I happened upon this feature story in the Financial Times and thought it was interesting enough to post. FT often has paywalls so I'm going to post it in its entirety

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/d634e198-...z3vdYiHqqW

Quote:Quote:

From the US to Russia, companies are freezing people hoping for a second shot at life

If you travel to the 15th-century monastery town of Sergiyev Posad on the outskirts of Moscow, drive down a couple of dirt roads and take a sharp left after the pink house with a giant hammer-and-sickle flag out front, you’ll see an unassuming green gate with signs warning of a guard dog and 24-hour video surveillance.

Through that gate, you will enter a different world. Inside a large white hangar are two giant vats filled with the brains and bodies of three-dozen humans from nine different countries and a menagerie of pets (cats, dogs and birds). Watching over them is Danila Medvedev, a 35-year-old who believes Russia will soon outpace the US in the world of anti-ageing, biomedicine and the science of living for ever. He is one of the founders of KrioRus, Russia’s first cryonics organisation.

Pale with red hair and a matching ginger beard, Medvedev is the son of a Soviet scientist and grew up reading the science fiction of Arthur C Clarke and Robert Heinlein. He has worked at an investment bank, hosted his own television show and helps run an anti-human-trafficking organisation but his day job is freezing people. Early on he became fascinated by the belief that humans — if cooled to -196C at the time of clinical death — could later be resuscitated at a time when science had advanced sufficiently to cure them of old age or illness. As a student, he began translating literature about cryonics from English into Russian and giving lectures. By 2005, he and eight others had formed KrioRus.


Over the past decade, KrioRus has morphed into one of the biggest cryonics companies in the world in terms of frozen patients, rivalling its American counterparts, such as Alcor in Arizona, but you wouldn’t know that from its headquarters. Located amid other Russian dachas (most of the neighbours don’t even know what lies beyond the green gate), the property consists of a modest two-storey house and the white hangar in the backyard — the place where the company keeps its 45 cryopreserved patients.

For most of the year the facilities are looked after by a man called Sergei, who was a forced labourer in Russia’s North Caucasus before he was freed by Medvedev’s anti-trafficking group. But every month or so, Medvedev goes to the facility to check on the two cylinders that are filled with liquid nitrogen and contain KrioRus’s wards. The company’s two-dozen full-body clients hang on individual pulleys by their ankles. (Their heads are closer to the bottom of the container, where it’s colder.) Meanwhile, the heads and brains of those who have elected to have a so-called neuropreservation are stored on the cylinders’ floor. In addition to the humans, KrioRus also stores more than a dozen pets in the same vats, though as Medvedev told me: “We try not to emphasise the fact that we’re storing people together with animals.”

...
The idea of cryonics first took off in the United States in the 1960s after the publication of a book called The Prospect of Immortality by Robert Ettinger, a Michigan college professor, which argued that a person frozen at the exact moment of death could later be brought back to life. Cryonics societies sprung up in California and Michigan. The first cryopatient, a University of California psychology professor, was cryopreserved in 1967 and, by 1972, half-a-dozen people had followed.

But the Cryonics Society of California soon ran into trouble. Led by a former TV repairman named Robert Nelson with no scientific background, the organisation didn’t have enough money to maintain the cryopreservation of its existing patients. It began stuffing multiple bodies into the same cryonic capsules and used the funds from new patients to maintain the struggling operation. Two capsules failed, causing the nine bodies inside to decompose. Nelson was sued by some family members and, in 1981, was ordered to pay them $800,000.

Since then, the reputation of cryonics in the US has fluctuated, securing a few famous acolytes along the way. The head of US baseball star Ted Williams is stored at -196C in a state-of-the-art steel thermos in Arizona. PayPal founder Peter Thiel and computer scientist Ray Kurzweil are booked in to be cryonically preserved; news anchor Larry King is said to be ready to sign the papers. In our health-obsessed age, the hunt for a long, possibly eternal, life has gone global. In Italy, former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi has said he plans to fund a research institute that will allow people to live until the age of 120, while Kazakhstan’s autocratic president Nursultan Nazarbayev has founded his own academy devoted to concocting the elixir of life.

But when it comes to cryonics, there is a new, and very cold war for patients and for scientific advances. Fittingly, the two geographical centres are the US and Russia. KrioRus is the third biggest cryonics company in the world and the only cryonics operation with frozen patients outside the US. The industry leader in the US is Alcor, which is based in Scottsdale, Arizona, and has more than 140 frozen clients in its facility — a number that is increasing slowly.

Part of KrioRus’s competitive advantage lies in its pricing. Unlike Alcor, which stores its bodies in individual containers, KrioRus takes a socialist-inspired approach and stores them in giant communal vacuum flasks. As a result, at KrioRus, the cryopreservation procedure costs $36,000 for a full body or $12,000 for just a head. At Alcor it costs $200,000 for a full body and $80,000 for a head. (Alcor advocates that clients pay through life insurance.)

