind is an artifact of the organistic brain. Period.
Gregory Greenwood
Of course they won’t see the inside of a cell, they are wealthy.
I discovered that the founder of the our first ISP (Cadvision – since bought by Telus) is going to be frozen as is his son. He also had his genes sequenced by 23 and Me.
http://www.shmigelsky.com/Geoffrey_Shmigelsky/Welcome.html
I suspect that injecting the anti-freeze would effectively flush your “mind” out of your brain and even if it could be revived, most of you would no longer be in there. Also, your brain knows how to operate only your body which is no longer available if you take the low priced option.
I wrote about that poor dead rabbit before. The brain was fixed with aldehydes and vitrified. Ain’t no way it’s ever going to be revived.
This is why Abbott and Costello were not allowed to perform surgery.
Oh, poor kiddo. She was being robbed and placed herself in the hands of lesser beings to try to get ‘something–anything’ back.
Here’s hoping for an outcome ala Star Trek:
Originial series Space Seed episode with Khan Noonien Singh and some 70 and more survivors of a sleeper ship (she can be a superhuman bully if she wants to);
and the NG episode with at least three 20th-century survivors completely without a clue and annoying the hell out of Picard.
Sudden death for the young is one thing; but to know it’s coming and nothing can be done… I’ll risk scorn here among the rational and hope for a fantasy for her.
In theory, future humans that have undergone substantial genetic modifications to generate suitable antifreeze inside the cells might survive vitrification, like the Siberian newts and a species of beetle in Alaska.
This would be useful for doctors who are running out of time to grow repair tissue from stem cells, or finding a “personalised medicine” approach (like that succesfully attempted for Jimmy Carter) to treat a rapidly growing tumor.
Maybe it could be used as a last ditch option to save stranded astronauts (see Stanislaw Lem’s “Fiasco”) but I would not trust it for periods longer than what the newts and beetles have demonstrated as “doable”.
@30 I was going to correct you, but I’m the one in need of correction. I didn’t notice it was mispelt in the video title. Oops.
I wrote most of the RationalWiki article on cryonics, just updated courtesy of that Baffler article. It strikes me as mediocre, but it’s still the best overview on why cryonics is bogus that I’ve found. Wish there was a better one so I could crib from it …
I started it ‘cos someone I knew was seriously interested in cryonics. (He’s signed up now … with Alcor.) I was neutral-to-positive before. Then I actually looked into it, and went “LOL WHAT THE SHIT”.
Conceptually, I’m okay with the idea of going beyond the mold of homo sapiens. Not like the human form is sacred. But really, science isn’t magic. Humans are complex, Jerry-rigged meat machines. At most, I’d expect decent prosthetics and computer expansions added onto our brains, and it’s not going to happen easily or quickly. I don’t think I’ll be getting any augmentation unless I get in a horrible accident or something, and that’ll be about getting closer to normal, not superpowers.
But at least in fiction land, my Changeling character can pick some up augmentation at the local pseudoscience-themed Goblin Market. There, magic is science and genetic engineering does come in a bottle.
To refer to this as a scam would imply that the individuals involved were deliberately deceiving others in order to enrich themselves. Even a cursory familiarity with both the literature put out by Alcor and with the people involved (and the fact that almost all of them are earning less than they could in just about any other job there is, including working at Starbucks) should tell you that the characterization is entirely false.
You can claim that they’re wrong. You can claim that they’re nuts. However, the claim that this is a “scam” is entirely counterfactual.
Let me also note that fairly few con artists publish complete accounts of their work, including all mistakes, for absolutely anyone to see.
Perry Metzger:
Oh yes, that’s why they deny, deny, deny that anything fails, even when it obviously does. Of course it’s a fucking scam, and they prey on people – how could it be otherwise when they know damn well that their “procedures” don’t work at all.
Oh, and similarly: you can claim that those involved are inept, especially since the term “inept” is largely a matter of opinion and there’s wide latitude for argument about it, but the claim of *malicious* ineptitude does not appear to be particularly easy to sustain without evidence of actual malice.
“Oh yes, that’s why they deny, deny, deny that anything fails” — I have seen no evidence of denial of failures. The failures are, in fact, documented for all to see and appear to be substantially regretted by all those involved, indeed, regretted in public.
Inept doesn’t need malice. All it needs is ignorance, and failure to follow SOPs for surgery.
And again: one can have a legitimate difference of opinion about whether something is science or pseudoscience. You are not on nearly such firm ground if you opine that someone is engaging in deliberately deceptive behavior (especially when all their actions are documented by them and published), or when you opine that they’re somehow engaging in a malicious scam when when they are paid minimal salaries and you possess no evidence that they are either malicious or attempting to enrich themselves through fraud.
A discussion about the merits of cryonics seems perfectly justified. Claims that the individuals in question are malicious and engaging in a deliberate scam are, however, a different sort of thing entirely.
“Inept doesn’t need malice” — the claim was *malicious* ineptitude, not mere ineptitude. Please re-read.
How is this any different from hocking crystals and shark fin powder to terminal cancer patients? And if it’s not different, how is it any less fucking disgusting and morally reprehensible?
It was malicious, if the person doing the procedure was not properly trained and equpped, as was the case. QED
Show otherwise with hard evidence….
“How is this any different from hocking crystals and shark fin powder to terminal cancer patients? And if it’s not different, how is it any less fucking disgusting and morally reprehensible?”
Well, lets see.
