As an ex-biologist, I can assure you that horrible cellular damage is being committed to these "preserved" people. I used to flash-freeze all sorts of cells, ranging from bacteria (e. coli) to animal (IMCD3 and MDCK kidney) to human (Human Embryonic Kidney, Primary cortical and hippocampal neurons).

These protocols are pretty simple. Pellet and re-suspend a small vial of cells to dilute out the media, replace with a special preservation media then dunk the entire 5mL vial in a big pot of liquid nitrogen for a few minutes. Then it goes into the deep freezer (-80C).

Sadly, even though this is a tiny aliquot that is frozen almost instantly, cell death on thawing and resuspension is immense. Like, it's a good day if 50% of the cells live. It usually doesn't matter, since these cell lines are immortalized and they just start growing again, but it illustrates the point. Despite the most ideal circumstances, cells hate to be frozen.

Now, imagine you are trying to flash freeze an entire body. They do this by perfusing preservation media through your blood, relying on your body's circulatory system to get the media in all the right places. This takes time. Perfusing a small mouse with formaldehyde takes at least 5-10 minutes. A human body? Practically ages I would guess.

All the while, cells are dieing left and right because they are no longer getting a steady supply of oxygen (and instead a bath of relatively cytotoxic preservation media). When the body is finally perfused fully and dunked into liquid nitrogen...flash freezing isn't immediate. The outer layers freeze much faster than the inner layers.

Ok, so just freeze the brain? Same problem as before, just on a slightly smaller scale.

Ignoring all the cell death that has been happening for the last hour, how about thawing? Well, let's pretend its a "good day" and 50% of your cells live. That might be ok for your skin, liver, or spleen - they are going to be unhappy but still alive. But 50% of your neurons dieing? Hmm. Also take into account that neurons don't regenerate. You just killed half your brain. Even super optimistic numbers, 70%-80% survival rate, still leave a lot of your brain as goo.

This is all just biology. I'm not even touching the morals and ethics of companies that are under no obligation to actually do what you paid them to do (since you are dead).

http://www.21cmpublications.com/

Or for a simpler starting point, the FAQs for scientists at Alcor:

http://alcor.org/sciencefaq.htm

You might also look at ongoing results from the Brain Preservation Technology Prize:

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2012/03/an-update-from-co...

Evidence-Based Cryonics has a lot of as-unbiased-as-you're-going-to-get stuff on the perfusion and ischemia issues associated with vitrification of tissue, as well as explorations of other commonly voiced objections. Just wade through the archives:

http://www.evidencebasedcryonics.org/

Also, since we seem to be arguing from authority here, you might look at this, noting that a number of the signatories are quite well known biologists:

http://www.evidencebasedcryonics.org/scientists-open-letter-...

Like I said, the current state of "businses cryonics" is basically astrology and wishful thinking. I also don't doubt that in ten, twenty, fifty years, scientists will have figured out how to do it (much better).

But right now? I'm saying nope.

(Addendum: most of those publications listed at 21cm are about thin slices, which isn't exactly relevant. The even better ones are oocytes, which are practically tanks of the cellular world. Drosophila oocytes are so large you can see them with your naked eye and can withstand enormous punishment before dieing. Using them as case studies of vitrification is not really being honest.

This brings me back to my original point: the science is solid...at an academic level. Once you move past 50 micron tissue slices, it all goes to hell.)

As for the problem of outer layers freezing faster than inner layers, I think this is mostly addressed by filling the brain with anti-freeze first.

Now, I'm rather skeptical of the whole process myself, but the crynoics guys understand biology 101.

If someone could freeze at least a small insect brain after it "learned something", unfreeze it and prove that it retained what it learned, I might have at least a grain of faith in this. Even getting an insect ganglia out on a feeder plate with electrodes, training it to respond in a way to a certain sequence of input electrical impulses and proving that after thawing and reanimation it still preserves that memory would light a spark of faith, but we don't even have this!

Understanding "biology 101" means understanding that biology is about experiments, everyth is empirical (and will be for quite some time I guess), nothing can be said that "it works" in biology or medicine until you experimentally prove it does. Maybe in a few centuries we'll have cool equations describing life and have something like "theoretical biology" that will be like theoretical physics is to physics (no, what we call "theoretical biology" nowadays is not that!). Show me some equations (derived from experiments, of course, and that can predict other experiments of course) describing the amount of information relevant to a human's personality that can be recovered from a frozen brain! If you can't, prove it experimentally. If you can't... bad luck! With the kinds of probabilities involved in biology, "good things" (like being lucky to be able to revive a frozen human brain) don't happen by chance!