Russia also has the advantage of a clean slate, unlike the US with its history of scandals. Medvedev says: “We didn’t have the crisis that they had in the 1970s. People in Russia have no negative impression of cryonics.” In the US, meanwhile, members of the leading cryonics companies remain sceptical that the Russians will ever beat the quality and level of their service. When I told the head of one company how Russia was trying to set up a hospice-centre-cum-freezing-lab — the first instance where patients will die and be frozen in the same facility — he brushed off the prospect, noting that Alcor has a contract with a local hospice group.

In both countries, the cryopreservation process is largely the same. Once a patient is pronounced legally dead, the body must be cooled within the next few hours to start bringing down the body temperature. Most cryonics companies work with standby services whose main purpose is to get the body out of the hospital or morgue as soon as possible to begin the process. Over several hours, the patient’s blood is replaced with a cryoprotectant, essentially a chemical anti-freeze that shields tissue from freezing damage. Then the patient is cooled to -196C over the course of several days using nitrogen gas.


Many patients elect to freeze just their heads rather than their whole bodies. Some do so for financial reasons, others believe that all human identity and memory is stored in the brain and that a traditional body is not necessary for the revival process.

Alcor’s board says the company has come close to perfecting the cryopreservation procedure and can now freeze humans’ brains and bodies with little damage to the cell structure due to the formation of ice crystals. Yet there is little scientific proof that supports the theory of reanimation. Most mainstream scientists and doctors express great scepticism about the field. Michio Kaku, an American futurist and theoretical physicist, has been a vocal critic, while in an article in MIT Technology Review this year, McGill University neuroscientist Michael Hendricks wrote that any suggestion that cryonics could bring a person back to life was “simply snake oil”. “Reanimation or simulation is an abjectly false hope that is beyond the promise of technology and is certainly impossible with the frozen, dead tissue offered by the ‘cryonics’ industry,” he wrote.

 . . . 

Nonetheless, clients keep trickling in. In Russia, KrioRus falls outside both the medical industry and the funeral services industry and has few of the regulatory difficulties faced by a US company in terms of getting hospitals and morgues to release clients. When KrioRus got its first client in 2005 — Lidia Fedorenko, an elderly St Petersburg mathematician whose grandson wanted to see her cryopreserved — KrioRus had no facility. Fedorenko’s head was simply stored in dry ice in her bedroom for the first few months. (Her family kept the windows open.)

It was a similarly haphazard experience when the company got its first request to freeze a full-body patient, Medvedev recalled. “We said, ‘We don’t do it.’ They said, ‘But we want it.’ So we said, ‘OK.’” While KrioRus has a membership scheme, it is not strict about last-minute converts.

Due to its relatively cheap pricing, KrioRus has attracted a diverse group of cryopatients hailing from countries including the US, the Netherlands, Italy and Japan. Valeria Udalova, one of its co-founders, has her mother’s head frozen inside the facility; the brain of Medvedev’s grandmother is stored there as well.

“I wouldn’t put an exact percentage on the probability of [cryonics working]. But the main thing is it’s better than zero,” Alexei Samykin, a Moscow teacher, told me. Enamoured with the idea of cryonics after he saw Medvedev speak about it on TV, he signed himself up and then his mother a few months later after she was diagnosed with breast cancer. (His mother was too sick to sign the papers herself but Samykin insists she gave her oral consent.)

KrioRus is in the process of moving to a new 3,300 square metre facility in the city of Tver that will also double as an oncology and hospice centre — the first time in history that a cryonics facility has been allowed to share a site with a working medical centre. Internationally, it has signed multiple memorandums with Chinese groups, paving the way for a joint venture in China. Plans are also under way to build a future outpost in Switzerland, a destination the founders like because of its neutrality — which they see as perfect for the potentially unstable world KrioRus’s patients would be revived in — and its light-touch regulation, including a new law permitting euthanasia.

That Russia has become home to one of the world’s largest cryonics companies is strange for several reasons, most notably Russians’ general attitude towards the future, which tends to be pessimistic. Yet, as Medvedev notes, the pace of change in the country also lends itself to people’s suspension of disbelief that humans could one day be revived or live for ever. “I’m somebody who lived 10 years in the Soviet Union, 10 years in the 1990s and 10 years in modern Russia,” he said. “Even if I wasn’t a futurist, it would still be easy for me to see how things change quickly.”