First, you’re not specifying whether those hocking said crystals are doing so with an actually held belief that they’re useful or are doing so fully knowing they’re useless in an attempt to enrich themselves. Without such a distinction, we can’t determine if their actions are morally reprehensible or not. They might, for example, legitimately believe the crystals are helpful, and therefore would merely be ignorant and misguided.
Second, there’s a bit of a bait and switch going on here. No one who seeks cryopreservation is being asked to forgo any sort of medical treatment. It is, in fact, performed entirely after the subject has gone through clinical death. Since signing up for cryonics in no way shortens ones life the way that substituting shark fin powder for chemotherapy might, they’re not really the same thing.
Regardless, disgust is an emotional reaction, not a statement of objective knowledge. Some find homosexuality disgusting. Some find cremation disgusting. Some find key lime pie disgusting. I don’t think we should really care about what “disgusts” other people provided it causes no actual harm to them.
“It was malicious, if the person doing the procedure was not properly trained and equpped, as was the case.” — your definition of malice seems to be entirely wrong. It does not involve ineptitude or a lack of equipment. Malice involves a desire to cause harm. If those involved did not desire to cause harm, you can call them many things — stupid, perhaps, or ignorant, or incompetent, but not malicious.
> Without such a distinction, we can’t determine if their actions are morally reprehensible or not. They might, for example, legitimately believe the crystals are helpful, and therefore would merely be ignorant and misguided.
This may not be the appropriate standard to apply. Cryonicists are some of the smartest people you’ll ever meet. After forty years of the level of competence described here in Alcor’s own words, at what point can we reasonably expect they can be expected to know better?
Note that this is a “within reason” standard of proof rather than a “you cannot philosophically prove that it is physically impossible” one.
Irrelevant. Selling false hope to vulnerable people for cash is profiting from falsehoods and preying on the weak. It’s wrong regardless of what the crystal healer believes.
Irrelevant. You’re still misleading distraught, vulnerable people into false hope with no actual justification in exchange for money. It’s no different from a crystal healer or deathbed priest.
If lying to dying people and leading them to have false hope in exchange for cash doesn’t meet your definition of doing harm, I consider your definition of harm useless.
Cryronics is just sci-fi snake oil. It’s no different from selling a dying man a bottle of “Mr Whatelys Original Pick-Me-Up Elixer”
“Irrelevant. Selling false hope to vulnerable people for cash is profiting from falsehoods and preying on the weak.” — hardly irrelevant because to “prey on the weak” implies a *deliberate* desire to deceive. You appear to be unable to come to grasp with the distinction between an incorrect but truly held belief and a desire to commit fraud. The two are not the same.
“Irrelevant. You’re still misleading distraught, vulnerable people into false hope with no actual justification in exchange for money. It’s no different from a crystal healer or deathbed priest” — hardly irrelevant because, again, there is a distinction between encouraging someone to undergo what is (from your point of view as someone who thinks cryonics is bunk) merely an unusual burial and encouraging them to take actions that would reduce their lifespan.
“If lying to dying people and leading them to have false hope in exchange for cash doesn’t meet your definition of doing harm, I consider your definition of harm useless” — but again, to be a lie, the person making the claim needs to disbelieve the claim they are making. I see no evidence that any of those involved do not believe their own claims, so at best you can call them stupid, not mendacious.
The lack of a distinction in your mind between ignorance and deception seems to be rather a fundamental error. This is not some small thing — it is central.
Regardless: to claim that those at Alcor are enriching themselves would imply that some of them are living anything more than the most modest possible lifestyles, and to claim that they are being deceptive requires evidence that they do not believe their own claims. I see no evidence for either of these statements.
Any amount of money you make from selling false hope to dying people is too much, regardless of whether they’re getting rich off of it or making pennies.
Okay, I’ll grant that they might just be idiots profiting off of selling false hope to dying people.
The “idiot” part doesn’t make them any less guilty of the “profiting off of false hope to dying people” part. That’s morally reprehensible no matter why they do it. Intent is irrelevant.
“Any amount of money you make from selling false hope to dying people is too much, regardless of whether they’re getting rich off of it or making pennies” — so by that statement, would you claim that giving chemotherapy agents to terminal cancer patients largely to soothe their families desire to “do something” is a sort of fraud? Should doctors be prosecuted for it?
How about religions? Should religious figures be imprisoned for claiming there’s an afterlife (for which I think we would both claim there is no evidence).
No, because unlike crystals, shark fin powder, and cryology, there’s a body of evidence to show that Chemotherapy actually works.
You get that we’re an atheist community, right? Yes, I am absolutely opposed to lying to people on their deathbed, including when religions do it.
“The “idiot” part doesn’t make them any less guilty of the “profiting off of false hope to dying people” part. That’s morally reprehensible no matter why they do it. Intent is irrelevant.” — Intent is almost always relevant in discussions of morality. Most claims about the morality or immorality of various actions require that the actor have a guilty mind in committing an act for the act to be immoral.
For example, if you opened a doorway, not knowing that someone was right behind the doorway on a ladder changing a lightbulb, and your act of opening the door caused him to fall and break his neck, the act would not be a moral problem even if it resulted in his death because you had no intent to cause anyone any harm.
Claims about immorality necessarily require discussions of intent.
Nope, it only requires that that the harm came though deliberate ignorance. The harm is that they will never be revived, as there is NO SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE that it will happen. Malice is knowingly taking money when you know you won’t cause them to be revived in the future. The chemicals used say it is impossible, as all the proteins are cross-linked into inactivity.
Your religion fuckwittery is simply that, irrelevant fuckwittery.
Are you a libertarian?