"Nature"/"The universe"/"God" is NOT on our side on this path, so there's no room for optimistic thinking, we can only rely on cold (literally) hard science and math!

Cryopreservation advocates do not claim that the process is proven to be work, they claim that the chance may be small, but it's non-zero.

>"Nature"/"The universe"/"God" is NOT on our side on this path, so there's no room for optimistic thinking, we can only rely on cold (literally) hard science and math!

I don't even know where you're going with this discourse. If you're a utilitarian rationalist you can estimate the chance of success for cryopreservation and revival. It's quite easy to show that if the probability is non-zero, then it's beneficial to make such a bet, as the possible positive utility can be huge if the cryopreservation is succesful.

If you think that probability estimates are "not science" and therefore "irrational", you don't know what you're talking about. If you think that current scientific evidence shows that the chance of revival is zero, then you're clearly wrong (and that would contradict your own claims, as zero chance would mean there's no need to make any new experiments).

They implicitly claim that not only is the chance non-zero, but that it's large enough to be worth the opportunity cost of actually freezing people. I agree that a non-zero chance seems obvious, but this claim definitely does not, and needs a lot more substantiation than there actually is.

It is true that chances can't just be "non-zero" and be rational, nor simply based on faith, because that's basically Pascal's Wager. However I think my 1-10% gut feeling is something that I could probably be talked out of if it were really arbitrarily low like people keep assuming.

Assuming that probability range, I think selling to ordinary people is pretty defensible at $50k-$500k rates, because we already spend around $5M to avoid accidental deaths via regulatory tradeoffs. If it is lower (0.1% say) and yet still not arbitrarily low, we would then need to restrict to either very rich or very desperate people (where the ratio of marginal utility of life to marginal utility of a dollar differs significantly from the norm). Arbitrarily low chances literally on level with egyptian mummification or worshipping a random god is definitely not something that should be sold to anyone (except as a novelty maybe).

Note also that cryonics storage cost is influenced by economies of scale, so mass-produced cryonics is likely to be a lot less expensive per person than the cost you see on the market today. If you could seriously measure a non-arbitrary 0.01% it wouldn't necessarily be impossible to justify even on the mass market and even to relatively death-complacent people -- it would just have to be very cheap for them. Granted, gut feelings are hard to calibrate well to reality at such extremes (hence lottery tickets) so I'm not going to seriously argue that, I'm just saying this to give you a feel for why I think there's a need for fairly strong counterargument before you can reasonably take the position that cryonics is just innately bad/fraudulent business.

I also anticipate various positive externalities from the cryonics business, such as sooner (eventual) development of suspended animation of the damage-free variety, which has potential to save a lot of lives and spare a lot of suffering. These too should be accounted for as part of a robust criticism.

You can look it this way: life after rewarming can last for hundreds of years, easily a thousand as medical technology will have advanced at that point. People are currently willing to pay $100k in medical bills to extend their life by about one year with 50% chance, which means that the cost is $200k per year.

Cryopreservation also costs about $100k (slightly more in real life I guess, I'm rounding numbers for simplicity).

If cryopreservation has a 1% of success to extend life by 1000 years for $100k, then they will "buy" 1 year for $10k. Of course, you can change the numbers (in any direction), e.g. 100 years of life would come out to $100k per year, still cheaper than what most people are willing to pay today to live slightly longer. The 1% success rate is rather pessimistic, too.

If you take quality of life into consideration, the argument starts to favour cryonics quite heavily (we can assume that life is a lot better in the future thanks to advancement of technology).

Where do you get that? From what little I understand, 1% seems highly optimistic, given how destructive the freezing process is at the moment.

I'm just emphasizing that this technology is not a realistic solution to anything, just as a lottery ticket is not a solution for one's financial problems. I may choose to buy a lottery ticket myself, same as I may choose to have my head frozen, but I'm not going to consider this as a real solution to any problem - just like a lottery ticket, it may have more "entertainment" value than real value (though the "entertainment" value may be enough for me to buy it).