Russia was officially an atheist country for decades during communism and after the USSR’s fall many people scrambled for new beliefs. Some returned to their traditional religions but others searched for new spiritual avenues, with a rise in popularity of psychics and mysticism.
Operating room at Alcor’s base in Arizona


Medvedev predicts that the first head transplant will be performed in the near future, resulting in a rich person’s head being transplanted on to a poor person’s body. “They can have a nice life with lots of money, sex, drugs and gambling in Monte Carlo,” he said of the resulting two-person hybrid that would emerge. “They would discuss it with psychologists, lawyers.”

He has already come up with a plan that will best ensure his own chances for revival (storing half his brain in Russia and half elsewhere to hedge against a natural disaster) and is plotting how to recruit more potential patients from countries as far away as Ecuador, bringing the bodies back in the cargo of commercial airliners. “If we have enough time to prepare, we could possibly do [the preservation] anywhere. We could do it in Antarctica,” Medvedev told me. KrioRus’s dream, he added, was to bring the Scott expedition explorers — frozen there in 1912 — back to their laboratory. “There is still time to get there. Most likely the temperature was low enough that we could preserve the brains and revive them in the future. It’s still on our to-do list.”

 . . . 

If KrioRus is the Lada of the cryonics world, Arizona’s Alcor is the Mercedes-Benz. The world’s largest cryonics company, Alcor conducts tours of its site twice a week, showing off its operating room, where vitrification and freezing take place, and the so-called long-term patient care bay. Here frozen clients are kept in sleek, Alcor-branded steel capsules that look a bit like giant Thermos flasks. The room’s viewing window is said to be made of bulletproof glass.

Alcor’s hallmark conference this year took place in October at a four-star Arizona resort where the couple of hundred cryonicists in attendance mingled alongside golfers and pool-goers. It was a predominately white, male and largely older crowd — an age demographic that wasn’t accidental, Max More, Alcor’s chief executive, told me. It’s called cryocrastination, he said. “The younger you are, the less likely you are to need [cryonics].”

More, a muscular Briton from Bristol who sports a wardrobe of matching black T-shirts and blazers, joined Alcor as a member at the age of 22. After graduating from Oxford with a degree in philosophy, politics and economics in 1987, he came to the US in 1988 and went on to become Alcor’s chief executive at the end of 2010 following a series of scandals at the company. These included claims of embezzlement by one employee as well as a book that claimed Alcor had mistreated the frozen head of baseball star Ted Williams. (Alcor denies the allegations.)

Like Medvedev, More is less of a scientist than a salesman for the future. “I feel like it’s pretty controversial to say this but things get better over time,” he said when I asked why he would want to come back in the future. “I feel like we have this myth of the Garden of Eden and the past as paradise. But it wasn’t. It was a horrible place. Would you like to go back to a century or so before you were able to vote and you were essentially your husband’s property? Would you like to go back to a time when we had slaves?”

Alcor patients, he added, would come back to a world that was just as good if not better than the one they had left. “If we’ve completely destroyed our environment and have a massive economic decline, we won’t be able to afford to bring people back. The very fact that [we] have been revived means that things are pretty good.”

The language at Alcor is unfailingly cheerful across the board. The clients are not called corpses, they are patients. They don’t get frozen, they’re suspended. The frozen state is known as stasis, and the revival process is referred to as reanimation. The company brochures feature a smiling, happy couple on the cover (Alcor’s chief financial officer and her partner). Then there’s the gallows humour. “Please if you have to die, die of cancer. We like cancer! It’s more predictable,” More tells the conference at one point. “Try not to pass away on a weekend,” Steve Graber, another staff member, jokes.

Alcor currently has 1,053 live members who plan to freeze themselves and are counting on the company to reach their dead body within 24 hours and perform the cryopreservation. About three-quarters of those members are men. At the moment, Alcor has 141 people cryopreserved inside its facility. The company also has a separate programme for young cryonicists with 115 members between the ages of 13 and 29. One family has signed up their five daughters.

David Wallace Croft, a computer programmer from Dallas, Texas, said two of his six children — aged 15 and 18 — had signed up for Alcor, although it had created some familial tensions. “My wife isn’t on board at all. She finds the whole thing silly and embarrassing,” he said. Raised in the Southern Baptist Church, Croft, 47, says he decided to leave after reading 1984 in high school. He and another Alcor member, Tripper McCarthy, belong to the Society for Universal Immortalism, a religious group that tries to incorporate church rituals into atheism and transhumanism.

Like Croft, McCarthy is also a computer programmer and a libertarian. His cat Pip is already suspended at Alcor. “My wife called me at work and said, ‘Pip is dead! Pip is dead!’ And I said, Grab the ice!’” He rushed home from work and drove the 380 miles from Los Angeles to Scottsdale overnight with a friend. The cost for Pip’s cryonic preservation? $4,500.