“No, because unlike crystals, shark fin powder, and cryology, there’s a body of evidence to show that Chemotherapy actually works.” — I specifically brought up a case in which chemotherapy essentially does nothing. There are a variety of agents on the market that, if we really take the studies for them at face value, provide perhaps a few days to weeks of extra life at the cost of comfort and high financial expense. None the less, such agents are routinely administered to people with incurable cancers.
“You get that we’re an atheist community, right? Yes, I am absolutely opposed to lying to people on their deathbed, including when religions do it” — I didn’t ask if you were opposed to religion. I asked whether you felt that religious figures should be *imprisoned for their claims and beliefs*. One can be an atheist and none the less feel that it is not right to imprison someone for their religious beliefs.
I disagree. It’s still murder. You still directly caused the death of a person through your actions.
I might consider intentionally pushing that person to his death worse, but I wouldn’t just shrug it off and say that it’s morally neutral.
So sure, cryonics peddlers are better than snake oil salesman because they’re intentionally fleecing dying people of their cash. It’s still wrong.
“Malice involves a desire to cause harm.”
“Nope, it only requires that that the harm came though deliberate ignorance”
This is a new and entirely novel definition of “malice” unlike any that I have ever seen before. Congratulations. None the less, you still haven’t met your own burden of proof — you haven’t demonstrated that any of the ignorance in question was *deliberate*. It isn’t even clear to me how one could go about doing that.
Nope. They can be done with the methods and procedures used, and the knowledge behind them.
Hypotheticals are for the unevidenced, that is typically what happens to newbies when they lack the evidence to positively support that which they want to justify.
And I disagree that it does something. A proven procedure with a known rate of success that fails to work is leagues ahead of sci-fi snake-oil. Furthermore, unlike cryonics fetishists, doctors tend to be rather frank when the odds of success on a procedure are low, and may even recommend against it.
Show where I said that cryonics peddlers should be imprisoned for their bullshit, or you’re just attacking a strawman of my position.
Oh, and: “Malice is knowingly taking money when you know you won’t cause them to be revived in the future” — actually, that again isn’t malice (you’re instead describing fraud), but none the less, given that the people in question almost certainly don’t agree with the claim that there is no chance of revival, they are not knowingly taking money in such circumstances. (Whether their sincere belief is thanks to superior knowledge or astonishing stupidity is a matter of dispute, but you lack evidence that their belief is not sincere, and I would say that the evidence is strong that the belief *is* sincere.)
something -> nothing*
“Claims about immorality necessarily require discussions of intent.”
“Nope. They can be done with the methods and procedures used, and the knowledge behind them.”
This would then be an entirely new form of moral argumentation unprecedented in the annals of moral philosophy. I’ve read extensively through the literature on moral philosophy and have yet to find a moral system that claimed that one can be morally culpable for accidents and other acts that involve no intent at all.
I look forward to your description of your full moral system, including how I may distinguish the truth of your moral claims from those made by others.
You can go to jail for manslaughter. QED.
Perry:
Pardon me for asking, but as you’re here, attempting to defend the indefensible, just what is your interest? You wearing one of those braceletes, Cupcake?
I’ll put it out the day after the paper is published that shows revival of the head. Until then, it is nothing but a malicious scam, and you are an amoral asshole for defending the indefensible. You know about morality? Bwahsahahahahahaha
Perry Metzger:
If you’re giving people something that you think is a medicine, you should first do no harm. You should know some facts about whether the purported medicine is actually medicinal, what the potential risks are, and so forth. That means you should have more than a mere belief, because it takes some genuine work to know what the facts are and reason about them appropriately. Otherwise, you have no fucking clue whether you’re giving them something beneficial, toxic, a waste of their time/money/effort or anything else. That is a morally reprehensible thing to do, no matter what fucking belief or intention you have. So if you can’t determine that, then I guess you’re not thinking clearly. But that’s your problem.
The resources could be spent on anyone or anything else, so they really are the same thing. It could be used directly to save someone else’s life. Without that, it isn’t going to happen.
We don’t have, and we’re not discussing, a world in which there is only a person who wants cryopreservation and another offers it. So it’s not the case that we should really and only care about the one individual you focused on. Instead, there are billions of people and many causes that could be supported, not just the one “cause” of selfishly devoting valuable resources to a fucking corpse. Also, environmental destruction itself causes deaths and other types of harm, so wasting shit on ludicrous crap is obviously contributing to that too. Claiming otherwise would amount to saying it happens by fucking magic, so I’m going to assume you simply didn’t consider that.
Oh, also, I have no problem with the idea of punishing for some religious beliefs and practices. If your ~sincerely held belief~ is teaching your kids to avoid medicine, that killing people gets them sent to a better part of heaven, or that people are filthy worthless reprobrates for violating arbitrary religious laws, I fully support having their children taken away and a potential punishment for child abuse.
@PZ
Ya I thought there was something like that that you had written, which is why I was more skeptical than the gushing articles I read. I didn’t know you had actually talked about that specific experiment, though!
“If you’re giving people something that you think is a medicine, you should first do no harm. You should know some facts about whether the purported medicine is actually medicinal, what the potential risks are, and so forth.” — since your claim is that cryonics is performed upon the dead, how does it cause them actual harm? Does it cause them to be even more dead than before? It would appear that at the point in question (that is, after clinical death) that there is very little that could (given your other beliefs) constitute harm or entail risks.
“The resources could be spent on anyone or anything else, so they really are the same thing. It could be used directly to save someone else’s life” — I will point out that it could be claimed that any form of burial that involves anything more than being thrown into a wood chipper costs quite a lot of money in our society — indeed, the average funeral costs something like $10,000. Would you favor having a law banning such expenditures and mandating that dead bodies simply be thrown in the trash?