My only point is that we should always see the difference between "lottery tickets" and real solutions, and always see the former as what they are: hope growing "entertainment" forms... I know, most people don't like this way of looking at things and label it "dark and gloomy", but it's how I see it :)

As we're using analogies: we know that machine-flight is possible. But how many people broke their legs after gluing feathers to wings strapped to their arms and jumping off a barn, flapping wildly, before Kitty Hawk flew?

I am all for keeping a bit of hope alive, but a non-zero chance argument on its own is not enough. What is the probability exactly, can it be proven.

The "non-zero" argument can be fixed simply by comparing relative likelihoods, or noting that while one can't ever rationally believe with 0% probability, you can use epsilon as a substitute for "it's more than 0 but I can't measure how much because it's so small". Personally I think there's enough evidence to put religious ideas of afterlife far below the probability of a single sha256 hash resulting in a new block in the bitcoin blockchain: http://blockexplorer.com/q/probability

Actually, you can get away with assigning anything you want. That's hidden in the assumption that the criteria he lists are more-or-less independent.

> You might have a different list of criteria or different probabilities, but the point is to lay them down and give a reason why you think it's unlikely enough not to pay the small sum of money.

You've got the burden of proof backward. The cryonics advocates are the ones trying to argue that cryonics will work with sufficiently high probability to make investing in it worthwhile. The grandparent cited 5% as if that figure had even one significant digit -- which it doesn't, by Hanson's own calculation.

> It also lets others argue with you over your estimates, because they might have information you don't, now or in future years.

It also lets others argue even if they don't have new information, which just wastes everyone's time. The same phenomena also occurs with the Drake equation.

Part of this isn't really biology (as we know it) though, so I'm not sure that biologists who criticize are seeing the whole picture. Look at it like a cryptographer: Is putting a brain in liquid nitrogen a secure erasure method against all future attacks from a determined opponent with lots of resources? Would you trust your financial data to such a method of data erasure?

> "Nature"/"The universe"/"God" is NOT on our side on this path, so there's no room for optimistic thinking, we can only rely on cold (literally) hard science and math!

I like this sentiment, I wish more cryonics people took it to heart, but at the same time I don't believe that "The Force" is actually against us. There is some reasonable burden of proof on the assertion that the data is is utterly gone and out of reach of all realistic future technology.

Actually, they mostly understand Psychology 101, which is that people are willing to pay unlimited amounts of money for the promise of life after death. SEE ALSO: turning lead into gold.

> Alcor has no company owners to profit from cryonics, salaries are modest, and the Board of Directors serves without pay.

Why not cut out the middle-man? Just do a full brain scan and store the digital data until the nano-bots arrive? Then just recreate brains within stock bodies or some virtual/machine environment?

Clinging to the freezing and thawing, when you're forced to concede they won't actually work and then having to invent far superior technologies, but only applying them as a band-aid over the broken technology, looks an awful lot more like someone with a belief grasping for intellectual cover, rather than someone with an intellectual understanding positing solutions.

Because we don't currently have the technology to either scan or store a 3-d scan of your brain in the same resolution you can get by physically perfusing it with antifreeze and dropping it into a bucket of liquid nitrogen.

Even the lesser amount of damage may be too much. Cryonics is a bet that it is not.

What we know about the rest of the world is that this does not work, it will cause extensive damage even if it could work, so it would not necessarily re-generate the same person even if it did work [1] and that humans are notoriously awful at projecting technological advances 50 years out, to say nothing of our track record of projections even further.

Extrapolation of current technology, from any particular point in our history, points us in wildly incorrect directions. See: the history of people proclaiming us on the verge of vanquishing death. "too cheap to meter" energy. Nuclear cars. Flying cars. Lab-grown meat. Off-world colonies in the far-off year 2000. Choose an AI prediction. Choose a cloning prediction.

The notion that some technology has worked in the past, so a particular technology has some chance of working, is as flawed as "it appeared that my last prayer was answered, so my next one has a chance". Both require selective reporting from the available data to even entertain.

[1] There are no shortage of case studies of people who've sustained comparatively minor brain trauma and been reduced to mere shadows of themselves, if not manifested new and almost entirely different personalities.

You might as well argue that nano-bots will be able to reanimate a body that has decomposed, and save money on all the freezing equipment. Perhaps that will be the case if given enough time, but we seem to be a long way away from that technology.