At the conference, there are a handful of twentysomethings, including a few software engineers and programmers from the Bay Area. But even More admits that Alcor has struggled to attract new members. Linda Chamberlain, a cryonics pioneer and Alcor co-founder together with her late husband Fred, says there are sometimes problems keeping older members excited about cryonics once they start enduring the physical and psychological tolls of old age. “When you’re young, there is this biological urge for survival. It’s strongest when you’re young. There are so many people I’ve seen who were fire-breathing cryonicists when they were young and then lost the desire.”

Over the course of the weekend, I meet David Pizer, an Arizona resort operator who is running as the first openly pro-cryonics candidate for the US Senate; a man who hopes cryopreservation will allow him to come back and live out his long-held dream of becoming an astronaut; and Jordan Sparks, the founder of a cryonics start-up in Salem, Oregon, who hopes to take advantage of the state’s Death with Dignity Act and create a euthanasia room inside his clinic.


Those who elect to sign up seem to fall into two categories. The first consists of people who consider themselves pioneers and would be quite content to come back in the future, knowing no one and nothing of the current culture. The second is of people scared both by the prospect of death and by the finality that comes with saying goodbye to a loved one for ever, a feeling most sceptics would find hard not to empathise with.

Of those two categories, Gary Abramson and Maria Entraigues-Abramson probably fall into the former. A photogenic couple who live in Los Angeles, the two met at a conference devoted to life extension and married not long after. “I had this curiosity since I was a little girl about ageing. I always felt it was something that was not right,” Entraigues-Abramson told me. “If you’re frozen, you’re locked in time,” Abramson chimed in. “If you wait 100 years or 1,000 years or however much time it takes for the technology to develop, it doesn’t matter. I’m sure it’s a split second for your experience. It may be a one in one thousand chance. But the alternative is a 100 per cent guarantee annihilation of your existence.”

“And if you don’t like it in the future, you can always die again if you want to,” Entraigues-Abramson said. “You can take a peek and say, ‘I like it’ or ‘I don’t. I’d rather be dead.’” She added: “People think cryonics is freaky but lying in the ground and decomposing isn’t? What’s the difference?”

 . . . 

Back in Moscow from Arizona, I take one last trip to KrioRus. Medvedev and Udalova are just back from Necropolis — the Russian funeral directors’ association annual conference — and both seemed ecstatic. “Today at Necropolis was fantastic!” Medvedev emailed me. “I didn’t expect it to go that well!!!” Representatives from all of Russia’s funeral homes had been there, including the industry leader, a Novosibirsk institution so big that it houses its own museum of death and hosts an annual rock concert, Udalova told me. Among those advertising their services had been cremators that can turn a deceased loved one’s ashes into a pencil or an artificial diamond, and a company that will scatter ashes in space. “They had a nice big stand right at the entrance but nobody was looking at it,” Medvedev said of the space burial group. “The whole time everyone was trying to talk to us.” He added: “People in the funeral industry are very forward-looking in Russia and looking to change something.”

Meanwhile, Udalova, his co-founder, has made inroads with embalmers who would be able to help with the aesthetic part of the freezing (“Right now all the focus is on the brain, which means we don’t pay any attention to the face or the visual presentation,” Medvedev said.) He added that KrioRus was trying to persuade the Moscow city government that the 8,000 homeless bodies left unclaimed in morgues each year should be cryogenically frozen in the new Tver facilities — a cheaper way to store the bodies, according to the company. “If we have 8,000 people being cryopreserved, it will be a big step,” he said. “People are dying all the time and something needs to be done with the bodies. For us it’s a way to educate people.”

What about the time frame for bringing them back? Medvedev forecasts that scientists will be able to revive the brain in the next 40 years. “It’s not possible to revive the brain today but we know we can revive parts of it. Artificial organs, stem cells, artificial intelligence — all these technologies can be used to revive a person. It just depends on the regulatory and social climate,” he said. “It’s very likely we will have the technology to reanimate a human brain by 2050 and if not, sometime in the 21st century almost certainly — if we don’t destroy ourselves,” he added quickly.

On the one hand, I can immediately tell that I wouldn't be able to stand the people quoted in the article, with their cats and allusions to a progressive new world.

But the weirdos aside, I find the idea of cryo-freezing to be somewhat appealing. Hope is the most precious thing in life and it is its absence that is most crushing. I am not a religious person, and the idea of a spiritual afterlife is of no comfort to me, which means that each passing year brings me closer to the inevitable cessation of existence.

Would I feel slightly better about being an old geezer tottering on the edge of the abyss if I knew that the moment I died I would be shunted straight to a "stasis chamber" from Alien instead of a coffin to rot and be eaten by worms? I know it sounds retarded, but frankly I would. And that is where I see the true value of this cryofreezing service: not in offering the infinitesimal possibility of being revived centuries from now, but in providing the tiny glimmer of comfort while I am still alive. And since it's not like I'd need the money once I'm dead, paying for something like this is a no-lose proposition.