How about pets? Generally speaking, owning a cat or a dog is fairly useless. Can we ban having pets because the resources spent feeding them could be spent on saving human lives instead? How about banning having anything but the most basic possible car or going to the movies on the basis that these are frivolous and useless wastes of money?
At least one part of this statement must be false, because there’s a very well-developed body of moral reasoning dealing with concepts like “reasonable expectation”, “culpable recklessness”, and “wicked carelessness”.
Vivec: “You can go to jail for manslaughter. QED” — first, law and morality are not the same. One cannot claim that all legal actions are moral — or if you do claim that, it is a very unusual position, and one that I would argue is nearly indefensible. Second, the legal definition of manslaughter (at least in the US and UK) requires mens rea, that is, an actual intent to harm, to be present, so your counterexample fails a second way.
“At least one part of this statement must be false, because there’s a very well-developed body of moral reasoning dealing with concepts like “reasonable expectation”, “culpable recklessness”, and “wicked carelessness”.” — those involve intent. To be deliberately careless is quite distinct from having belief you are doing anything wrong. To be reckless, for example, requires intent.
Personally? I could be convinced of it. Tying up potentially useful land storing dead bodies is a waste, and as the population increases, that might be a prudent decision to make.
Once again, I can definitely see future outcomes where these would be prudent laws to make. I don’t think we’re quite at that point, but if we fuck up so bad that the choice is “no pets or run out of resources for people”, I’ll gladly support such a law.
Apparently not, unless you want to claim that drunk drivers that hit someone and go to jail went out driving with the intent to run people over.
@81: No, they don’t. I’ve served on a High Court jury in a murder trial which hinged on the concept of wicked carelessness, so I’ve had it explained to me in interminable detail, and the whole point is that it doesn’t require intent, merely disregard for reasonably predictable consequences.
Perry – you don’t seem to have answered my comment. At what point could we reasonably expect that these ridiculously smart people (as they are) should have known better?
I concur that discussion of their internal mental state is probably not useful here. And in any case, the ardent misguided sincere – and cryonicists are painfully sincere – can do vastly more harm than a mere rogue.
Is this some kind of wacky libertarian thing? Like, the “gubmint cant tell me not to dump my industrial waste in the water, fuck the consequences” kind?
Because I think most people could probably be reasoned into being fine with giving up movie goddamn theaters if it was demonstrated it would be necessary for humans to survive.
@48, Perry Metzger
As a general statement, this is true (but only trivially so in the sense that legitimate differences are in theory possible for any differing beliefs between two people about any subject, not just the subject of pseudoscience).
Anyways, if anyone wants some help deciding if something is pseudoscience, here are some criteria:
Also, trying to show that some medically accepted cancer treatments are useless doesn’t change anything. That would simply be another example of a problem.
Reminds me of a person on a wikipedia talk page who wanted the classification of pseudoscience removed from the Mothman article, because there are other that might be pseudoscience that currently aren’t labelled pseudoscience! (their examples were economics and psychology!)
Was going to say, even if you could demonstrate chemo was as pathetically useless as cryogenics or crystal healing, that wouldn’t be a justification for hawking crystals and meat lockers in cancer wards.
Dunc @ 83:
I think here in the States, the comparable legal concept would be depraved indifference.
See also the discussion of involuntary manslaughter here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manslaughter.
Correction in my last paragraph:
*because there are other articles on wikipedia that might be pseudoscience
David Gerard:
I take issue with the statement that all cryonicists are super smart, just as I do with the statement that they are sincere. Perhaps many, or even most are sincere, but I expect there are those who aren’t, by virtue of being smart enough to know this shit does. not. work., if nothing else.
As for that supposed intelligence, what does it tell you when these sincere, super smart people play clowns in a car with corpses, acknowledge failure, and still do the “hey, we did it!” dance? Sorry, but I don’t buy into it. Anyone who was actually sincere and super smart would be working on a way to make cryonics a reality, not fleecing people of their last dime in order to cut off their head, drop it all over the place, fail at perfusion, and stick it in a freezer anyway.
Anybody who was actually sincere would be working on developing the vast amount of basic science required before cryonics might even be vaguely plausible. Given the current state of the art, it is wholly unreasonable to expect that any attempt at cryonic preservation could have even a tiny chance of success. The best possible interpretation is that these people are hopelessly deluded – but in that case, you’d expect them to be somewhat more careful. The utterly careless and slapdash approach they take to their procedures seems to indicate that they don’t really expect success.
Perry Metzger
Doing this
<blockquote>paste copied text here</blockquote>
Results in this
It makes comments with quotes easier to read.
also, FYI
<b>bold</b>
bold
<i>italic</i>
italic
Here’s a page from Alcor:
Problems Associated with Cryonics
(and some possible solutions)
It tries to work as a disclaimer against accusations of pseudoscience, but it looks like a bunch of self defense and promotion and complaining about persecution. They take a “we just don’t know” stance, but (as best I can tell) they never reveal what science does know: that current cryonics causes damage, and that the brain is such a delicate intricate machine that damage is a big deal. We even have studied cases of what just a short time of oxygen deprivation can do to a person. And even this new celebrated experiment with the rabbit brain, as PZ has said, is known to erase informationwithin the cells.
They dance around the problems, lamenting problems that might be caused by brain damage that patients had prior to cryonics!
It looks like it’s all evasion and deflection. They point to everything else as a problem except for their current cryo tech.
Caine @88: yes, that does seem to be equivalent.