The business model seems to be "give us money now, and the technology that could make this work will probably be invented soon enough. Probably".

No, you might not as well argue that. If you think you can, then please argue how you can retrive information from a completely decomposed brain. On the other hand, it's pretty reasonable to assume that a cryopreserved brain preserves a lot of the information in the brain.

No! That's not at all reasonable. We understand very little about brains. We understand even less about deep-frozen brains.

Both of these things are impossible, at the current level of tech.

One or both of them might become possible through the use of sufficiently advanced technology.

> On the other hand, it's pretty reasonable to assume that a cryopreserved brain preserves a lot of the information in the brain.

See, I don't think it's reasonable to assume this.

I believe that both of these things are equally possible - that is, not very possible at all.

I believe it's incorrect to claim that the probability that a cryopreserved brain has some information about the brain structure is equal the the probability that a fully decomposed brain has after decades of decomposing (which is the scenario I have in mind).

I just don't understand how someone could make such a proposition. If we dig up a decomposed brain, it's just pretty much completely destroyed (e.g. fully decomposed) if we look at it with a microscope. I'm assuming that we're not talking about rare niche cases of fossilization etc.

To have an idea of how much information vitrification preserves, you should know that a kidney can be frozen and thawed, and replanted to a live animal.

We can also look at neural tissue after vitrification, like here: http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/braincryopreservation1.htm...

After you've looked at this probably new evidence presented to you, do you still seriously claim that it's exactly equally as possible to retrive information from a cryopreserved brain as it is from a decomposed brain?

I don't believe you actually think that. I think that you've made the mistake to take two extremely unequal yet different and small probabilities to mean exactly the same.

If you assume that the probability that cryopreservation is 0.1%, then you should think that the probability to retrieve information from a decomposed brain to be lower than 0.001%. They're both really small, but they're not unequal.

Do you think that the probability is exactly the same? I rate such beliefs as not only wrong, but ignorant of empirical evidence.

You are taking me literally, when you shouldn't - I was being flippant. Of course it is unlikely we will ever make the technology that can take the dust that, decades ago, used to make up a human brain, and somehow retrieve information from it.

The point I am making is that you said:

> On the other hand, it's pretty reasonable to assume that a cryopreserved brain preserves a lot of the information in the brain.

I flippantly argued that if your argument is "it's reasonable to assume science will solve the problem for us", you could apply that to essentially anything.

It used to be reasonable to assume that the world is flat, or that the world was the center of the universe.

I do not think we will somehow invent a machine that turns dust in to a working brain.

I do think that "it's reasonable to assume" is faulty logic when talking about something that is beyond the current reach of science, and should be questioned at every possible opportunity.

Now, you might say "but Mike, I provided links that back up my assumption" - and if that's the case, you are no longer "reasonably assuming" that this is true, but basing your belief of the scientific literature that outlines how such a thing is done. :)

Well, I don't believe that anything is reasonable, that applies merely to reasonable things.

>I do think that "it's reasonable to assume" is faulty logic when talking about something that is beyond the current reach of science, and should be questioned at every possible opportunity.

Just because it's beyond the reach of technology, doesn't mean it's faulty to talk about it. It's clear that it will be possible in principle to travel to other planets, cure aging etc., but we don't have the technology for that yet.

Sounds like that "cargo cult" variety of science.

And what's a brain antifreeze? Even biocompatible antifreeze proteins found in arctic oceans have a thermal threshold of 269K, which is no where near cryogenic temperature.

Vitrification avoids ice. Nanobots could e.g. remove toxic compounds from extracellular areas and replace them with nontoxic solutions, and deliver yet-to-be-invented drugs that would activate upon thawing.

> Even biocompatible antifreeze proteins found in arctic oceans have a thermal threshold of 269K, which is no where near cryogenic temperature.

The stuff invented by 21st Century Medicine and used to successfully cryopreserve a rabbit kidney is a combination of the ordinary kind of penetrating antifreeze that depresses the freezing point (glycerol, EG, DMSO, and the like) with polymers that inhibit ice nucleation (functionally similar to antifreeze proteins). It has been known for a while that you can vitrify slowly by using high concentrations of the former kind of solute (depress the freezing temperature to below the glass transition temperature and the cooling rate no longer matters) but the latter lets you get away with somewhat more water in the mix, is my understanding.