It is a scam. They are selling the dream of immortality. It is better to fear death, and make something of your life.

Look at the people who are doing it. That was the best observation you made. They belong in the "Things Losers Say" thread.

It is like the people who send their jizz to a sperm bank. It is the dream of being a parent without any of the hassles. Immortality again. Living on through the descendants you never met.

The dream of immortality is universal, no doubt. These bastards are cashing in on it, and all their clients are going to be the helpless dead.

A bible is cheaper.

I agree with all that. The problem is, I cannot make myself believe in the bible, whereas the concept of cryopreservation makes sense on a level of basic physical laws. This, combined with the idea that we cannot predict what will be possible for the technology in the very distant future creates the possibility that I may some day reawaken, however remote that possibility actually is. And that is all that I would be paying for: a tiny, vanishing chance of life after death is still the avoidance of the finality of death.

Would I pay for this while I'm alive and not a geezer? Hell not. When I'm 80 and/or already dead? Why not. I certainly won't be needing the money. It's kind of funny to suggest they are "preying" on the dead. Once you're dead, there is nothing (negative) that anyone can do to you.

Quote: (12-28-2015 01:27 PM)Fast Eddie Wrote:  

Would I pay for this while I'm alive and not a geezer? Hell not. When I'm 80 and/or already dead? Why not.

I was being facetious about the Bible. It doesn't hurt anyone else if you want to do this.

I have done goofier things than that to bring myself a measure of solace.

My main point is that coming to terms with your mortality is a struggle that is worth undertaking for the lessons you learn.

Quote: (12-28-2015 01:34 PM)debeguiled Wrote:  

Quote: (12-28-2015 01:27 PM)Fast Eddie Wrote:  

Would I pay for this while I'm alive and not a geezer? Hell not. When I'm 80 and/or already dead? Why not.

I was being facetious about the Bible. It doesn't hurt anyone else if you want to do this.

I have done goofier things than that to bring myself a measure of solace.

My main point is that coming to terms with your mortality is a struggle that is worth undertaking for the lessons you learn.

There is nothing to really be said about coming to terms with mortality. You can try to twist your mind into all sorts of weird contortions to make yourself feel better but at the end of the day you are swallowing a very bitter, rotten lemon and there is no two ways about it. I personally don't have the mental discipline to come to terms with it, and in fact I don't think it's fully possible for anyone. I think it's far easier to swallow having a shitty job and a fat wife than the fact that you will die, yet it's not exactly a piece of cake to make your mind believe your are happy with the shitty job and the fat wife.

Quote: (12-28-2015 01:44 PM)Fast Eddie Wrote:  

You can try to twist your mind into all sorts of weird contortions to make yourself feel better but at the end of the day you are swallowing a very bitter, rotten lemon and there is no two ways about it.

They don't look that much different from one another:






But if it makes you happy, have at it.

This field is not just retarded from a philosophical point of view (as confirmed by all the degenerates who are the most interested in it), but also represents a huge fraud. I looked up one of those articles mentioned and it does a good job of thoroughly debunking the new-age nonsense that cryonics are filled with:

Quote:Michael Hendricks Wrote:

The False Science of Cryonics

Proponents have added a patina of scientific plausibility to this idea by citing the promise of new technologies in neuroscience, particularly recent work in “connectomics”—a field that maps the connections between neurons. The suggestion is that a detailed map of neural connections could be enough to restore a person’s mind, memories, and personality by uploading it into a computer simulation.

Science tells us that a map of connections is not sufficient to simulate, let alone replicate, a nervous system, and that there are enormous barriers to achieving immortality in silico. First, what information is required to replicate a human mind? Second, do current or foreseeable freezing methods preserve the necessary information, and how will this information be recovered? Third, and most confounding to our intuition, would a simulation really be “you”?

I study a small roundworm, Caenorhabditis elegans, which is by far the best-described animal in all of biology. We know all of its genes and all of its cells (a little over 1,000). We know the identity and complete synaptic connectivity of its 302 neurons, and we have known it for 30 years.

If we could “upload” or roughly simulate any brain, it should be that of C. elegans. Yet even with the full connectome in hand, a static model of this network of connections lacks most of the information necessary to simulate the mind of the worm. In short, brain activity cannot be inferred from synaptic neuroanatomy.
....
Synapses are the physical contacts between neurons where a special form of chemoelectric signaling—neurotransmission—occurs, and they come in many varieties. They are complex molecular machines made of thousands of proteins and specialized lipid structures. It is the precise molecular composition of synapses and the membranes they are embedded in that confers their properties. The presence or absence of a synapse, which is all that current connectomics methods tell us, suggests that a possible functional relationship between two neurons exists, but little or nothing about the nature of this relationship—precisely what you need to know to simulate it.