You said you wouldn’t be able to determine whether people “hocking crystals and shark fin powder to terminal cancer patients” as a cure were doing something morally reprehensible, unless you knew whether those people had an “actually held belief that they’re useful.” That’s what you said. Did you forget?
The fact that it is still harmful, by ripping that very person off if for no other reason, qualifies it as morally reprehensible. You don’t need to kill or injure someone in order to qualify. That other people are also harmed or killed, indirectly, is also a consequence I mentioned, although it must have sailed way over your head.
Who is supposed to benefit, in any way whatsoever, from chopping off your head and freezing it for an indeterminate length of time? It’s my understanding that actual people actually do benefit from these things you’re calling “frivolous and useless wastes of money.” But if anything is genuinely not worth the cost, then it’s not worth the fucking cost, simple as that. If you’re really going to utterly reject any sort of reasoning like that, then say so — and show how the fuck that’s supposed to work.
Ok my comment has disappeared, maybe due to the link? Here it is without the link for now:
Here’s a page from Alcor:
Problems Associated with Cryonics
(and some possible solutions)
It tries to work as a disclaimer against accusations of pseudoscience, but it looks like a bunch of self defense and promotion and complaining about persecution. They take a “we just don’t know” stance, but (as best I can tell) they never reveal what science does know: that current cryonics causes damage, and that the brain is such a delicate intricate machine that damage is a big deal. We even have studied cases of what just a short time of oxygen deprivation can do to a person. And even this new celebrated experiment with the rabbit brain, as PZ has said, is known to erase informationwithin the cells.
(They dance around the problems, lamenting problems that might be caused by brain damage that patients had prior to cryonics! That kind of thing makes up the majority of their long wordy page.)
It looks like it’s all evasion and deflection. They point to everything else as a problem except for their current cryo tech.
Perry:
Really? You sure about that one? There’s a fucktonne of research which shows just the opposite. Not confined to dogs or cats, either. Companion animals not only provide comfort, they can provide against complete isolation, help with health issues, become absolutely vital to people with various disabilities, mental and physical. People who take animals into hospitals, such as rabbits into pediatric burn wards, have shown great benefits to patients. The list goes on and on. Animals do a hell of a service for societies everywhere. How does chopping off the heads of corpses and mishandling them help?
Oh god and they are encouraging people to sign Religious Objection to Autopsy forms.
I’ve got a great business idea… I’m going to offer to deposit people’s cremated remains on the moon, for $100,000 a pop. My process for doing this will involve dressing up like an astronaut, getting in a big cardboard box with the words “lunar rocket” written on the side, and making “fwoosh!” noises. Seem legit?
Brian:
My, my.
My elderly (>70) parents had a dog who died previous week at the age of 15 years. He has succeded in keeping them occupied, mentaly alert and fit and not getting lonely after the children and grandchildren mostly left and went their own ways. I also loved that dog dearly and it casues me great grief. With this in mind I would like to give you all the fucks there are, may you choke on them you prententious piece of human shit.
And since I am the one who said these people belong to jail, I present following argument (I did not watch the video, I am going by what I read):
They do not promise to perform an elaborate or extravagant burial. They are claiming that they are fixing a person(ality) in a state that is fit to be revived at some point. This claim is completely unsuported any evidence and present (huge) body of evidence points in fact to the oposite direction, that any revival is impossible no matter how advanced technology gets. It is irrelevant if they are unconvinced by this evidence due to incompetence or malice, they still pretend that this evidence against their position does not exist or bear weight in order to get money from desperate people. Therefore they are enriching themselves (enriching =/= getting rich btw. that was a nice equivocation spiel you have shown there) and thus they aare fulfilling the basic legal definition of fraud – gaining money uder false pretense (in this case by selling a product, that according to all sum of actual scientific knowledge cannot work – and they know it, their belief is not relevant to the legality or morality of the issue, only their knowledge).
@5, Doubting Thomas
Ya, but it can’t really be like Pascal’s wager. Pascal’s wager is actually an argument that evidence doesn’t matter at all, or something like that.
Just because something involves betting on an uncertainty, doesn’t mean it is as ridiculous as Pascal’s Wager. All decisions are made in uncertainty, we just have to choose the best option available. In the case of gods, that would be The Atheist’s Wager! :P
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheist's_Wager
http://infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/heaven.html
And in this case, there really isn’t a better bet for beating mortality, besides living long enough to use far superior and less risky technology than that currently available (well, hopefully you could find people more professional etc. than Alcor, and of course the cost etc. has to be weighed against other things that money could be used to do). I’m not even sure what PZ has said about the rabbit brain thing would actually be a significant problem.
Dunc writes:
I think you’ve missed the essence of the argument made by the cryonicists. It is not that current methods produce easily reversed preservation — clearly there is no technology currently available capable of reviving a body preserved by these methods. However, the question is not whether any such technology currently exists, but whether one might exist.
The two premises are (1) at LN2 temperatures, the Arrhenius equation tells you that chemical reactions that might take seconds at room temperature will take tens of thousands of years to occur and (2) there’s a possibility that over the course of such astonishingly long periods of time that mechanisms might be developed to recover the brain states of those who have been preserved.
The question is therefore whether or not enough information is preserved by the process to allow any conceivable future technology — even one developed many centuries hence — to recover a meaningful part of someone’s personality. At the present time, there is no good answer to that. We simply have no way to know, only suspicions.