There's a tradeoff when you cool things, where if you get cold enough it slows toxicity. They don't perfuse with the stuff until the brain is already cooled to near 0 degrees C, and it is ramped in concentration over time to prevent osmotic shock.

They're not making any money off this, Alcor is a non-profit and the wages of the personnel involved are fairly low.

Not going to happen.

    “We know that secondary memory does not depend on continued activity of the nervous system, because the brain can be totally inactivated by cooling, by general anesthesia, by hypoxia, by ischemia, or by any method, and yet secondary memories that have been previously stored are still retained when the brain becomes active once again. Therefore, secondary memory must result from some actual alterations of the synapses, either physical or chemical.” — Textbook of Medical Physiology by Arthur C. Guyton (W.B. Saunders Company, Philadelphia, 1986), page 658.

    “Procedural and declarative memories differ dramatically. They use a different logic (unconscious vs. conscious recall) and they are stored in different areas of the brain. Nevertheless, these two disparate memory processes share several molecular steps and an overall molecular logic. Both are created in at least two stages: one that does not require the synthesis of new proteins and one that does. In both, short-term memory involves covalent modification of preexisting proteins and changes in the strength of preexisting synaptic connections, whereas long-term memory requires the synthesis of new proteins and the growth of new connections. Moreover, both forms of memory use PKA, mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK), CREB-1, and CREB-2 signaling pathways to convert short-term to long-term memory. Finally, both forms appear to use morphological changes at synapses to stabilize long-term memory.” — “Synapses and Memory Storage” by Mayford M, Siegelbaum SA, and Kandel ER. Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Biology, April 10, 2012, page 10.

If you take a HD and write over half the bits with zeroes, you will not be recovering much useful information from that with digital forensics.

(Yet.)

No, that's not very rational. Cryopreservation may have low chances of success, but it's like a billion billion billion times better than just dying (which has zero chance of success). Nobody is claiming that cryopreservation is very probable, but it's a lot better than nothing.

>Now, imagine you are trying to flash freeze an entire body.

I don't think your critique is very relevant, when almost all cryopreservation is only done to the brain, not the whole body.

>Ignoring all the cell death that has been happening for the last hour, how about thawing?

Thawing is not relevant to be discussed at this point, because the bodies will not be thawed using current technology. If the cryopreserved brain has enough information to be reconstructed, it will be done at some point using advanced nanotechnology. Nobody will be thawing brains using 21st century technology.

> I'm not even touching the morals and ethics of companies that are under no obligation to actually do what you paid them to do (since you are dead).

Yes, there are risks. Nobody is claiming that cryopreservation has a very high chance of success. It's a lot better than nothing, though. By the way, thse cryocompanies or organizations tend to be owned and supervised by relatives of the cryopreserved people. These managers also want to get cryopreserved themselves, and want to reconstruct their own relatives. In addition, there's great scientific value of bringing 100 year old people back alive.

By the way, scientists don't refer to the cryopreversation as freezing, they call it vitrification.

That's basically Pascal Bet (if there's God you get infinite payoff, if there's no God you get finite negative payoff (wasted time caused by being believer), so to maximize payoff you should believe in God). The problem is - there are very many possible gods, many of them incompatibile with each other. You should consider the bet with ALL gods as possible options, not just some god versus no god.

Same with the cryogenic. You should consider the possibility that freezing you with our poor technology can make you unrecoverable, while some other technology could allow you to be saved eventually.

Also I'm sorry for Mr Banks, I love his books about Culture.

Yes, and that's rational. If there's another preservation technology that's better than cryopreservation, we should adopt that. There's nothing irrational about that. You just need to first invent such technology, and then provide evidence that it's better than current vitrification tech.

This has happened in the past. A few decades ago the preservation method was changed from freezing to vitrification, after vitrification was shown to be better.

Ok, I'll give you that there is a non-zero chance. Other's have touched upon that in this thread, and I would contend that giving 200k to some family/friend is more useful than throwing it away, but it's your money. If you are happy with a negligible-but-non-zero chance, go for it.

>I don't think your critique is very relevant, when almost all cryopreservation is only done to the brain, not the whole body.

There is exactly zero evidence that a brain/mind is functional without it's body. And there is currently no computer simulation or interface capable of simulating a human body and its various sensory input, so this is a moot point.