Additionally, neurons and other cells in the brain are in constant communication through signaling pathways that do not act through synapses. Many of the signals that regulate fundamental behaviors such as eating, sleeping, mood, mating, and social bonding are mediated by chemical cues acting through networks that are invisible to us anatomically. We know that the same set of synaptic connections can function very differently depending on what mix of these signals is present at a given time. These issues highlight an important distinction: the colossally hard problem of simulating any brain as opposed to the stupendously more difficult task of replicating a particular brain, which is required for the promised personal immortality of uploading.
...
The features of your neurons (and other cells) and synapses that make you “you” are not generic. The vast array of subtle chemical modifications, states of gene regulation, and subcellular distributions of molecular complexes are all part of the dynamic flux of a living brain. These things are not details that average out in a large nervous system; rather, they are the very things that engrams (the physical constituents of memories) are made of.

While it might be theoretically possible to preserve these features in dead tissue, that certainly is not happening now. The technology to do so, let alone the ability to read this information back out of such a specimen, does not yet exist even in principle. It is this purposeful conflation of what is theoretically conceivable with what is ever practically possible that exploits people’s vulnerability.

Finally, would an upload really be you? This is unanswerable, but we can dip our toes in. Whatever our subjective sense of self is, let’s assume it arises from the operation of the physical matter of the brain. We could also tentatively conclude that such awareness is substrate-neutral: if brains can be conscious, a computer program that does everything a brain does should be conscious, too. If one is also willing to imagine arbitrarily complex technology, then we can also think about simulating a brain down to the synaptic or molecular or (why not?) atomic or quantum level.

But what is this replica? Is it subjectively “you” or is it a new, separate being? The idea that you can be conscious in two places at the same time defies our intuition. Parsimony suggests that replication will result in two different conscious entities. Simulation, if it were to occur, would result in a new person who is like you but whose conscious experience you don’t have access to.

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/541...-cryonics/

Quote: (12-28-2015 02:01 PM)debeguiled Wrote:  

They don't look that much different from one another:






But if it makes you happy, have at it.

We'll see who who'll have the last laugh when one of us is laying in a wooden casket and the other is chilling through the centuries in a tricked out, pimped out cryo-coffin brah!

@HCE

The whole idea behind cryopreservation is that it will deliver your corpse into a future in which the technology does exist. I feel like I emphasized this ad infinitum ad nauseum already but here it goes again:

Yes, I know the probability of this working is so infinitesimally small as to be nearly impossible.

But since I will be dead anyway and will have no need for the money, I see no downside in paying for that infinitesimal chance. I'm not losing anything by doing so.

Worst case scenario, I'll be dead. Just like I would have been without the cryofreeze. I don't see any reason to so strenuously object

Yes, but the whole point is that the information is gone and it's gone forever. It's the non-existent storage technology that matters - not the hypothetical future one that will make use of the information. There's nothing to make use of, no matter the future advances.

However, if someone wants to waste their money on this, more power to them.

Quote: (12-28-2015 02:24 PM)Handsome Creepy Eel Wrote:  

Yes, but the whole point is that the information is gone and it's gone forever. It's the non-existent storage technology that matters - not the hypothetical future one that will make use of the information. There's nothing to make use of, no matter the future advances.

However, if someone wants to waste their money on this, more power to them.

Fair enough. It's important to note though that we don't know enough about the brain at this point to even know what level of information is necessary to replicate the information flow. Sure, the chemical and ionic environment of the brain contributes just as much to the brain's activity as the actual synaptic architecture.

But is it theoretically possible to derive the chemical and ionic environment from the synaptic architecture? Not currently, perhaps not ever. But possibly, we don't know. Perhaps in 200 years, neuroscience and computational simulation will be so advanced that neuronal architecture preserved through freezing could be used to recreate the chemical environment. There is some sort of theory about informational completeness that I'm trying but failing to recall here. Something like, if you knew certain information about the parameters of every particle during the big bang you could predict literally everything that would ever happen in subsequent eons, given the computational tools.

In the case of the brain, this concept may work in reverse: given enough fundamental neuroscience knowledge and the synaptic layout of a brain, it may (or may not) be possible to work out the other bits of information that are not captured by the physical structure of the synapses but are nevertheless closely related to them and arose in the environment that those structures created.

Quote: (12-28-2015 01:44 PM)Fast Eddie Wrote:  

Quote: (12-28-2015 01:34 PM)debeguiled Wrote:  

Quote: (12-28-2015 01:27 PM)Fast Eddie Wrote:  

Would I pay for this while I'm alive and not a geezer? Hell not. When I'm 80 and/or already dead? Why not.

I was being facetious about the Bible. It doesn't hurt anyone else if you want to do this.