Clearly brain states are sometimes preserved even through prolonged periods of ischemia — we know this from careful experiments that have been conducted on lab animals which have been put on heart lung machines, been given special drug cocktails, had their hearts stopped, been brought down to a couple of degrees C for hours with no heartbeat, and have (to the best of our ability to tell) been successfully revived. However, this is not a terribly natural way to have your heart stop for hours — those animals were quite unusually handled throughout. We also know that brain cells start dying after even a couple of minutes of oxygen deprivation under normal conditions, and that very rapidly no current method will revive them. However, how much information may be recovered from a dead brain cell is not a question we can currently answer. Certainly the configuration of the connectivity of the nerve cells remains intact even if the cells themselves die, but is that information sufficient to reconstruct a personality? We don’t know.
So yes, it is absolutely certain that definitive proof that cryonics works or does not work (or, more likely, the extent to which it works and under what circumstances) would require actual revival, which is to say, would require that we wait many years and possibly centuries for an answer.
Meanwhile, however, some people have decided that they would prefer to be part of the experimental group, no matter how remote the possibility of success, than the control group. I understand that around here classical liberals who think people should be let alone to live their lives as they see fit are viewed with extraordinary contempt, but I’m one of them, and I don’t see why people can’t, with informed consent, decide to try it out.
I will also note that almost everyone who I have met who is signed up for cryonics is pretty smart and well informed of the fact that the chance of success is unknown and possibly very low — if you have a PhD in biochemistry and this is your thing (and I know such people — several in fact), third parties can’t reasonably claim that you aren’t aware of what you’re doing.
As to whether the folks at Alcor are charlatans, I have rarely seen people engaged in an enterprise requiring so much effort who are so tentative and conditional about their belief in its viability. The usual stigmata of pseudoscience don’t attach terribly well. The fact that the people involved are so open even about instances of their own incompetence should tell you something.
(For clarity, the people I know with PhDs in biological sciences above are people who are signed up with Alcor, and my point was that such a person clearly has the ability to give informed consent.)
If you’re going to postulate the invention of some presently-unimaginable Sufficiently Advanced Technology that can somehow recover a useable brain-state from what is basically a bowl of brain and antifreeze soup, you really might as well just say “and then a miracle occurs” and have done with it.
I totally called this being some wacky libertarian bullshit.
If you want to have the right to fleece dying people out of their money in the name of sci fi woo, go make an IRL Galt’s Gulch and leave the rest of us out of it. I fully support teh ebil gubmint’s right to shut down these bullshit businesses and jail the idiots in charge for fraud.
Perry – you’re being asked about present-day cryonics practice clearly not in any sense possibly working and you’re answering with some hypothetical future cryonics practice maybe working. Reframing the question in this manner is common to cryonics discussion, and is not a productive response style.
The first presentation I ever saw on Cryonics was a long presentation by some Alcor types of electron micrographs of extensive ice crystal damage in nerve cells subjected to the equivalent of some of Alcor’s earlier protocols. The audience, which consisted largely of cryonicists, understood very well what that implied and was more than adequately horrified by it. I think you’re giving the Alcor folks too little credit for understanding and pessimism. The pessimism does not extend, however, to believing that they know that it can’t work, only to not knowing if it will work. I openly state I agree with that position.
The “they’re a bunch of charlatans” narrative doesn’t work on a number of levels. First, Alcor people can probably tell you about forms of damage that current techniques cause far better than you can guess what they might be — they’re exceptionally realistic about how bad the damage situation is, and are constantly looking for better methods of preservation because none of them feel particularly sure that what’s been done to date will work. Second, the people involved are absolutely not getting rich off the operation — almost everyone there would make more money getting a “normal” job.
I will also reiterate that they’re insanely open about their methods, even when the process failures involved are ridiculously embarrassing. I think that openness is a good thing, and one that many professional scientific labs and medical practices of my acquaintance would do well to emulate. They do not hide their mistakes, which is a rare thing, and they try to learn from them, which is even rarer.
Perhaps the belief that there might be some hope to survive death provides some people with similar comfort. I’ve heard people suggest that religion, in fact, has great psychological utility in spite of being entirely counterfactual, and yet I don’t see people here claiming that religion is a good thing. Regardless, many people have radically different opinions on what is a useful expenditure. I think the simplest tack, in general, is to let people decide for themselves and leave it there.
@108, Perry Metzger
So what is wrong with what I actually said?
Okay, so cryonics is just as much placebo effect magical thinking bullshit as religion. Thanks for your argument against cryonics.
No, they are not claiming that. They are claiming that they’re preserving a brain in a manner that may (emphasis on may) permit it to be revived at some point, possibly a very long time hence, but that there’s no guarantee that this will work. This is very distinct from claiming that they’re going to successfully revive you.
I see no reason to believe your claim there. Clearly the configuration of your brain, and not some sort of extraphysical “soul”, is the reason you are who you are. Whether mere connectivity patterns of neurons plus some information on things like receptor density is sufficient information to revive a mind or not is unknown, but that information appears to be reasonably well preserved (though not perfectly) by current cryopreservation techniques. There may or may not be additional configuration information that is required to revive a mind which is poorly preserved by freezing. If there is additional required information and freezing doesn’t preserve it well enough, the enterprise is doomed.
However, there is no body of evidence pointing at the idea being impossible, in spite of your claim to the contrary. What you can accurately claim is that many people think the damage caused is too great to permit the information to be extracted well enough and have some reasonable arguments to make in their direction, but they are going on supposition, just as the advocates are. Actual information does not yet exist, emphasis on yet.