>Thawing is not relevant to be discussed at this point, because the bodies will not be thawed using current technology. If the cryopreserved brain has enough information to be reconstructed, it will be done at some point using advanced nanotechnology. Nobody will be thawing brains using 21st century technology.

Bit of a cop-out, no? Is the flying spaghetti monster going to thaw you? At this point your theories are no better than saying a big bearded guy in the sky is going to resurrect you. Except he'll do it for free.

>By the way, scientists don't refer to the cryopreversation as freezing, they call it vitrification.

I guess I wasn't a classically trained biologist working in neuroscience labs for 6 years then, sorry. Also, it was before my cup of coffee in the morning.

Appropriate terminology or no, my points were and are still valid.

My understanding is that head transplants actually have been done in mammals with retention of consciousness.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_transplant

So no, I wouldn't say "exactly zero evidence".

> Ok, I'll give you that there is a non-zero chance. Other's have touched upon that in this thread, and I would contend that giving 200k to some family/friend is more useful than throwing it away, but it's your money. If you are happy with a negligible-but-non-zero chance, go for it.

I basically agree that there's a minimal standard of evidence for cryonics working that is required for it to be worth more to an individual than giving the $200k to family and friends. However, it is not clear whether cryonics-as-it-exists exceeds that mark or not. I would think it does. Estimate $5M per life, and chances in the 1-10% range are reasonable for the cost.

>> Nobody will be thawing brains using 21st century technology.

> Bit of a cop-out, no?

Not really. There are things we can justifiably think are possible but too technically difficult to accomplish in the very near term. Comprehensively curing cancer for example. It's going to happen, but it will take a while. Likewise, machine-phase nanotech that can operate at very low temperatures to perform subtle manipulations on vitreous biological materials which improve its ability to support itself during rewarming.

The thing is, when you rewarm cells in the lab after freezing them, they incur damage during rewarming. For example, if the vitrification point is below the freezing point, that means ice will try to form if it has a chance to during rewarming. In situations where extracellular ice exists, it will melt during rewarming and thus cause osmotic shock to the dehydrated cell.

In the concentrated solute version of vitrification like we see in cryonics, the concern is more that the concentrated solutes will interact with proteins when they get warm enough to do so. That can denature them and trigger autolysis. So prior to rewarming, picture a machine-phase manipulation that digs in and gently pulls out chunks of toxic cryoprotectant, and replaces them with something more benign for the thawing process. It could also add drugs that haven't been invented yet, e.g. a comprehensive autolysis blocker, or improved ice blocker that lets you replace some of the vitrificant with water and still take your time rewarming.

That's not getting into nano-repair, which is complex enough that I would concede it could be implausible (though I don't exactly think it needs to be ruled out at this point).

I don't know about that. I have this pet theory that our minds exist in a 5-dimensional non-euclidean space for which our brains serve as mere substrates, much as a CPU is merely a substrate for the running of a software program. I'm not saying you should adopt this theory (especially considering that I don't feel like explaining it and have only tenuous evidence, so it's basically a deeply-felt hunch), but nor do I accept your contention that it's freezing or nothing with no other alternative. For that matter I'm not convinced oblivion is so awful either, but that's more of a philosophical argument.

'I am the Iain (M) Banks,' the ship said, through the drone.

'That's a weird name. How did you end up calling yourself that?'

The remote drone dipped one front corner slightly, its equivalent of a shrug. 'It's a long story . . .'

IMHO this is the cryo equivalent of an ethnic slur. Cryophobia, if you will. It meets the "you can't change this thing about yourself so we outsiders are going to make fun of you for it, nyah nyah" pattern while being devoid of useful information content. Cryonics proponents do not readily concede the point that patients are technically dead, based on the evidence available.

The legal status (which is a fully independent use of the term "dead" and can be readily conceded with absolutely zero consequence to the technical argument) is something else, but if you are implying that cryonics companies would therefore be within their legal rights to dump their patients, that could just as easily be seen as a problem with the law (i.e. it fails to adequately protect cryonics patients). So it's not clear to me why you would think this is an innate ethical shortcoming of the choice to practice cryonics in the first place.