I have done goofier things than that to bring myself a measure of solace.

My main point is that coming to terms with your mortality is a struggle that is worth undertaking for the lessons you learn.

There is nothing to really be said about coming to terms with mortality. You can try to twist your mind into all sorts of weird contortions to make yourself feel better but at the end of the day you are swallowing a very bitter, rotten lemon and there is no two ways about it. I personally don't have the mental discipline to come to terms with it, and in fact I don't think it's fully possible for anyone. I think it's far easier to swallow having a shitty job and a fat wife than the fact that you will die, yet it's not exactly a piece of cake to make your mind believe your are happy with the shitty job and the fat wife.

I imagine that you're a young man, and you're mostly motivated in your thinking because of this.

When you're in your 80s, you'll have different thoughts on the matter. Most people reach a certain age, and although death may concern them, it doesn't concern them they way it would a young person in the prime of their life. It's not that they abandon hope. It's not an overnight change in their beliefs or outlook. It's a journey of mental development that takes a lifetime, and the destination for all of us is the same.

The billionaires who spend money on this shit do so because they come to the stark reality that only one thing is out of reach for them financially. All the money in world will not buy you one second of time. You can have yachts, palatial estates, exotic cars, countless exotic women to satisfy every sexual depravity you can imagine. Plastic surgery, hair transplants, and hormone injections can mask the signs of aging, but they can't eliminate them.

Quote: (12-28-2015 02:10 PM)Fast Eddie Wrote:  

We'll see who who'll have the last laugh when one of us is laying in a wooden casket and the other is chilling through the centuries in a tricked out, pimped out cryo-coffin brah!

You call that being alive?

Quote: (12-28-2015 03:06 PM)porscheguy Wrote:  

Quote: (12-28-2015 02:10 PM)Fast Eddie Wrote:  

We'll see who who'll have the last laugh when one of us is laying in a wooden casket and the other is chilling through the centuries in a tricked out, pimped out cryo-coffin brah!

You call that being alive?

Sealed next to Captain Janeway forever and ever. . .

First off, the biggest problem I see with cryonics is this:



A single event can wipe out your prospects for immortality. It could be a power failure. It could be the bankruptcy or dissolution of the organization that keeps you in deep freeze. It could be an errant revival procedure. Or the costs of revival could be prohibitively expensive (people who are long gone aren't very good at coughing up cash). I think OP's article hits the nail on the head; the odds of it working could very well be one in a thousand.

Second, is it actually worth it? Let's crunch some numbers. OP's article says that the cost for a full body freeze is $36,000. Given that the odds of the freeze working out are about one in a thousand, you would be valuing your life at around $36 million ($36,000/0.001 = $36,000,000).

You can argue that a life (especially your own) is priceless, but that's a tough sell in a world with scarce resources. It's impossible to spend all the money in the world to try to live forever. When promulgating safety regulations, the U.S. federal government values a statical life at around $5 million. If a government assumed that human life was priceless, bureaucrats could justify any regulation under the sun by saying it could save a single life.

So what would I tell you? Despite the seemingly low costs, you would still be overpaying by about $31 million. Wait for the costs to go down further or the chances of success to increase.

Only way I could theoretically see some form of immortality is through storing your consciousness in a computer and download it into another body.

Fancy new tech is always possible over time. Just because it doesn't exist yet does not rule it out. We have ships that weigh 70,000 tonnes that can ride waves and have thousands of people on board sipping wine, floating on their lilo's in the dozen or so pools onboard.

We're sending men to another planet entirely within 50 years. Tell that to those who lived 200+ years ago.

Trying to directly simulate a brain in a computer by creating data structures to mimic the behavior of neurons strikes me as a dumb way to do computer science. Computers process information in a fundamentally different manner than a brain:

Computer: CPU, graphics CPU, registers, RAM, and disk memory are all separate and swappable parts. A modern CPU is capable of several billion extremely simple operations per second, i.e. add/subtract/bitwise logic two numbers, move a number from one place to another, move the instruction pointer from one place to another. Each operation doesn't do much, but billions in a row can simulate all sort of complex things.

Brains: Massively parallel, each neuron emits signals based on what kind of neurotransmitters it's getting as input combined with whatever hormones its swimming in, and if you believe in religion there's even an extradimensional entity that can only project the electromagnetic force into our dimension via neurons, which will be rewarded/punished for an eternity based on how it manipulates those neurons.

These two computing models are so far apart that there's no way one can emulate the other without slowdown. I don't add numbers up to 32,768 within a billionth of a second, and computers can grind for minutes trying to process visual information that we get within a second.