Dunc writes:
Except we know that’s not what you get. If you take a test animal, subject it to the protocols in question and then examine the brain afterwards, you don’t get “soup”, you get a brain with significant cellular damage but also more or less all of the connectome there when you electron micrograph samples. The biggest problem known is that sometimes the process results in large cracks, and it isn’t clear if they’re clean enough to deduce the connectome by jigsaw-puzzling the halves back together — that might indeed make the entire thing impossible. It is also known that (depending on how saturated with cryoprotectant things are) you can get some cell membrane damage from ice crystal formation, though one can reasonably expect that this doesn’t destroy the information on the connectome.
However, what you are claiming is that you end up with some sort of brain homogenate, and that’s simply counterfactual. Arguments to the effect that the damage is too severe to fix might be reasonable, but claims that the organ doesn’t remain grossly intact are simply inaccurate. You don’t end up with “soup”.
David Gerard writes:
No, that was not my claim anywhere. Please carefully re-read my claims. I made them very carefully. They are also extremely limited.
Who’s to say future scientists can’t use their magical techo-waves to resurrect a person from the smallest tissue sample? I mean, if we’re playing Scifi make-believe why stop at frozen bodies?
Brian Pansky writes:
Unlike some claims here (see the question of whether you end up with “brain and antifreeze soup”, which is a purely factual matter) your statement was a matter of opinion. You believe they are not sufficiently open about the problems and the amount of damage that is caused. I think they are quite open about it and make very, very limited claims. However, no openness measuring device exists for us to settle that question, so there is no way to determine which of us is correct.
(And yes, on your related point but not the one I answered before, it is clearly the case that a sufficient load of cryoprotectant to minimize freezing damage is extremely toxic to cells. However, that still does not answer the question of whether the information needed to reconstruct that mind is gone or not. The connectome and some neurotransmitter receptor population counts or other well preserved information might be enough, or what is preserved might be woefully inadequate. We don’t know. That’s not a disingenuous “we don’t know but wink wink of course it will work”, that’s a serious we don’t know.)
Vivec writes:
Answering a question you obviously don’t mean to have answered, since you posed it only to be sarcastic:
For the obvious reason that we have completely compelling evidence that the mind is a phenomenon of the brain. If I cut off your leg, your personality remains intact. If you get a section of your brain removed, your personality will not remain intact, and the damage to your mind is even related to what part of the brain we damage.
It therefore is fairly clear that the mind arises out of the brain, and that preserving the brain, and not some arbitrary small tissue sample, would be necessary to preserve the information needed to reconstruct the person’s mind, and it can be fairly reasonably hypothesized that losing significant parts of the information in the brain would not permit reconstruction of the entire original personality.
Whether or not current cryopreservation techniques can possibly preserve enough of the information in the brain to permit reconstruction is not currently answerable. Such methods very well may not be sufficient, perhaps not even remotely sufficient. We don’t know enough yet to answer.
Nah, our feeble non-futuristic science has just not discovered the secret hidden brain encoding all our cells have. Techno-waves could easily recreate dead brain tissue, because I say so.
A comment thread full of Perry Metzger bloviating, dodging questions, and smuggling cargo freighter loads’ worth of assumptions while being convinced he’s wholly rational and logical…it’s like the cypherpunks mailing list all over again. But that was two decades ago, and some of us (by which I mean me) have moved on.
On the question of maliciousness on the part of Alcor: As a general thing, if I go to any specialty shop to get their specialty performed, I expect that with 40 years’ experience, they’ll be able to do their thing. It might not provide the relief I hope for, but at least they’ll be able to do the work, whether it’s providing baking mixes free of things I’m allergic to that aren’t trouble for most people, maintaining the lift mechanisms in a wheelchair-carrying van, or providing T-shirts in a size and cut I need and they advertise for sale.
But here, in at least this case, Alcor couldn’t do any of the things they say themselves increased the chances of successful storage and revival. That this wasn’t followed by firings and public accountability review means that it’s not that big a deal to them. That is, they don’t care whether they can do what they claim to sell. After even one year in business, that would be malicious negligence. After forty, even more so.
Invective is not quite the same thing as argumentation.
BTW, I don’t claim to be wholly rational or logical. Human beings are not fully rational creatures. We can, however, strive to try to overcome our limitations as best as we can. One way to do that, I might note, is to eschew ad hominems, even when they’re tempting.
This lesson in rationality brought to you by our resident cryo-cultist Perry Metzger
This is like saying we know the Earth is made of matter, so all we have to do to fix climate change is reconstruct a state of the Earth when the climate was better. Or after Trump wins the election in November, the ragtag team of post-apocalyptic survivors will “simply” have to make an Earth resembling the one in which Sanders got elected. It is, after all, just configurations of matter in space (you’re of course not wrong about that specific point), so “all they have to do” is put it into the correct configuration.
Maybe you (or anybody for that matter) should solve the three-body problem. Or even two. Then we can talk about what it would mean to try to do a zillion-body problem. Also, how much is required for having the same person: for instance, a dead brain (like a live one) isn’t a closed system, so what information is lost into the environment? Does that stuff not matter? How do you know that? Exactly how big is the system we’re supposed to study if the goal is to reproduce a person, and what are all of the variables and pieces of it, which a biochemist may or may not have any familiarity with? After going through lots of actual work like that… then you might be in a place where “well, gee, I just don’t know, maybe” seems like a fucking ridiculous position to take, but it could at least be the right moment in the conversation to say pointless bullshit like that. But right now, I don’t get the feeling you even know what the fuck you’re talking about.
@Perry Metzger
You quoted me on a factual claim, and I made other factual claims.
Though, to be fair, I went on and saw that they do talk about most of this stuff on their other pages such as the FAQ pages.