> companies that are under no obligation to actually do what you paid them to do

It certainly would contradict the purpose, and likely the bylaws, of a cryonics organization to fail to keep patients safe, for at least the period of time that is realistic given the limits of initial funding and uncontrollable factors world economic stability. (100 years is definitely more reasonable than a million.) Assuming the funds set aside experience real growth above the rate of inflation, the risk could actually decline over time because the financial safety net would be larger.

One possible approach if you think the time is going to be long before the needed technology is available, would be to allocate funding towards measures designed to stabilize the economy, avoid war, and/or prevent natural disasters. The other approach would be to try and create disaster-proof cryobunkers (but there's physical limits, as always).

Everything is temporal, we're merely surfing the entropy gradient for a while.

There is a lot of possible change that does not involve death. I used to buy your argument, but upon reflection I've decided that it does not automatically follow from simple considerations. We need to be a lot smarter to know the answer for sure. Just as negative temperatures are possible, death-free eternities may also be possible.

Lifespan increase is certainly a stronger possibility than immortality, and is therefore a stronger motive to pursue cryonics. So why is so much space wasted talking about it every time someone suggests cryonics? The thousand year or so extension we could reasonably expect with a good aging cure and decent public safety is pretty significant regardless of eternal considerations.

The deathism of this thread, on a site read by technically-oriented people, where problably many agree with the computational theory of mind really makes me lose hope in the human kind.

It's not thinking that cryonics is not worth it. That's a reasonable position. I'm undecided myself. It's that response, that fighting death is somehow unethical or naive. That Death is Good, Part of the Cosmos, Don't You Dare, whatever.

Man, talk about Stockholm syndrome. Well, fuck it:

>>> DEATH IS BAD. <<<<

Yes it is. We die because we don't know how to avoid it, not because is good, natural, right or proper. Our bodies are machines that we don't know how to repair. That's all. We may invent lies to make ourselves feel better and maybe that's a natural strategy to cope with the HORROR that is death, but we are still fooling ourselves, and most likely keeping the problem from being solved.

There are some things that happened to my physical body that I cannot now, nor never will remember. Is that bad? There are memories I have that my physical body never really experienced. Is it bad that that person never existed? If I forget those, will that be bad?

Suffering is bad. Death is the ultimate destiny of all which was once alive. It is tempting for a brain state looking ahead to its demise to say that one or ten or one hundred years is too few, and if we had one thousand, or one million, or one million million, that would be enough. But I know no reason that should be true.

I look forward and see a descendant of humanity surviving to witness, in itself, the heat death of the universe. As every resource has been expended to maintain its consciousness, while the last holes fill in with entropy, it remembers everything that has ever happened, and it is looking forward with its dying thoughts to an infinity times an infinity as many lifetimes of nothingness which will follow, and I do not want it to weep that it will cease to be. I want it to stride boldly into oblivion, knowing that it has done its best, and with some glimmer of hope and pride for what, in some yet unconceived corner of possibility space, might be.

And I want that peace for every consciousness and form of consciousness, however transient, that experiences itself from now until then, be they animal, vegetable, or mineral.

Of course we should fight aging, with every resource we can muster, because aging is suffering. But we should not hate death, because that too is suffering.

To bring it back around... Iain M. Banks will die, very soon. Many people here are extremely distraught about this, and I am one of them. He has a choice to make, whether to make some attempt to extend his life at some expense to his remaining quality of life. It sounds as if he will choose not to. Many will, in grief, hate him for that choice. They are grieving, and it is natural, but that idea abstracted is selfish and it is evil. Iain Banks will die, and he will be fine. It is we who grieve who deserve peace, and I and others feel that peace is contained in this truth:

Death is okay.

It is not great. We do not love it. We can and will work to destroy it. But we will not succeed, and that is -- that must be -- okay.

Immortality is not something our society can simply add to its current socio-economic make-up. Some fundamental changes would have to be made in order for the situation to be at all morally satisfactory and not utterly revolting and depressing. And no doubt any attempted change would take at least 50 years for the wild oscillations to even out.

To put it bluntly, any machine becomes harder to repair over time, and some machines become so out of date as to become worthless except as curiosities anyway. People are no different. What would we ever do with 100 million nineteenth century people? The 23rd century should have as little use for us.

Galaxies die and so do we.

"Firmly restating his atheism, Banks spoke of his belief that death is an important 'part of the totality of life', to be treated realistically, not feared."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iain_Banks