So how would I simulate a human brain if I wasn't already busy developing Super Hentai Battle Whore CCG for Japanimation-obsessed manchildren? I wouldn't try to look at a brain cells with a microscope and then try to make a program that copies them, since that would be hard and probably wouldn't work right. I would write software designed to observe everything a person does over a long period of time, and then attempt to copy that behavior. Facebook is already doing most of this, by carefully observing user behavior in order to target ads or report users to the German government for crimethink. It would be fairly straightforward to make a program that can observe a person's facebook posts and then emulate them afterwards by skimming news articles and friend posts and predicting how that person would respond. Just extend that premise to an interactive robot and bang, you're immortal.

Obviously this isn't a particularly satisfying solution, since presumably your soul is still burning in hell for an eternity, and the robot is still just a mindless automation that's providing responses based on programmed input. On the other hand, you just might be a biological mindless automaton that's provdiing responses based on programmed input, so was there really a loss of information?

This nonsense was all the rage back in the 80s. I remember it vividly as a kid.

Nothing new in the World folks.

Fools and their money and all that...

One thing I don't get about people against cryonics is the alternative: rotting with worms. Yes, it seems very unlikely that we'd be thawed out and resurrected, but I'd rather take that small chance than none at all. The arguments against storage mediums being available etc are all valid, however is there really anyone alive today that has enough domain expertise to know for a fact that a frozen brain would not store sufficient information to resurrect it in the future? If we can extract DNA from dinosaur bones and potentially in the future clone them, I'd say we shouldn't be too quick to dismiss things as scientists may have done so at this prospect in the 1800's.

Not sure if anyone is familiar with the longecity community, but there's a lot of interesting research going on in this area that is discussed. I too share the same skepticisms, particularly in regards to a corporation based on profit actually carrying out its promise, especially when the government considers the frozen brains to be dead anyway (thus no liability). This is more of a concern in my mind than the current technology. Despite that however, I'd rather have a 1% of a chance at resurrection than 0%.

If I had the money I would do it.

Being big into Science Fiction and researching technology of the future I'd love to have even an incredibly small chance to see what the world will be like in the future when I have long since passed.

Technology has gotten to the point where my great grandparents plowed the earth with oxen and stored food in a hole in the ground but lived to see NASA put a man on the moon via TV broadcast.

I'm inclined to call these investors stupid for spending 80-200K for experimental cryonic storage, but with the pace of technology, they might have the last laugh.

if they do find a way to cheat death it will only be for the wealthy elite I doubt any average person will be given the privilege of immortality.

Quote: (12-28-2015 01:27 PM)Fast Eddie Wrote:  

I agree with all that. The problem is, I cannot make myself believe in the bible, whereas the concept of cryopreservation makes sense on a level of basic physical laws.

Maybe you should make peace with that spiritual aspect of yourself. There are a million things working against you from being able to keep yourself alive forever.

However, there isn't anything impeding you from trying to understand your spirituality right now.

And finally, for all we know if they figure out how to revive your body it might just be an animated vegetable. Meaning your body survived but your consciousness didn't make it through.

There's more to consciousness and life than science can give us right now. I'd rather work on cultivating a spiritual side to sooth the fear of death rather than fight it where the odds of losing are way higher.

Quote: (01-05-2016 10:20 AM)The Beast1 Wrote:  

Quote: (12-28-2015 01:27 PM)Fast Eddie Wrote:  

I agree with all that. The problem is, I cannot make myself believe in the bible, whereas the concept of cryopreservation makes sense on a level of basic physical laws.

Maybe you should make peace with that spiritual aspect of yourself. There are a million things working against you from being able to keep yourself alive forever.

However, there isn't anything impeding you from trying to understand your spirituality right now.

And finally, for all we know if they figure out how to revive your body it might just be an animated vegetable. Meaning your body survived but your consciousness didn't make it through.

There's more to consciousness and life than science can give us right now. I'd rather work on cultivating a spiritual side to sooth the fear of death rather than fight it where the odds of losing are way higher.

Barring perhaps in some cases a major life perspective changing event (near death experience for instance, or a girl slutting it up for 20 years and feeling a need for divine forgiveness) it's pretty damn hard - I'd say virtually impossible - for most of us atheists to suddenly start believing in what we consider silly superstition about on par with, but slightly less entertaining, than fairy tales.

I've seen some manosphere articles the last year praising the virtues of religious beliefs in prospective LTR girls as well as as a counter to the degenerate nature of Western society. And while I think those make some very good points given that even intelligent atheists can certainly often agree with the moral foundations of Christianity (while on the other hand the prevalence of atheism among leftists, particularly in Western Europe, definitely seems to have played a part in the societal decline), that still doesn't make the rest of the religion package any easier to believe for some of us than say taking the latest Star Wars movie as historical fact.

But granted you said spirituality rather than religion, and in its loosest definition I guess that can be limited to the usefulness of eg. meditation and Zen quotes.