We know that clinically dead people do not come back to life. We do not know how to remove and reattach heads without causing death with living creatures, so since dead things do not come back to life, and we can’t fix spinal cords or spines or death, we know that there is zero chance that the deceased will get any benefit from this. Anyone who pressures a terminal brain cancer into signing over a sizable amount of life insurance for snakeoil is a slimeball, who should be in jail for fraud.
Perry@120: I’m not making an argument in that part, just an observation. The stuff about why Alcor should be thought of as maliciously negligent, that was an argument.
This is also not an argument, or at least I’m not intending it to be one… Extropian thought was broadly appealing to me decades back, because I really hated the limitations of my body. In the time since then I’ve grown to realize that I’m transgendered, and acted on that, and no longer feel that desperate craving to escape my flesh. Of my five or so closest trans friends, three are also ex-extropian. Since all of us are life-long science fiction fans with a real interest in actual medicine, technology, space, and the like, this isn’t hugely surprising, but I feel like we’re using up some other community’s allocation of ex-extropians.
I am shocked! Perry doesn’t know what what an ad hominem is, but if you say he is bloviating it causes him to ignore the two paragraphs of detailed critique in order to claim the moral ad hom high ground. *own goal*
Perry:
At this point, you and your little notes can fuck right off, Perry. You are appallingly ignorant, and seriously unarmed for any type of actual argument. No one in this thread has committed an argumentum ad hominem. Calling “ad hom!” is generally the refuge of those who have absolutely nothing. Shit happens, oh pardon, invective happens around here, especially when the commentariat encounters someone as willfully obtuse as you happen to be.
Taking recourse in scolding over the naughty words? You have nothing. Zip, zilch, nada. As that’s the case, perhaps you could shut the fuck up, as this post and thread is not titled “All about Perry Metzger”.
I note that you seem to do little listening (reading, with full comprehension), preferring the sight of your own unending pixels. I will, in spite of that, provide you with the proper definition of argumentum ad hominem, which is most definitely not using the naughty words or calling you an ignorant ass and so forth: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem
Perry Metzger
You’re welcome. And congratulations.
.
Once the FutureMedicos revive and replant the brain in a new … body,
does the resultant entity have a soul?
@Perry Metzger, bloviation #113
So they are using weasel words to dodge the burden of proof. And? I can sell you Prague castle right now and say that some future politicians may (emphasis on may) make the transaction legal so you or your descendants can move there. Tell me if you are interested and if you think I would not be committing fraud.
Also they make unfalsifiable claims, one of sure signs of pseudoscience.
It is known that mind is not the brain, but the process running there. And brain is not like HDD, it is more alike to RAM – the information is there as long as there is power supply. After you cut off the power supply, the information gets lost very quickly, so even if you found a way to start it, the information is gone. For example we know that activity in brain has corresponding activity in vegetative systems, like vessel expansion, which allows us currently to some degree measure where some mental processes occur and how. Once that activity stops, there is no way to find out in what state it was at the stop. Just like after you deflate a balloon, you cannot say anymore to what degree it was inflated before that.
That is why the universal criterion to declare someone dead is no EEG signal, because that is a sign that the process of neural activity has according to our current knowledge irreversibly stopped – a brain death.
It is known, that prolonged absence of oxygen can lead to irreparable damage to brain, so even when people survive it physically, they suffer changes in personality.
It is known that difficulty of solving a problem does not rise linearly with the number of variables because the variables to not only ad up, they also divide, multiply, square and combine in multitude of other and interesting ways. And the number of variables involved in solving the “mind problem” is much bigger than in the already mentioned three body problem.
Therefore still the null hypothesis is that once brain dies, it cannot be revived. The null hypothesis has to be falsified first for at least some basic mammal brain in order for this not being a scam. They do not work on falsifying the hypothesis, they are taking money of desperate people and when called out they invoke essentially the “God of the gaps” argument (and you do so too on their behalf) where they replace God with future scientists.
If you are a qualified biologist, physicist or statistician per chance, I suggest you return your diploma.
Since it’s possible that both time travel and brain uploading will be invented at some point in the future, how about I charge you $100,000 dollars to arrange to have somebody travel back in time once those technologies have been invented to capture your brain-state immediately before your death?
Alcor is practicing cargo cult science. They have a goal of preserving a mind through death, and they know that mind is a product of the brain — so they do the stuff that histologists have been doing for a century to preserve structure, and pretend that locking down the locations of membranes and organelles is synonymous with preserving a mind. It isn’t. The neuroscientists whose techniques they’re copying know it isn’t and have never pretended that it is.
Ancient Egyptians also thought that mummification was a way to preserve the body for the deceased mind’s use. It isn’t. Natron and dessication preserve some of the structure, but we have no illusions that that is sufficient. Flushing the circulatory system with aldehydes and antifreeze is just as destructive, but the cryonuts are trying to present an illusion that they’re scientific, therefore good.
And people like Metzger just credulously eat it all up.
I do not see this point anywhere – even if it were not a scam in general, it definitively was a scam in this particular case of this particular woman.
They might have a (still only extremely weak and hypothetical) case for the victims of cancer of any other bodily organ, or of an accident or illness, but not of brain cancer. Because brain cancer by definition destroys the very organ they pretend to preserve for future revival. They were waiting (in order not to commit blatant murder) for the cancer to kill her. So they willingly and knowingly took money from a person, then waited untill the illness killed her and then pointlesly “preserved” the brain whose structure was already destroyed by cancer – which they knew it would be.
When they started to preserve the brain, there already was nothing there to preserve. They might as well throw the brain in a blender and freeze the goo – it would make just as much sense.